A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm.

At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma filaments that could conduct electricity akin to Benjamin Franklin’s silk kite string.

No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves.

Laser triggers electrical activity in thunderstorm for the first time

Belong’s COLORLOSS RECORD came out a couple of months ago, and its dusty, crackling and haunted rooms seemed to me to be a small-scale attempt to do for shoegaze what Burial did for r&b and rave. As someone who was around for My Bloody Valentine, the record’s swoon and glide naturally appealed to me, but I didn’t think it signalled another of the periodic attempts to rediscover or repeat shoegaze. Until I heard a bit of the new M83 yesterday, which on first listen is all about ’88 (when M83 was a kid, it seems). Anyway, if that’s the revival, listen to a little bit of the funeral.

Belong – “Late Night”

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Richard Kadrey

newuniversal: 1959
Written by KIERON GILLEN
Penciled by GREG SCOTT
Cover by BRANDON PETERSON
This is a story about killing the future. 1959 is the dawn of the new age of superheroics — the so-called “Fireworks” have granted superhuman powers to three Americans, and set the world on a collision-course with destiny. But it’s a destiny Philip Voight must prevent at any cost. The first newuniversal one-shot expands the mythos of this world, thanks to writer KIERON GILLEN (Phonogram), hand-picked by newuniversal’s Warren Ellis, and the brilliant art of GREG SCOTT shows us the world, like it never was…in 1959.
48 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99

Released July 2008

(Butterfly Collector)

• Cellphones – Third World and Developing Nations – Poverty – Technology – New York Times
  “…the 15 monk disciples had cellphones — Nokia cellphones — and most were fancier models than the one Chipchase was carrying. One of the disciples asked to look at Chipchase’s phone. “So he then data-mines my phone for all its content…”"
  (tags: comms)
• Bruce Sterling on the freaky future of installation design – Boing Boing
  Bruce Sterling stand-up
  (tags: video spimeworld sterling design)

Jason Stoddard (who could really use a "home" link back to the main index on his site, by the way) offers up "5 Small Things Science Fiction Can Do To Improve Its Image". All of which are blatantly obvious. All the more chilling, then, that none of them have been implemented in the sf field. I mean, seriously, none of these orgs, mags or publishers have set up a Ning page?

Yes, small things. As in, “There ain’t no reason not to do this.” As in, “This costs nothing, or next to nothing.” As in, you don’t need to reinvent the industry or discover the magical monetization model or invent the free ebook reader that convinces everyone to give up their iPhone.

Don’t go to the comments section unless you really want to grapple with people who think social networks are "a Ponzi scheme."

Yes, this subject continues to fascinate me beyond all reason.

English Russia has got some brilliant stuff today:

* Parachute jumping, Russian-style

* A clip from a late-80s Russian sf/horror film made for twenty roubles

* It’s a little windy in Moscow lately

* The Petrol PC

* And, most impressively, a tour through a declassified neutrino detection installation:

• design:related – Jordan Crane’s Cover Art for Michael Chabon
  well, goddamn.
  (tags: design)

New episode is up, and still completely free.

My kinda future.

• Sucks My Brain Radio
  (tags: radio)
• Scientists take drugs to boost brain power: study
  Twenty percent of scientists admit to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons
  (tags: med mind dr)
• Fruit and vegetable waste clogs landfills
  The report said a third of all food purchased each year in Britain gets thrown in the garbage even though it could have been eaten
  (tags: gmf)

So I happened upon the Wikipedia page for the Louvin Brothers, they of the famous SATAN IS REAL album cover, tonight. And, on scrolling down, I did a classic doubletake while drinking coffee. I took a screenshot and cropped it down to the area in question.

See if you can spot the one which is not like the others.

EDIT: took ‘em about 20 mins from my posting to them fixing the entry.

Until very recently, asking what happened at or before the Big Bang was considered by physicists to be a religious question… But in the past few years, a new theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) has emerged. The theory suggests the possibility of a “quantum bounce,” where our universe stems from the collapse of a previous universe. Yet what that previous universe looked like was still beyond answering.

Now, physicists Alejandro Corichi from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Parampreet Singh from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario have developed a simplified LQG model that gives an intriguing answer: a pre-Big Bang universe might have looked a lot like ours.

Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?

Superinsulation may sound like a marketing gimmick for a drafty attic or winter coat. But it is actually a newly discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions. This discovery opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics and breaks ground for a new generation of microelectronics.

Newly Discovered Fundamental State Of Matter, A Superinsulator, Has Been Created

John Robb:

…communities need to gain control over the flows of electricity in order to become resilient. One of the first steps towards this goal is through the concept of the Microgrid… creating a local network (electricity plus data services) that can become a platform for the organic growth of a diverse and innovative ecosystem of solutions and providers.

Me on Entertainment Weekly’s website, talking about the comic that first hooked me on the medium.

• Welcome to Vivaty | Easy Virtual Scenes
  nailing a Second Life- style 3D chat environment to Facebook
  (tags: web)

Jamais wrote, earlier:

"Mesh-to-Mesh" — social network applications, like Twitter, structured as overlapping peer networks. Living in the space between one-to-one and many-to-many, mesh-to-mesh networks serve as a medium for discovering & creating new network connections, and bridging otherwise distinct communities.

…questions and responses to someone on my Twitter who’s part of one community (say, eco-bloggers) are visible everyone on my Twitter list, across the full array of represented communities. If they aren’t already linked, they’ll only see my half of the conversation, but (in my experience) speaking directly to someone often leads to some folks on my network becoming part of theirs.

And that got me thinking about something else. How long until enough open source Twitter clone systems stabilise enough to decentralise Twitter itself? I remember hearing about two that were at least being tested and shaken out. I’m talking now not about attempts to gouge out some of Twitter’s "business," but Twitter-like systems that individuals and groups can run privately. Groups of mobile friends and fellow-travellers dropping off the Twitter network entirely into small, private de-meshed teams. How far away is that?

1978. Whenever I play this, I’m mildly amazed. “Regenmacher” was on the album DURCH DIE WUSTE, and it was released in 1978. I can hear so many other pieces of music in it now — so many things that “Regenmacher” prefigured. I first heard this around 1996, and knew then that Jarre must’ve listened to it before MAGNETIC FIELDS and ZOOLOOK. Something new every time. I happened to play this next to Animal Collective’s FEELS the other day, just jamming random shit into the cd changer, and goddamn. It’s there in FEELS too. And it’s just a strange and beautiful thing in itself.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius – "Regenmacher"

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Via English Russia:

(Morning shower)