Group items tagged

according to the normal website (http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/): "The UK Space Agency website will officially launch on 1 April 2010. Until then, the BNSC website will be in a state of transition " the guys above i think just take the piss coz theres no official website. Mission statement: TOGETHER WE ARE GOING TO EMBARK ON A JOURNEY INTO SPACE. ..........................THE MISSION IS......MARS................................."

I've just read a blog entry about this on New Scientist, and while the entry itself is not interesting, I learned from it where the UKSA and ESA's UK establishment are going to be based. Answer: it's even more in the middle of nowhere than Plymouth! BTW does anyone (Leo?) know what is the basis on which new ESA establishments locations are chosen (if this info is classified, you can send it on priv ;) [Edit] Esa has released a news item about it... Whatever one can say about the British Space Agency, they certainly have a fantastic logo!

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.

Progress in atomic, optical and quantum science1, 2 has led to rapid improvements in atomic clocks. At the same time, atomic clock research has helped to advance the frontiers of science, affecting both fundamental and applied research. The ability to control quantum states of individual atoms and photons is central to quantum information science and precision measurement, and optical clocks based on single ions have achieved the lowest systematic uncertainty of any frequency standard3, 4, 5. Although many-atom lattice clocks have shown advantages in measurement precision over trapped-ion clocks6, 7, their accuracy has remained 16 times worse8, 9, 10. Here we demonstrate a many-atom system that achieves an accuracy of 6.4 × 10−18, which is not only better than a single-ion-based clock, but also reduces the required measurement time by two orders of magnitude. By systematically evaluating all known sources of uncertainty, including in situ monitoring of the blackbody radiation environment, we improve the accuracy of optical lattice clocks by a factor of 22. This single clock has simultaneously achieved the best known performance in the key characteristics necessary for consideration as a primary standard-stability and accuracy. More stable and accurate atomic clocks will benefit a wide range of fields, such as the realization and distribution of SI units11, the search for time variation of fundamental constants12, clock-based geodesy13 and other precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature. This work also connects to the development of quantum sensors and many-body quantum state engineering14 (such as spin squeezing) to advance measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit.

"What's new: Choi said that although some researchers have used natural photosynthetic units to enhance the light-harvesting abilities of nanomaterials, this is the first time anyone has used nanomaterials to enhance the function of photosynthetic units."

Always check your units! Your units are wrong! cried the teacher. Your church weighs six joules - what a feature! And the people inside Are four hours wide, And eight gauss away from the preacher! How Fermi could estimate things! Like the well-known Olympic ten rings, And the one-hundred states, And weeks with ten dates, And birds that all fly with one... wings. For things moving free or at rest, Observe what the first law does best. It defines a key frame, Inertial by name, Where the second law then is expressed.

A recently published review on insect flight appeared in Review of Modern Physics. It might be of interest to the biomimetics unit.

very nice success by what we called in 2003 "the second space age" ... for Joris: (related to the discussion we had the other day) But the spacecraft will be assembled, integrated and tested in the United States and will include U.S. hardware, meaning they would not be allowed for launch aboard Indian or Chinese rockets under current U.S. regulations.

best comment: "I've seen people wear far sillier things in the pub than 3D specs"

CHARLI is the first untethered, autonomous, full-sized, walking, humanoid robot with four moving limbs and a head, built in the United States. His two long legs and arms can move and gesture thanks to a combination of pulleys, springs, carbon fiber rods, and actuators. CHARLI soon will be able to talk as well.

Ugh.

what a stupid move! puts them back another few decades :-) ...

Box Jellyfish have 24 eyes - for each task one. No central processing unit required.

From the article: By the end of September 2014, Jason Budinoff, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), is expected to complete the first imaging telescopes ever assembled almost exclusively from 3D-manufactured components. The devices' optics and electronics will be fabricated using conventional methods. "As far as I know, we are the first to attempt to build an entire instrument with 3D printing," says Budinoff. He is building a fully functional 50 mm camera whose outer tube, baffles, and optical mounts are all printed as a single structure. The instrument is appropriately sized for a CubeSat (a small satellite made of individual units each about 100 mm on a side). 

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.

Apple apparently interested in exactly the type of wireless power transfer we were looking into with Duncan and Xurxo!

"The metamaterial aperature is only 40 centimeters long and it doesn't move. It's a circuit-board-like structure consisting of two copper plates separated by a piece of plastic. One of the plates is etched with repeating boxy structures, units about 2 millimeters long that permit different lengths of microwaves to pass through. Scanning the scene at various microwave frequencies allows the computer to capture all the information necessary to reproduce a scene."

where is Luzi's comment when one needs it ???

good luck with this....

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.

Poor Boltzmann ...

Two aerospace companies are teaming up to launch giant space habitats to orbit, with the first such liftoff targeted for 2020. Bigelow Aerospace will loft its giant, expandable B330 modules - each of which will provide one-third as much usable volume as the entire International Space Station (ISS) - aboard United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rockets, representatives from both companies announced today (April 11).

Metamaterials that absorb seismic waves rather than steer them, might be a better way to protect some buildings, say engineers

what are seismic metamaterials?

must look funny ... They calculate the properties of such a metatmaterial and how it might be constructed with a basic repeating unit in the form of a concrete cylinder some 18 metres in diameter, with four perpendicular holes in its sides (see picture). These cylinders, perhaps varying in size to absorb a range of seismic wavelengths, would need to surround the foundations of a building in cylindrical shells some 60 metres across. That needn't be prohibitively expensive but it would be a big structure that could only be constructed around isolated buildings (thereby somewhat negating the supposed benefit that other buildings in the earthquake 'shadow' might also be protected).