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hmmm, I was wondering how many ESA employees do know that ACT does exist....

And my son studying at Stanford (he just sent me the same link !) follows the courses this semester of two of the teachers mentioned in the article, Thrun - very good and Ng - excellent

The video technique could lead to remote diagnostic methods, like the ability to detect the heart rate of someone on a screen.

Are there potential applications to earth observation etc..?

For all the AI guys (Christos, Marek, Ed, Markus and co ...) and of course Luiz, Sante ... You will like this one :-)

Quite a lot of blabla, some usual misconceptions (like QT the source of randomness in nature), but a -- from my point of view -- very true (though in the text somehow hidden) conclusion: Free will, creativity etc. from the point of view of fundamental physics are just randomness! Many physicists won't like this conclusion, though, and in this respect also the title is rather misleading!

We are pleased to announce the beta version of our RoboRoach control circuit is now available, which allows you to trick a cockroach into turning left or right by microstimulation of the antenna nerves.

Courtesy of Alexandre

paywall skipping: http://www.ncmis.cas.cn/kxcb/jclyzs/201202/W020120203526011739796.pdf

Sante: did you see this?

Maybe a stupid question: The authors argue with the results obtained by Cohen and Glashow [2]. In [2] ist was stated that superluminal neutrinos should lose energy by producing photons and e+e- pairs. This should be observable. These conslusions are based on known physics (I guess), i.e. on the laws valid for subluminal conditions. How reasonable is it to apply (i.e. to assume the validity of) the same laws for superluminal particles?

Joggobot turns a quadrocopter into a running companion Researchers from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia have developed a flying running companion called Joggobot. The system uses the built-in camera on a commercially-available Parrot AR Drone quadrocopter to track the position of a jogger, and fly a few feet out in front.

"Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding?"

The work of our team on the Mimosa Pudica has been publish! It proves for the first time the ability of plants to learn. After a countless number of rejections, Oecologia had the courage of publishing it. Now the road is open to demonstrations that learning capability exists not only in sensitive plants, but also in normal plants. This can change the entire biology. A bit rhetorical, but real.

very nice!!! congratulations! what are you working on now - also on this?

I work on some aspects of plant to plant communication! I hope to publish soon something equally exciting!! and of course I will let you know!!

The natural multitaskers are profited the least from this configuration. And then there is Thijs

haha :) "The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers' ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn't help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity." Actually, I grew up studying my homework in my parents shop downstairs. No noise whatsoever drives me insane :)

I think you should do something like this with your Botiful Johannes :)

Seems like drones are quite in this day when studying wildife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CoApUAZFf8

Charged like your electric toothbrush by lowering the receiving coils to 4cm above the ground.

nice; there are similar trials ongoing a bit all over; there is one I know of in Mannheim, where i think they have quick charging coils at each stop to reduce the battery mass they need to carry; I have seen a demonstration of this in Kyoto university about 13 years ago on a normal car - even one where they had an entire road equipped with these chargers and tested with charging as you go , charing at traffic stops, parking etc ....

Weird.

This reminds me a 2013 paper on how to perform derivatives, integrals and even time reversal in optical fibres: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130403/srep01594/full/srep01594.html "The manipulation of dynamic Brillouin gratings in optical fibers is demonstrated to be an extremely flexible technique to achieve, with a single experimental setup, several all-optical signal processing functions. In particular, all-optical time differentiation, time integration and true time reversal are theoretically predicted, and then numerically and experimentally demonstrated."

Would this kind of computer be more space environment resistive?

S. Hawking argues black holes might not exist: "The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity." Physicists will likely appreciate...

Despite the benefits of low-temperature fuel cell technologies, they cannot directly use biomass as a fuel because of the lack of an effective catalyst system. However, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a low-temperature fuel cell that directly converts a wide variety of biomass sources to electricity. Possible application areas are local electricity supply in developing countries

The researchers used a global climate model to show that if an extreme emissions pathway -- RCP8.5 -- is followed up until 2035, allowing temperatures to rise 1°C above the 1970-1999 mean, and then SRM (Solar Radiation Management) is implemented for 25 years and suddenly stopped, global temperatures could increase by 4°C in the following decades.

Nice quantitative study. They treat the problem within the full uncertainty range of climate sensitivity parameter (much uncertain), very complete. However, at SRM ceasing, after an initial positive spike of Radiative Forcing, the rate of warming seems to return to rates predicted for the non-geoengineering case: "The 20-year temperature trends following SRM cessation are 0.2−0.6 °C/decade for the range of climate sensitivities (figure 5), comparable to those trends that occur under the RCP8.5 scenario without any SRM." I am actually working on a similar idea for deliberate Mars terraforming: aiming to cool the planet down before we introduce a positive Temperature raising feedback with greenhouse gases, maybe could be more efficient than warming itself.

A Hungarian team has created the first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock. The researchers watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest, zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.

old news, but wow .... Nature is becoming more and more like a magazine and less and less a scientific journal. This stuff is highly irrelevant but to the group that did it.

this is not a nature paper but just an article on their website - the papers they provide as references are all old

TED is sponsoring an A.I. XPRIZE. The goal? Develop an artificial intelligence that jumps on stage and gives a 3min talk on a random topic...

I am going to propose that the rules include in addition something practical - like washing the dishes... If we are to foster progress, let's finally do so in the right direction...

This sort of reminds me of Hinton's paper from some years ago: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf Train it on previous TED talks and let it run TED talk - like gibberish. It would probably be of similar value. He had a nice one on the meaning of life but I can't find it anymore.

By just getting a DNA footprint of a person scientists (and soon police) can produce an image of the person's face. Check out the pictures!

should try it the other way around, deduce the DNA from facial features. That would be even cooler.

Well actually, they did something like that as they searched for common DNA patterns in people that had similar facial features. With a large enough dataset that could provide already 24 DNA tracers that could used reliably for prediction. Imagine if you had even more data available, who needs a model then... just let the NN do it :)

Interesting read if you're interested on the kind of coding that goes into something like the Curiosity rover. :) btw.. nice fill-packet being sent by Curiosity: "Elvis has Spirit. The answer is 42....END\r\n"