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Maybe something to look at for Ricarda? Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices. "There's no need for heat or light to fix the crack or break in a circuit or battery, which is often required by previously developed self-healing materials." Yu and his team created the self-healing gel by combining two gels: a self-assembling metal-ligand gel that provides self-healing properties and a polymer hydrogel that is a conductor.

Ricarda??

This collaborating swarm of drones acts as 3D pixels (voxels) to create giant, flying interactive displays.

I have never understood the flying part of these things. Isn't it really impracticle to have all those tiny quadrocopters zooming around. My money is on holography or still a google glass type of device, if only considering the energy requirements for doing anything kinetically.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air. it turns out this configuration is harder than diamond, plus the material has a very low work function. The latter might be very interesting for electronics or as electrode material.

Maybe* this is the wonder material with very low workfunction needed in the Photon Enhanced Thermionic Emitter future prototype :)

Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables and by watching and imitating what adults are doing. But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot's arm or body to show it how to perform an action.

Researchers have managed to create a materials that can extract CO2 from a humid environment, which was up to now not possible due to water blocking the absorption. With this hurdle taken, it may be possible to extract CO2 in large quantities from the atmopshere. This would then either be stored or possible even processed with H2 to form carbohydrates. Marsian atmosphere?

Quoted from one of the authors in a separate interview: "We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal." Bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic scale could see some interesting applications in sensors, or generally entanglement-enhanced applications.

They were previously working on the same concept in N-V centers in diamond (as a semiconductor). Here the advantage is that SiC could in principle be integrated with Si or Ge. Anyway its all about controlling coherence. In the next 10 years some breakthroughs are expected in the field of semiconductor spintronics, but quantum computing in this way lies still in the horizon

Research in active-matter systems is a growing field in biology. It consists in using theoretical statistical physics in living systems such as molecule colonies to deduce macroscopic properties. The aim and hope is to understand how cells divide, take shape and move on these systems. Being a crossing field between physics and biology "The pot of gold is at the interface but you have to push both fields to their limIts." one can read

Maybe we should discuss about this active matter one of these days? "These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world - among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. They are increasingly being made in the laboratory: investigators have synthesized active matter using both biological building blocks such as microtubules, and synthetic components including micrometre-scale, light-sensitive plastic 'swimmers' that form structures when someone turns on a lamp. Production of peer-reviewed papers with 'active matter' in the title or abstract has increased from less than 10 per year a decade ago to almost 70 last year, and several international workshops have been held on the topic in the past year."

Inspired by the work that was done at the ACT, I continued working on optical flow landing at TU Delft. Today Bio & Bio published my article on a new theory that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. it shows that drones approaching an object with an insect-inspired vision strategy become unstable at a specific distance from the object. Turning this weakness into a strength, drones can actually use the timely detection of that instability to estimate distance. The new theory will enable further miniaturization of autonomous drones and provides a new hypothesis on flying insect behavior. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm7SMJp8EA4&feature=youtu.be Article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016004

According to their Nature article, they can detect "a tunnel less than 1m across, buried 2m underground" just from its gravitational difference. Using a device that they predict could cost ~100 € in mass production. UK researchers have built a small device that measures tiny fluctuations in gravity, and could be used to monitor volcanoes or search for oil. Such gravimeters already exist but compared to this postage stamp-sized gadget, they are bulky and pricy.

Computer scientists have been searching for years for a type of problem that a quantum computer can solve but that any possible future classical computer cannot. Now they've found one.

Oh this is a big one! Unfortunately, the problem is only relativized (i.e. you need an oracle for it) but nevertheless an impressive result.

A new study from Harvard reveals that open plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration.

I vote for a silent booth for everyone in ACT

Great study! If something goes wrong Leo and Dario could always blame the "open office".

he initiative, 'Plan-S' (https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Plan_S.pdf), brings together eleven top national research funders, plus the European Research Council, in an effort to release some of the world's highest quality and highest impact research from behind journal paywalls.

the russian made it years back for everybody and for free :)

Google is taking position here, but can they live up to their own standards?

" Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias." Thats the very definition of the AI used today. If you learn from a dataset, you are biased to that data set. No escape from it.

Relates to robots raising children before the arrival at an exoplanet.

The bear ears add some nice biological component to it.

Development in brain computer interfaces developed by DARPA is progressing.

This best-in-class streaming algorithm works by remembering just enough of what it's seen to tell you what it's seen most frequently. it suggests that compromises that seemed intrinsic to the analysis of streaming data are not actually necessary.

Not new, but always good to read: British intelligence recommend not having password expiry dates. Something we should apply at ESA!

I second that. It has been an open secret for long though that frequent password changes are creating more problems than they solve. See Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/frequent_passwo.html

"By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems. it is this application of climate model results that fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models."

but you know wo these global warming policy foundation is, do you? they are the main advocacy group for climate change deniers in the UK, nothing scientific to start with; fine to post here reasonable scientific papers criticising global climate models but please not this shit

Evolutionary Strategies are able to explore broader areas of the search space than reinforcement learning techniques. Thus, they are able to encounter strange bugs resulting in large rewards.

It will be the new hype in a few years when DL is settled....

for the ACT architects .... Can we do the same for the Moon Village? We brainstorm on some mathematical simplified objectives for growing the settlement (taking inputs from the modular growth, resources, terrain suitability etc ....), we define some simple rules for growth and we optimize. ..... easy peasy (i am serious)

i agree, with most of the parameters that would actually be really cool. but doesn't it get very messy once economy plays a large factor?

We can start studying the ideal case, or add also some economical constraints on the settlement layout ...