Advanced Concepts Team

This literally terrifies me

"To create Sketch-RNN, Google Brain researchers David Ha and Douglas Eck collected more than five million user-drawn sketches from the Google tool Quick, Draw! Each time a user drew something on the app, it recorded not only the final image, but also the order and direction of every pen stroke used to make it. The resulting data gives a more complete picture (ho, ho, ho) of how we really draw." It's funny because this David Ha used to be a quant banker ha ha

OHB and Luxspace venture to ensure human life on the Moon! Research on O2 production and others.....

Has BH at least completed an orbit yet? Or are they still at 10mins in microgravity?

Scientific use cases show promise, but challenges remain for complex data analytics.

"Gravity spoils the symmetry regardless of whether magnetic monopoles exist or not. This is shocking. The bottom line is that the symmetry cannot exist in our universe at the fundamental level because gravity is everywhere"

AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool. It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast. There's nothing to download. Nothing to pay for. And it works anywhere: smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc. AutoDraw's suggestion tool uses the same technology used in QuickDraw, to guess what you're trying to draw. Right now, it can guess hundreds of drawings and we look forward to adding more over time. If you are interested in creating drawings for others to use with AutoDraw, contact us here. We hope AutoDraw will help make drawing and creating a little more accessible and fun for everyone.

A nice quartz article about research in neuromorphic hardware in micro/nanotech out there and future vision of the field.

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

An international team of scientists led by Liang-shi Li at Indiana University has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials.

Cyano bacteria to shield from radiation. An idea from italians flying to the Moon via Team Indus

Nice idea, but is it really new: resistance of cyanob. to UV radiation has been known but studies have been inconclusive as to under what resource limitations it works, but according to what we see from evolution: on Earth it works, since they survived pre-ozone atmosphere! some papers from a quick google search: 1999 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09670269910001736392 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25463663

"We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations"

Interesting European network on glues in nature

Related paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00034/full

"The Neuromorphic Computing Platform allows neuroscientists and engineers to perform experiments with configurable neuromorphic computing systems. The platform provides two complementary, large-scale neuromorphic systems built in custom hardware at locations in Heidelberg, Germany (the "BrainScaleS" system, also known as the "physical model" or PM system) and Manchester, United Kingdom (the "SpiNNaker" system, also known as the "many core" or MC system)."

very nice paper on adaptation of cells to microgravity

You need to avoid posting these types of links in the title as it is not managed well by plugins connected to our diigo account. Try to go to the source next time, and get rid of useless url codes.

Related paper at: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.080501

In the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop a cool concept for a magnetic dipole sitting at Mars L1 with an estimated field of 1-2 Tesla was proposed to shield Mars from Solar Winds and provide an elementary magnetic shielding to Mars.

"By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems. It is this application of climate model results that fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models."

but you know wo these global warming policy foundation is, do you? they are the main advocacy group for climate change deniers in the UK, nothing scientific to start with; fine to post here reasonable scientific papers criticising global climate models but please not this shit

A college course at University of Washington on "Calling Bullshit". We should invite them to give a lunch lecture at ESA... Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: * Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. * Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. * Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit. * Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit. * Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit. We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

love it: "Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit - and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument."