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Caves on the #Moon? This is a 100 m deep pit in the Sea of Tranquility, potentially an entrance to a tunnel system. We’re seeking innovative ideas for how to explore #lunar caves, via the Open Space Innovation Platform 👉 http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/D…unar_caves (📷 NASA/GSFC/Ariz. State Univ.)

How would you design a system to detect, map and explore caves on the Moon? Our latest hunt for ideas is seeking novel initiatives that address this question.

While the surface of the Moon has been well-documented with cameras on board several satellite missions, relatively little is known about the presence and nature of subsurface cavities. In volcanic areas of the lunar maria, planetary geologists have identified pits that could be related to the collapse of cavities such as lava tubes – where lava once flowed under the lunar surface.

“Exploring and mapping these tubes could provide new information about the Moon’s geology, but they could also be an interesting option as long-term shelter for future human visitors to the Moon,” explains Franceso Sauro, Director of ESA’s PANGAEA planetary geology astronaut training. “They would shield astronauts from cosmic radiation and micrometeorites and possibly provide access to icy water and other resources trapped underground.”

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By David Hambling

A robot pilot is learning to fly. It has passed its pilot’s test and flown its first plane, but it has also had its first mishap too.

Unlike a traditional autopilot, the ROBOpilot Unmanned Aircraft Conversion System literally takes the controls, pressing on foot pedals and handling the yoke using robotic arms. It reads the dials and meters with a computer vision system.

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Black holes are some of the most powerful and fascinating phenomena in our Universe, but due to their tendency to swallow up anything nearby, getting up close to them for some detailed analysis isn’t possible right now.

Instead, scientists have put forward a proposal for how we might be able to model these massive, complex objects in the lab — using holograms.

While experiments haven’t yet been carried out, the researchers have put forward a theoretical framework for a black hole hologram that would allow us to test some of the more mysterious and elusive properties of black holes — specifically what happens to the laws of physics beyond its event horizon.

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This week a collaborative effort among computer scientists and academics to safeguard data is winning attention and it has quantum computing written all over it.

The Netherlands’ Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), national research institute for mathematics and computer science, had the story: IBM Research developed “quantum-safe algorithms” for securing data. They have done so by working with international partners including CWI and Radboud University in the Netherlands.

IBM and partners share concerns that data protected by current encryption methods may become insecure within the next 10 to 30 years.

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A team of researchers at Yonsei University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has recently developed a new technique that can recognize emotions by analyzing people’s faces in images along with contextual features. They presented and outlined their deep learning-based architecture, called CAER-Net, in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

For several years, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop tools for automatically detecting by analyzing images, videos or audio clips. These tools could have numerous applications, for instance, improving robot-human interactions or helping doctors to identify signs of mental or neural disorders (e.g.„ based on atypical speech patterns, facial features, etc.).

So far, the majority of techniques for recognizing emotions in images have been based on the analysis of people’s facial expressions, essentially assuming that these expressions best convey humans’ emotional responses. As a result, most datasets for training and evaluating emotion recognition tools (e.g., the AFEW and FER2013 datasets) only contain cropped images of human faces.

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