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Next great step for humankind. "... and we're standing by now for the first consumption of one of these red romaine lettuce leaves ..." :-)

Dissolving in sodium hydroxide vs freeze-drying... which one for you?

shit ... they discovered biomimicry ... what's next?

Just a bunch of folks disappointed with not being selected to be real astronauts, or did they smell a real business? See also an interview on newscientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727696.200-astronaut-for-hire-space-tourism-will-help-science.html

Another Pi digits calculation record.

wow - apparently the project started as a high-school project! http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

quantumphysics holds ....

Time reversed waves to detect defects in materials and earth quakes

Following up on our coffee-time discussion, here's an Evolutionary Algorithm where you are the fitness function, and evolution is guided by your subjective artistic sense. Start from scratch, or pick an existing image in the database, and start evolving. At every generation, you are presented with the individuals/images in the population. Pick the ones you like. Those will be the parents from which the next generation will be bred. Repeat, repeat... where do you get to? If you want to learn more about the science behind this, check the tutorial below by Kenneth Stanley, who is also this site's supervisor: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1830761.1830920

Awesome video!!!

Link to the paper that is the subject of this article: Olsson-Francis, Karen and Cockell, Charles (2010). Use of cyanobacteria for in-situ resource use in space applications. Planetary And Space Science, 58(10), 1279-1285.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2010.05.005

sleeping for 100 million years .... 

Cynthia - please have a look ... can we check the OoM?

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html hmm should be the ACT in Nature, no? ;)

Yeeesss :) So the "non-commercial" rockets do not emit soot? And how many "non-commercial" launches per year are there in comparison to the commercial ones? Finally commercial space-flight seems more realisable than ever, and "non-commercial" guys will do everything to prevent situation in which they have to compete on an open market... Coming years should be very interesting...

fantastic!

This is related to the "Verified Software" item in NewScientist's list of ideas that will change science. At the link below you'll find the text of the patents being auctioned: http://icapoceantomo.com/item-for-sale/exclusive-license-related-improved-methodology-formally-developing-control-systems :) Patent #7,627,538 ("Swarm autonomic agents with self-destruct capability") makes for quite an interesting read: "This invention relates generally to artificial intelligence and, more particularly, to architecture for collective interactions between autonomous entities." "In some embodiments, an evolvable synthetic neural system is operably coupled to one or more evolvable synthetic neural systems in a hierarchy." "In yet another aspect, an autonomous nanotechnology swarm may comprise a plurality of workers composed of self-similar autonomic components that are arranged to perform individual tasks in furtherance of a desired objective." "In still yet another aspect, a process to construct an environment to satisfy increasingly demanding external requirements may include instantiating an embryonic evolvable neural interface and evolving the embryonic evolvable neural interface towards complex complete connectivity." "In some embodiments, NBF 500 also includes genetic algorithms (GA) 504 at each interface between autonomic components. The GAs 504 may modify the intra-ENI 202 to satisfy requirements of the SALs 502 during learning, task execution or impairment of other subsystems."

I think they are taking it a bit too far....

is my memory wrong or isn't this what you have already mentioned as theoretically possible a few years back when discussing this, Luzi?

Very well possible that I mentioned this. In fact I was one of the first who took spacetime transformations in transformation optics seriously. But first, my name is not Leonhardt and I don't work at Imperial, that's why nobody cites me and second I most probably found the idea too stupid to be published. You see the two reasons why I'm not successful in science...