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The Small Satellites Systems and Services Symposium, the "4S Symposium", is a biennial event that was first held in 1992. The 4S Symposium is a good occasion to present results to an international audience and to learn what's happening worldwide in

Very Low mass PPT system

This is a bibliography management system one of my project partners suggested. I (Tobias) am trying it out in the frame of the project. If you do not hear anything from me, it was probabely not sooo successfull...

Positioning via accumulated accelerometer data used to stabilize cold trapped atoms. Current systems are not very reliable for submarines, which cannot use GPS underwater. To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force - and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.

In the space industry, concurrent design is frequently implemented as requirements are frequently not set but developed along the design process. In many cases this is due to the interconnection between (sub)systems. In the industry however, this is hardly done, but it is becoming more relevant as lead times and innovation speed needs to increase. There is a webinar tomorrow 10 december from Agile on this topic regarding the semiconductor industry

missed it ... did anybody attend?

New optics based computer architecture

I think there are a few difficulties when assuming that the macroscopic block of glass will accelerate instantaneously. Also, if I prevent the block from moving would it become perfectly reflective as no momentum can be transferred to it? One could say that the momentum is then transferred to the larger system that holds the glass. But surely I could make that system (or even the block of glass) so heavy that it would not move more than Planck's length during the passage of the photon - especially if the glass is very thin or the light is very red.

By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.

Bad news from this frontier: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking As the Americans are not going for it, it might be a good opportunity for Europeans to make a real difference in space.

Merkel seems anyway a bit short of ideas ...

NASA's oldest interstellar spacecraft is suddenly measuring changes more dramatic than any it has seen during its 35 year journey

this is very nice! in either of the explanations Voyager will likely be in good enough shape to send data when outside of the boundary layer ...

All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the antiquated patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero - which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.

Very nice experiment on the verge of Condensed matter Physics! The presence of Landau levels is a necessary condition to obtain a Quantum Hall state. Quantum Hall states have first appeared in 2D electronic gases when applied a perpendicular magnetic field that induces a new topological state of the "electronic gas". This new topological state is believed to "protect" some parameters of the system, such as conductance making it possible to measure fundamental constants with very high precision even in imperfect experimental conditions. In this fundamental experiment, a synthetic magnetic field was created that acts in continuum photons, producing "an integer quantum Hall system in curved space, a long-standing challenge in condensed matter physics".

Nice overview about past missions to other bodies of our solar system.

The laws of thermodynamics must apply to self-replicating systems. Now one physicist has worked out how

Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory....

The prototyped EV equipped with a wireless power feeding system is based on the electric version of Volkswagen's "Golf." IHI Corp announced Nov 22, 2011, that it has added a wireless power receiving function to an electric vehicle (EV) and begun to test it by simulating actual use conditions.

The atom may not be a planetary system, but under specific circumstances it can behave like one. That is the curious finding of physicists in Austria and the US, who have confirmed a 1994 prediction that, in the presence of an applied electromagnetic field, electrons in very highly energized atomic states should behave like the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

Bohr's model finally not so wrong?

"Real leadership is about transforming the system, not just succeeding within or despite the system. Today, we know how to run organizations in ways that that lift up the human spirit, both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done. So why don't we get on with it?"