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All the satellite-related systems (except for the rocket to launch it) are DIY programs -- designed so that regular people may also have the chance of developing and eventually launching their own.

I was saying that mainly because of some flaws - the piggy-pack installation, no dedicated stage, the limited control, ... It is so far very funny, but once he can fill all the gaps, it should be an excellent initiative - although careful about the debris if anyone has its own ;p

his quote: "when art becomes practical, we call it technology; when technology becomes useless, we call it art" ... this is probably the later one ....

...and hitting the news in the same day: A Rocket Built from U.S. and European Parts "A new rocket that would combine parts from NASA's canceled Ares I rocket as well as the Ariane 5 , a well-proven European satellite launcher, could provide a low-cost option for taking crew and cargo to the space station. The rocket proposal was announced this week by ATK, an aerospace and defense company that manufactures the solid rocket motors for NASA's space shuttles, and Astrium, the European company that makes the Ariane 5. They say the rocket, called Liberty, would be ready for flight by 2015." "Other commercial companies, including Boeing and Orbital Sciences Corporation, are looking to use low-end versions of the Atlas V to carry the capsules they are building. Liberty could carry any capsule at a cost less than that of the Atlas V, according to ATK." Look! Competition! :)

According to the company's wikipedia page, the computer costs $ 10 million. Can we then declare Quantum Computing has officially arrived?! quotes from elsewhere in the site: "first commercial quantum computing system on the market"; "our current superconducting 128-qubit processor chip is housed inside a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter shielded room" Link to the company's scientific publications. Interestingly, this company seems to have been running a BOINC project, AQUA@home, to "predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of hard problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. AQUA@home uses Internet-connected computers to help design and analyze quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques". List of papers coming out of it.

We present the application of Principal Component Analysis for data acquired during the design of a natural gesture interface. We investigate the concept of an eigengesture for motion capture hand gesture data and present the visualisation of principal components obtained in the course of conducted experiments. We also show the influence of dimensionality reduction on reconstructed gesture data quality.

Bio-inspired robots. Cockroaches are also in.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, employees can now log on to their own intranet portal designed for group collaboration, social bookmarking, and general employee-to-employee ...

and we are late again!!!!

It's an article from April, now that we got Anreij's Google thing though is more actual - Unusually, the search giant designs its own servers. For the first time, Google unveils one publicly, showing a surprise built-in battery. Read this blog post by Stephen Shankland on Business Tech.

A control and design architecture inspired by bio-arms (i.e. fluffy elastic things)

The authors report the design and implementation of a paperlike, thermally activated display fabricated from thermochromic composite and embedded conductive wiring patterns, shaped from mixture of metallic nanoparticles in polydimethylsioxane using soft l

Just got this very shocking link that I want so share. This is how designers see biomimetics...

Researchers have demonstrated a spinning liquid mirror design that could be used for the main mirror of a huge infrared telescope based on the moon.

check this out Luca!

Basics of Space Flight is a tutorial designed primarily to help operations people identify the range of concepts associated with deep space missions, and grasp the relationships among them.

Collaborative desing of a car - Could the technical approach be useful for spacecraft design?

Yet it does all this with a thermal design power of around 2W - incredibly, less than three per cent that of an everyday Core 2 Duo. Average power consumption is promised to be in the milliwatt range, with idle draw as low as 30mW.

2collab is a new type of research tool launched in 2007- a collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical and medical communities. 1.Online bookmarking and reference management 2.Groups - for sharing with existing n

The object being imaged or stimulated with subwavelength accuracy does not need to be in the immediate proximity of the superlens or field concentrator: an optical mask can be designed that creates constructive interference of waves known as superoscillat

An opinion piece by an ex-Googler, talking, among other things, about how corporate culture is creeping into Google. I've highlighted some snippets which I've found eerily familiar :)

big big booster coming ... !

even bigger booster also coming: China Aims To Build World's Largest Rocket "Back in March, China revealed it is studying the feasibility of designing the most powerful carrier rocket in history for making a manned moon landing and exploring deep space, according to Liang Xiaohong, vice head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. The rocket is envisaged to have a payload of 130 tonnes, five times larger than that of China's current largest rocket. This rocket, if built, will eclipse the 53 tonne capacity of the planned Falcon 9 Heavy from SpaceX. It will even surpass the largest rocket ever built, the 119-tonne Saturn V."

still only "is studying the feasibility of designing a powerful carrier rocket" - we could easily do the same at no cost almost ... but still ... they might be serious ...