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“What a curious feeling,” says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale, as she shrinks to a fraction of her size, and everything around her suddenly looks totally unfamiliar. Scientists too have to get used to these curious feelings when they examine matter on tiny scales and at low temperatures: all the behaviour we are used to seeing around us is turned on its head.

The Internet has fallen in love with place. From wildly popular Instagrammers like the photographer behind Humans of New York, to globe-trotters leaving digital travel notes on the story-sharing site Findery, to cloud-based services that help brands pitch themselves through location-based storytelling, the digital masses have discovered the thrill of writing about where they’re at.

To catalogue more than 12,000 lakes and lagoons in Mongolia’s steppe, to identify new Entomostraca species and to develop strategies to diagnose the state of lakes in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe are the main scientific challenges faced by the Limnological Catalogue of Mongolian Lakes, a project led by researcher Miquel Alonso, who collaborates with the Department of Ecology of the University of Barcelona and studies the limnology of lakes.

(Phys.org) —The Human Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon, led by the group’s director Chris Harrison, an assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction, have done work that shows how traditional hand movements to perform tasks such as measuring and erasing can be naturally applied to the digital screen, improving on a natural interaction with computers. They have come up with TouchTools, a gesture design approach.

(Phys.org) —Two teams of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three distant exploding stars that have been magnified by the immense gravity of foreground galaxy clusters, which act like “cosmic lenses”. These supernovae are the first of their type ever to be observed magnified in this way and they offer astronomers a powerful tool to check the prescription of these massive lenses.

Alaska’s seismic network records thousands of quakes produced by glaciers, capturing valuable data that scientists could use to better understand their behavior, but instead their seismic signals are set aside as oddities. The current earthquake monitoring system could be “tweaked” to target the dynamic movement of the state’s glaciers, suggests State Seismologist Michael West, who will present his research today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).

(Phys.org) —A group of senior university officials suggests it is time to add faculty research activities that translate into patents, licensing and commercialization of products to the traditional model for faculty tenure and career advancement , which for years has been based primarily on research and publication in scientific journals.

To create more energy-efficient clouds and crunch Big Data faster, we need a new generation of technologies including novel transistors. But before we can put these future technologies into mass production, we need new techniques for prototyping below 30 nanometers—the size where prototyping becomes increasingly difficult.

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) literally ‘saw the light’ just days before crashing into the lunar farside last Thursday April 17. Skimming just a few kilometers above the moon’s surface, mission controllers took advantage of this unique low angle to gaze out over the moon’s horizon in complete darkness much like the Apollo astronauts did from lunar orbit more than 40 years ago.

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, along with assistance from several African wildlife agencies, has found that contrary to popular belief, cheetahs are able to maintain population levels when sharing space with lions. In their paper published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, the team describes how they performed an analysis of cheetah and wild dog survivability in lion areas using data from prior field studies.