Galaxy Zoo: Hubble ETH - IDSC - Flying Machine Arena The Flying Machine Arena (FMA) is a portable space devoted to autonomous flight. Measuring up to 10 x 10 x 10 meters, it consists of a high-precision motion capture system, a wireless communication network, and custom software executing sophisticated algorithms for estimation and control. The motion capture system can locate multiple objects in the space at rates exceeding 200 frames per second. While this may seem extremely fast, the objects in the space can move at speeds in excess of 10 m/s, resulting in displacements of over 5 cm between successive snapshots. The system uses this knowledge to determine what commands the vehicles should execute next to achieve their desired behavior, such as performing high-speed flips, balancing objects, building structures, or engaging in a game of paddle-ball. Although various objects can fly in the FMA, the machine of choice is the quadrocopter due to its agility, its mechanical simplicity and robustness, and its ability to hover.
The Higgs boson made simple STUTTGART, Germany — At the Mercedes-Benz headquarters here, a showroom display illustrates the rapid evolution of the iconic luxury brand’s hydrogen-fueled cars. In a 1992 prototype, the fuel cell takes up the entire cargo area of a delivery van. Across the room, today's model — now merely the size of an average television set — is displayed in front of a neon-lit outline of a compact passenger car. This “zero emission” engine, it appears, is ready for prime time. With the aid of government spending and joint efforts by Ford and Nissan, Daimler — Mercedes’s parent corporation — aims to start selling hydrogen-fueled cars to the public as early as 2017. If they take off, the biggest impact may be felt not in the car industry but in wind energy. To meet Europe's aggressive targets for emissions reductions, Daimler is developing hybrids and electric cars, too. “We’re very sure we can achieve a product cost level which is competitive [with today's hybrid cars]," he says. Thomas Peter / REUTERS
Physics and Physicists Bell Labs Researchers at Bell Labs – Alcatel-Lucent’s research organization – collaborate closely with the company’s customers and product development teams to create the technologies that are transforming the way people connect with each other and with the information around them. What would our children want from 5G? What would our children want in THE communications platform of the future? It is likely a seamless network that adapts to them, rather than forcing them to adapt to the network.. Join the conversation about 5G > Bell Labs shows primacy at ECOC 2013 At the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communications, Bell Labs researchers presented post-deadline papers documenting major advancements in optical research. Learn about the future of optical networking > Who we are Our industry is subject to extraordinary forces of change. Our experts – many of them global leaders in their respective disciplines – collaborate to conduct fundamental and applied research.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not Even Wrong I’ve just replaced the old version of my draft “spacetime is right-handed” paper (discussed here) with a new, hopefully improved version. If it is improved, thanks are due to a couple people who sent helpful comments on the older version, sometimes making clear that I wasn’t getting across at all the main idea. To further clarify what I’m claiming, here I’ll try and write out an informal explanation of what I see as the relevant fundamental issues about four-dimensional geometry, which appear even for $\mathbf R^4$, before one starts thinking about manifolds. Spinors, twistors and complex spacetime In complex spacetime $\mathbf C^4$ the story of spinors and twistors is quite simple and straightforward. While spinors are the irreducible objects for understanding complex four-dimensional rotations, twistors are the irreducible objects for understanding complex four-dimensional conformal transformations. Real forms In this case the conjugation acts in a subtle manner. Some philosophy
Scripps Research Home Preposterous Universe Usually, technical advances in mathematical physics don’t generate a lot of news buzz. But last year a story in Quanta proved to be an exception. It relayed the news of an intriguing new way to think about quantum field theory — a mysterious mathematical object called the Amplituhedron, which gives a novel perspective on how we think about the interactions of quantum fields. This is cutting-edge stuff at the forefront of modern physics, and it’s not an easy subject to grasp. “Halfway between a popular account and a research paper” can still be pretty forbidding for the non-experts, but hopefully this guest blog post will convey some of the techniques used and the reasons why physicists are so excited by these (still very tentative) advances. I would like to thank Sean to give me an opportunity to write about my work on his blog. represented by a single Feynman diagram. As a first step, we need to characterize how the amplitude is invariantly defined in a traditional way.
The Reference Frame