Advanced Concepts Team

For those interested in AI, a good idea to keep track of what's recently been put out there

From a quick glance, a serious contender to the most unreadable article ever. 60% of the pages of this document are references... Still, in the use of abbreviations doesn't even come close to aerospace...

The fast developping solar cell technology of perovskites. "Perovskites are a broad class of crystalline minerals that have been known for well over a century. But their ability to convert solar energy to electricity came to light only in 2009. Since then, the efficiency of perovskite solar cells has climbed from 3.8% to 19.3%, a pace of improvement unmatched by any other solar technology. By comparison, crystalline silicon solar cells, the leading commercial technology, convert about 25% of solar energy to electricity."

While the new bacteria is pretty much useless, it would be interesting to see how base 3 genetic programming would turn out.

Weird geocentric universe hoax story

Looks like we are all spider men and women :)

Some cheating involved

Reminds me a bit of optical tweezers - although the principle seems somewhat different. Could the optical tweezers principle be applied through sound? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers

There is this optical neuron that gets stimulated from motion. Mapping it is difficult in the lab: "The stumbling block is a lack of fine-grained anatomical detail about how the neurons in the retina are wired up to each other." So, use people deciphering from 2D images --> the 3D neuron structure using the human spatial reasoning to figure out what is part of a branching cell and what is just background noise in the images (yet incomparable to their best algorithms' performance) 120.000 users so far mapped 2% of the retina

Lots of Earth Observation data has become available at no charge in Europe and the US recently and there is a strong push for more open EO data. With precision farming, advanced agriculture using GPS, satellite observations and tractors with on-board computers, the farming process is performed as accurately and efficiently as possible. This is achieved by combining data from earth observations with other geospatial sources such as cadastral data, data on the quality of the soil, vegetation and protected areas. This enables the farmer to find the optimal trade-off in maximizing his yield with minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides while respecting environmental protection.

A vascular synthetic system that restores mechanical performance in response to large-scale damage. Gap-filling scaffolds are created through a two-stage polymer chemistry that initially forms a shape-conforming dynamic gel but later polymerizes to a solid structural polymer with robust mechanical properties.

the only downside is that you have to launch it before it can run... :)

Hmm.. but how would you make it such that it can stand up? Maybe launch it somehow forward?

I can imagine a system with 2 retractable support legs to stand it up and raise it a bit above the floor. Then make it run and retract the legs abruptly.

unfortunately we have to wait until december - for new levels of astrodrone!

Using the angular momentum transmitted by an internal flywheel as an impulse, these cubes can move, jump, roll across the ground and climb over and around one another. They stick together using a set of small magnets, smart !

That is indeed a great way of using modular robots to build larger structures. I think we did bump into this some time back, but never really considered it much. Considering now the working group on structure assembling, I think we should add it to the list of building strategies and seriously consider it.

...and this is what comes out of this combination.

Whether society embraces face recognition on a larger scale will ultimately depend on how legislators, companies and consumers resolve the argument about its singularity. Is faceprinting as innocuous as photography, an activity that people may freely perform? Or is a faceprint a unique indicator, like a fingerprint or a DNA sequence, that should require a person's active consent before it can be collected, matched, shared or sold?

Dr. Atick is firmly in the second camp.

Actually these sort of things are also quite easy to exploit. Print a picture of Osama bin Laden on your t-shirt and have the entire police force scared out of their wits.

I saw so many bin laden t-shirts already ... they must have better filters than this

Theoretized 80 years ago was Breit-Wheeler pair production in which two photons result in an electron-positron pair (via a virtual electron). It is a relatively simple Feynmann diagram, but the problem is/was how to produce in practice a high energy photon-photon collider... The collider experiment that the scientists have proposed involves two key steps. First, the scientists would use an extremely powerful high-intensity laser to speed up electrons to just below the speed of light. They would then fire these electrons into a slab of gold to create a beam of photons a billion times more energetic than visible light. The next stage of the experiment involves a tiny gold can called a hohlraum (German for 'empty room'). Scientists would fire a high-energy laser at the inner surface of this gold can, to create a thermal radiation field, generating light similar to the light emitted by stars. They would then direct the photon beam from the first stage of the experiment through the centre of the can, causing the photons from the two sources to collide and form electrons and positrons. It would then be possible to detect the formation of the electrons and positrons when they exited the can. Now this is a good experiment... :)

True, but isnt it E2=(pc)^2 + (m0c^2)^2 such that for photons E\propto{pc} and for mass E\propto{mc^2}. I agree it will take a lot of energy, but this assumes that that wont be the problem at least. The question therefore is whether the mass flow of the photon rocket (fuel consumed to create photons, eg fission/fusion) is higher/lower than the mass flow for e-p creation. You are probably right that the low e-p cross-section will favour direct use of photons to create low thrust for long periods of time, but with significant power available the ISP might be higher for e-p pair creation.

In essence the equation tells you that for photons with zero rest mass m0 all the energy will be converted to momentum of the particles. If you want to accelerate e-p then you first spend part of the energy on creating them (~511 keV each) and you can only use the remaining energy to accelerate them. In this case the equation gives you a lower particle momentum which leads to lower thrust (even when assuming 100% acceleration efficiency). ISP is a tricky concept in this case because there are different definitions which clash in the relativistic context (due to the concept of mass flow). R. Tinder gets to a I_SP = c (speed of light) for a photon rocket (using the relativistic mass of the photons) which is the maximum possible relativistic I_SP: http://goo.gl/Zz5gyC .

Physicists have exploited the laws of quantum mechanics to generate random numbers on a Nokia N9 smartphone, a breakthrough that could have major implications for information security

Now something on working methods... More than anything else Box does, Notes seems to embody the philosophy that in business, you never write for the sake of writing. You write to share with people. After all, memos were never meant to be ends in themselves-just the means.

frickin awesome

finally!!!

Positioning via accumulated accelerometer data used to stabilize cold trapped atoms. Current systems are not very reliable for submarines, which cannot use GPS underwater. To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force - and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.