Advanced Concepts Team

Finally some Internet for our meeting room!

interns at NASA are looking into soft robot actuators

What happens if you put a TV in the maze your robot is supposed to navigate (driven by curiosity)?

Does the fact that I follow this process of learning, make me a meta-learner? Or a pre-robot?

New idea for launcher?

do you have a direct link to the high speed video?

first science results reported in Nature (as far as I know) from the Yutu-2 and Chang'e mission .... and they look very good!

Sure they are very useful! It will be even better if they manage to fit the data to modeled circulation of the lunar magma ocean that was formed posterior to the "Theia" body collision with Earth. The collision was the cause of the magma ocean in the first place. The question now is how this circulation pattern of the lava-moon "froze" in time upon phase transition to solid. Because, what crystallizes last in sequence, is more rich in "incompatible" with the crystal structure, elements, we might combine data+models to predict their location. Those incompatible tracers are mainly radioactively decaying elements that produce heat (google publications about lunar KREEP elements (potassium (K), rare earth elements(REE), and phosphorus(P)). By knowing where the KREEP is: - we know where to dig for them mining (if they are useful for something, eg. Phosphorus for plants to be grown on the Moon) - we avoid planning to build the future human colony on top of radioactives, of course. The hope is that the Moon, due to lack of plate tectonics, has preserved this "signature of the freezing sequence". Let's see.

thanks Nasia! very interesting comment

first fully "artificial" designed organism reported ...

beautiful! anybody knows of similar trials to fool EO data classifiers?

I am not aware of any similar trials, yet this study remind me of generative adversarial talking heads https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.07716.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1b5aiTrGzY

Toothache in space? No problem.

Life could have had much more time to evolve on mars than previously thought...

"A list of the many different animals, plants, microbes, natural phenomena and supernatural activities that can be spotted in the wild lands of the metaphor-based computation literature"

Blog from rarefin on our Proba-V Super Resolution competition

New results in NLP might allow to automate scientific discoveries by data mining of papers. Work considers 3.3M abstracts from material science, physics and chemistry and claims to discover new materials before they are published later on.

ACT did that from diigo post digging in the retreat of 2014! Still without NLP.

That's cool! Didn't know.

Random branches are collected, scanned to 3D, and connected with servos. Then a neural network is trained to control this "robot".

California wants to force bots to reveal their identity in communication.

MEGA CONSTELLATION and AI ... China again :)

and we did not even propose it ...

Collecting space rocks.

if a geologist hears you calling them rocks they will curse you collectively. I am in a workshop where some of those are present and I constantly remind myself to call them "minerals".

minerals sound much better indeed ... but what is wrong with rocks ? :-)

Correct me, if I am wrong, but AFAIK this is the first time an AI enters a ladder, i.e. playing against humans on their own terms in the wild and not as part of some pre-arranged experiment.

Another victory for our future robo-overlords.

How much did Apollo cost?