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Let an AI develop your magic tricks! (The one with the smart phone is actually neat)

They published it in Frontiers of Psychology...?

Eve, an artificially-intelligent 'robot scientist' could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.

Unfortunately, "make drug discovery faster and much cheaper" actually means "increase profit margin for pharmaceutical companies"...

More arguments for a lunar base? "They found the most mass-efficient path involves launching a crew from Earth with just enough fuel to get into orbit around the Earth. A fuel-producing plant on the surface of the moon would then launch tankers of fuel into space, where they would enter gravitational orbit. The tankers would eventually be picked up by the Mars-bound crew, which would then head to a nearby fueling station to gas up before ultimately heading to Mars."

There was a paper with a very similar concept (reaching Mars via DRO) at the AAS meeting in January by Conte et al. First, the total Delta V required for a trip Earth -> LLO -> MLO is higher than Earth -> MLO. The trick is that Earth -> LLO requires less Delta V than Earth -> MLO and hence less mass has to be carried along *from Earth*. Essentially what both approaches have in common is that they say "if there's a free gas station orbiting the moon, it's cheaper to fly empty and fill up there on the way". The AAS paper actually does a decent job at estimating the "real" cost by also including estimates of the cost of a lunar base. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/files/44275737/Conte_etal_AAS2015_Earth_Mars_transfers_through_Moon_distant_retrograde_orbit.pdf

AI week on BBC - interesting opportunity to get a glimpse into how the field is viewed by laymen...

A new so called 5D data storage that could potentially survive for billions of years. The research consists of nanostructured glass that can record digital data in five dimensions using femtosecond laser writing.

Yes Alex, indeed, the durability is the point I think they highlight and focus on (besides the fact the abstract says something as the extrapolated decay time being comparable to the age of the Universe..). Indeed memories face problems with retention time. Most of the disks retain the information up to 10 years. When enterprises want to store data for longer times than this they use... yeah, magnetic tapes :-). Check a interesting article about magnetic tape market revival here http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123458854/rise-fall-and-re-rise-magnetic-tape I compared for fun, to have one idea of what we were talking about. I am also very curious so see the writing and reading times in this new memory :)

But how can glass store the information so long? Glass is not even solid?!

According to their Nature article, they can detect "a tunnel less than 1m across, buried 2m underground" just from its gravitational difference. Using a device that they predict could cost ~100 € in mass production. UK researchers have built a small device that measures tiny fluctuations in gravity, and could be used to monitor volcanoes or search for oil. Such gravimeters already exist but compared to this postage stamp-sized gadget, they are bulky and pricy.

How to cram in all buzzword technologies in one title. I will give it all tags we have.

Another bubble is coming to its end, it seems!

Relates to robots raising children before the arrival at an exoplanet.

The bear ears add some nice biological component to it.

Not new, but always good to read: British intelligence recommend not having password expiry dates. Something we should apply at ESA!

I second that. It has been an open secret for long though that frequent password changes are creating more problems than they solve. See Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/frequent_passwo.html

"By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems. It is this application of climate model results that fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models."

but you know wo these global warming policy foundation is, do you? they are the main advocacy group for climate change deniers in the UK, nothing scientific to start with; fine to post here reasonable scientific papers criticising global climate models but please not this shit

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....

An overview of all the neurotech companies messing with the brain. When reading this I really wonder why we need ethical approval for everything in human research.

Related paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00034/full

(Lucy in the sky with diamonds....?) UK billionaire is using entirely renewable sources to make "sky diamonds" from captured CO2 and hydrogen from rainwater... The CVD technology they use is not new but the idea of mining diamonds from the sky is cool!