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Latest advances in gecko-like adhesive technology made the cover of Nature in July 2007

A collection of crazy scientific ideas.

The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.

A group of brains thinks about science. Similar to our timeline exercise.

This is a bit advanced version of our bionics2space.com database. Seems nicely done. Still no opinion about the content, though.

Funny pictures

more ants ....

You can use idle computers as extra computing power in a big run, or you can use idle personnel as extra computing power by making them play computer games:

this is probably the better link ...

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

Positioning via accumulated accelerometer data used to stabilize cold trapped atoms. Current systems are not very reliable for submarines, which cannot use GPS underwater. To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force - and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.

Bio-inspired assembly of fluorescent molecules boosts the fluorescence output.

Nice read! It is actually part of the Ariadna PETE study of one of the teams. You can supervise if you want :)

Bifurcations, patterns and other visualised mathematical problems for zen. Even found an oscillatory chemical reaction "Belousov-Zhabotinsky". Had no idea such a thing existed :-)

Cockroach is back!

"A paper posted online in January takes theoretical computer scientists halfway toward proving one of the biggest conjectures in their field. The new study, when combined with three other recent papers, offers the first tangible progress toward proving the Unique Games Conjecture since it was proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a computer scientist now at New York University. Over the past decade and a half, the conjecture - which asks whether you can efficiently color networks in a certain way - has inspired discoveries in topics as diverse as the geometry of foams and the stability of election systems. And if the conjecture can be proved, its implications will reach far beyond network-coloring: It will establish what is the best algorithm for every problem in which you're trying to satisfy as many as possible of a set of constraints - the rules in a sudoku puzzle, or the seating preferences of a collection of wedding guests, for instance."

IBM for the first time ever is making quantum computing available to the public, providing access to a quantum processor via the cloud. Users can create algorithms and run experiments and get inspired by the possibilities of a quantum computer.

Looks interesting.. Have you tried it?

Mathias Troyer from ETH Zurtich gave a talk in Leiden where he showed what he wants to be the replacement to this IBM programming or the best ally of it - program quantum computers with, for instance, python code. Nice developments coming from the quantum coding field, besides the fact we are ages away from a practical quantum computer.