Advanced Concepts Team

There you go, the latest-and-greatest chip is there. Now the only remaining tiny detail - program it.

Let's buy it first and we'll figure the rest out later :P

A handy feature that allows linking of over 300 online apps. For example, generating Trello cards from calendar events automatically (and vice versa).

HealthMap uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts.

even confining spatially harmful phytoplankton blooms, away from coastal areas

"The OpenBCI Board is a versatile and affordable analog-to-digital converter that can be used to sample electrical brain activity (EEG), muscle activity (EMG), heart rate (EKG), and more" Perhaps some work or ideas on brainwave analysis would be interesting ? (User interfaces, mood classifier, detection of various alertness levels )

It's not worth it for $400... The chips are seriously nothing special and you can get a lot better for a lot cheaper. I would just get the electrodes and link them to a RPi or an Odroid or something.

True, but the selling feature here is that they take care of that stuff and sell it for 400$. Lets say the hardware is 100USD, then an RF-grade person here here has to do the coding, interfacing, testing within roughly (300/16eur/hour) 20 hours to break even and even then the interface is much nicer in their case.

"As in a colony of ants, "there's no centralized leader per se," Rubenstein says." Thought of ant colony document permanently on Dario's desk. Some relevance?

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies - something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. "Simulation is the future of innovation"

While the powerful solvents known as ionic liquids show great promise for liberating fermentable sugars from lignocellulose and improving the economics of advanced biofuels, an even more promising candidate is on the horizon - bionic liquids. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-bionic-liquids-lignin-results-pave.html#jCp

Maybe Nasia is looking for it in all the wrong places? :P

Very recent paper on brain wave-sensing technology, where researchers were able to communicate words from one brain to another brain over the internet. The encoded information appeared as flashes of light in the receiver's brain at the corner of their vision.

Omg - they will not only murder you, but also suck on your bones.

Marcus, might be up your street? http://www.giraffobia.com/news.htm

Fantastic! Although my recent encounters with the species helped me control my giraffobia...

maybe we can use some neural networks to do animal "speech" recognition? :P

Some bacteria can influence the weather. Up high in the sky where clouds form, water droplets condense and ice crystal grow around tiny particles. Typically these particles are dust, pollen, or even soot from a wildfire. But recently scientists have begun to realize that some of these little particles are alive - they are bacteria evolved to create ice or water droplets around themselves. old but might be worth a discussion

"A Soviet supercavitation torpedo called Shkval was able to reach a speed of 370km/h or more - much faster than any other conventional torpedoes," he said. However, The SCMP highlighted two problems in supercavitation technology. First, the submerged vessel needed to be launched at high speeds, approaching 100km/h, to generate and maintain the air bubble. Secondly, it is difficult if not impossible to steer the vessel using conventional mechanisms, which are inside the bubble, without direct contact with water. As a result, its application has been limited to unmanned vessels, fired in a straight line.

can't you just selectively inject the gas so that you control in which direction the bubble forms?

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.

"We have made optical systems at the microscopic scale that amplify light and produce ultra-narrowband spectral output," explained J. Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Illinois. "These new optical amplifiers are well-suited for routing optical power on a chip containing both electronic and optical components.

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On the one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This paper gives overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures.

YEEHA! looks like there is hope for me after all! :)

> looks like there is hope for me after all! Not really, if you believe ScienceDaily headlines...

Astronomers using ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory have demonstrated beyond doubt that dead stars known as white dwarfs can reignite and explode as supernovae. The finding came after the unique signature of gamma rays from the radioactive elements created in one of these ex...