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of relevance to this discussion: Koomey's Law, a Moore's Law equivalent for computing's energetic efficiency http://www.economist.com/node/21531350 http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/2148202/whither-moores-law-introducing-koomeys-law

And some comparison between NASA and ESA about artist in residence programs :)

Bacterial networks communicating via thread-like membranes. Especially the video is pretty cool

from wired.com

Wired magazine has a special focus today on Plutonium-238 the fuel for RTG power sources. The history of the material plus the challenges due to the shortage of it - potentially ending deep space exploration as we practice it today (?)...

Wired article giving an opinion on the future trends for mobile computing (e.g. SLAM, 3D vision, ...)

This is seriously scary. Basically the only thing that hospitals could still help you with are broken arms and alcohol poisoning... :-\

And the scary part is antibiotics use for human medicine is dwarfed by antibiotics use in livestock, at least in most countries I think.

Nice wired article on high temp. superconductors. With some quotes by my old material science Prof. Jan Zaanen :-D

it seems that there are indications that we are differently wired .... Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

I like this abstract: sex, sex, sex, sex, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...!!! I wonder if the "sex differences" are related to gender-specific differences...

Editor of Wired describes his experience

Fascinating! New type of spider silk?

Nice video featuring the technology. Plus it comes with a good soundtrack! Google's project wing uses a lifting wing concept (more fuel efficient than normal airplane layouts and MUCH more efficient than quadrocopters) but it equips the plane with engines strong enough to hover in a nose up position, allowing vertical landing and takeoff. For the delivery of packages the drone does not even need to land - it can lower them on a wire - much like the skycrane concept used to deliver the Curiosity rover on Mars. Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. Anyways, the video is great for its soundtrack alone! ;-P

Fair enough, but even if you consider advanced/robust/efficient AI, why would you use a drone? Do we envision hundreds of drones above our heads in the street instead of UPS vans, or postmen, considering delivers letters might be more easily achievable. I am not so sure if personal delivery will take this route. On the other hand, if the system would work smoothly, I can image that I'm send a mail with the question whether I'm home (or they might know already from my personal GPS tracker) and then notify me that they are launching my DVD and it will come crashing into my door in 5min.

I'm more curios how they're planning to keep people from stealing the drones. I could do with a drone army myself and having cheap amazon or google drones flying about sounds like a decent source.

Basically neuroscientists discovered time delay neural networks. Guess we were right on track with AI back in the 70s.

Apparently this cart settled some longstanding physics dispute... Would there be a way to think of something similar using solar wind? *no clue*

the counterintuitive aspect in my view is not the travelling against he wind but the faster than wind travelling with the wind, where the simple trick of having the wheels power the propeller flips the mind to understand it easily ... (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/downwind-faster-than-the-wind/)

But from that point of view it should also be counter-intuitive that it travels against the wind at twice the speed of the wind...

Few news events can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record. Scroll down for the commercial. :)) Funny that when I keep complaining about privacy and monitoring, people still point and laugh.

And the direct link to the whole stash: https://ht.transparencytoolkit.org/ Their admin kept a plain text file with passwords on his desktop. Maybe they should have hired someone to do an audit :) More importantly, from the files it follows that this company found and exploited yet another vulnerability in Flash. So the current round of plugin/browser updates is thanks to this hack :)

The vulnerability only seemed to affect some of the more recent versions. Maybe from time to time we should downgrade flash to avoid them :))

one of the best piece of aeronautic technology to date.

what a ACT's exercise should look like...

Maybe, you should propose this exercise to the team. You'll see there is not much imagination, unless, you consider imagination equals craziness (bullshit things ... and the too common blah blah in the act). I think this concept is an imaginative credible concept. "anything we might ever see" explains it well.

well, the article is not very detailed so it can be only "du vent" ! did they actually try if such an airplane can fly ??? what about the engine ??? i find the solar impulse (see post below) much more eco-friendly !!! I agree with Leopold that it's quite boring and stays in the mainstream of the production. I'm sure we can do much better !!! What about some really useful things like pills against the flight sickness, and some really good food in the plane ? haha not soon to happen with all the cost reduction. The future of air transport will be a plane without seats, stewards and perhaps even without pilot !!!

Just some ant suff again.

what strategies!!!

haha! is this a joke...?

well i guess the news headline is a bit too much trying to be attractive :)