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The competition is open....

And what does one win in the end? Yet another unfeasible concept to be archived somewhere in a journal? Look at "Millis hypothetical drives"... Give me a break, for sure!!

I like the sentence "16 peer-reviewed journal articles, and an award-winning website (Warp-When), all for a total investment of less than $1.6M". This gives 100.000 dollars per peer-reviewed paper (we neglect the award-winning web-site under the assumption that is the easy part....). With these number the ACT in 2010 cashed 1.4 millions only in research papers making it an obvious good investment for the European Space Agency also in austerity times!!!

Sounds good!

well of course money is trust, and even more loans and credit and even more stock and bond markets. It all represents trust and expectations. However since the first banks 500 years ago and the first loans etc. etc., and as well the fact that bonds and currencies bring down whole countries (Greece lately), and are mainly controlled by large financial centres and (central) banks, banks have always been on the winning side no matter what and that isn't going to change easily. So if you are talking about these new currencies it would be a new era, not just a new currency. So should Greece convert its debt to bitcoins ;P ?

well, from 1936 to 1993 the central bank of france was owned by the state and was supposed to serve the general interest...

I always new it - the future of telecom is with pigeons ... (what happened to our idea of the pigeon inspired navigator??)

Well, it's been newn... I mean known since computer networks were invented that it'll take them a long time to match with a throughput of a train carrying recorded media. The point is that throughput is not the only important parameter: the other is response time... (BTW let's see how this commenting feature works, not many folks seem to use it...)

I do use it quite regularily .... a train full of DVDs and flash drives, yes ok - but a pigeon!!!!

sleeping and driving on the highway

"The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle." .... what or who is defining a professional driver? one of the always overly tired truck drivers?

In Spain, 53% of the energy demand could be supplied by wind farms (during one weekend with quite strong winds)!!!!

Indeed! they have also among the biggest wind farms in Europe. For instance, if you drive from Algeciras (and Gibraltar) to Tarifa, you can see them rotating like hell!!

article written a bit as if they had invented rectennas ... they are used since the 60s (Brown powered a small helicopter via 2.45 GHz ... and Kaya-san has showed wireless power transmission via advanced rectenna's at almost every SPS conference since 20 years ...

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

I mainly see neural networks in this... maybe some evolutionary stuff :))

The blockchain technology behind bitcoin has been gaining traction. This article makes a good job of describing it, and the different (not-bitcoin) ways in which it's being adopted. Worth reading, even if only for the funny bit about self-driving self-owning cars who pay themselves for fuel, parking and repairs.

Engineer Roger Shawyer's controversial EM Drive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA's Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech.

I like this just because it will end up on Thijs' desk :D

Interesting that the new comes in... Yahoo Finance :). Another more complete article http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/nasa-eagleworks-has-tested-upgraded.html

The functional principle is similar to ordinary pumped storage plants: when power is needed, water flows into the sphere and drives the turbine thus generating power. If surplus power is available (usually during the night), water can be pumped out of the sphere again, thus effectively charging the storage system.

it works! No, of course it doesn't. I've wasted your time just posting this.