Researchers from Alterra Wageningen UR were able to grow and harvest ten different crop species on Mars and moon simulant. 'The total above ground biomass produced on the Mars soil simulant was not significantly different from the potting compost we used as a control' researcher Wieger Wamelink said. I wonder if the taste was as disappointing as that of normal dutch veggies :P

A team of Russians crowdfunding a satellite to annoy astronomers ;) A satellite that will become the brightest star in the night sky

according to the website they have a whole team of people working on various aspects of the mission.

For 11 years, Henley & Partners has published the Visa Restrictions Index, giving unprecedented and inimitable insight into the development of visa policies over time. It is the only Index produced in collaboration with the International Air Transport Association, which maintains the world's largest database of travel information.

The functional principle is similar to ordinary pumped storage plants: when power is needed, water flows into the sphere and drives the turbine thus generating power. If surplus power is available (usually during the night), water can be pumped out of the sphere again, thus effectively charging the storage system.

Get cracking, ACT AI team ;) A new X prize designed to advance artificial intelligence has been announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. The X Prize was set up to push the boundaries of technology to solve issues such as climate change. The winner, which will be announced at TED in 2020, will win $5m (£3.4m).

Now this would be really cool if it had a brain computer interface and could be controlled by a trained drummer's mind! Science and Technology Society and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have built a wearable robotic limb that allows drummers to play with three arms. The two-foot long "smart arm" can be attached to a musician's shoulder. It responds to human gestures and the music it hears.

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor. Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth-very close in astronomical terms-the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space. The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns. Lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. "The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," he said. Professor Staveley-Smith said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s. "We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," he said. "We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour." The research identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way, including three galaxy concentrations (named NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (named CW1 and CW2).

Sounds like an interesting building material. Unlike concrete, after use it can simply be molten down (at seemingly reasonable temperatures) and used again to build different parts. Crack in the wall? Just iron it out (literally)! A group at Northwestern University wants to solve an engineering challenge now to prepare for the future: it's turning Mars-like soil into concrete. And, in turn, that concrete requires very little (if any) water. It's just the thing we may need to make life on Mars sustainable.

From the section Science & Environment US researchers have developed what they call a "molten glass sewing machine" by combining 3D printing of glass with a mathematical model of how a liquid thread forms different types of loop. When the nozzle releasing a stream of molten glass is raised above a certain level, that thread begins to wobble.

Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion that something is common when it is actually rare. One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all.

Finally the thing will have a little more artificial intelligence than just "bump into wall, turn a bit, repeat". We've known for a while now that iRobot has been developing robots with wireless integration along with intelligent navigation capability based on VSLAM (Vision Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). We've know this for enough of a while that it's been a little bit frustrating to see iRobot's most recent Roomba upgrades come out without those neat features.

Horizon2020 project on post quantum cryptography just released their first draft of recommendations for quantum computer safe encryption algorithms. No big surprise with the symmetric algorithms (what's used today is fundamentally sound), but the asymmetric public-key methods will be interesting.

A neuronal network trained to paint the scene of a given photograph in the style of Kandinsky, van Gogh, or Munch. Their results look quite impressive. Unfortunately the article is in German, but the English paper (with plenty of pictures) is here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf Malen wie Kandinsky, wie van Gogh, wie Munch nur auf Basis einer Fotovorlage? Natürlich gibt es begabte Kunstfälscher, die das können. Jetzt aber gelingt es auch Computern, und zwar auf höchst eindrucksvolle Weise. Drei Forscher von der Universität Tübingen haben es geschafft, einem sogenannten künstlichen neuronalen Netzwerk das Malen beizubringen.

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...

Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!

Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).

In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).

Worldwide Telescope enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best telescopes in the world. I managed to crash it twice in 20 minutes, but otherwise quite nice. Maybe Ingmar can add the GTOC solution in it ;)

Humanity's Public Library #ImagineIf censorship did not exist information was free for everyone, education was truly universal, every home had a library, disasters could be anticipated. Get your Lantern Portable, solar-powered, multi-frequency Outernet receiver. Maybe we should get/build one of those receivers for the ACT just because it's geeky:)

Elon Musk is moving forward with space based internet service...

While Google and facebook are out: http://qz.com/422775/facebook-and-google-are-out-of-the-space-race/