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An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech

XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...

aaah its the XEROX centre, didn't know. Yep they made the mouse and then handed it over nicely to Apple after IBM thought it was useless

The partnership brings together leading IT providers and three of Europe's leading research centres, CERN, EMBL and ESA in order to provide computing capacity and services that elastically meet big science's growing demand for computing power.

Helix Nebula provides an unprecedented opportunity for the global cloud services industry to work closely on the Large Hadron Collider through the large-scale, international ATLAS experiment, as well as with the molecular biology and earth observation. The three flagship use cases will be used to validate the approach and to enable a cost-benefit analysis. Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed.

This game-changing strategy will boost scientific innovation and bring new discoveries through novel services and products. At the same time, Helix Nebula will ensure valuable scientific data is protected by a secure data layer that is interoperable across all member states. In addition, the pan-European partnership fits in with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and its strategy for cloud computing on the continent. It will ensure that services comply with Europe's stringent privacy and security regulations and satisfy the many requirements of policy makers, standards bodies, scientific and research communities, industrial suppliers and SMEs.

Initially based on the needs of European big-science, Helix Nebula ultimately paves the way for a Cloud Computing platform that offers a unique resource to governments, businesses and citizens.

"Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed." And here I was thinking cloud computing was old news 3 years ago :)

"The forecasts were the product of a series of "summer studies" led by NASA's Ames Research Centre and Stanford University, at which top academics, scientists, and engineers gathered to imagine how future space colonies could look. Artists gave life to the blueprints, producing a stunning series of images that look like a cross between CGI real-estate models (complete with would-be residents smugly sipping wine) and the fantastical worlds of Isaac Asimov."

"Developers, designers, innovators all kinds of creative thinkers" aka "nerd objective-C programmers with no life"?

Well, the ACT actually proposed a few of the topics (BEWARE, THERE BE CUCUMBERS!). Some are not necessarily software based, like creating a LEGO model of the ExoMars rover (although they stripped LEGO from the challenge description and now it just says "create an ExoMars rover from hardware" ... ). Also we had no clue that they would host part of the challenge here at ESTEC - so our 5 or 6 challenges will all be hosted in Rome... ...

have a look at this .... cooperation? becoming a centre?

"Patents, licensing practices and technology transfer from rich to poor countries are major issues in the fight against climate change," says Ahmed Abdel Latif, the programme manager for intellectual property at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development

they used names of scientists and research centres without these actually knowing about their involvement it seems.... I am wondering what they actually reported back in terms of results? randomly generated papers? Christos?

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm very pessimistic. I guess they will impose even more control, ask for even more detailed description of the results that will be delivered and concentrate even more on project funding instead of funding open research.

maybe this is what happen when there is so much paper involved... a simple phone call to one of the research scientist and the fraud is unveiled :) or maybe the "bored project officer" has a brand new mercedes...

Did you know about this Oisin?

Regenerative Medicin research centre

as discussed at lunch: "Robert Newman gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred years - but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at school, he places oil centre stage as the cause of all commotion."

Works for mercury as well.

We just need some chocolate....

Physicists in the US have made the first ultrathin flat lens. Thanks to its flatness, the device eliminates optical aberrations that occur in conventional lenses with spherical surfaces. As a result, the focusing power of the lens also approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Really nice indeed! The new flat ultrathin lens is different in that it is a nanostructured "metasurface" made of optically thin beam-shaping elements called optical antennas, which are separated by distances shorter than the wavelength of the light they are designed to focus. These antennas are wavelength-scale metallic elements that introduce a slight phase delay in a light ray that scatters off them. The metasurface can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle and spacing between the nanoantennas. "The antenna is nothing more than a resonator that stores light and then releases it after a short time delay," Capasso says. "This delay changes the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would." The lens surface is patterned with antennas of different shapes and sizes that are oriented in different directions. This causes the phase delays to be radially distributed around the lens so that light rays are increasingly refracted further away from the centre, something that has the effect of focusing the incident light to a precise point.

Mantis shrimp seem to have 12 types of photo-receptive sensors - but this does not really improve their ability to discriminate between colors. Speculation is that they serve as a form of pre-processing for visual information: the brain does not need to decode full color information from just a few channels which would would allow for a smaller brain. I guess technologically the two extremes of light detection would be RGB cameras which are like our eyes and offer good spatial resolution, and spectrometers which have a large amount of color channels but at the cost of spatial resolution. It seems the mantis shrimp uses something that is somewhere between RGB cameras and spectrometers. Could there be a use for this in space?

> RGB cameras which are like our eyes ...apart from the fact that the spectral response of the eyes is completely different from "RGB" cameras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg) ... and that the eyes have 4 types of light-sensitive cells, not three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-response.svg) ... and that, unlike cameras, human eye is precise only in a very narrow centre region (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea) ...hmm, apart from relying on tri-stimulus colour perception it seems human eyes are in fact completely different from "RGB cameras" :-) OK sorry for picking on this - that's just the colour science geek in me :-) Now seriously, on one hand the article abstract sounds very interesting, but on the other the statement "Why use 12 color channels when three or four are sufficient for fine color discrimination?" reveals so much ignorance to the very basics of colour science that I'm completely puzzled - in the end, it's a Science article so it should be reasonably scientifically sound, right? Pity I can't access full text... the interesting thing is that more channels mean more information and therefore should require *more* power to process - which is exactly opposite to their theory (as far as I can tell it from the abstract...). So the key is to understand *what* information about light these mantises are collecting and why - definitely it's not "colour" in the sense of human perceptual experience. But in any case - yes, spectrometry has its uses in space :-)

Team leader Professor Steven Tingay, Director of the MWA at Curtin University and Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) said the MWA will be able to detect the space junk by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations including popular youth network Triple J.

The Earth Monitoring Competition is annually awarding prizes to innovative solutions for business and society based on Earth observation data.

In case you are lacking some catchy ideas, here is the Finnish version of research that Leo certainly likes.

but at the end is Navier Stokes and turbulence and a few papers on fractals...... catchy?

That's the lab I worked...

just being cinical ... but did not we know that g = 9.809 in Paris? I can also create a complex measurement procedure that will held pi = 3.1415, just as expected!!!

well, sure... the interest of such gravimeter is to be absolute, and for now slightly more accurate than the other type of absolute gravimeter which uses retroreflector and interferometry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravimeter ). While the latter ones reached their limit in term of sensitivity, the atomic ones can be enhanced in many ways (using cooler atoms, better optics, etc...)