Advanced Concepts Team

The work of our team on the Mimosa Pudica has been publish! It proves for the first time the ability of plants to learn. After a countless number of rejections, Oecologia had the courage of publishing it. Now the road is open to demonstrations that learning capability exists not only in sensitive plants, but also in normal plants. This can change the entire biology. A bit rhetorical, but real.

very nice!!! congratulations! what are you working on now - also on this?

I work on some aspects of plant to plant communication! I hope to publish soon something equally exciting!! and of course I will let you know!!

pretty awesome Opens the door to a lot more biomimetic approaches

interesting article on spider webs as electrostatic catchers. Would be interesting to see if they also catch bacteria by this principle for the cleanrooms at ESA and the ISS... 

Thijs interested? quinones are my field

I think the major benefit of this system is the low cost of the products involved compared to standard flow batteries. However, two issues still remain, corrosion and size. I think these things need to be big right due to the volumetric storage using quinones? Nevertheless, it is interesting to see where this development will lead to. "The system is far from perfect, however: bromine and hydrobromic acid are corrosive, and could cause serious pollution if they leaked. "The bromine is, right now, the Achilles heel of this particular battery," Aziz says. The answer could be to go completely organic, he adds: "We are working on replacing the bromine with a different quinone." Are there quinones which would not be corrosive but retain good volumetric performance?

Innovative individuals are less flexible learners while innovative species are also at the same time more flexible.

of interest to Tom's project?

The natural multitaskers are profited the least from this configuration. And then there is Thijs

haha :) "The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers' ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn't help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity." Actually, I grew up studying my homework in my parents shop downstairs. No noise whatsoever drives me insane :)

A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.

130 km2 as next step will be quite an area

I think you should do something like this with your Botiful Johannes :)

Seems like drones are quite in this day when studying wildife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CoApUAZFf8

Put together two ACT topics and see what happens.

I remember discussing this briefly and then discarding the idea - but don't remember why any more; duncan?

Well, I think that although the antenna is small, you counteract this with a much large metameterial lens. Probably if you design an antenna of a similar size to the 'lens' you can couple power equally well over the same distance. Then again, further optimization might help improve the size. Maybe in the end you want to combine both together, optimization of the antenna, including a metamaterials lens.

Weird.

This reminds me a 2013 paper on how to perform derivatives, integrals and even time reversal in optical fibres: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130403/srep01594/full/srep01594.html "The manipulation of dynamic Brillouin gratings in optical fibers is demonstrated to be an extremely flexible technique to achieve, with a single experimental setup, several all-optical signal processing functions. In particular, all-optical time differentiation, time integration and true time reversal are theoretically predicted, and then numerically and experimentally demonstrated."

Would this kind of computer be more space environment resistive?

The ASACUSA experiment at CERN has succeeded for the first time in producing a beam of antihydrogen atoms. The ASACUSA collaboration reports the unambiguous detection of 80 antihydrogen atoms 2.7 metres downstream of their production, where the perturbing influence of the magnetic fields used initially to produce the antiatoms is small. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140121/ncomms4089/full/ncomms4089.html

intriguing but of little interest for space it seems to me

The dwarf planet Ceres, one of the most intriguing objects in the solar system, is gushing water vapour from its unusual ice-covered surface, scientists said on Wednesday in a finding that raises the question of whether it might be hospitable to life.

U.S. scientists say they're working on mini-satellites that could function as "space cops" to help avoid collisions in space of satellites and space debris. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have tested a ground-based satellite to prove it is possible to refine the orbit of another satellite in low Earth orbit.

European research network GÉANT turns Voyager 1 & 2 data into a musical duet.

Update on the post-food man who lives solely on powder cocktails and turned it into a business.

Maybe this can be used for a newcomer's joke.

here is the video - did not really get the mechanism

here is the video now really http://alhlabbench.wordpress.com/research/jumping-salamanders/