By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. With as extra bonus: Besides providing high levels of passive insulation, AgNW-coated clothing can also provide Joule heating if connected to an electricity source, such as a battery. The researchers demonstrated that as little as 0.9 V can safely raise clothing temperature to 38 °C, which is 1 °C higher than the human body temperature of 37 °C. How about that for personal comfort during the cold winter months

A bit of an older story, but I was quite impressed (as a robotics non-expert) by the movement in the video. To me it shows the power of the brain and the "eagerness" (lack of better word) at which it tries to exert some control in the world around it.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

In the space industry, concurrent design is frequently implemented as requirements are frequently not set but developed along the design process. In many cases this is due to the interconnection between (sub)systems. In the industry however, this is hardly done, but it is becoming more relevant as lead times and innovation speed needs to increase. There is a webinar tomorrow 10 december from Agile on this topic regarding the semiconductor industry

In essence, the idea involves building a skeleton structure, wrapping it with elastic materials and then start filling it with concrete. A technique first tried in the 60's but now evaluated again with renewed interest as low-cost option for housing.

New technology demonstration of laser communication link to offer high-speed near real time delivery of data from space... Oh, that's us... :)

Another Appathon with the aim to allow access to vast amounts of 'space data' and then play around.. In other words, a neural network's guy wet dream, so Paul, what are you waiting for?

A group of researchers from Austria have sent twisted beams of light across the rooftops of Vienna. It is the first time that twisted light has been transmitted over a large distance outdoors, and could enable researchers to take advantage of the significant data-carrying capacity of light in both classical and quantum communications. Although the data rate is not very high, it could offer a way to provide unhackable data links via space. Would provide an edge over terrestrial fibre optics?

Clean Power November 5th, 2014 by The Scottish renewable energy sector is one of the world's best performing, and new data from WeatherEnergy has shown that October was a "bumper month" for the country, generating more than enough electricity from renewable sources to power the country.

Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources. A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.

Several new components for biological circuits have been developed by researchers. These components are key building blocks for constructing precisely functioning and programmable bio-computers. "The ability to combine biological components at will in a modular, plug-and-play fashion means that we now approach the stage when the concept of programming as we know it from software engineering can be applied to biological computers.

Nine out of 10 workers perform better when listening to music, according to a new study that found 88pc of participants produced their most accurate test results and 81pc completed their fastest work when music was playing.

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Update two.. RF chip is faulty and tonight I have to solder a new chip into place.. That's open-source hardware for you!

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

An unusual signal picked up by a European space observatory could be the first direct detection of dark matter particles, astronomers say. The findings are tentative and could take several years to check, but if confirmed they would represent a dramatic advance in scientists' understanding of the universe.

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").

Darn... Another field taken by NN.. paul?

Robert Alexander spends parts of his day listening to a soft white noise, similar to water falling on the outside of a house during a rainstorm. Every once in a while, he hears an anomalous sound and marks the corresponding time in the audio file.

Scientific proof, shotgun on the red couch!

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On the one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This paper gives overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures.