Advanced Concepts Team

An out-of-this-world gallery... Can my camera do bessel beam super-resolution structured illumination microscopy too??

This December, two Swiss architects and an Italian robotics engineer will, for the first time, build a tower solely by flying robots.

very nice!

VERY nice! one of the promised apps of "swarms" at last demonstrated...and i was beginning to lose hope! (pity this article goes under this "singularity" website...)

Tomorrow, at 9am EST, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland are expected to announce, with fairly strong certainty, that they have observed the Higgs boson "God" particle at a mass-energy of 125 GeV. For just over a week, rumors have been rife that observations with 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty (96% to 99.9%) have been made.

The first solid experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson has been unveiled today by physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Members of the ATLAS experiment revealed evidence that the Higgs particle has a mass of about 126 GeV/c2. "By 2014/2015 we could have enough additional data to eliminate large classes of theories that attempt to explain the Higgs,"

spaceship1 on steroids ...

Looks slightly fragile in the middle...

The idea has been around for already some time (2008) but I like it despite the challenges/trade-off: visible vs IR photovoltaics, black leaves would be better... Piezo + classical PV would already be great... Optimizing the leave shape & distribution for both wind and sun energy harvesting could be interesting...

Two independent teams have made ultrathin, cabon-based membranes with extraordinary properties that could be used in a range of applications, from water filtration to petroleum processing.

Anybody tried this out already?

nobody? where is Francesco hiding?

he drone of speakers who won't stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas and public libraries.  Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission. 

...must...not...make...the...obvious...ACT...meeting...joke...

Unfortunately it won't work when it is most needed .... Read this: "Their tests also identify some curious phenomena. They say the gun is more effective when the delay varies in time and more effective against speech that involves reading aloud than against spontaneous monologue. Sadly, they report that it has no effect on meaningless sound sequences such as "aaaaarghhh".

This is almost word for word the title Andrés gave to the first presentation of the team to DG ten years ago ...

There's a whole series of futuristic articles, may be worth having a look: http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future

"That's why silicon chips operate at temperatures hot enough to fry eggs." I stopped reading after this sentence... is the remaining part of the article equally scientifically (in)accurate?

... each act member should have one, together with the mug... :) Se also http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y3sHTKrGdKI

I want one too! On a side note, his story about transformers is a nice illustration that being able to express something in a mathematical equation is not equivalent to understanding something.

A real scientific study...

tool to avoid big brother listening in ...

crowdsourcing science funding ...

there have been a few of these popping out lately, thanks to Kickstarter's incredible success. This one http://www.petridish.org/ launched last month, and has a lot of projects already, including a fully funded one (219 backers, $12,247 raised) to "find the first exomoon": http://www.petridish.org/projects/help-us-find-the-first-exomoon

archaeology for a bit of a change of pace. "The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history's first 'barbarians' - mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world's first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq."

Connected to asteroid deflection? :)

Worth following for inspiration?

Yes, definitely!

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com." In other words, UK is not part of the world...

Intel's goal is to build chips that work more like the human brain. Now its engineers think they know how