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At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.

Acasa was born out of Singularity University, a unique, world-changing institution founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. After nine weeks at NASA Ames, the home of Singularity University, four teams emerged with projects focused on one common goal-to positively affect the lives of one billion people over ten years. Our team has designed a business plan to leverage advances in rapid 3D additive manufacturing technologies in order to construct affordable, customizable housing for the developing world. This environmentally sustainable solution has the potential to create a powerful new paradigm for improving housing construction using local resources.

cool video, i'd like to see that in reality... Though i'm not sure it would be less expansive than the very cheap workers you can get on site ! You need to build the robot, to bring it on-site, highly specialised enginneers to supervize the project, etc...

yeah I am not sure about that either but the idea seems nice though

The quest for finding Planet Nine is meant to stay apparently.

Researchers in Japan have developed what may be the first string-theory model with a natural mechanism for explaining why our universe would seem to exist in three spatial dimensions if it actually has six more. According to their model, only three of the nine dimensions started to grow at the beginning of the universe, accounting both for the universe's continuing expansion and for its apparently three-dimensional nature. ... The team has yet to prove that the Standard Model of particle physics will show up in its model,...

In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn't come bigger than this. In the world of bathroom tiling - I bet they're interested too. If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane. Also only mathematicians can put the words "Pentagon", "attack", and "plane" in the same sentence...

I especially love this part of the story: "The hunt to find and classify the pentagons that can tile the plane has been a century-long mathematical quest, begun by the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt, who in 1918 discovered five types of pentagon that do tile the plane. (To clarify, he did not find five single pentagons. He discovered five classes of pentagon that can each be described by an equation. For the curious, the equations are here. And for further clarification, we are talking about convex pentagons, which are most people's understanding of a pentagon in that every corner sticks out.) Most people assumed Reinhardt had the complete list until half a century later in 1968 when R. B. Kershner found three more. Richard James brought the number of types of pentagonal tile up to nine in 1975. That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James' discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. In 1985 Rolf Stein found a fourteenth. Way to go!"

we can't access it from within the firewall I fear ...

A system of nine quantum bits (qubits) that is robust to errors that would normally destroy a quantum computation has been created by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Google. The device relies on a quantum error-correction protocol, which the team says could be deployed in practical quantum computers of the future.

Nine out of 10 workers perform better when listening to music, according to a new study that found 88pc of participants produced their most accurate test results and 81pc completed their fastest work when music was playing.

There's this website: https://www.focusatwill.com/ , which I used for some time. At some point I even subscribed for the paid version (more tracks, control over "intensity" of music). Unfortunately I realized I work the best in complete silence, which is tricky to get - occasionally I put on the white noise http://simplynoise.com/ which works quite well for me.

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles).

Beautiful interactive tree of life

A bit slow, but I finally could figure out the common ancestor of the nine-banded armadillo and the common ostrich!