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Cockroaches accept little robots that smell like cockroaches. Cockroaches like it dark. Cockroaches explore but stay with cockroaches once they meet. Even if they are robots. If robots like it bright, cockroaches go with them.

The vibrissae of rats (et al) are examined and transferred to robotic devices for orientation and tactile exploration.

These guys from caltech work on a minituarized, automated microscope. Could be interesting for any type of human space exploration.

See the video at the end of the article.

Nautral Light for Human Space Exploration

wow, that looks pretty real to me! I remember a presentation some time ago on difficulties with large scale LED lights for making directed light sources. I guess we can cross that off the list :)

Agata - have a look at this!

After the Go, real-time RPG as Hendrik alluded?

In the wake of the financial crisis, many started questioning different aspects of the economic formalism. Here a mathematical "dynamic" alternative to economic utility theory (which has also been the target of some famous recent attacks, see prospect theory) is developed and applied to the St. Petersburg coin tossing paradox. A good read at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/chaos/26/2/10.1063/1.4940236

Our work sheds light on many interesting directions of future exploration in the development of quantum-inspired algorithms for unsupervised machine learning, which are promisingly possible to realize on quantum devices.

Evolutionary Strategies are able to explore broader areas of the search space than reinforcement learning techniques. Thus, they are able to encounter strange bugs resulting in large rewards.

It will be the new hype in a few years when DL is settled....

They are developing so-called "Avatar" technology which will allow people to control robots remotely, as in the movie "Avatar." With Avatar X, they hope to revolutionize space exploration, resource extraction, and other space-based activities. On the Avatar X website, it says, "AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar."

Genetic algorithms are a competitive alternative for training deep neural networks for reinforcement learning. For paper see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06567.pdf

Interesting pointers in this one! I would like to explore neuroevolution as well, although it seems extremely resource-demanding?

Not necessarily, I think it can be made to be much faster hybridizing it with backprop and Taylor maps. Its one ideas in the closet we still have not explored (Differential Intelligence: accelerating neuroevolution).

NASA and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have successfully demonstrated a new nuclear reactor power system that could enable long-duration crewed missions to the Moon, Mars and destinations beyond. Main page for kilopower project: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower

NASA marketing interstellar travel to foreign bodies even without knowing how they actually look like.

Beautiful interactive tree of life

A bit slow, but I finally could figure out the common ancestor of the nine-banded armadillo and the common ostrich!

In case you want to ask him anything

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. The result: visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery.

There has been much recent interest in accelerating materials discovery. High-throughput calculations and combinatorial experiments have been the approaches of choice to narrow the search space. The emphasis has largely been on feature or descriptor selection or the use of regression tools, such as least squares, to predict properties. The regression studies have been hampered by small data sets, large model or prediction uncertainties and extrapolation to a vast unexplored chemical space with little or no experimental feedback to validate the predictions. Thus, they are prone to be suboptimal. Here an adaptive design approach is used that provides a robust, guided basis for the selection of the next material for experimental measurements by using uncertainties and maximizing the 'expected improvement' from the best-so-far material in an iterative loop with feedback from experiments. It balances the goal of searching materials likely to have the best property (exploitation) with the need to explore parts of the search space with fewer sampling points and greater uncertainty.

Can AI create the next wonder material? http://www.nature.com/news/can-artificial-intelligence-create-the-next-wonder-material-1.19850?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160505&spMailingID=51301208&spUserID=MTEzODM0NjYzMzgS1&spJobID=920498312&spReportId=OTIwNDk4MzEyS0

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.