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We had a short discussion yesterday about using nuclear isomers as batteries for spacecraft. The principle is that energy is stored as an excitation of the nucleus which can then release the energy as a gamma-photon. However angular momentum has to be conserved an this suppresses the decay strongly - making these states stable up to 10^35 longer than a typical decay.

The key is the triggering of the dacay wheras the triggering comsumes less energy than the decay provides. The x-ray based triggering of the gamma photon decay turned out to be quite controversial and needs significantly more scientific attention.

I think that there should be some references and traces of the discussions we had on this on the shared drive or wiki ... One other aspect: converting the omnidirectional gamma bursts into useful energy ....

The mantles of Earth and other rocky planets are rich in magnesium and oxygen. Due to its simplicity, the mineral magnesium oxide is a good model for studying the nature of planetary interiors. New work studied how magnesium oxide behaves under the extreme conditions deep within planets and found evidence that alters our understanding of planetary evolution.

I Knew!!! I Knew!!! They are all around. I always though Marek was one :) "I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I'm not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist"

His rival putin on the other hand... He got into an ultra-light aircraft to guide birds during their migration - from the video it seems that only very few birds think he is credible (as a guide). --> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/9524900/Flying-Vladimir-Putin-leads-birds-on-first-ever-migration-in-latest-publicity-stunt.html

Yup. My structural perfection is matched only by my hostility.

nice - did not know about it. GTOC on steroids and with loads of cash. concerning this specific challenge and especially the last condition: doesn't this hint towards a flawed design? In addition to maximizing the total power output there are some constraints on the possible movements: Each SARJ and BGA is limited to a maximum angular velocity and to a maximum angular acceleration. Each SAW must produce at least some minimum average power over the orbit (which is different for each SAW). The sequence of positions must be cyclic, so it can be repeated on the next orbit. The maximum amount of BGA rotation is not limited, but exceeding a threshold will result in a score penalty. Some structural members of the SAW mast (called Longerons) have restrictions on how they can be shadowed.

The longerons will expand and contract with exposition to sun (I think whatever the material they are made of). Because you have 4 longerons in a mast, you just need to be carefull that the mast is well balanced, and that the 4 longerons support each other, basically, you need an even number of shadowed longerons, possibly 0 too. I would call this an operational constraint.

looks like some backwind for all the cold fusion believers ...

I just answered something very similar to Franco, except the conclusions: I don't think that there is a good reason for us or anybody else in ESA to get involved at this stage.

I agree - if this device would work it there would be other interest groups (like the energy sector) with a much more concrete stake in the technology.

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.

some of the quotes in there are a bit limit ... :-)

I would well imagine a team at an other space institution, with their own diigo, commenting on that news ... ;p Interesting trend nonetheless. At the NASA Space Apps Challenge, few teams proposed a similar G&C application but for the rover Curiosity... this is certainly a good approach for citizen science.

winners of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship competition (informally) announced

Hopefully the money wasted on the brain project will be offset by the gains on graphene... When I heard the proposals presentations on fet11 conference back in 2011, the graphene project was my bet.. Although its motivations were mostly political ("everyone else is working on graphene so if Europe won't do something, we'll soon be far behind"), in contrast to other projects it appeared to have well defined tangible objectives and gave hope of actually delivering something.

Scary. Maybe we should start to consider what to do after things go bad. Some kind of Asimov'ian Foundation?

Sooner or later we'll have to infect other planets with our dumb selves - there is no way around that. Until then we have to delay the collapse by deploying local rules which emerge in a globally more responsible behavior of mankind.

One more reason why we should be much more open about all these EO data we have .... The two citizen scientists, Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano, are listed as authors on the scientific paper recently published. I love this: the digital nature of these data make it far, far easier to analyze the science than it was in the past, and also easier to get the data out to people. Because of this, we have an explosive growth in these kinds of projects. Planet Hunters is great, but then so is Galaxy Zoo, Moon Mappers, Ice Hunters, and so many others. You can find several of these collected at the CosmoQuest website.

Wiktor is also collecting these science games in the ACT-wiki. You should have a look at: http://sophia.estec.esa.int/actwiki/index.php/On-line_Games_4_Science

Oh, I like this one. One more point for swarm intelligence! :)

We could have come up with an inspiration like this !!! As creative as the roots :-) "These male amphibians use their calls to attract the female, who can recognise where it comes from and then locate the suitor. The problem arises when two males are too close to one another and they use their call at the same time. The females become confused and are unable to determine the location of the call. Therefore, the males have had to learn how to 'desynchronise' their calls or, in other words, not call at the same time in order for a distinction to be made."

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

MTA-Atomki A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say - if the finding holds up. Would be cool, after all the high energy physics being done to verify the SM it could be extended at the other end where nobody bothered to look ;)

An excellent science coffee topic! This is a true breakthrough in pure mathematics with plentiful applications in the lesser sciences (such as theoretical physics). People tell me quantum gravity is already practically solved by this. Conway's powerful theory of Alternative Facts can render many difficult problems tractable. Here we demonstrate the power of AF to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. We further suggest applications of AF to other challenging unsolved problems such as the zero-equals-one conjecture (which is also true) and the side-counting problem of the circle.

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

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"Two sets of [ ATV docking training for astronauts ] lessons are now available for the home user to try." And in case you wonder *where* in the earth are they available, the links are on the right-hand column (also known as ESA's scorn on usability). As usual for the material located there, I took me a few minutes to find them...

Well I tried and could not locate the app to download from these links and sent them a feedback on what I thought a wrong error - though the email bounced :-) So, what is the right link to the app then?

Leo, I'm not iEnabled, so I can't help you with the app. Using other links you can try the PC version (so 20th-century-ish, I know), of course assuming you have somewhere one with Internet Explorer :-)

"Given that for both craft electricity is supplied by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTGs) powered by the heat given off by the radioactive decay of plutonium - an energy source that decays exponentially with time - Turyshev and others suggested that the extra acceleration could be caused by thermal radiation being emitted from the craft in a preferred direction. "