Advanced Concepts Team

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

Underoptimistic ... Excellent source of inspiration and quotation for all our reports

put them on the wiki ....

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

Technically, this is a correct prediction :P

More decoration for Horizon...

filtered by ESA:
Category : "Pornography"

try this then: http://lifehacker.com/5422780/remains-of-the-day-a-day-in-the-internet-is-mindblowing-edition

learning to flap wings without gravity

is there something more than a video where nothing happens...?

title speaks for itself - so if it's not meteorites to blame, what is it?

link doesn't work for me

Use of COTS products for low-cost nuclear reprocessing plant decommissioning. I suggest a brainstorming session for potential spin-in technologies involving walking around digros.

some ideas for movie Fridays
A "must" see on my opinion (never heard about it in the past!) : Primer
Sounds ideal:
"Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1]
Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following."

I watched it a while ago during my studies in Belgium... The plot is quite well summarized on this diagram: http://xkcd.com/657/large/
According to the text above I'm either savant or a liar (you choose). But I watched the movie under significant exposure to Belgian beer, so this may have helped...

#4 is pretty interesting 

There are (even in Science):
http://science-mag.aaas.org/cgi/reprint/314/5803/1253.pdf
There is also a group at UCAR (lead by S. Solomon, one of the Gods in atmospheric research) who are analyzing this effect:
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/thermosphere.shtml

for the drag effect, this is well known in fluid mechanics, we use the Knudsen number, which explains this phenomenon ... for a perfect gaz though!

A link to help the discussion a few posts below....

one post above you mean ...?

Now that you commented, it's below :)
[Edit] Fun reading btw.

Space trip anyone?

".... taking at least 50kg of payload into a polar orbit with a minimum altitude of 400km (248 miles), but engineers would aim to get significant additional performance.
"We'd be looking at a range from 50 to up to a maximum of 200kg because you'd want to do different sizes of satellite," said Mr Whitehorn."

fantastic walk through Pompei!

Francesco pointed out this research one year ago, we dropped it as noone was really considering it ... but in space a low CPU power consumption is crucial!! Maybe we should look back into this?

I don't remember what is the speed factor, but I guess this might do it! Although, I remember when using an IMU that you cannot have the data above a given rate (e.g. 20Hz even though the ADC samples the sensor at a little faster rate), so somehow it is not just the CPU that must be re-thought.
When I say qualification I also imply the "hardened" phase.

I don't know if the (promised) one-order-of-magnitude improvements in power efficiency and performance are enough to justify looking into this.

For once, it is not clear to me what embracing this technology would mean from an engineering point of view: does this technology need an entirely new software/hardware stack? If that were the case, in my opinion any potential benefit would be nullified.

Also, is it realistic to build an entire self-sufficient chip on this technology? While the precision of floating point computations may be degraded and still be useful, how does all this play with integer arithmetic? Keep in mind that, e.g., in the Linux kernel code floating-point calculations are not even allowed/available... It is probably possible to integrate an "accelerated" low-accuracy floating-point unit together with a traditional CPU, but then again you have more implementation overhead creeping in.

Finally, recent processors by Intel (e.g., the Atom) and especially ARM boast really low power-consumption levels, at the same time offering performance-boosting features such as multi-core and vectorization capabilities. Don't such efforts have more potential, if anything because of economical/industrial inertia?

A look into the future that never was

And, for par condicio (see post below), an old link with a list of overoptimistic predictions

ecological construction and environmental protection of a city cluster and more than CNY500 billion will be invested to build this eco-city cluster, which is to be centered on Wuhan.

University Alliance for Low Carbon Energy
 
Three universities, including Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have fostered up an alliance on November 15, 2009 to advocate low carbon energy and climate change adaptation The alliance will mainly work on 6 major areas: clean coal technology and CCS, homebuilding energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable transport, biomass energy and other renewable energy, advanced nuclear energy, intelligent power grid, and energy policies/planning. A steering panel made up of the senior experts from the three universities (two from each) will be established to review, evaluate, and endorse the goals, projects, fund raising activities, and collaborations under the alliance. With the Headquarters at the campus of Tsinghua University and branch offices at other two universities, the alliance will be chaired by a scientist selected from Tsinghua University.
 
According to a briefing, the alliance will need a budget of USD 3-5 million, mainly from the donations of government, industry, and all walks of life. In this context, the R&D findings derived from the alliance will find its applications in improving people's life.

interesting initiative - also with respect to "space and water" a theme we should explore a bit better in my view ...