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NASA validates the EmDrive (http://emdrive.com/) technology for converting electrical energy into thrust. (from the website: "Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.")

I have to join the skeptics on this one ...

Technology/Robotics Scientists have developed an octopus-like robot, which can zoom through water with ultra-fast propulsion and acceleration never before seen in man-made underwater vehicles. Most fast aquatic animals are sleek and slender to help them move easily through the water but cephalopods, such as the octopus, are capable of high-speed escapes by filling their bodies with water and then quickly expelling it to dart away.

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).

First really strong evidence that the vestibular system affects sleep architecture, sleep stability and sleep spindles. If there is an effect due to a changing acceleration there might also be an effect of no gravity vector. We'll find out when I get the space shuttle data.

They are developing so-called "Avatar" technology which will allow people to control robots remotely, as in the movie "Avatar." With Avatar X, they hope to revolutionize space exploration, resource extraction, and other space-based activities. On the Avatar X website, it says, "AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar."

Genetic algorithms are a competitive alternative for training deep neural networks for reinforcement learning. For paper see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06567.pdf

Interesting pointers in this one! I would like to explore neuroevolution as well, although it seems extremely resource-demanding?

Not necessarily, I think it can be made to be much faster hybridizing it with backprop and Taylor maps. Its one ideas in the closet we still have not explored (Differential Intelligence: accelerating neuroevolution).

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted - a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

Might have some interesting datasets.

If you have 45 minutes and you want to learn a bit about inverse design of metasurfaces using machine learning, then I would highly recommend this talk. I found it very easy to follow both the physics and machine learning parts of it.