Advanced Concepts Team

Docking Impender assumed a demonstrator of a novel kinetic energy absorber applied to CubeSat mockups tested on a 2D microgravity simulator: an air bearing table. Inspired by prof. Lagiewka: http://www.euroinfrastructure.eu/en/safety/byl-zderzak-lagiewki-bedzie-bariera-lagiewki/

Nanometre-sized rods of carbon can expel water in puffs of vapour when the air is already humid. Materials such as carbon and silica gels typically pick up moisture as humidity increases. But Satish Nune and his colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, found that their carbon-based nanorods take up water at low humidity and then give off about half of it when the relative humidity exceeds 50-80%. The team thinks that water condenses between adjacent rods and then capillary forces draw the rods together until the water bursts from the ends of the rods and evaporates.

Be careful .... new technologies are killing us!!!

New technologies, old stupidity. I remember the Polish couple one from the news... Horrific, kids left traumatised for life...

Very nice experiment on the verge of Condensed matter Physics! The presence of Landau levels is a necessary condition to obtain a Quantum Hall state. Quantum Hall states have first appeared in 2D electronic gases when applied a perpendicular magnetic field that induces a new topological state of the "electronic gas". This new topological state is believed to "protect" some parameters of the system, such as conductance making it possible to measure fundamental constants with very high precision even in imperfect experimental conditions. In this fundamental experiment, a synthetic magnetic field was created that acts in continuum photons, producing "an integer quantum Hall system in curved space, a long-standing challenge in condensed matter physics".

These people want to construct a synthetic human genome

A sonification experiment taking data from ATLAS and translating it into music. The outcome was played at Montreux jazz fest, listen to the results in soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/sonification-quantizer. The way it works is "A tiny subset of collision data from the ATLAS Detector (in CERN, Switzerland) is being generated and streamed in real-time into a sonification engine built atop Python, Pure Data, Ableton, and IceCast." Code's in github https://github.com/cherston/Quantizer_public

I'm not sure what's new here; space and fashion collide violently every day at the ACT...

Belgian startup company. Medical wearables will transform healthcare and patient care - they promise.

The best robot prototype videos in ICRA conference. Nice whiskered robots and "self-supervised" self learning robot hands using CNNs.

Strongly recommended for everyone living on the Earth :)

An hypothesis for explaining missing shoreline traces of ancient water ocean on mars: Some 3.4 billion years ago, giant meteoroids slammed into a frigid ocean covering Mars's northern hemisphere. The impacts kicked up enormous waves that raced across the water and swamped the shoreline, research suggests. On the scale of planetary catastrophes, such tsunamis would have dwarfed most Earthly ones.

Powered by solar energy, Thales Alenia's Stratobus has an operation lifespan of five-years and only needs ground maintenance just a few days a year Can hover 12.4 miles (20km) in the air and reaches altitudes of 20,000 meters.

Yesterday [11th May], the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a Demo Day for the Department of Defense in the courtyard at the center of the Pentagon to give the defense community "an up-close look at the Agency's diverse portfolio of innovative technologies and military systems at various stages of development and readiness."

Really? Is this what we were all waiting for?

to be honest, while the alien megastructure is a cookie idea, I highly doubt that those aliens woke up one day and thought: "hm, let's send laser pulses at this particular random spot in space sometime in the next 6 days".