Advanced Concepts Team

DARPA creates a set of games that covertly search for software vulnerabilities

Heat and a magnetic field cause the liquid lithium to swirl rapidly, an effect that could be useful in fusion reactors. With a nice video http://physics.aps.org/assets/eab7d11d-20cd-4c37-ab2c-313729ad8422/video-v1.mp4

nice movie

pretty interesting! I am still convinced we can do something in this :)

There surely must be possibilities indeed, maybe we should expand it to an RF? By coincidence, I bumped into a quantum optics PhD looking for a post-doc, who would love to give a talk in the team on his research (although very different topic) and I invited him for early January.

Does this have implications for AI algorithms??

I was actually thinking exactly about this question during my bike ride this morning. I am surprised that some codons would need to have a double meaning though because there is already a surplus of codons to translate into just 20-22 proteins (depending on organism). So there should be about 44 codons left to prevent translation errors and in addition regulate gene expression. If - as the article suggests - a single codon can take a dual role, does it so in different situations (needing some other regulator do discern those)? Or does it just perform two functions that always need to happen simultaneously? I tried to learn more from the underlying paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.full.pdf All I got from that was a headache. :-\

Probably both. Likely a consequence of energy preservation during translation. If you can do the same thing with less genes you save up on the effort required to reproduce. Also I suspect it has something to do with modularity. It makes sense that the gene regulating for "foot" cells also trigger the genes that generate "toe" cells for example. No point in having an extra if statement.

Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida are partnering with counterparts at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to develop systems to bring potential future robotic "service tow trucks" to orbiting spacecraft in need of aid

beati pauperes spiritu :-) "Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy." I think that there are many factors missing there that are just not asked possibly such as altruism as a source for happiness ...

According to The Beatles "Happiness is a warm gun"... To each his own, I guess. :-)

It really depends on one's values really. If your values don't follow the standard vanilla flavor then it all breaks down.

Known technically as a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wave, the effect will allow the nano-antennas to operate at the low end of the terahertz frequency range, between 0.1 and 10 terahertz - instead of at 150 terahertz With this antenna, we can cut the frequency by two orders of magnitude and cut the power needs by four orders of magnitude," said Jornet. "Using this antenna, we believe the energy-harvesting techniques developed by Dr. Wang would give us enough power to create a communications link between nanomachines." As always, graphene seems to be the answer to anything, but steady progress is being made although one needs to find out first an easy method of generating high quality graphene layers (btw that is also one of the reasons to do the supercapacitor study...)

Well plasmonics is also the solution to everything it seems...

TU Delft researchers have developed the DelFly Explorer, the world's first Micro Air Vehicle with flapping wings that can avoid obstacles by itself. The uniqueness of this achievement lies in the DelFly Explorer's very low weight (20 grams, i.e. a few sheets of paper), and this opens up new possible applications for both smaller and larger MAVs.

I'm kinda curious what you used for processing power there. Is that a DSP?

Development of biodegradable batteries to power medical devices that you could inject into the human body, for example to do medical checkup, drug delivery etc

safe not only fossil fuels when biking but clean the air at the same time :-) (well... in theory)

500000 lego bricks, a tank of compressed air, some mechanical engineering and a lot of time later...

To determine the mass of an exoplanet using transmission spectroscopy, de Wit relied on the effect that a planet's mass has on its atmosphere, as transmission spectra give information on a planet's atmospheric properties. To do that, he worked from a standard equation describing the effect of a planet's temperature, gravitational force, and atmospheric density on its atmospheric pressure profile-the extent to which pressure changes throughout its atmosphere.

Anna, Sante, some Christmas reading! Real theoretical physicists never sleep ;)

Each year the dutch NSA (AIVD) comes out with a christmas puzzle (never knew) which consists of 20 severe cryptic questions. Unfortunately, all the questions are in Dutch :( I solved 3 at the moment...

It turns out that falling along any straight line through the Earth takes 42 minutes (Gravity train). I think this has not been opted as an explanation of Douglas Adams' 42 but this fact is definitely quite beautiful.

New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust found the negatives in an expedition hut from Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's failed 1912 quest to become the first man to reach the South Pole.