Advanced Concepts Team

this will be big! check the video. according to one of the related posts, they'll be on sale already by the end of 2012! Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this

> Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this It's sort of hard to think when your brain's gone.

What about battery charging by walking on them ?

It is not new, but I can't remember any discussion on this concept at the ACT

trajectory calculations by no-brainers ... Newton known to primitive fishes? (can we use it for space? :-)

the ArduSat (Arduino - satellite) will be the first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on-demand, and even broadcast personalized messages back to Earth.

The video technique could lead to remote diagnostic methods, like the ability to detect the heart rate of someone on a screen.

Are there potential applications to earth observation etc..?

Corning unveiled a new flexible glass -- called "Willow Glass" -- at the Society for Information Display's Boston Display Week on Monday. It's about as thick and flexible as a piece of paper, while having the strength, durability and other qualities of existing glass.

Seems as if the guy likes string theory ... Luzi won't be happy :-)

No comment!

proposal for one of the next ACT movie nights? anybody seen it?

oh, haven't seen that one, but it looks cool! We need to get our hands on it...

Look at this! Seems that we are as close to the bonobos as we are to the chimpanzees If only we resolved more to their ways of getting rid of stress (sex) more than using the chimpanzees' (aggression)...

Physicists in the US have made the first ultrathin flat lens. Thanks to its flatness, the device eliminates optical aberrations that occur in conventional lenses with spherical surfaces. As a result, the focusing power of the lens also approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Really nice indeed! The new flat ultrathin lens is different in that it is a nanostructured "metasurface" made of optically thin beam-shaping elements called optical antennas, which are separated by distances shorter than the wavelength of the light they are designed to focus. These antennas are wavelength-scale metallic elements that introduce a slight phase delay in a light ray that scatters off them. The metasurface can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle and spacing between the nanoantennas. "The antenna is nothing more than a resonator that stores light and then releases it after a short time delay," Capasso says. "This delay changes the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would." The lens surface is patterned with antennas of different shapes and sizes that are oriented in different directions. This causes the phase delays to be radially distributed around the lens so that light rays are increasingly refracted further away from the centre, something that has the effect of focusing the incident light to a precise point.

Scare tactics to prepare for Copenhagen.

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

really really interesting article also referring to a Nature paper called Evolutionary dynamics on graphs

Christos and Jürgen, please have a look at this - shouldn't we get involved??

For those sceptics about the use of neuroscience: A 20min talk (by a computer scientist!) about brain science and its use to build intelligent technology

so what does he sell? 22' without saying anything? Just "intelligence is prediction" - great but what are you gonna do mate?

I do not think his intention is to sell anything... Just to make people (from a non neuroscience background) aware that brain science will have an impact on technology. Also: I am a firm believer in that "prediction"defines intelligence, as he states, and that making machines that behave in such a way is the way to go :) (the talk is from 2003 btw :p)

BEAUTIFUL! Cassini images are always amazing...

what a live, what an interesting person!