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Scientists in the US have used a common virus to produce materials that resemble skin and bone. In addition to providing new insights into how such materials develop in the natural world, the work also brings synthetic production of tissue in the laboratory closer to reality

"The OpenBCI Board is a versatile and affordable analog-to-digital converter that can be used to sample electrical brain activity (EEG), muscle activity (EMG), heart rate (EKG), and more" Perhaps some work or ideas on brainwave analysis would be interesting ? (User interfaces, mood classifier, detection of various alertness levels )

It's not worth it for $400... The chips are seriously nothing special and you can get a lot better for a lot cheaper. I would just get the electrodes and link them to a RPi or an Odroid or something.

True, but the selling feature here is that they take care of that stuff and sell it for 400$. Lets say the hardware is 100USD, then an RF-grade person here here has to do the coding, interfacing, testing within roughly (300/16eur/hour) 20 hours to break even and even then the interface is much nicer in their case.

Interdisciplinary teams of handpicked individuals chosen for their field-leading expertise and innovative mind combine humanitarian questions with state of the art science, cutting-edge technology and endless fantasy. Organised by THE Port Association, hosted by CERN (IdeaSquare tbc) and with partners from other non-governmental organisations, a three-day problem solving workshop hackathon will be devoted to humanitarian, social and public interest topics. Interdisciplinary teams of selected participants will work together in the fields of: communication - transport - health - science - learning - work - culture - data

An exhaustive overview of all possible advanced rocket concepts, eg.. "As an example, consider a photon rocket with its launching mass, say, 1000 ton moving with a constant acceleration a =0.1 g=0.98 m/s2. The flux of photons with E γ=0.5 MeV needed to produce this acceleration is ~1027/s, which corresponds to the efflux power of 1014 W and the rate of annihilation events N'a~5×1026 s−1 [47]. This annihilation rate in ambiplasma l -l ann corresponds to the value of current ~108 A and linear density N ~2×1018 m−1 thus any hope for non-relativistic relative velocity of electrons and positrons in ambiplasma is groundless." And also, even if it would work, then one of the major issues is going to be heat dispersal: "For example, if the temperature of radiator is chosen T=1500 K, the emitting area should be not less than 1000 m2 for Pb=1 GW, not less than 1 km2 for Pb=1 TW, and ~100 km2 for Pb=100 TW, assuming ε=0.5 and δ=0.2. Lower temperature would require even larger radiator area to maintain the outer temperature of the engine section stable for a given thermal power of the reactor."

The problem is not achieving a high energy density, that we can already do with nuclear fission, the question however is how to confine or harness this power with relatively high efficiency, low waste heat and at not too crazy specific mass. I see magnetic confinement as a possibility, yet still decades away and also an all-or-nothing method as we cannot easily scale this up from a test experiment to a full-scale system. It might be possible to extract power from such a plasma, but definitely well below breakeven so an additional power supply is needed. The fission fragments circumvent these issues by a more brute force approach, thereby wasting a lot of energy for sure but at the end probably providing more ISP and thrust.

Sure. However, the annihilation based photon rocket concept unifies almost all relevant drawbacks if we speak about solar system scales, making itself obsolete...it is just an academic testcase.

Their accuracy is orders of magnitude better than what is currently being used, however at the moment, it sounds like quite a large setup -> they're working on getting it down to 1m^3 :o, still any gravity mapping instruments could benefit from these in the future.

Actually GPS is much more accurate, but as it doesnt work under water, the only alternative (without building an underwater GPS equivalent using probes) is to use cumulative accelerometer data. But as this is prone to drifting over time, quantum systems like this can help improving the accuracy significantly.

Very true :). I was thinking though when you want to remove 'noise' from any gravity mapping experiment, highly accurate accelerometers are required, like those used in GOCE.

Scientific proof, shotgun on the red couch!

this really only works if you can fall asleep instantly. If it takes you at least 10mins to sleep the whole procedure fails miserably.

nice video and nice story, no revolution in physics and somehow surprising that not done/tried earlier (maybe just again good MIT public relations work?)

CSI writers will have to up the ante now.

it was probably already done... by the NSA

very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."

any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?

"Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA

I still have my doubts that this mission will ever happen as announced but this is a first step...

Inspired by the work that was done at the ACT, I continued working on optical flow landing at TU Delft. Today Bio & Bio published my article on a new theory that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. It shows that drones approaching an object with an insect-inspired vision strategy become unstable at a specific distance from the object. Turning this weakness into a strength, drones can actually use the timely detection of that instability to estimate distance. The new theory will enable further miniaturization of autonomous drones and provides a new hypothesis on flying insect behavior. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm7SMJp8EA4&feature=youtu.be Article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016004

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.

Best explanation for beginners I could find. Definitely helped me when I was starting...

A simple, but neat helper for coding: ML gives idiomatic usage patterns to semi-automate the daily development work.

Machine learning to write better machine learning code...count me in haha

Works for mercury as well.

Showing why epycicles worked so well

I would troll the world and do a GR theory using epicycles :)

Two ways of measuring the universe's expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame. See also this work based on GAIA data that, on the other hand, reinforces the discrepancy: Milky Way Cepheid Standards for Measuring Cosmic Distances and Application to Gaia DR2: Implications for the Hubble Constant https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.10655

Definite solution for our work space!!!!!

Absolutely :-) according to picture http://www.ufunk.net/gadgets/helmfon-casque-open-space/attachment/helmfon-casque-open-space-5/ we could squeeze three times as many researchers then :-)

New results in NLP might allow to automate scientific discoveries by data mining of papers. Work considers 3.3M abstracts from material science, physics and chemistry and claims to discover new materials before they are published later on.

ACT did that from diigo post digging in the retreat of 2014! Still without NLP.

That's cool! Didn't know.

Cyano bacteria to shield from radiation. An idea from italians flying to the Moon via Team Indus

Nice idea, but is it really new: resistance of cyanob. to UV radiation has been known but studies have been inconclusive as to under what resource limitations it works, but according to what we see from evolution: on Earth it works, since they survived pre-ozone atmosphere! some papers from a quick google search: 1999 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09670269910001736392 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25463663