Advanced Concepts Team

Monopoly is one of the classic American games. It's played amongst close friends, loved ones, and trusted business partners. It's also one of the few times in life where it's perfectly acceptable to want to systematically annihilate and crush the aforementioned friends, loved ones and partners. We broke down the must-know math behind Monopoly as well as several lessons you can take away from what truly is The Most Dangerous Game.

Internal crowdfunding for ESA? for Ariadna? Perhaps I'm late, but sounds feasible.

An art movie on critical transitions from scientist Marten Scheffer!!

The strange formation resembles a tiny spire surrounded by a webby picket fence and is about 2 centimeters wide. Apparently nobody knows what it is, but Tom said that it may actually come from a spider (according to the way the web was spun)!

New research reveals that humans utilize a part of the brain that is organized topographically to determine, for example, the number of jelly beans in a bowl or the number of cookies in a jar.

It is a very interesting projecto to easily perform quantum optics calculations.

2nd find within a year of unknown lifeforms. 23% unknown DNA.

The underground lake is big enough to cover Kenia's water need for the next 70 years

why are we not getting these type of startups in Europe .... btw: Will is british

I agree, the mentality is different, it's hard to find VC funding for hardware stuff, even more so if you wanna shoot your HW into space. but there is movement, e.g. pioneers.io, they are in vienna and are actively trying to get more VC funding (in europe) for HW and other engineering startups

thanks for the link ... just read this blog ... http://pioneers.io/blog/space-race-2-0-putting-satellites-into-the-hands-of-everyone a lot of selling talk but fundamentally I agree that they have a point ... and as ACT we will face the criticism in not so long that we have not managed (nor tried hard enough) to convince ESA about the need to embrace this "new space"

Video shows how easy the process is and how cool the results look. Does anybody know a potential scientific application for such image processing?

this is very impressive indeed ... looks like the manual steps they are doing could be automatised, can't they?

Wired article giving an opinion on the future trends for mobile computing (e.g. SLAM, 3D vision, ...)

not even gears are a human invention it seems ... Gears are found rarely in animals and have never been reported to intermesh and rotate functionally like mechanical gears. We now demonstrate functional gears in the ballistic jumping movements of the flightless planthopper insect Issus. The nymphs, but not adults, have a row of cuticular gear (cog) teeth around the curved medial surfaces of their two hindleg trochantera. The gear teeth on one trochanter engaged with and sequentially moved past those on the other trochanter during the preparatory cocking and the propulsive phases of jumping. Close registration between the gears ensured that both hindlegs moved at the same angular velocities to propel the body without yaw rotation. At the final molt to adulthood, this synchronization mechanism is jettisoned.

NASA JPL presentation on how and when Voyager exited the Heliosphere about a year ago - fascinating!

NASA doing a great job here - very good presentation at a perfect abstraction level. I recommend watching the whole record.

This December, NASA plans to launch a set of packs, filled with a material akin to kitty litter, functioning as planters for six romaine lettuce plants. The lettuce will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days. Once harvested, it will be frozen and stored away for testing back on Earth. No one is allowed to eat anything before the plants are thoroughly vetted for cosmic microbes.

Amazing what evolution can lead to!

see my post from the 12th below Interacting Gears Synchronize Propulsive Leg Movements in a Jumping Insect http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6151/1254

New method could help to reconnect injured organs or build functional human tissues from the ground up

Big Bang was mirage from collapsing higher-dimensional star, theorists propose.

why am I not surprised .....

http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...

unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas