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Other webs: http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2008/03/17/ciencia/1205775399.html

Tobias - of interest?

just saw a presentation on this - anybody wants to digg deeper into it?

An short article about something called biomimetics. To all I understand, it is not.

Dario, Marek and Christos, please have a look at this - lookslike the implementation of a nice decentralised swarm control into autonomous helicopters - LS

Way ahead of us.... btw is this the group that applied for our study?? - DI

Some pics and movies on insect-inspired Mirco Air Vehicles. Some of the stuff I have seen in Ascona. And we are also mentioned. But only with one sentence...

Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement

want have ....

Programmable matter - another nice title for an ACT project...

"slides which were presented by an executive at Toyota during some kind of task force meeting that discusses Japan's direction/strategy in space exploration"

The integration makes it pretty innovative.

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

This could become quite relevant in future control systems if the setup can be made simple to keep alive and stable. I was doing some follow-up on a story about people controlling aircraft with their brainwaves (through EEG) when I ran into this really cool story. The idea of growing the neurons in patterns is incidentally very similar to the Physarium slime-mold stuff that Dario and me were curious about a little while ago.

I think we already had a discussion on this during a wednesday meeting :P

Oh, I thought that was on the little robot that was controlled by rat neurons and bumped into EVERYTHING. The interesting thing here is that they add a surface patterning (with some kind of nutrient) to control the growth of cells. (Maybe that is not new either, though.)

Today we released the Astro Drone app. People that have the Parrot AR drone can freely download the game. While they fly their drone in the real world, they are trying to dock to the ISS in the virtual world. But the app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state and uploaded. The data is then used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.

Visit the main ESA website and you'll be greeted with a 6-minute Rosetta promo movie by a kickass Polish artist... P.S. You can also find the video here. P.P.S It seems I've just discovered a way to hijack old diigo entries ;-)