Advanced Concepts Team

The researchers are busy working on a feasibility study assigned to them by the ESA. The idea is that by combining a rover that can navigate over large distances with a snake robot that can crawl along the ground and can get into inaccessible places, so many more possibilities could be opened up, e.g. collecting samples from tight spots that the rovers cannot reach.

"Horsetail plant spores use 'legs' to walk and jump!"

Apparently the core does not only produce a magnetic field - it is also an electric motor!

Video shows how surface gravity and rotation rate of a star can be characterized from variations in its light

should we all go home then? apparently you just need a balloon

paper here: http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/MILTON%20ISOLATION_final.pdf Not the best journal out there, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology They currently have an open call for papers on Astro-Theology ! :)

wow. the wiki page is hilarious. maybe i'll submit something

Looks fantastic!

Sounds like a great tool for calculation and may provide some deeper understanding. But: I think their comments about space and time are misleading. Often you can ignore space and time when you just want the probability of an event (and it makes your calculations easier) but especially in the low-energy regime an event is clearly localized.

where is Luzi? where is Anna? where is Sante? when you need them?

Wired magazine has a special focus today on Plutonium-238 the fuel for RTG power sources. The history of the material plus the challenges due to the shortage of it - potentially ending deep space exploration as we practice it today (?)...

Now it is too late for Bepi Colombo: most interesting thing on Mercury has been already spotted by NASA.

It is not him guys. Everybody knows he got out of that when the Jedi returned. It must be some other forgotten Jabba's prisoner.

This is becoming a mess :)

I see your point, and I agree that funding was also promoted through the energy players and their political influence. A coincident parallel interest which is irrelevant to the fact that the question remains vital. How do we affect climate and how does it respond. Huge complex system to analyse which responds in various time scales which could obscure the trend. What if we made a conceptual parallelism with the L Ácquila case : Is the scientific method guilty or the interpretation of uncertainty in terms of societal mobilization? Should we leave the humanitarian aspect outside any scientific activity?

I do not think there is anyone arguing that the question is not interesting and complex. The debate, instead, addresses the predictive value of the models produced so far. Are they good enough to be used outside of the scientific process aimed at improving them? Or should one wait for "the scientific method" to bring forth substantial improvements to the current understanding and only then start using its results? One can take both stand points, but some recent developments will bring many towards the second approach.

Sounds strangely familiar - don't know why???

ha! mine is not there!!

Nice pictures from the past :)

Get well, Tom! We urgently need you back.

thanx it is strange, they keep saying they have this synthetic spider silk but there is absolutely no mention of the actual properties of the thing...for a few years now... And I remember we have tested some, way back and it was really bad.

Reminds me of psychohistory in Asimov's Foundation trilogy

Seems we have 1.7 billion years before we need to find a new place to live, when Earth's 'property value' is reduced to zero.