Advanced Concepts Team

NASA marketing interstellar travel to foreign bodies even without knowing how they actually look like.

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted - a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

microsoft just bought github ...

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.

Found them!

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity (GR), has been tested precisely within the Solar System. However, it has been difficult to test GR on the scale of an individual galaxy. Collett et al. exploited a nearby gravitational lens system, in which light from a distant galaxy (the source) is bent by a foreground galaxy (the lens). Mass distribution in the lens was compared with the curvature of space-time around the lens, independently determined from the distorted image of the source. The result supports GR and eliminates some alternative theories of gravity.

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.

Claims to be "the most powerful rocket propellant".

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Just out - I wish I could understand this :(

ignorance is a bliss :)

A rectenna at infrared wavelength. They authors mention a potential application in RTGs

The ice-cube observatory in Antarctica reveals the source of high energy cosmic neutrinos. Spoiler: its Blazars!

Hate spoliers!

How many people to we actually need put on that ship?

We should invite these people to the AF special issue

sounds really interesting. their simulations don't account for biological issues (mutation, migration, selection, drift, founder effect) though, so the numbers are very low. this paper (https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0094576513004669/1-s2.0-S0094576513004669-main.pdf?_tid=6bec2a5c-f05f-4024-b4de-af78ab06fd42&acdnat=1531827379_d4f0be1b193873890d6e5b4574e82f2e) takes those effects and their implications on genetic composition of populations into account, but the numbers are enormous. do you have an idea why they (marin and beluffi) wouldn't put those effects into the simulations?

Our work sheds light on many interesting directions of future exploration in the development of quantum-inspired algorithms for unsupervised machine learning, which are promisingly possible to realize on quantum devices.

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

The bear ears add some nice biological component to it.

Meanwhile in Australia...

You erase it, AI reconstructs it.

Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what's being said and faint images of what's around a corner.