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Can we use this discharge energy to .... half the cost of access to space? ;-)

Learnability cannot be proven! An important theoretical brick on machine learning capabilities.

I tried reading the abstract and my eyes glazed over at the buzzword density. Is this hot doo doo or a meaningful result?

wow, quantum, artificial life, biomimetic, quantum supremacy .... quantum machine learning, and quantum artificial intelligence and, wait for it ...... quantum complexity. All in one abstract is this the new champion?

Some people answering the question 'What's cooler than blasting space debris with lasers...?'.

If it fires in both directions, can we align it such that it deorbits two debris with one shot?

:) the idea of having this method for debris removal is actually an ACT one from Claudio Bombardelli (ACT RF in MAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-beam_shepherd). This is just a technological device to implement it so that the system on board is simplified (i.e. instead of two engines, you get away with one and a weird nozzle) Marcus, you cannot align it to get rid of two debris as you need to keep the spacecraft close to the debris as this is a long duration acion. One of the two would drift away (can only follow one!)

Pretty cool this was never spotted before!!

Found them!

Lucky astronomist watches star go boom.

"A list of the many different animals, plants, microbes, natural phenomena and supernatural activities that can be spotted in the wild lands of the metaphor-based computation literature"

Another victory for our future robo-overlords.

Interesting paper on flexible pumps, maybe also of interest for thinner more comfortable EAV suits

A college course at University of Washington on "Calling Bullshit". We should invite them to give a lunch lecture at ESA... Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: * Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. * Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. * Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit. * Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit. * Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit. We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

love it: "Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit - and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument."

very nice paper on adaptation of cells to microgravity

You need to avoid posting these types of links in the title as it is not managed well by plugins connected to our diigo account. Try to go to the source next time, and get rid of useless url codes.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans' psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.

Loss of connectivity in the multisensory integration cortical areas after short term microgravity experience, which could explain astronauts decrease of performance in sensorimotor tasks and spatial working memory. However, the effect should wear off after a few days in microgravity and after adaptation to incongruent vestibular information. ISS experiment needed...

The best paper on transformation optics written ever :-)

Concerning the fabrication... as usual, no idea. I agree that this is the main drawback of MM, and certainly difficult to overcome. I would double check that number, because its value is related with the beam shape of Fig. 1 A. I believe that the simulations are correct, it's just a detail.

wow ... still publishing despite babysitting and new job!!

Couldn't find more details on this but sounds interesting.

interesting indeed as a concept and to explore how far one can go to overcome some of the natural deficiencies of wood. regarding the main purpose of debris avoidance, it's typically not the structure that survives re-entry and one would have to see the environmental effect of what would be released in the atmosphere when burning.

maybe also a future way to store information?