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what seems to be an impressively detailed space game

> The games we write are always games with a scientific purpose (not training not educational) I'd say investigating how to get the crowd may be an important part of "science of crowdsourcing". So, an obvious example would be comparing how many participants the original ACT space mission game attracted versus a variant implemented in Kerbal and why. Easily made and easily publishable I think. But that's just an obvious example I can give on the spot. I think there is more potential than that, so would not dismiss the idea so definitively. But then, correct me if I'm wrong, social sciences are still not represented in the ACT... Perhaps an idea to revive during the upcoming retreat? ;-)

it's on sale on steam til tomorrow by the way if anyone's interested

"A band of space hackers and engineers are trying to do something never done before - recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft from the grips of deep space and time. With old NASA documents and Rockethub crowdfunding, a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, back into an Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, 'ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists helping with design and travel to Mars'. Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, propulsion designs are in hand and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration

I am also looking into this idea since some time and it seems NASA is already ahead, awarding two contract to investigate magnetoshell aerocapture. This could be interesting for probes that want to enter eg Marsian atmospheres at relatively high velocity. Or for multiple re-entry s/c at Earth. The idea of the experiment, The satellite will carry a copper coil, powered by a lithium-ion battery, that generates a magnetic field around the probe. As it descends, the spacecraft will eject a small amount of plasma. This gets trapped in the magnetic field, creating a protective bubble that stops air molecules colliding with the craft and producing heat.

A few years back Mimmo has worked on this, rather from the theory side if I remember well ...

The power requirements for such a thing must be HUGE!

This is too funny...

How I wish I would have been tougher with the guy when he showed up here ....

you should have told him that we're very into it, if they could only make a small deposit in our account and we'll send them a lot of money later

Can we have one?

They say they create 2 GeV electrons in a very small setup. However the laser they use is more than 10 meters in length. Still a really nice result.

Compared to a 27km circumference this is major achievement and it is indeed already foreseen that future colliders will include this technology as beam fillers and pre-accelerators at some point. The technique is quite elegant and a lot more energy efficient. Nevertheless, there are also thoughts that future particle colliders might actually go towards space and study collisions orginating from extremely energetic cosmic particles

If you pry open one of today's ubiquitous high-tech devices-whether a cellphone, a laptop, or an electric car-you'll find that batteries take up most of the space inside. Indeed, the recent evolution of batteries has made it possible to pack ample power in small places.

solidstate batteries would be perfect indeed, but up to now I know of no solid electrolyte that can do the trick. The article itself does not mention any material beyond superionic lithium-ion conductors, but does not specify which one in particular. The premis seems to be "if it conducts fast enough, the battery can conduct efficiently"

Small robots that jump on water have been created by scientists and could one day be used in surveillance and search and rescue missions. The team led by Seoul National University's Je-Sung Koh studied water striders to replicate the insect's ability to propel itself from the surface of water.

stronger than steel - small teeth of snail like creature ...

According to a BBC news article it's actually stronger than Kevlar...

The spider silk is no longer the toughest natural material around.

The "climatosceptics" are more and more powerful, in France it's crazy how much they are in newspaper and television... Before it was fancy to fear the global warming, now it's fancy to fight the "dictat" of the Science, as if Science was a religion with its dogma !

Nice opinion piece.

nice indeed .... especially like: "They make such great stuff, but they're such assholes. Do I really want to support this company? Should Apple care what people like me think? What difference does it make if they alienate a small minority of their users? There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems evil, the best programmers won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it's largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today. Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don't have to work for a company they have qualms about. But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it's not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that win."

Poor programmers can complain, but they will keep developing applications for iPhone as long as their bosses will tell them to do so... From my experience in mobile software development I assure you it's not the pain of the programmer that dictates what is done, but the customer's demand. Even though like this the quality of applications is somewhat worse than it could be, clients won't complain as they have no reference point. And things will stay as they are: apple censoring the applications, clients paying for stuff that "sometimes just does not work" (it's normal, isn't it??), and programmers complaining, but obediently making iPhone apps...

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

haha, seems super small !!!

Interesting launch, not just the first Japanese Venus [0] mission, also an interplanetary university mission [1] and also a solar sail mission [2]. Looks very interesting ... [0] http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f17/index_e.html [1] http://www.unisec.jp/unitec-1/en/about_unitec-1.html [2] http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/ikaros/index_e.html

If I could write, this is exactly what I would write about rocket, GO, and so on... :) "we are decadent and tired. But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years ago. We may, in other words, need to look beyond strictly U.S.-centric explanations for such failures of imagination and initiative. ... Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis." "But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of "technology" might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces."

Would have been nice if it were historically more accurate and less polemic / superficial

mmmh... the wheel is also an old invention... there is an idea behind but this article is not very deepfull, and I really don't think the problem is with innovation and lack of creative young people !!! look at what is done in the financial sector...

here's a recording of the transmission: http://ia600406.us.archive.org/13/items/STS-133/03-07-11_STS-133_FD12_Crew_Wakeup.mp3 to quote from the thread at reddit: "When the space shuttle first flew, 55 americans were being held hostage in the embassy in Iran, and Ronald Reagan had just become president. That same year Prince Charles would marry Lady Diana, the HIV virus would be first identified, Post-It notes were invented, and a small company called Microsoft released it's new operating system MS-DOS."

Speaking of William Shatner, the legendary "Rocket Man": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hARDXYz2io