Group items tagged

quasicrystalline superlattice that self-assembles from a single type of nanoparticle building blocks

The Nature paper this article is reviewing (behind their paywall) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-018-0075-8

At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.

an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. It might be a bit far-fetched but I thought it might be useful when exploring new planets. Combined with AI the robot would able to assess the terrain and deploy another robot the shape of which would be chosen to best suit its environment. I was thinking of this in the context of exploring places on other planets which are inaccessible by regular rovers (e.g. caves on Mars).

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 ...

any clue how? "With the peel-and-stick process, we integrated hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) TFSCs on paper, plastics, cell phone and building windows while maintaining the original 7.5% efficiency. The new peel-and-stick process enables further reduction of the cost and weight for TFSCs and endows TFSCs with flexibility and attachability for broader application areas. We believe that the peel-and-stick process can be applied to thin film electronics as well"

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone's Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone's story, the team will join Google X.

space-related kickstarters moving from cubesats to space telescopes. This funding campaign was launched today, and will last for 32 days. They are asking for 1M USD.

"Since the formation of Planetary Resources, our primary goal has been to build technology enabling us to prospect and mine asteroids. We've spent the last year making great leaps in the development of these technologies." - Damn we need to get in touch with these people..!

Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.

Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.

I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

Winter is coming... and deep learning, too!

"Sergey Brin has said he wants to build a benign version of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey" ... didn't they try to do that in that movie called "2001: A Space Odyssey" ?

Just a small step till we can compute trajectories in our blood cells...

Really cool research. I think that the potential of analog computing has been neglected for quite a long time. Building the whole thing within a single cell makes it only more awesome.

TU/e is participating in the new Cruiser class of the World Solar Challenge. This competition entails building an eco friendly family car (instead of a racer) to prove that solar powered transportation is possible. Actually this car produces more solar power than it needs and has a range of 300+ km.

The French Space Agency (CNES) commissioned Damien Labrousse to recreate the Jupiter Mission Control Room in Lego for display at the Kourou spaceport. The impressive build features 6,000 bricks, 80 minifigs, a working video screen that shows the rocket launch sequence and a sound system, displaying launch countdown.

Meet the incredible shrinking material. Most things swell when they warm up, creating engineering headaches, but now a 3D-printed material has been configured to contract instead. When two interlinked materials expand at different rates, they can warp or crack. It's a problem in buildings, bridges, electronics and anything else that is exposed to a wide temperature swing.

"IBM delivered on the DARPA SyNAPSE project with a one million neuron brain-inspired processor. The chip consumes merely 70 milliwatts, and is capable of 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt-literally a synaptic supercomputer in your palm." --- No memristors..., yet.: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537211/a-better-way-to-build-brain-inspired-chips/

In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

A good DIY project - build a tractor beam using 3D printed parts. The 3D files and research are available for download. A new way for microgravity research @fichbio ?

" The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today's nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy."