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More arguments for a lunar base? "They found the most mass-efficient path involves launching a crew from Earth with just enough fuel to get into orbit around the Earth. A fuel-producing plant on the surface of the moon would then launch tankers of fuel into space, where they would enter gravitational orbit. The tankers would eventually be picked up by the Mars-bound crew, which would then head to a nearby fueling station to gas up before ultimately heading to Mars."

There was a paper with a very similar concept (reaching Mars via DRO) at the AAS meeting in January by Conte et al. First, the total Delta V required for a trip Earth -> LLO -> MLO is higher than Earth -> MLO. The trick is that Earth -> LLO requires less Delta V than Earth -> MLO and hence less mass has to be carried along *from Earth*. Essentially what both approaches have in common is that they say "if there's a free gas station orbiting the moon, it's cheaper to fly empty and fill up there on the way". The AAS paper actually does a decent job at estimating the "real" cost by also including estimates of the cost of a lunar base. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/files/44275737/Conte_etal_AAS2015_Earth_Mars_transfers_through_Moon_distant_retrograde_orbit.pdf

Inspired by the work that was done at the ACT, I continued working on optical flow landing at TU Delft. Today Bio & Bio published my article on a new theory that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. It shows that drones approaching an object with an insect-inspired vision strategy become unstable at a specific distance from the object. Turning this weakness into a strength, drones can actually use the timely detection of that instability to estimate distance. The new theory will enable further miniaturization of autonomous drones and provides a new hypothesis on flying insect behavior. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm7SMJp8EA4&feature=youtu.be Article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016004

"Without the relevant data for reasoning about the state of AI technology, we are essentially "flying blind" in our conversations and decision-making related to AI [...] The AI Index is an initiative to track, collate, distill and visualize data relating to artificial intelligence. "

one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.

No idea... another one I don't get is the one with the waiter presenting some small black-white thing to the white hair guy on a chair.

love the clockwork orange one

Let's keep a eye on this... Animals use odor cues to navigate through their environments, helping them locate targets and assess danger. Much of how animal brains organize, read out, and respond to odor stimuli across spatial and temporal scales is not well understood. To tackle these questions, Odor2Action uses a highly interdisciplinary team science approach. Our work uses fruit fly, honeybee, and mouse models to determine how neural representations of odor are generated, reformatted, and translated to generate useful behaviors that guide how animals interact with their environment.

reminds me of the methan smelling source finding study we did ...