Group items tagged

NASA marketing interstellar travel to foreign bodies even without knowing how they actually look like.

Amazing! :-D Makes you forget how hard it is to detect individual atoms at all.

While amazing indeed, it makes me wonder how much longer we will still have to wait until all this nanotechnology stuff will deliver something actually useful (say super-efficient/super-small transistors in my cell phone, camera, computer, etc.)? So far it seems to excel mostly in marketing...

Interesting mater thesis that lead to the just announced new launcher ! Remember our discussion after the advanced concepts workshop!?!?!

do you know about this? https://www.qb50.eu/launch.php

I knew about the project only, but not about this very interesting missile ... "The launcher has a remarkable track record of several hundred successful launches and only 1 failure. Shtil is marketed by the State Rocket Center Makeyev."

The cooperation took place through ESA's Networking/Partnering Initiative, which supports work carried out by universities and research institutes on advanced technologies with potential space applications.

really nice, especially since it is an idea that started in the team, led to an Ariadna study by Carlo Menon, RF in biomimetics who then got a research position at simon fraser univ, where he created his own biomimetics group menvra (http://menrva.ensc.sfu.ca) there, struggling as an italian in a canadian university doing space and not having access to the US space market ... the NPI was the first contract he got for a space resaerch project ... its fantastic to see his student now making headlines with this idea

In remote / under-developed regions this might actually be a strong alternative for building internet connectivity - somewhat like the exploding market for cell phones in Africa due to the lack of land lines.

Quote: "This is exactly what we are pursuing - self-assembling materials that organize at smaller sizes, say, less than 20 or even 10 nanometers"

Direct Self-Assembly (DSA) is one of the competitors for the next-generation 'lithography' together with direct-write via electron beam and the more traditional extreme UV (EUV) lithography. Although there are huge benefits to use DSA, the technology does have some drawbacks when it comes to line edge roughness. It seems however particularly good for repetitive structures that are used in memory chips. As long as EUV is struggling to get it working, DSA definitely has a fighting chance to enter the market one day.

... and on students as well, who should actually know better!

For me it is not a surprising result at all that criminals cooperate more than students. The former are partners in crime, united by being "against the system". The latter are nothing more than competitors of each other at the job market. On a side note, the majority of the students doesn't *know*, they *memorise*. There is a difference. I recommend "Celda 211". Good movie on the topic.

Did the theoretical payoff matrix take into account what happens when you next encounter the person you cheated out of their coffee/cigarettes?

NASA answer to the big data hype

"The service encompasses selected NASA satellite and global change data sets -- including temperature, precipitation, and forest cover -- and data processing tools from the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)" Very good marketing move for just three types of selected data (MODIS, Landsat products) plus four model runs (past/projection) for the the four greenhouse gas emissions scenarios of the IPCC. It looks as if they are making data available to adress a targeted question (crowdsourcing of science, as Paul mentioned last time, this time climate evolution), not at all the "free scrolling of the user around the database" to pick up what he thinks useful, mode. There is already more rich libraries out there when it comes to climate (http://icdc.zmaw.de/) Maybe simpler approach is the way to go: make available the big data sets categorized by study topic (climate evolution, solar system science, galaxies etc.) and not by instrument or mission, which is more technical, so that the amateur user can identify his point of interest easily.

They are taking a good leap forward with it, but it definitely requires a lot of post processing of the data. Actually it seems they downsample everything to workable chunks. But I guess the power is really in the availability of the data in combination with Amazon's cloud computing platform. Who knows what will come out of it if hundreds of people start interacting with it.

The main reasons: (1) awareness, people know that a variety of consumer cars exist (2) negative incentives that push people away from gasoline powered cars, eg fuel taxes (3) positive incentives, exemption from road tax, purchase tax and free parking (all temporary) and (4) extensive recharging infrastructure. Other countries have some/all of these elements, but Norway has pushes mostly and the result is that the nissan leaf was the best sold car in September and October, beating all other cars.

If there's anyone who could afford such things, it is Norway... According to http://xkcd.com/980/, Oljefondet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway) is currently worth nearly as much as US has spent on wars. I mean, all of them together... One of the biggest problems in Norway is what to do with this money without damaging the economy in the long run :-)

wireless power transmission made useful ? this application did certainly not come to my mind when Guy Pignolet showed me 12 years ago how his handy would lid up a small diode after our first SPS meeting in Paris ...

Great idea to use either unused/wasted energy. Then again, the signal power (receiver floor) is steadily going down going from 3G to 5G, yet there might be more use of bandwidth to compensate this. It is funny though that you buy a device which could have the function build in it on the back from the start, yet you put a shell around it and then harness wireless power to give it that add-on functionality.

Recently I came across this article in a Japanese newspaper about wireless power transmission applications in the women beauty business. It's probably not as useful as an iPhone cover but apparently there is a market for such things! http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/18/business/led-nails-light-up-when-calling/#.U2OcWV7v2X8

We must get one of these. They had a goal of 50.000$ but got, instead more than 3,000,000$ !!

Really bad market analysis on their part...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable-professional-3d-printer?ref=live i think this is the one I was talking about the other day. ~3M$ from 100k$ target in 2012. I think I remembered it though cos they got sued for patent infringement and it was the first time kickstarter had been included in the lawsuit. I may even have posted the story on diigo...

Cynthia - please have a look ... can we check the OoM?

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html hmm should be the ACT in Nature, no? ;)

Yeeesss :) So the "non-commercial" rockets do not emit soot? And how many "non-commercial" launches per year are there in comparison to the commercial ones? Finally commercial space-flight seems more realisable than ever, and "non-commercial" guys will do everything to prevent situation in which they have to compete on an open market... Coming years should be very interesting...

YES YES YES! And good riddance! :)

website of the project working on the 'Living Earth Simulator': http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT five page summary of the FuturICT Proposal: http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/data/FuturICT-FivePageSummary.pdf

an active and open community for whoever interested and the new YGTs RFs in Innovation/ Economics/ CMS etc.

...and hitting the news in the same day: A Rocket Built from U.S. and European Parts "A new rocket that would combine parts from NASA's canceled Ares I rocket as well as the Ariane 5 , a well-proven European satellite launcher, could provide a low-cost option for taking crew and cargo to the space station. The rocket proposal was announced this week by ATK, an aerospace and defense company that manufactures the solid rocket motors for NASA's space shuttles, and Astrium, the European company that makes the Ariane 5. They say the rocket, called Liberty, would be ready for flight by 2015." "Other commercial companies, including Boeing and Orbital Sciences Corporation, are looking to use low-end versions of the Atlas V to carry the capsules they are building. Liberty could carry any capsule at a cost less than that of the Atlas V, according to ATK." Look! Competition! :)