awesome

he Juneau-based beer maker has installed a unique boiler system in order to cut its fuel costs. It purchased a $1.8 million furnace that burns the company's spent grain — the waste accumulated from the brewing process — into steam which powers the majority of the brewery's operations. Company officials now joke they are now serving "beer-powered beer."

Built from single atoms, the first-of-their-kind switches could one day be networked via fiber-optic cables to form the backbone of a "quantum Internet" that allows for perfectly secure communications, said Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin, who, together with Professor Vladan Vuletic of MIT, led a team consisting of graduate students Jeff Thompson and Lee Liu and postdoctoral fellows Tobias Tiecke and Nathalie de Leon to construct the new system. Their research is detailed in a recently published paper in the journal Nature.

The formation of snowflakes—essentially, the idiosyncratic way that water crystallizes when suspended in our atmosphere—is an extremely complex process that still hasn't been fully described by scientific formulas. "People think that a snowflake is just a frozen raindrop," says Caltech physics professor Kenneth Libbrecht, who's spent the past few decades studying the process of snowflake formation. "But that's sleet, just little ice cubes, and not even close to what a snowflake is."

Via NASA:

Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, is framed like a cosmic Christmas tree with starry decorations in this colorful telescopic portrait, snapped on December 16th. Its lovely coma is tinted green by diatomic C2 gas fluorescing in sunlight. Discovered in August of this year, this Comet Lovejoy is currently sweeping north through the constellation Columba, heading for Lepus south of Orion and bright enough to offer good binocular views. Not its first time through the inner Solar System, this Comet Lovejoy will pass closest to planet Earth on January 7,