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In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

Researchers in the US have built a new type of solar cell that emits light as well as absorbs it, making it the most efficient solar cell ever developed. The efficiency of their prototype cell allows it to convert 28.6% of the Sun's energy into electricity.

well, the text is at best misleading ... the most efficient solar cells are well over 35% and approach the 40s with concentration! what they have done is to increase the limit of a single junction cell it seems to me ... still, nteresting though from text most details on how this was done are missing ... paper is not yet published, correct?

I learn of it in a workshop few weaks ago. It's on GaAs and I think that the key theoretical aspects are explained here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1603

Not explicit but smells like RTGs

"The effort contrasted and compared eight heat sources technologies, three power conversion, two dual cycle propulsion system configurations, and a single electrical power generation scheme." Yes, it's about RTGs, at least partially.

The quote "it was disappointing to all that the political realities would not allow use of the results" may refer to RTGs too :-)

If you've ever flown an R/C plane, you know how nerve wracking it can be. Navigating in three dimensions opens up the possibility to run into so many things, and a single crash could be your last. Now, a team from EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems has been working on a UAV called the AirBurr.

An approach to robot design that makes sense. I can see applications to planetary explorers here.

Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms.

Multiplexed optical recording provides an unparalleled approach to increasing the information density beyond 1012 bits per cm3 (1 Tbit cm-3) by storing multiple, individually addressable patterns within the same recording volume. Although wavelength, polarization and spatial dimension have all been exploited for multiplexing, these approaches have never been integrated into a single technique that could ultimately increase the information capacity by orders of magnitude.

Weird.

This reminds me a 2013 paper on how to perform derivatives, integrals and even time reversal in optical fibres: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130403/srep01594/full/srep01594.html "The manipulation of dynamic Brillouin gratings in optical fibers is demonstrated to be an extremely flexible technique to achieve, with a single experimental setup, several all-optical signal processing functions. In particular, all-optical time differentiation, time integration and true time reversal are theoretically predicted, and then numerically and experimentally demonstrated."

Would this kind of computer be more space environment resistive?

The Northeast Blackout of 2003 that forced the shut-down of over 100 power plants and affected 55M people - the largest black-out in US history - was precipitated by a single overloaded transmission line, in Ohio, sagging and touching overgrown vegetation.

nice indeed! " Triggered by commonly available ambient mechanical energy such as human footfalls, a NG with size smaller than a human palm can generate maximum short-circuit current of 2 mA, delivering instantaneous power output of 1.2 W to external load. The power output corresponds to an area power density of 313 W/m2 and a volume power density of 54 268 W/m3 at an open-circuit voltage of 1200 V. An energy conversion efficiency of 14.9% has been achieved. The power was capable of instantaneously lighting up as many as 600 multicolor commercial LED bulbs. The record high power output for the NG is attributed to optimized structure, proper materials selection and nanoscale surface modification. This work demonstrated the practicability of using NG to harvest large-scale mechanical energy, such as footsteps, rolling wheels, wind power, and ocean waves."

You should be able to put it also in your shoes such that you may be able to power some gadgets. Thinking about it, I have seen many kids already running around with brightly lit sneakers!

Does this have implications for AI algorithms??

I was actually thinking exactly about this question during my bike ride this morning. I am surprised that some codons would need to have a double meaning though because there is already a surplus of codons to translate into just 20-22 proteins (depending on organism). So there should be about 44 codons left to prevent translation errors and in addition regulate gene expression. If - as the article suggests - a single codon can take a dual role, does it so in different situations (needing some other regulator do discern those)? Or does it just perform two functions that always need to happen simultaneously? I tried to learn more from the underlying paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.full.pdf All I got from that was a headache. :-\

Probably both. Likely a consequence of energy preservation during translation. If you can do the same thing with less genes you save up on the effort required to reproduce. Also I suspect it has something to do with modularity. It makes sense that the gene regulating for "foot" cells also trigger the genes that generate "toe" cells for example. No point in having an extra if statement.

The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise",

Could it be used to measure ocean acidification? I found a study that links sound wave propagation with ocean acidity. Maybe we are able to do such measurement from space even? "Their paper, "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH," published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that fossil fuels are turning up the ocean's volume. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the overall pH of the world's oceans has dropped by about 0.1 units, with more of the changes concentrated closer to the poles. The authors found that sound absorption has decreased by 15 percent in parts of the North Atlantic and by 10 percent throughout the Atlantic and Pacific"

The last time I asked an oceanographer for the use of acoustic waves, she said it is still a bit problematic method to take into account its data, but we were referring to measuring ocean circulation. It may be more conclusive for PH measurements, though. The truth is that there is a whole underwater network with pulse emmitters/receivers covering the North Atlantic basin, remnant infrastructure for spying activities in the WW2 and in the cold war, that stays unexploited. We should look more into this idea

Chemists at UCR have found a way of turning a single photon into two excitons, by a process known as singlet fission. By doubling the yield of excitons in a solar cell, you theoretically double the number of electrons produced and could lead to having a max theoretical efficiency of 60% or more in an (organic) solar cell See also DOI: 10.1021/jz500676c - "Singlet Fission: From Coherences to Kinetics"

In this article the authors describe an improvement of their optical microscope techniques for which some of the received a Nobel prize in the past. They achieve resolutions far beyond the optical diffraction limit which is supposed to limit detail resolution due to quantum-mechanical effects. Their techniques include structured illuminiation (producing interference patterns), switchable fluorescent markers as well as multi-frame super resolution enhancement. Authors are able to take a single image in about 0.3 seconds which allows the study of protein processes in the cell: http://spon.de/vgTb7 . Although it is hard to imagine the application of many of these techniques for telescopes (except for super resolution), I am wondering if any of this could help building telescopes with increased optical power or reduced weight. Any ideas..?

A team of researchers at Colorado based Escape Dynamics is reporting that initial tests indicate that it might really be possible to launch space-planes into space using microwaves sent from the ground, to allow for a single stage spacecraft. If the idea pans out, the cost savings for sending satellites (or perhaps humans) into orbit could be considerable.

Not very new, but a very slick video nonetheless! Will it work? I am not so sure whether "just engineering" applies in this case. The array of antenna's required is quite significant to compensate for beam losses. Wall plug efficiency is not that high therefore, then again.. solar energy is for free almost in the future so who cares.. let's go for it! :)

Built in Silicon technology (Samsung's 28 nm process), its power is measured as one million neurons and 256 million synapses. It contains 5.4 million transistor being the largest IBM chip in these terms. All this said, it consumes less than 100 mW!! "These systems can efficiently process high-dimensional, noisy sensory data in real time, while consuming orders of magnitude less power than conventional computer architectures." IBM is working with initLabs to integrate the DVS retinal camera with these chips = real time image neuro-like image processing. In what seems to be a very successful project hugely funded by DARPA, "Our sights are now set high on the ambitious goal of integrating 4,096 chips in a single rack with 4 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses while consuming ~4kW of power."

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!"

The accuracy of these new clocks is insane. Hope there will be soon some of these in space :)