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Does ESA really want to sent 2 S/C to this rock ?

Isn't there a bit of confusion there - Don Quijote will actually not fly, is it? Isn't it just an old buzz that has been misquoted...

indeed the article is a bit too upbeat - DQ is a concept and brain child of Andrés! and chances are indeed good that ESA will do something on NEO missions, if it will be don quijote, nobody knows of course ... but in my view it's a nice concept ...

A short overview on cool experiments with flies.

Dedicated to Joris...

An ACT classical subject

We had the idea with the mirror neurons!!! We should go on in doing something

A paper on fruit flies and why it is so difficult to kill them. Watch the high speed movies!!!

DQ!!!!

amazing

crazy swiss ....

bankruptcy #2

probably not very new but certainly impressive!

and they do it with Kinect too :) http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-03/video-mits-quadrocopter-carries-kinect-autonomous-flying

This could become quite relevant in future control systems if the setup can be made simple to keep alive and stable. I was doing some follow-up on a story about people controlling aircraft with their brainwaves (through EEG) when I ran into this really cool story. The idea of growing the neurons in patterns is incidentally very similar to the Physarium slime-mold stuff that Dario and me were curious about a little while ago.

I think we already had a discussion on this during a wednesday meeting :P

Oh, I thought that was on the little robot that was controlled by rat neurons and bumped into EVERYTHING. The interesting thing here is that they add a surface patterning (with some kind of nutrient) to control the growth of cells. (Maybe that is not new either, though.)

Today we released the Astro Drone app. People that have the Parrot AR drone can freely download the game. While they fly their drone in the real world, they are trying to dock to the ISS in the virtual world. But the app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state and uploaded. The data is then used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.

Visit the main ESA website and you'll be greeted with a 6-minute Rosetta promo movie by a kickass Polish artist... P.S. You can also find the video here. P.P.S It seems I've just discovered a way to hijack old diigo entries ;-)

NASA Releases Tool Enabling Citizen Scientists to Examine Asteroid Vesta Vesta Trek is a free, web-based application that provides detailed visualizations of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in our solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. Data gathered from multiple instruments aboard Dawn have been compiled into Vesta Trek's user-friendly set of tools, enabling citizen scientists and students to study the asteroid's features. The application includes: -- Interactive maps with the ability to overlay a growing range of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements and geology, as well as analysis tools for measuring the diameters, heights and depths of surface features and more. -- 3-D printer-exportable topography so users can print physical models of Vesta's surface. -- Standard keyboard gaming controls to manoever a first-person visualization of "flying" across the surface of the asteroid. "There's nothing like seeing something with your own eyes, but these types of detailed data-visualizations are the next best thing," said Kristen Erickson, Director, Science Engagement and Partnerships at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC.