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according to the normal website (http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/): "The UK Space Agency website will officially launch on 1 April 2010. Until then, the BNSC website will be in a state of transition " the guys above i think just take the piss coz theres no official website. Mission statement: TOGETHER WE ARE GOING TO EMBARK ON A JOURNEY INTO SPACE. ..........................THE MISSION IS......MARS................................."

I've just read a blog entry about this on New Scientist, and while the entry itself is not interesting, I learned from it where the UKSA and ESA's UK establishment are going to be based. Answer: it's even more in the middle of nowhere than Plymouth! BTW does anyone (Leo?) know what is the basis on which new ESA establishments locations are chosen (if this info is classified, you can send it on priv ;) [Edit] Esa has released a news item about it... Whatever one can say about the British Space Agency, they certainly have a fantastic logo!

I wanted to post this one, as plant-inspired robotic design and algorithms are a new kid on the block, and then noticed that some ACT-members may already be aware of this special issue...

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

Eleven of ESA's 18 Member States are participating in the ExoMars Programme: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, plus Canada. Greece doesn't participate. pfffff national debt, crisis and bullshit

"The Neuromorphic Computing Platform allows neuroscientists and engineers to perform experiments with configurable neuromorphic computing systems. The platform provides two complementary, large-scale neuromorphic systems built in custom hardware at locations in Heidelberg, Germany (the "BrainScaleS" system, also known as the "physical model" or PM system) and Manchester, United Kingdom (the "SpiNNaker" system, also known as the "many core" or MC system)."