Advanced Concepts Team

Marc Stephens "ProtoSpace embodies agility," says Vincent Loubière. "We can move from concept to demonstrator quickly." The 'agility' method is modelled on proven successes in the computer industry but the ProtoSpace team also works with automotive and communications blue-chips, as well as start-ups whose creations could have applications in aerospace. Airbus's ACT :)

Nice web story on setting up the event horizon telescope network of up to 20 telescopes across the globe to observe the black hole at the galaxy's center

New 3D printed macro structure exhibits selective buckling open the way for custom shape-memory materials found our neighbor scientists from the Lorentz Institut of the Leiden University. Wonder if it can be applied for self-assembled deployment of structures.

Elon Musk is moving forward with space based internet service...

Facebook announced they are ready to test of of their High Altitude Platform element, a drone of the size of a Boeing 737. See the new here http://phys.org/news/2015-07-facebook-ready-giant-drone-internet.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=ctgr-item&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter. It seemed interesting for me that they are developing also a reliable optical communication between this element and scattered ground stations.

Nice link, that thing is huge and I would love to see a drone that size fly. Also, Facebook's Aerospace Team? :)

Humanity's Public Library #ImagineIf censorship did not exist information was free for everyone, education was truly universal, every home had a library, disasters could be anticipated. Get your Lantern Portable, solar-powered, multi-frequency Outernet receiver. Maybe we should get/build one of those receivers for the ACT just because it's geeky:)

Seems like astrologists were somehow right... Ptolemy would be proud.

Greetings from July :-) On an unrelated note... this chart made me suddenly realise I've been always thinking of the year as passing counter-clockwise and starting at the bottom. Very strongly. Seems like some tempo-spatial association. Anybody has a similar feeling?

Deep neural networks "dreaming" psychedelic images

Google released the code behind this, and applications of it are now popping up: - http://googleresearch.blogspot.nl/2015/07/deepdream-code-example-for-visualizing.html - https://imgur.com/a/nVlLe - https://twitter.com/hashtag/deepdream

Funny how representation errors in NNs suddenly become art. God.... neo-post-modernism.

Octopus and optoelectronics camouflage, light bugs and LEDs, or spider webs and touch screens, ... a whole cool bunch of biomimetic stuff

See also the referred work "Light-extraction enhancement for light-emitting diodes: a firefly-inspired structure refined by the genetic algorithm" - quite cool! https://pure.fundp.ac.be/portal/files/11946897/paper89.pdf

TED talks are so random even recurrent neural networks can do it

:D this is so good !!

my favourite sentence: "or to be able to solve the data in an astronaut a spider"

Imagine a material that only admits thermal conduction for certain temperatures. Martin Maldovan from Georgia Tech holds a tiny thermoelectric device that turns cold on one side when current is applied. Recent research has focused on the possibility of using interference effects in phonon waves to control heat transport in materials. These are exciting news (see Nature Materials paper here http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v14/n7/full/nmat4308.html). Heterostructure research lead to outstanding new possibilities when applied to electronic transport (e.g. in quantum well and quantum dots) and to photonics (e.g. Quantum Cascade Laser tunnable lasers). Apparently the time has come to see selective thermal control in this way! Truly exciting!!

by Maria Popova "Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought." For as long as I can remember - and certainly long before I had the term for it - I've believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks - knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas - that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something "new."

Worldwide Telescope enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best telescopes in the world. I managed to crash it twice in 20 minutes, but otherwise quite nice. Maybe Ingmar can add the GTOC solution in it ;)

Wow, it also supports the Oculus! I see a new application to install :)

an update on homomorphic encryption research and applications

Few news events can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record. Scroll down for the commercial. :)) Funny that when I keep complaining about privacy and monitoring, people still point and laugh.

And the direct link to the whole stash: https://ht.transparencytoolkit.org/ Their admin kept a plain text file with passwords on his desktop. Maybe they should have hired someone to do an audit :) More importantly, from the files it follows that this company found and exploited yet another vulnerability in Flash. So the current round of plugin/browser updates is thanks to this hack :)

The vulnerability only seemed to affect some of the more recent versions. Maybe from time to time we should downgrade flash to avoid them :))

Parallel processing in computing --- Brainet The team sent electrical pulses to all four rats and rewarded them when they synchronised their brain activity. After 10 training sessions, the rats were able to do this 61 per cent of the time. This synchronous brain activity can be put to work as a computer to perform tasks like information storage and pattern recognition, says Nicolelis. "We send a message to the brains, the brains incorporate that message, and we can retrieve the message later," he says. Dividing the computing of a task between multiple brains is similar to sharing computations between multiple processors in modern computers, "If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal."

In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).

Global air travel contributes around 3.5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions behind/driving anthropogenic climate change, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But what impact does a warming planet have on air travel and how might that, in turn, affect the rate of warming itself?

The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions.

We were there last year, swimming in one of those 'healthy' mud pits..

250m and we did not know about them ??

The high seas of Mars may never have existed. According to a new study that looks at two opposite climate scenarios of early Mars, a cold and icy planet billions of years ago better explains the water drainage and erosion features seen today.

That's a lot of assumptions along the way, what do you think of it Nina?