Advanced Concepts Team

Turns out you can do stuff with sound if you have enough of it.

saac Asimov's predictions of the year 2014 back in 1964.. Truly amazing to read how close his sharp mind turned out to be at that time (cold war, Yuri Gagarin just went into space and Fortran first appeared 7 years before). The last prediction also came true I think, however the solution was not psychiatry.. instead we invented Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Also, he predicted that solar power stations would power the places on earth where solar power nor fission (?) would be available... Not there yet

At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December, he reported an average figure that was between 0.005 and 0.008 per cent greater than the value for Earth's mass established by the International Astronomical Union. A disc of dark matter around the equator 191 kilometres thick and 70,000 km across can explain this, he says. Harris has yet to account for perturbations to the satellites' orbits due to relativity, and the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. Maybe relativistic GPS could improve this even further? As a side note however, the Juno spacecraft flyby showed an gravity acceleration which matched the calculations, casting doubts on the earlier calculations.

A visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours.

The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters

In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole

Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this

We should have had this for the Movember :)

The new battery, which is described in the journal Nature, is based on an organic molecule-called a quinone-that's found in plants such as rhubarb and can be cheaply synthesized from crude oil.

As the researchers desribe, the aquifer found is defined as a basin filled with aged snow (firn) that was saturated with water trapped within its porous structure. More ice cores to study! But in that case the time sequence along the length of the cores - to be extracted- would not be monotonic, as was the case in the dry cores we analysed. That's because there is constant input of surface water percolating through the ice-sheet to reach the depth of the aquifer, and since it flows downward its temperature could affect its partial pressure => its vertical position along the core

This would fit well with a study I saw on 'nanogrooved surfaces' with which you could make very good light absorbers. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n7/full/ncomms1976.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20120724

our next gadget? fully open source it seems

cool, now let's put that on drones/quadcopters :)

Bringing water to that supercritical phase (high pressurization and temperature) renders it into an oxidation agent of organic material with pure CO_2 and H2O as products. Less waste volume in the ISS. Also, all contained salts precipitate out at that phase.

The cooperation took place through ESA's Networking/Partnering Initiative, which supports work carried out by universities and research institutes on advanced technologies with potential space applications.

really nice, especially since it is an idea that started in the team, led to an Ariadna study by Carlo Menon, RF in biomimetics who then got a research position at simon fraser univ, where he created his own biomimetics group menvra (http://menrva.ensc.sfu.ca) there, struggling as an italian in a canadian university doing space and not having access to the US space market ... the NPI was the first contract he got for a space resaerch project ... its fantastic to see his student now making headlines with this idea

some biomimicry used in energy systems... maybe it sparks some ideas

not much new that has not been shared here before ... BUT: we have done relativley little on any of them. for good reasons?? don't know - maybe time to look into some of these again more closely Energy Efficiency( Termite mounds inspired regulated airflow for temperature control of large structures, preventing wasteful air conditioning and saving 10% energy.[1] Whale fins shapes informed the design of new-age wind turbine blades, with bumps/tubercles reducing drag by 30% and boosting power by 20%.[2][3][4] Stingray motion has motivated studies on this type of low-effort flapping glide, which takes advantage of the leading edge vortex, for new-age underwater robots and submarines.[5][6] Studies of microstructures found on shark skin that decrease drag and prevent accumulation of algae, barnacles, and mussels attached to their body have led to "anti-biofouling" technologies meant to address the 15% of marine vessel fuel use due to drag.[7][8][9][10] Energy Generation( Passive heliotropism exhibited by sunflowers has inspired research on a liquid crystalline elastomer and carbon nanotube system that improves the efficiency of solar panels by 10%, without using GPS and active repositioning panels to track the sun.[11][12][13] Mimicking the fluid dynamics principles utilized by schools of fish could help to optimize the arrangement of individual wind turbines in wind farms.[14] The nanoscale anti-reflection structures found on certain butterfly wings has led to a model to effectively harness solar energy.[15][16][17] Energy Storage( Inspired by the sunlight-to-energy conversion in plants, researchers are utilizing a protein in spinach to create a sort of photovoltaic cell that generates hydrogen from water (i.e. hydrogen fuel cell).[18][19] Utilizing a property of genetically-engineered viruses, specifically their ability to recognize and bind to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), researchers have developed virus-based "scaffolds" that

Charged like your electric toothbrush by lowering the receiving coils to 4cm above the ground.

nice; there are similar trials ongoing a bit all over; there is one I know of in Mannheim, where i think they have quick charging coils at each stop to reduce the battery mass they need to carry; I have seen a demonstration of this in Kyoto university about 13 years ago on a normal car - even one where they had an entire road equipped with these chargers and tested with charging as you go , charing at traffic stops, parking etc ....

"Time travellers may be using Twitter and Facebook, claim scientists, despite finding no evidence of it" the same can be said for most moders science "big claims with no evidence" :)

Multiplexed optical recording provides an unparalleled approach to increasing the information density beyond 1012 bits per cm3 (1 Tbit cm-3) by storing multiple, individually addressable patterns within the same recording volume. Although wavelength, polarization and spatial dimension have all been exploited for multiplexing, these approaches have never been integrated into a single technique that could ultimately increase the information capacity by orders of magnitude.

Optimization of locomotion on a range of different bipeds with nice visualisation and funny movie (definitely watch at 3:25 !!) Also simulations at lower/higher gravity