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Powerful contrast between the two pictures!!

Francesco pointed out this research one year ago, we dropped it as noone was really considering it ... but in space a low CPU power consumption is crucial!! Maybe we should look back into this?

I don't remember what is the speed factor, but I guess this might do it! Although, I remember when using an IMU that you cannot have the data above a given rate (e.g. 20Hz even though the ADC samples the sensor at a little faster rate), so somehow it is not just the CPU that must be re-thought. When I say qualification I also imply the "hardened" phase.

I don't know if the (promised) one-order-of-magnitude improvements in power efficiency and performance are enough to justify looking into this. For once, it is not clear to me what embracing this technology would mean from an engineering point of view: does this technology need an entirely new software/hardware stack? If that were the case, in my opinion any potential benefit would be nullified. Also, is it realistic to build an entire self-sufficient chip on this technology? While the precision of floating point computations may be degraded and still be useful, how does all this play with integer arithmetic? Keep in mind that, e.g., in the Linux kernel code floating-point calculations are not even allowed/available... It is probably possible to integrate an "accelerated" low-accuracy floating-point unit together with a traditional CPU, but then again you have more implementation overhead creeping in. Finally, recent processors by Intel (e.g., the Atom) and especially ARM boast really low power-consumption levels, at the same time offering performance-boosting features such as multi-core and vectorization capabilities. Don't such efforts have more potential, if anything because of economical/industrial inertia?

Apparently there is a project going on in ESA on this topic led by TEC-EP, the contact person is Evelyne Simon. I really would like to do some research on these topics to see if we can find something interesting that would not have been considered in this study.

Might be of some interest to Christos?

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

Sounds like a metastable one. Wondering which half-life period it has, this is the primary issue concerning its technical applicability...

If I could write, this is exactly what I would write about rocket, GO, and so on... :) "we are decadent and tired. But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years ago. We may, in other words, need to look beyond strictly U.S.-centric explanations for such failures of imagination and initiative. ... Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis." "But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of "technology" might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces."

Would have been nice if it were historically more accurate and less polemic / superficial

mmmh... the wheel is also an old invention... there is an idea behind but this article is not very deepfull, and I really don't think the problem is with innovation and lack of creative young people !!! look at what is done in the financial sector...

well not many new things here but an interesting point of view

A rain forest vine has evolved dish-shaped leaves to attract the bats that pollinate it, scientists have found. Tests revealed that the leaves were supremely efficient at bouncing back the sound pulses the flying mammals used to navigate. When the leaves were present the bats located the plant twice as quickly as when these echoing leaves were removed.

what about ESA?

I said "more" because we already gave them money in the form of Sophia and Atlas :) If we want to be consistent in promoting "open" efforts (open innovation, open source, open governance, etc.) we should avoid Apple like the plague. They are far far worse than Microsoft in terms of closedness, secrecy, shady market practices and vendor lock-in. Just google a bit and you will find lots of example of their behaviour.

cant' really argue about the Apple practices, although I ve read some things. I think the NASA app is more like a news feed and nothing more. But that online crowdsourcing game we had in mind, now that would be cool in a mobile version - new mobiles also have accelerometers nowadays

new challenge among the NASA centennial challenges ...

Is this bullshit or really useful?

That's very interesting. The algae can be used as an absorber of CO2. The problem is that in order to be efficient it has to cover a wide surface and needs water. Would it be possible to grow algaes in the clouds...? Do you know some plants that are capable of floating in the air ?

Yes. There are some epiphytic plants who do not have roots and remove CO2 and H2O from air. Oisin is doing some calculations on it.

Ultrathin films of highly monodispersed luminescent Si nanoparticles are directly integrated on polycrystalline Si solar cells. The authors monitor the open-circuit voltage and the short circuit current. The results demonstrate that films of 1 nm blue lu