Group items tagged

Why do we sleep? One answer could be: to clear waste products accumulated during the day. To prevent aging and neurodegeneration, the body must maintain homeostasis. What would happen if we experience chronic sleep loss? What would happen if microgravity impairs the cerebrospinal fluid to flush the brain? What would happen if cosmic radiations increase the amount of daily waste products?

Some locations on Mars are known to have water ice just below the surface, but how much has remained unclear. Dundas et al. used data from two orbiting spacecraft to examine eight locations where erosion has occurred. This revealed cliffs composed mostly of water ice, which is slowly sublimating as it is exposed to the atmosphere. The ice sheets extend from just below the surface to a depth of 100 meters or more and appear to contain distinct layers, which could preserve a record of Mars' past climate. They might even be a useful source of water for future human exploration of the red planet.

Apparently Atlas became a ninja and I missed it: https://youtu.be/fRj34o4hN4I

he looks way more elegant than most humans when running :D

I'll try not to take that personally...

no cutting-edge space-related science, but important anyways

The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack. PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/ On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.

Old data reveal new evidence of europa spouting plumes into space.

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity (GR), has been tested precisely within the Solar System. However, it has been difficult to test GR on the scale of an individual galaxy. Collett et al. exploited a nearby gravitational lens system, in which light from a distant galaxy (the source) is bent by a foreground galaxy (the lens). Mass distribution in the lens was compared with the curvature of space-time around the lens, independently determined from the distorted image of the source. The result supports GR and eliminates some alternative theories of gravity.

No GUTs, no glory

These are lasers whose lasing mode exhibits topologically-protected transport without magnetic fields. The underlying topological properties lead to a highly efficient laser, robust to defects and disorder, with single mode lasing even at very high gain values.

Life could have had much more time to evolve on mars than previously thought...

Random branches are collected, scanned to 3D, and connected with servos. Then a neural network is trained to control this "robot".

Collecting space rocks.

if a geologist hears you calling them rocks they will curse you collectively. I am in a workshop where some of those are present and I constantly remind myself to call them "minerals".

minerals sound much better indeed ... but what is wrong with rocks ? :-)

Recent study on a moon-based space elevator towards GEO

In the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop a cool concept for a magnetic dipole sitting at Mars L1 with an estimated field of 1-2 Tesla was proposed to shield Mars from Solar Winds and provide an elementary magnetic shielding to Mars.

very nice paper on adaptation of cells to microgravity

You need to avoid posting these types of links in the title as it is not managed well by plugins connected to our diigo account. Try to go to the source next time, and get rid of useless url codes.

Scientists have created bacteria covered in tiny semiconductors that generate a potential fuel source from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water

A rocking bed might help you to fall asleep and maintain you in deep sleep!

"Hinton's new approach, known as capsule networks, is a twist on neural networks intended to make machines better able to understand the world through images or video. In one of the papers posted last week, Hinton's capsule networks matched the accuracy of the best previous techniques on a standard test of how well software can learn to recognize handwritten digits." Links to papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09829 https://openreview.net/forum?id=HJWLfGWRb&noteId=HJWLfGWRb

impressive!

seems a very impressive guy :"Hinton formed his intuition that vision systems need such an inbuilt sense of geometry in 1979, when he was trying to figure out how humans use mental imagery. He first laid out a preliminary design for capsule networks in 2011. The fuller picture released last week was long anticipated by researchers in the field. "Everyone has been waiting for it and looking for the next great leap from Geoff," says Kyunghyun Cho, a professor"

A new idea called the "information bottleneck" is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms - and might also explain how human brains learn.