Group items tagged

Make sure you have a look at the gallery: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15293922 Some are pretty interesting...

The latest from Schmidt / Lipson / Eureqa. A significant improvement over their previous work is that now "The algorithm selects between multiple candidate models by designing experiments to make their predictions disagree."

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

he new SR-72 will use a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) that will employ the turbine engine at lower speeds, and use a scramjet at higher speeds. A scramjet engine is designed to operate at hypersonic velocities by compressing the air through a carefully designed inlet, but needs to be traveling supersonic before it is practical to begin with. So far research projects from NASA, the Air Force and other Pentagon entities have not been able to solve the problem of transitioning from the subsonic flight regime, through hypersonic flight with a single aircraft. Same problem as Reaction Engines is trying to solve, so I am not sure whether they actually cracked it. In any case, nice pictures. Not sure why the exhaust color is purple in color. Its not running on Argon I believe.

Weird article. Intermediate thruster stage (Ramjet) is missing. Scramjet has supersonic combustion and a normal turbine delivers subsonic flows. Even with afterburner - the Scramjet inlet would decelerate the flow down to subsonic velocity with "normal" subsonic combustion. The only thing I can imagine is that the Scramjet stage is bi-functional and covers both, subsonic and supersonic combustion. But the article doesn't say anything about it.

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

Taking out the trial and error network design and adding ensembles.

first fully "artificial" designed organism reported ...

after many announcements, now some first design drawings ...

If you have 45 minutes and you want to learn a bit about inverse design of metasurfaces using machine learning, then I would highly recommend this talk. I found it very easy to follow both the physics and machine learning parts of it.

EXACTLY what I wanted to investigate as a rapid constuction tool for shape memory alloy structures!

A short article about Saul Griffith and his R&D company Otherlab. Pretty much halfway between Mythbusters and the ACT.

Doesn't really sound sexy, but this is of utmost importance for next generation grids for renewable energy.

I agree on the significance indeed - a small boost also for my favourite Desertec project ... Though their language is a bit too "grandiose": "ABB has successfully designed and developed a hybrid DC breaker after years of research, functional testing and simulation in the R&D laboratories. This breaker is a breakthrough that solves a technical challenge that has been unresolved for over a hundred years and was perhaps one the main influencers in the 'war of currents' outcome. The 'hybrid' breaker combines mechanical and power electronics switching that enables it to interrupt power flows equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station within 5 milliseconds - that's as fast as a honey bee takes per flap of its wing - and more than 30 times faster than the reaction time of an Olympic 100-meter medalist to react to the starter's gun! But its not just about speed. The challenge was to do it 'ultra-fast' with minimal operational losses and this has been achieved by combining advanced ultrafast mechanical actuators with our inhouse semiconductor IGBT valve technologies or power electronics (watch video: Hybrid HVDC Breaker - How does it work). In terms of significance, this breaker is a 'game changer'. It removes a significant stumbling block in the development of HVDC transmission grids where planning can start now. These grids will enable interconnection and load balancing between HVDC power superhighways integrating renewables and transporting bulk power across long distances with minimal losses. DC grids will enable sharing of resources like lines and converter stations that provides reliability and redundancy in a power network in an economically viable manner with minimal losses. ABB's new Hybrid HVDC breaker, in simple terms will enable the transmission system to maintain power flow even if there is a fault on one of the lines. This is a major achievement for the global R&D team in ABB who have worked for years on the challeng

NASA has tested a prototype of a new design for a small uranium reactor as a power source for deep space exploration. In principle this should pose a smaller radiation danger during launch and more energy per mass compared to RTGs.

nice - did not know about it. GTOC on steroids and with loads of cash. concerning this specific challenge and especially the last condition: doesn't this hint towards a flawed design? In addition to maximizing the total power output there are some constraints on the possible movements: Each SARJ and BGA is limited to a maximum angular velocity and to a maximum angular acceleration. Each SAW must produce at least some minimum average power over the orbit (which is different for each SAW). The sequence of positions must be cyclic, so it can be repeated on the next orbit. The maximum amount of BGA rotation is not limited, but exceeding a threshold will result in a score penalty. Some structural members of the SAW mast (called Longerons) have restrictions on how they can be shadowed.

The longerons will expand and contract with exposition to sun (I think whatever the material they are made of). Because you have 4 longerons in a mast, you just need to be carefull that the mast is well balanced, and that the 4 longerons support each other, basically, you need an even number of shadowed longerons, possibly 0 too. I would call this an operational constraint.

Data-Visualization Firm's New Software Autonomously Finds Abstract Connections --> Annalisa?

I had a nice introduction about Ordinal Regression via Manifold Learning by Francisco last week. It is doubtless a very actual research branch!

I doubt :) The original paper from Liu is from 2011 and has .... wait for it .... 1 quotation (and a self-one)!!! http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=it&q=Ordinal+Regression+via+Manifold+Learning&btnG=&lr=

Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization framework developed by NASA since 2010

have a look ... article from Claudio

I wanted to post this one, as plant-inspired robotic design and algorithms are a new kid on the block, and then noticed that some ACT-members may already be aware of this special issue...

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.

WPT overview paper ...