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.
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.)
I was into this some time ago and found a documentary in which they performed an experiment on a guy.
Long story short, it didn't work that good. He was semi-lucid all the time and his mental performance dropped.
Perhaps it is possible to survive like this for months, but if your goal is to maximize your daily output, you will not gain extra work hours due to being 3/4 conscious most of the time.
EDIT: Not related to the documentary I mentioned but some first hand stories: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/co5t9/i_attempted_polyphasic_sleep_for_a_documentary_ama/c0tza1e
I also heard about it. At the moment, I am on some sort of bi-phasic sleep and I am not feeling more tired than with the monophasic one (while sleeping effectively less right now).
If it exists, there's an xkcd about it: http://xkcd.com/320/
Actually the schedule proposed there is quite useful if you're into this whole Friday / Saturday night thing..
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/
from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted".
So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights???
In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations.
There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.
nice video and nice story, no revolution in physics and somehow surprising that not done/tried earlier (maybe just again good MIT public relations work?)
We're obviously not crypto-bros in the team, but this lengthy article is nonetheless very much worth a read to try to make sense of all this madness. Written by an expert in economics and finance, doesn't hold back any punches!
The Robobee takes off without guide wires!
It is still powered via a wire, and the control is done with the help of a VICON system and on an external computer, but this still is an amazing feat!
The way they make this thing is just as impressive. The manufacturing technique is "pop-up book" folding, a method that has been developed by the same group and that allows a two dimensional monolithic MEMS structures to be easily assembled into a 3D structure. I actually put this as an item of the "Technology List 2020" on the wiki this morning.
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.
really ! this article should go for the ignobels !
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3778
I wonder which substance theorists are taking... I will avoid...!
but really this is very preoccupating:
"complex structures will occasionally emerge from the vacuum as quantum fluctuations, at a small but nonzero rate per unit spacetime volume. An intelligent observer, like a human, could be one such structure."
Is this a new alternative to Darwinism...??? a support to creationism ?? How can a physicist can write such non-sense ?
In 1996 Sokal hoaxed sociologists with his famous nonsense text on political implications of quantum gravity. Can one play a similar game with "researchers" on Boltzmann brains, multiverses, string landscapes or similar? I doubt, this is just reality satire that can't be topped.
At 8:33 a.m., (Japan Standard Time) January 15, 2017, SS-520 No. 4, JAXA's sounding rocket launched from the Uchinoura Space Center. Through SS-520 No. 4 launch, JAXA sought for research and development of launch vehicles and satellites and the launch demonstration of TRICOM-1, its onboard nanosat that weighs about 3 kilograms. The launch was part of Japanese government's program for development of launch vehicles and satellites in public-private partnerships.
Long story short: Space-X has the better fireworks