Advanced Concepts Team

interesting collaboration ... unfortunately no prices yet available

A nice article explaining the principle of quantum superposition from the double slits experience. Nothing new here but still interesting to read :)

I myself am quite a big fan of the one-electron universe paradigm :))) And of the cat cannon: http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/12/q-can-you-do-the-double-slit-experiment-with-a-cat-cannon/

Lets capture a star, shall we?

Artes-20 embracing crowdsourcing and putting substantial money into it - at least its first step

A nice GPU-based framework that is basically an emulator of the brain of the fruit fly. If you need a fruit fly brain - here it comes!

Rings of excited atoms that harness a quantum effect to absorb light at an enhanced rate could be used in future technologies such as highly sensitive cameras, solar cells and systems for optical power transmission.

Devices made from resonating graphene "drums" could be used as microwave amplifiers and memory chips in quantum computers. So say researchers at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who are the first to demonstrate optomechanical coupling between a mechanical resonator and a superconducting microwave cavity.

A Heisenberg's dog is the central unit in a quantum computer that factors prime numbers. We report the outcome of a proof-of-principle Gedankenexperiment in which the number 3 was factored and good agreement was found both with an analytical theoretical prediction and with the results of a quantum Las Vegas calculation. Other future applications of Heisenberg's dog are hinted at. The anonymous reports of the referees and our reply to them are reproduced in appendix A and appendix B respectively.

Evolutionary Robotics, as practised by biologists. Here's the link to John Long's book, mentioned in the article: Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007QXVRZG/

A nice study on the soon cancelled-before-it-began hit TV show "MarsOne" (or, how it should be called, "How to make someone else rich while slowly dying on Mars").

Also check out this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V0FowbxEe3w. I like the "pay for wtf?" concept.

loads of nice passwords - should we have a closer look at it? anybody volunteering? e.g. Anna and Daniel?

Just to add to this possible discussion, two important breakthroughs in Quantum Computing using Silicon were published last week (October 12th). Check it here: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-physicists-silicon-quantum.html

For fun. "Dolphins are only the second most intelligent form of life on Earth"

Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Is positive news definitely, but when it comes to fusion energy being skeptic is the wisest course of action. On the back of a truck basically means that the energy density of the device is such that the surface energy of a (steady state) plasma is beyond currents materials limits. It is probably a pulsed (ignitor-type) device, which are prone to instabilities. That could therefore refer to their breakthrough claim, of which they hardly say anything though. Lets see

Since there were already a lot of false alarms on the field, one should definitively be careful about it. However not a single detail about its structure or how it works in this new... Here http://www.fusenet.eu/node/400 you can find a bit more of information about it.

The problem is that the light cone angle has a limit - all particles with high momentum (mass x velocity) generate light cones with the same angle. Hence, these particles are indistinguishable. Now Chalmers researcher Philippe Tassin and his colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have designed a material that manipulates the Cherenkov cone so that also particles with high momentum get a distinct light cone angle too. The work is on the cover of this week's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters ("Controlling Cherenkov Radiation with Transformation-Optical Metamaterials").

An unusual signal picked up by a European space observatory could be the first direct detection of dark matter particles, astronomers say. The findings are tentative and could take several years to check, but if confirmed they would represent a dramatic advance in scientists' understanding of the universe.

Looks like crowdsourcing for astronomy stuff is already being done.

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)