Cool stuff indeed !
And cool photo :D

iirc those "House batteries" are being developed by Tesla, so they're at least tied to the company producing the cars.

Well, yes, but its not in the cars yet. I think his thinking was to get things rolling as fast as possible. Create a new market. (well, arguably the electric car market already existed, but Telsa certainly took it too another level).

The inside of a Telsa car battery is sort of fun, incidently
http://hackaday.com/2014/09/13/tesla...tery-teardown/

You cant see it clearly from that picture but all those little round bits contain Panasonic battery's like this;
http://industrial.panasonic.com/ww/p...-type/NCR18650

7000+ of those cylinder ones is what Telsa cars use. Literally 7000 of those little things put in a giant slab under the car :P

Audis moon rover;

https://s7d9.scene7.com/is/image/Aud...d=1613&hei=908

Cute.
This is their entry for the Google Luner X-prize. Basically a contest to put a rover on the moon that can stream HD images back.
Launch eta 2017.

https://www.audiusa.com/newsroom/new...eam-for-xprize

Note the wheels - each wheel is its own motor.

I see. Well, fair enough. It's a shame battery technology hasn't improved all that much. It feels similar to how before the past decade most/all rockets were built on '60's engineering (or direct reuse from engines literally built back then). As if time stood still. Lot of stuff to be improved with batteries.

Well, the mobile phone market has helped at least drive down costs. While capacity is only improveing slowly, the prices crashed significantly. And there is strong demand for light,high capacity batteries that dont explode. So a lot of research money is going into it these days.
Hopefully there will be a breakthough soon that makes it to market.

Oh, I did another article picking my favorite Hololen app ideas;
http://darkflame.co.uk/EverythingEve...he-best-part-2

Things going to the ISS in the next few months.

http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/mi...ep-space-habs/

I notice they are playing it safe and not doing their fire safety experiments while attached.

You know how in time travel sci-fi/fantasy there's this "Meanwhile, in the future..." thingy? Well I typed that into Google and found a very interesting blog/podcast: http://gizmodo.com/tag/meanwhile-in-the-future

Some very interesting insights there about all kinds of stuff.

The top reason for me to having been anticipating this resupply mission. Bigalow is by far the most developed in space habitats. And while NASA is still the one leading in actual life support systems, these habitats will be setting a firm basis for any Martian habitats later on. Their approach (inflatable habitats) is just mindblowing and it's a shame NASA refused to send anything of theirs up there sooner. And also quite a waste that they didn't order the bigger module right away, which would've doubled the livable space inside the ISS in one go iirc.

I absolutely agree.
Its probably just the fact NASA's on a pretty tight budget these days. Being told "Go to Mars!" but not given any increase in funds to pay for it makes everything a bit tight.
Not to mention because they dont have their own route into space right now, it costs them more to get up and down.
In essence its the old "save some cents now regardless of it costing more dollars later" mentality.

But, regardless, its still mindblowing this is finally happening.
I remember inflatable habitats being talked about in my youth - I think when I was 10 or so it was a sci-fi concept.

Google's AI beat the Europpean go champion !
So far this wasn't possible, as a go game is way more complex and more complicated to modelise (I think we talked about it once in here with DF).

wow. Thats really awesome. especially;

Yep, AIs programmed to improve themselves alone is something really impressive...

I am told by someone that knows more then me this is a significant breakthrough;
http://www.theguardian.com/environme...-angela-merkel

The article describes it as a donut shaped device, but that really under-sales the crazyness of the shape;

http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3...cj3o1_1280.jpg


More images;
https://www.google.nl/search?q=stell...h=1017#imgrc=_

My understanding is the precise, weird, shape to the device makes it vastly harder to make then the "normal" donut fussion reactors - but much more stable to run and thus easier to maintain a fussion reaction.

I have heard of this substance before, but first time I have seen videos.


This material, put simply, is insanely black. It absorbs almost all the light hitting it so that in person it looks like a hole in the space.

Even shining a high power lazer at it;

Oh, and its also highly hydrophobic;


I love science. The shear crazy materials we can make these days are just wonderful.

That's crazy. My mind is running crazy with ideas to what we can do with new crazy materials. CRAzY!

Btw I always wanted to have a portable hole, it's like my childhood dream.

I cant remember did anyone post yet with this material;

oh, and the latest from our robot overlords etc;
(and once again, I remain thankful that whatever the hell google wants with these things, I trust them more then the US military)

That robot stuff is impressive :eek: We really only miss the software now...

But for the first video... what exactly are we seeing ?

I think it's a kind of porous concrete that let's water (rain etc.) through.
Huge Idea in my opinion, but I would fear that greater amounts of water might wash away the ground underneath the concrete making it prone to cracks etc.

Yup, thats exactly what it is.
And your right, you would need good drainage under it.

Well, Google recently released a service when you can send it thousands of images and its AI will label them for you and send them back;
https://cloud.google.com/vision/
Its for developers so no web front end, and if your sending more then a few thousand images you need to pay, but still hugely impressive stuff.
This sort of tech would really help a robot in understanding its environment.

Putting aside how amazing this technology is, I'm not sure I like that. This would make censorship a lot easier to enforce, and by consequence would make it much easier to enact laws that would force websites and ISP's to censor user content before it's even published on web forums and other user-supplied content platforms.

This whole thing reminds me of the movie "Deus Ex" where the boss of a search engine company designs an AI. He says no one saw that the true potential of a search engine is to be used in an AI to fetch different thoughts.

That movie's name is Ex Machina. :) AWESOME movie.

Dont blame the tech for that though, as there's all sorts of great things that can be done with that. Blame any government that wants censorship.
(Here that UK idiots: STOP VOTING FOR CAMERON)
;)