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Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Is positive news definitely, but when it comes to fusion energy being skeptic is the wisest course of action. On the back of a truck basically means that the energy density of the device is such that the surface energy of a (steady state) plasma is beyond currents materials limits. It is probably a pulsed (ignitor-type) device, which are prone to instabilities. That could therefore refer to their breakthrough claim, of which they hardly say anything though. Lets see

Since there were already a lot of false alarms on the field, one should definitively be careful about it. However not a single detail about its structure or how it works in this new... Here http://www.fusenet.eu/node/400 you can find a bit more of information about it.

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").

"The OpenBCI Board is a versatile and affordable analog-to-digital converter that can be used to sample electrical brain activity (EEG), muscle activity (EMG), heart rate (EKG), and more" Perhaps some work or ideas on brainwave analysis would be interesting ? (User interfaces, mood classifier, detection of various alertness levels )

It's not worth it for $400... The chips are seriously nothing special and you can get a lot better for a lot cheaper. I would just get the electrodes and link them to a RPi or an Odroid or something.

True, but the selling feature here is that they take care of that stuff and sell it for 400$. Lets say the hardware is 100USD, then an RF-grade person here here has to do the coding, interfacing, testing within roughly (300/16eur/hour) 20 hours to break even and even then the interface is much nicer in their case.

pretty impressive stuff!

LSTMs: that was also the first thing in the paper that caught my attention! :) I hadn't seen them in the wild in years... My oversight most likely. The paper seems to be getting ~100 citations a year. Someone's using them.

There are a few papers on them. Though you have to be lucky to get them to work. The backprop is horrendous.

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

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

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

missed it ... did anybody attend?

Other possible study: get a textbook example of an image of a pen, evolve it just enough so NN can't recognize it anymore, while minimizing the distance between the original and evolved images. EDIT: Its been done already: http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/docs/understanding.pdf

Of course, you can't really use them to extrapolate. The unknown unknown is always the trickiest :P They should just make another class "random bullshit", really and dump all of this stuff in there. I think there's a potential paper right there

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...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

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

Our friends from NASA have come out with a plan to the human exploration of Venus in the time that everyone is speaking about Mars.

Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

There is this optical neuron that gets stimulated from motion. Mapping it is difficult in the lab: "The stumbling block is a lack of fine-grained anatomical detail about how the neurons in the retina are wired up to each other." So, use people deciphering from 2D images --> the 3D neuron structure using the human spatial reasoning to figure out what is part of a branching cell and what is just background noise in the images (yet incomparable to their best algorithms' performance) 120.000 users so far mapped 2% of the retina

Royal College of Art's Innovation Design Engineering course in collaboration with Tufts University silk lab. Not as good as it sounds as it does not fully mimic the photosynthesis equation (spare C, H atoms)

Interesting stuff and I guess it does not need to fully mimic photosynthesis in the end. As long as oxygen can be produced from CO2 and water that would be great enough. Though the carbon has to be deposited somewhere (in some form) and I wonder how one could extract this efficiently. Maybe it can even serve some purpose (as the sugars are doing for the plant)

Give the Ubermancycle a try?

> As in never ever see sun and daylight :)) Like in the Netherlands you mean?

Tri-phasic sleep rhythm works fine.

I mainly see neural networks in this... maybe some evolutionary stuff :))

"Tilted table", "peacock" and "triple-floor building" are just three of many fantastical 3D structures that have been created by compressing simple 2D patterns. The new technique for creating these objects is called compressive buckling, and has been developed by researchers in the US, China and South Korea.

"Hormones are molecules that act as the body's signals, triggering various physiological responses. The newly discovered hormone, dubbed "MOTS-c," primarily targets muscle tissue, where it restores insulin sensitivity, counteracting diet-induced and age-dependent insulin resistance." Good news for long distance space travelers?

as well as lazy couch potatoes

Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.

Jarvis could make it, add a power supply and aquarium and we are off :)

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.

True! Half the Phd Positions offered are in studying eddy variability. It links to resolving the - yet another holy grail - problem of turbulence.

Robot self-adapts its gait when limbs are damaged.