Advanced Concepts Team

Interesting read if you're interested on the kind of coding that goes into something like the Curiosity rover. :) btw.. nice fill-packet being sent by Curiosity: "Elvis has Spirit. The answer is 42....END\r\n"

As people point out in the comments: a bit fake. But nevertheless a good production and a definitely cool advertisement for KUKA! I enjoyed it!

yeah check out the making of, it's a nice movie and what would robotics movies be without movie magic :) somewhere they mentioned a vision system, which I think based on the making-of video they haven't really used for the video shoot

Old news... Sante was doing this 10 years ago! And why does their metamaterial look like a pyramid?

According to Terry Pratchett pyramids affect the flow of time. Using this, any kind of cloaking device should be trivial.

Sounds relevant. Does ESA need to have a position on this question?

This was on Slashdot now, with a link to the paper. It quite an iteresting study actually. "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."

Interesting, but is it new? In general, I would say that history has shown us that it is inevitable that civilisations get replaced by new concepts (much is published about this, read eg Fog of War by Jona Lendering on the struggles between civilisations in ancient history, which have remarkably similar issues as today, yet on a different scale of course). "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing." I guess this bang on it, the ones that can change the system, are not benefitted by doing so, hence enrichment, depletion, short term gain remain and might even accelerate to compensate for the loss in the rest of the system.

Siemens is using neural networks to improve operation of wind turbines, reducing maintenaince needs and improving output by one precent. It seems even that Siemens has quite a large neural network study group, probably linked to german universities, with various examples in practice (see websie)

"What's new: Choi said that although some researchers have used natural photosynthetic units to enhance the light-harvesting abilities of nanomaterials, this is the first time anyone has used nanomaterials to enhance the function of photosynthetic units."

Here you go. You can now scrap Lisa altogether. Who's going to tell Pacome?

Awesome and exciting stuff indeed! The data pinpoint the time when inflation occurred - about 10E-37 seconds into the Universe's life - and its temperature at the time, corresponding to energies of about 10E16 gigaelectronvolts, says cosmologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. That is the same energy at which three of the four fundamental forces of nature - the weak, strong and electromagnetic force - are expected to become indistinguishable from one another in a model known as the grand unified theory. I expect more fundamental physics insights to come out of this in the future. A full-sky survey from space may still be an interesting addition to the measurement capabilities, so I would not rule out LISA all together I guess...

Plants have many valuable functions: They provide food and fuel, release the oxygen that we breathe, and add beauty to our surroundings. Now, researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them completely new functions, such as monitoring environmental pollutants.

nice story ...

A total storage of 9.5 wt% H2 could be reached which is above the 7.5wt% set by the DoE for market requirements of hydrogen vehicles. The nanoboxes can be opened and closed using electric fields.

TED is sponsoring an A.I. XPRIZE. The goal? Develop an artificial intelligence that jumps on stage and gives a 3min talk on a random topic...

I am going to propose that the rules include in addition something practical - like washing the dishes... If we are to foster progress, let's finally do so in the right direction...

This sort of reminds me of Hinton's paper from some years ago: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf Train it on previous TED talks and let it run TED talk - like gibberish. It would probably be of similar value. He had a nice one on the meaning of life but I can't find it anymore.

"Cuckoos have a bad reputation as home-wreckers, taking over the nests of other birds and killing their chicks. But one species benefits its hosts by producing a smelly fluid that repels predators. "Cuckoos are not always the villains we think they are," says Ros Gloag of the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the study."

So they not only take over part of the nest, but also crap all over the place? Then again, if that is the prize to pay for safety, it might well be worth the inconvenience.. :)

By just getting a DNA footprint of a person scientists (and soon police) can produce an image of the person's face. Check out the pictures!

should try it the other way around, deduce the DNA from facial features. That would be even cooler.

Well actually, they did something like that as they searched for common DNA patterns in people that had similar facial features. With a large enough dataset that could provide already 24 DNA tracers that could used reliably for prediction. Imagine if you had even more data available, who needs a model then... just let the NN do it :)

"The BICEP2 data would eliminate about 90% of inflationary models, Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, told a packed auditorium at MIT the day after the BICEP2 announcement (see picture below). Many of those models do not produce gravitational waves at detectable levels, said Linde, who is one of the founders of inflation theory." Is there any hope for LISA now?

Of course - the data is more proof that GWs exist!!

so you don't expect any impact on the science objectives of Lisa at all?

Article mainly on anti-satellite testing by the Chinese and on US and Russian tests (2nd page) - quite extensive and technical but interesting

"In an effort to help solve the black hole information paradox that has immersed theoretical physics in an ocean of soul searching for the past two years, two researchers have thrown their hats into the ring with a novel solution: Lasers. Technically, we're not talking about the little flashy devices you use to keep your cat entertained, we're talking about the underlying physics that produces laser light and applying it to information that falls into a black hole. According to the researchers, who published a paper earlier this month to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (abstract), the secret to sidestepping the black hole information paradox (and, by extension, the 'firewall' hypothesis that was recently argued against by Stephen Hawking) lies in stimulated emission of radiation (the underlying physics that generates laser light) at the event horizon that is distinct from Hawking radiation, but preserves information as matter falls into a black hole."

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed. The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus.

An exhaustive overview of all possible advanced rocket concepts, eg.. "As an example, consider a photon rocket with its launching mass, say, 1000 ton moving with a constant acceleration a =0.1 g=0.98 m/s2. The flux of photons with E γ=0.5 MeV needed to produce this acceleration is ~1027/s, which corresponds to the efflux power of 1014 W and the rate of annihilation events N'a~5×1026 s−1 [47]. This annihilation rate in ambiplasma l -l ann corresponds to the value of current ~108 A and linear density N ~2×1018 m−1 thus any hope for non-relativistic relative velocity of electrons and positrons in ambiplasma is groundless." And also, even if it would work, then one of the major issues is going to be heat dispersal: "For example, if the temperature of radiator is chosen T=1500 K, the emitting area should be not less than 1000 m2 for Pb=1 GW, not less than 1 km2 for Pb=1 TW, and ~100 km2 for Pb=100 TW, assuming ε=0.5 and δ=0.2. Lower temperature would require even larger radiator area to maintain the outer temperature of the engine section stable for a given thermal power of the reactor."

The problem is not achieving a high energy density, that we can already do with nuclear fission, the question however is how to confine or harness this power with relatively high efficiency, low waste heat and at not too crazy specific mass. I see magnetic confinement as a possibility, yet still decades away and also an all-or-nothing method as we cannot easily scale this up from a test experiment to a full-scale system. It might be possible to extract power from such a plasma, but definitely well below breakeven so an additional power supply is needed. The fission fragments circumvent these issues by a more brute force approach, thereby wasting a lot of energy for sure but at the end probably providing more ISP and thrust.

Sure. However, the annihilation based photon rocket concept unifies almost all relevant drawbacks if we speak about solar system scales, making itself obsolete...it is just an academic testcase.