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is this the breaktrough that we were waiting for?

That depends on what application you are thinking of. For circuit board electronics this will allow integration of micro sized supercapacitors to provide operational power. They will have to be fed by external batteries still, but the close proximity allows for better tailored power demands. They also propose tapping into thermal/mechanical energy to charge the supercaps. In the end, they can provide significant specific power (W/kg) but you still need to upscale the production to cover large areas to also gain high specific energy (Wh/kg). This breakthough is for micro sized applications, not for replacement of large scale energy storage (electric vehicles, satellites) going up to kWh. That said, I know of several studies in supercaps at ESA, but they are still qualifying current relatively old commercial solutions.

Soft Robots Scientists from Cornell University and the Italian Technology Institute in Pontedera have developed an elastic robotic skin that is able to stretch up to five times its size, change colors, and even detect pressure. The luminescent skin, partly funded by the Army and Air Force's research wings, is comprised of different kinds of specialized silicone, making it flexible and soft.

related video here: http://imgur.com/gallery/q57U40Y

any clue how? "With the peel-and-stick process, we integrated hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) TFSCs on paper, plastics, cell phone and building windows while maintaining the original 7.5% efficiency. The new peel-and-stick process enables further reduction of the cost and weight for TFSCs and endows TFSCs with flexibility and attachability for broader application areas. We believe that the peel-and-stick process can be applied to thin film electronics as well"

Its already "old" news but kinda nice...

I want one for my smartphone...

Combining this with the robobee?

Small scale laser induced electron accelerator followed by induced beta decay to produce positrons. Relatively simple, yet requires a high power fs laser and some precision engineering

"Cast your name into deep space in style!"

Interesting approach, but with 99.9% probability they will miserably fail (at least in terms of their time schedule) simply because the technology is untested. I haven't read the refs (which miss by the way important works of E. Ahedo et al. on magnetic nozzle acceleration by ambipolar effects), but 1. using water means that you produce oxygen radicals which will erode chamber walls (ionisation efficiency is not 100% and experimental tests haven't been performed yet). 2. Electronic excitation (and radiation), rotational excitation, vibrational excitation, and dissociation are all processes which consume energy and reduce ionisation efficiency drastically. 3. It is a miniaturised Helicon thruster. Theoretical analysis probably does not consider near field effects. Far field models are probably not applicable due to the size of the thruster. I expect some surprises during thruster testing. In any case - good luck!

Apparently, there is only one qualification constraint regarding CubeSat propulsion which is related to volatile propellant. Since they use water as propellant and are also the owner of the CubeSat it is actually up to them how they qualify their thruster. Given that it is also possible to qualify the thruster within 18 months - since they define what "qualification" means.

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

Meet the incredible shrinking material. Most things swell when they warm up, creating engineering headaches, but now a 3D-printed material has been configured to contract instead. When two interlinked materials expand at different rates, they can warp or crack. It's a problem in buildings, bridges, electronics and anything else that is exposed to a wide temperature swing.

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

Aerographite. This post was originally published on Mashable. German scientists have developed a sturdy material called Aerographite made mostly of air, opening up huge implications for the future development of electronics. The jet-black, non-transparent porous carbon material - which was created by scientists at Kiel University and Hamburg University of Technology - was detailed in the July edition of scientific journal Advanced Materials .

In a jaw-dropping feat of engineering, electronics turn a person's thoughts into commands for a drone. Using a brain-computer interface technology pioneered by University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He, several young people have learned to use their thoughts to steer a flying robot around a gym, making it turn, rise, dip, and even sail through a ring.

Pretty cool, so when is this going to be available for our quadrocopter?

"An elegant combination of electronics and elastic materials has been used to construct a small visual sensor that closely resembles an insect's eye. The device paves the way for autonomous navigation of tiny aerial vehicles."

We discussed this today during coffee. The inventor claims that he claims that a pressure differential can push hydrogen through a proton conductive membrane (thereby stripping off the electrons) which flow through an electric circuit and provide electric power. The type of membrane is fairly similar to that found in a hydrogen fuel cell. If the pressure differential is cause by selective heating this is in essence a heat engine that directly produces electricity. The inventor claims that this could be a high efficiency alternative to thermoelectric devices and could even outperform PV and Sterling engines with an efficiency close to that of fuel cells (e.g., ~60% @ dT=600K). I could not find any scientific publications as the inventor is not affiliated to any University - he has however an impressive number of patents from a very wide field (e.g., the "Super Soaker" squirt gun) and has worked on several NASA and US military projects. His current research seams to be funded by the latter as well. Here are some more links that I found: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/shooting-for-the-sun/308268/ http://www.johnsonems.com/?q=node/13 http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=%22lonnie+g+johnson%22+&btnG=&hl=nl&as_sdt=0%2C5

At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.

"We have made optical systems at the microscopic scale that amplify light and produce ultra-narrowband spectral output," explained J. Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Illinois. "These new optical amplifiers are well-suited for routing optical power on a chip containing both electronic and optical components.

The novel part here is that it can be scaled down to the cubesat platform. I then wondered, could we place multiple of such Cubesats in a 'decaying orbit' around the Sun? Fractionated will give spatial and temporal information which, even with a simple langmuir probe setup, can give information on density, temperature, velocity, ion energy distribution, potential.. Of course they will be lost relatively quickly, but more could be ejected from a mother ship which is orbiting at a safer distance.

For example like the KickSat projec https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space Although a pc-reboot due to a radiation event in the electronics has reset the deployment timeline to approximately 2 days after re-entry... http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/06/kicksat-satellites_n_5273821.html

Researchers in Bangalore, India together with the Indian Space Research organization come up with an intelligent self-healing algorithm that can locate open-circuits faults and repair them in real-time. They used an insulating silicon oil containing conductive particles. Whenever a fault happens, an electric field develops there, causing the fluid to move in a 'thermodynamic automaton' way repairing the fault. The researchers make clear it could be one advantage for electronics in harsh environments, such as in space satellites.