Advanced Concepts Team

Cool video, although I'm surprised *they* could not afford a hi-speed camera...

Interesting. these guys are apparently gonna try developing pulsar navigation. They propose to solve the low apparent brightness problem using relatively complex signal processing and filtering to limit the antenna size etc. The say they've already had some promising results using ground based data. worth a science coffee perhaps?

Absolutely. Sante can you get in contact with them?

A habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land. The settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars the rest of their lives

"no political mumbo jumbo, no taxpayer's money" real work!

Aerographite. This post was originally published on Mashable. German scientists have developed a sturdy material called Aerographite made mostly of air, opening up huge implications for the future development of electronics. The jet-black, non-transparent porous carbon material - which was created by scientists at Kiel University and Hamburg University of Technology - was detailed in the July edition of scientific journal Advanced Materials .

For all the AI guys (Christos, Marek, Ed, Markus and co ...) and of course Luiz, Sante ... You will like this one :-)

Quite a lot of blabla, some usual misconceptions (like QT the source of randomness in nature), but a -- from my point of view -- very true (though in the text somehow hidden) conclusion: Free will, creativity etc. from the point of view of fundamental physics are just randomness! Many physicists won't like this conclusion, though, and in this respect also the title is rather misleading!

CubeSats + 3D printing... for space. I'm surprised this isn't an ACT project :) more info: SpiderFab: Process for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures

$100,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to hammer out a design and figure out whether spacecraft self-construction makes business sense .... I can answer for 0$ ..... NO Infact the question is just stupid: a) spacecraft self-construction exist: then it is a no brainer to decide wether it makes business sense b) it does not: then there is no business

wow ... nice project ... and very simple indeed!

sweet! That's a convincing biomimetic study :) Especially when it falls and survives...

nice and good work, as usual from this lab. however, biomimetic is only the name, as usual from this lab.

this is what I call a nice example of crowdsourcing or citizen scientists .... (remember my idea in the ideastorm ?? :-)

must view video from Nina ...

Illuminating article about corporations trying to exploit "open source" and not getting what they want.

I like the red had definition: "To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way."

yeah, it is the same with crowdsourcing in general, when some company "managers" see how much cheaper they could do it but don't understand where it comes from...

Albeit a bit dated, this is the classical Eric Raymond paper about the self-organizing open source model (the bazaar) compared to the usual closed software development model (the cathedral). Is science today more a bazaar or a cathedral?

funny .... this is exactly the book that Franco mentioned during one of the first meetings I had with him on the ACT, our research, how to organise, the potential of new ways of cooperating etc ...

Science today is a Basilica.

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.

seems nice, but would be a lot of work to implement and we already have something operational... It would add the search module and article in html (what about the compatibility with latex...?). For now I think we should focus on the next issue of acta futura !

probably already known ...

Caption under a photo: "The Terraformed Europa & Mars". LOOOOL

did not know it .... nice

this is what I call wireless power transmission really applied ...!

this is amazing !

Nice opinion piece by the creator of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup. Substitute "industry" with "science" and many considerations still apply :)

"for many, "programming" has become a strange combination of unprincipled hacking and invoking other people's libraries (with only the vaguest idea of what's going on). The notions of "maintenance" and "code quality" are typically forgotten or poorly understood. " ... seen so many of those students :( and ad "My suggestion is to define a structure of CS education based on a core plus specializations and application areas", I am not saying the austrian university system is good, but e.g. the CS degrees in Vienna are done like this, there is a core which is the same for everybody 4-5 semester, and then you specialise in e.g. software engineering or computational mgmt and so forth, and then after 2 semester you specialize again into one of I think 7 or 8 master degrees ... It does not make it easy for industry to hire people, as I have noticed, they sometimes really have no clue what the difference between Software Engineering is compared to Computational Intelligence, at least in HR :/

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship," says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful "lizard brains" to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. ... or to me the importance of setting deadlines, objectives and planning to not sabotage your creative work!

scary guy ..... his 'shipping' philosophy and his 'everybody is creative' line is close to Marx description of alienation ... I share more Stroustrup point of view "The idea of software development as an assembly line manned by semi-skilled interchangeable workers is fundamentally flawed and wasteful."

I don't think that is what he says, I think he says that everybody _can_ be creative but to be so you have to actually create things!

finally cross-scale is not selected, it was the only cosmic vision mission with multi-satellites formation flying, since the concept for Xeus has changed. There is still Swarm but it's not really formation flying... So ESA is missing something here...

For those working on space debris removal... Watch out for moon-protection activists that will accuse you of distroying a historical heritage: "There are countless places on Earth that have been awarded protection to preserve their historic or cultural importance. The moon has none. But that may be about to change...."

haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.

My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).

Same battle we are fighting since a few years....

nice! are they studying our website?