Advanced Concepts Team

Taking images through opaque, light-scattering layers is a vital capability and essential diagnostic tool in many applications. The research group of Prof. Mosk of U. Twente have started doing experiments shooting optical lasers into opaque materials in 2007, and for surprise of everyone, it turn out the light intensity after the opaque material in their experiments was orders of magnitude bigger than expected. Following these results they succeeded in taking non-invasive sharp pictures of objects hidden behind a screen of opaqueness, the so referred Super Vision in this Nature overview article.

very nice!!!

Nautral Light for Human Space Exploration

wow, that looks pretty real to me! I remember a presentation some time ago on difficulties with large scale LED lights for making directed light sources. I guess we can cross that off the list :)

Agata - have a look at this!

might look a bit scary ...

Mining the moon - now we know that the Moon's poles hold millions of tonnes of water ice, firms in the US as well as the Indian and Chinese space agencies are planning to mine this resource and sell it to space missions as fuel.

stronger than steel - small teeth of snail like creature ...

According to a BBC news article it's actually stronger than Kevlar...

The spider silk is no longer the toughest natural material around.

revealing - though not surprising, but nicely detailed; opportunities for really secure comm via space?

An alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered. No other star is known to have approached this close to us. An international team of researchers says it came five times closer than our current nearest neighbour - Proxima Centauri. Passing straight through the Oort Cloud region. This must have left some sort of mark maybe? A binary system of a red and brown dwarf (8% and 6% solar masses) so maybe not a too significant impact on trajectories in the Oort cloud?

I read this earlier and thought it might be another one of those alien conspiracy stuff. Freaky stuff.

what about taking a ride on one of these? - especially if they come with some companion planets? when is the next shuttle coming?

Hungary :)

Yeahhh? Coming back to ESA?

In this paper published on Nature, AI researchers used deep Q-network with very good adaptability and obtained performances comparable to those of a human games tester.

Bastards! And that was to be my next idea. Still no recurrency as I see it so far, so this is just some fancy way to do a markov model. Not sure if this is that particular paper or an earlier version but here it is for those interested: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf

DeepMind actually got a comp-sci paper into nature...

Filaments of plasma created by a high-powered laser beam undergo a similar type of phase transition as liquid percolating through a porous material - that is the conclusion of physicists in Switzerland. The also describe the application of laser filamentation for directed lightening and encouraged rainfall - Isabelle should come back to take a closer look :p

Christophe? Isabelle?

So basically we can photograph light now. Not just detect photons but photograph LIGHT WAVES. Really clever setup BTW.

"Hormones are molecules that act as the body's signals, triggering various physiological responses. The newly discovered hormone, dubbed "MOTS-c," primarily targets muscle tissue, where it restores insulin sensitivity, counteracting diet-induced and age-dependent insulin resistance." Good news for long distance space travelers?

as well as lazy couch potatoes

New VR headset by Valve and HTC outclasses everything else that out there. Developer kit this spring, full version by the end of the year.

Ever wondered what radiation looks like? If you have, I bet you didn't think it would look as cool as this. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission....

Once I saw a DIY spark chamber in LIP (CERN associated laboratory). It was the work of a bunch of BSc students, they made it all from scratch, so it seemed to be not that difficult to have one at home. Yet another project for the future 'Experimental Physics' stagiare maybe :)

interesting read - also on the approach taken ... again thanks to Snowden

and what an effort they make ..

Cornell applied physicists have demonstrated an unprecedented method of control over electron spins using extremely high-frequency sound waves - new insights in the study of the spin of the electron. Crazy idea but, no further need for complicated quantum encryption techniques of sound signals?

Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.

Jarvis could make it, add a power supply and aquarium and we are off :)

Told you so...

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.