Early tomorrow morning is one of the most astronomically special times in years for us inhabitants of Earth's Northern Hemisphere. The annual Perseid Meteor Shower is reaching its peak, and the best time to see up to 100 meteors streak through the sky every hour will be starting around 4 a.m. Eastern (1 a.m. Pacific) on August 13th, according to NASA. And because the Perseids' peak coincides with a new moon this year, the sky itself will serve as a darker — and better — backdrop upon which to gaze at the tiny bits of comet burning up as they enter Earth's atmosphere.
For those hoping to catch the sight in person, the space agency recommends heading out to areas away from city lights and giving yourself at least 30 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. As far as where to look, NASA notes the meteors will appear to be flying from all directions, though the meteor shower's name gives the best clue of where to direct your gaze. The Perseids are named after the constellation Perseus, which is where they appear to radiate outward from (map here). In reality, the Perseids are actually small debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, a 16-mile-wide hunk of rock and ice that is zipping around the solar system at a rate of 133 Earth years-per-orbit.
For those of us who are stuck in a city, or in the Southern Hemisphere, have no fear! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, NASA will be livestreaming the Perseids live on NASA TV beginning at 10 p.m. EST tonight, August 12.
Mankind could leave its first footprints on Mars sometime in the 2030s. And if we want to get there, we’re gonna need a new ride. That’s why NASA’s building the Space Launch System (SLS)—a heavy lift vehicle that’s intended, eventually, to carry astronauts into deep space.
To get us there, NASA is trying out a souped-up version of the space shuttle engine—and you can watch them test one right here, on Thursday at 4:30pm EDT.
For tomorrow's test, NASA will burn an RS-25 engine for about 9 minutes, or about as long as the engines would fire during a real launch. It’s sure to be fiery.
When the SLS launches in 2018 (hopefully) its main rocket booster will be powered by four RS-25 engines. Whereas the shuttle version of the RS-25 packed 491 thousand pounds of thrust, the upgraded SLS version reaches 512 thousand pounds, providing more power to bring humans and cargo far beyond the International Space Station.
More than 1,200 active satellites circle the globe; the lifeblood of modern military operations flows through many of them. In May, the U.S. Air Force announced a $5 billion budget to develop space-based offensive and defensive weapons. Other countries too are building capabilities on high. To win the next war, any great power will need to hold the ultimate in commanding heights.
A Good Offense
In a chapter from the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia are both reportedly developing anti-satellite systems. Last fall, Russia tested what’s believed to be the beginnings of a killer satellite. The Pentagon also admitted, in a 2014 report, that it was investing in offensive space weapons.
China too might be developing anti-satellite systems. In 2013, it launched what it called a scientific mission, but what experts say was a test of the Dong Ning-2, a surface missile that could strike enemy targets in low-Earth, high-Earth, and geostationary orbits.
After launching the Tiangong 3 space station sometime after 2020, China will become the only country with its own multimodule craft in space. China has said that the Tiangong 3 (which means “Heavenly Palace”) is for scientific research, but to military planners, it will be an enviable asset—especially as the International Space Station readies for decommission sometime in the mid-2020s.
Defense In Numbers
One response to these new risks is to make too many satellites to kill. DARPA’s water-cooler-size SeeMe project—short for Space Enabled Effects for Military Engagements—would flood space with hundreds of cheap, tiny satellites.
Conflict Comes Home
Geography has always been one of America’s greatest strategic advantages. During World War II neither German nor Japanese planes could reach the continental United States. In the cyberage, digital weapons know no such limits. More than 100 nations have cybermilitary units. America has the U.S. Cyber Command. But even nonmilitary groups, such as the tens of thousands of hackers in China’s university-linked cybermilitia or nonstate hacktivist collectives like Anonymous, might play a role in a cyberwar. Chances are in any new conflict, the first shot fired will now be virtual.
For all the fun it offers, biking can be dangerous. In 2012 some 49,000 cyclists in the United States were injured in traffic accidents, and cyclist deaths from automobile crashes increased 16 percent between 2010 and 2012. But it doesn’t have to be that way. New road gear can help riders avoid injuries--and crashes--altogether.
1. Helios Handlebar
Helios has created handlebars--which are available in bullhorn, drop, and flat--with a built-in 500-lumen LED headlight and two taillights. The latter double as blinkers, which allows a rider to indicate a lane change or a turn without taking a hand off the bars. Using Bluetooth Smart, the bars can connect to a smartphone, and rider-facing lights will pulse with turn-by-turn directions to keep eyes on the road, not a GPS device. During those long night hauls, the glow won’t fade because the system’s USB-rechargeable batteries run for up to 15 hours with lights on high. $280
2. Scott RC Protec
A typical Lycra riding suit might be sleek and lightweight, but it shreds in a crash--along with your flesh. With help from Swiss textile maker Schoeller, Scott developed high-strength, break-resistant carbon yarn. The material is woven into cycling jerseys and bibs where they’re most likely to tear--the shoulders and hips--and then coated with ceramic. The fabric feels like Lycra, but the ceramic coating helps it slide across pavement, not stick to it, and the carbon prevents the fabric from tearing. Call it the road-rash killer. $125 (bib); $145 (jersey)
3. Giro Synthe MIPS
Giro married aerodynamics with advanced safety technology in its new helmet--and it’s still light enough for top racers. The company covered the side air vents with perforated plastic to eliminate drag and to force wind to stream past while maintaining ventilation. Between the shell and the foam liner is the MIPS (multidirectional impact protection system)low-friction layer. In the event of a crash, the layer can slide on the head independently from the helmet’s shell, which reduces rotational forces on the brain caused by angled impacts. $270
This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Armor For Road Warriors.”
Humans are physically different from other apes in some important ways—including the fact that humans have much bigger brains, which use about a quarter of the calories we consume. But figuring out the diet that facilitated our big, energetically expensive brains hasn’t been easy. Using the findings of several recent studies in this field, an international team of researchers has put forth a theory: By adding starchy foods to their diets, early humans gave themselves the energy boost needed to support larger brains. The study is published in the Quarterly Review of Biology.
In human saliva, the enzyme amylase helps to break down starches. Compared to our primate relatives, who mostly munch on high-fiber, low-carb plant materials, humans have many more copies of the amylase gene, which would have enabled us to better break down carbohydrates and benefit from the extra energy. To the authors of this study, it makes sense that this adaptation would have spread over time, enabling humans to grow larger brains, which happened about 800,000 years ago. Plus, when we started cooking our food, starchy vegetables became much easier for the body to break down and extract calories from.
Now our brains use about a quarter of the calories we consume—something that wouldn’t have been possible without carbs, the study authors write.
To others in the field, this idea makes sense, though the timing isn’t fine-tuned enough to be totally convincing, as one researcher told the New York Times. Proponents of the carb-free paleo diet may need to add back some starch, after all.
Honey bees have been having a hard time around the world for the past few years due to the mysterious colony collapse disorder, pesticides, and loss of habitat. Not to mention their workload. In Oslo, they'er building a bee superhighway while here in the US, there's a federal task force looking into ways we can protect the pollinators that keep our agriculture buzzing along. But new research is showing that our situation might not be quite as untenable as we think...there are backup bees waiting in the wings.
NPR reports that while honeybees are the workhorses of the bee pollination/agricultural complex, with hives trucked around the country to pollinate different crops, they've got relatives that could work even harder — if they are only given the chance.
Researchers at Penn State University are finding that farmers might not need to rent out honeybees for the season. Squash bees exist in the wild and are great at pollinating crops like pumpkins during their short life span. A genus of bees called osmia works quickly in orchards, especially one variety called the Japanese Orchard Bee.
"The honeybee is a little bit lazy," Dave Biddinger told NPR. "It will only maybe visit one or two flowers per minute. An osmia will do up to 15 flowers per minute. ... We've seen with osmia that they can carry up to 100 times more pollen than what a honeybee can."
Scientists are still studying the bees, but diversifying the types of pollinators that we rely on could help make agriculture more resilient, able to bounce back more quickly if the busy honeybee were to collapse.
Robots are made, they are not born. Or are they? At the University of Cambridge, scientists have created a "mother robot" that can not only build smaller robots, it can also select the fittest among them for survival, and re-arrange the rest.
Welcome to the world of evolutionary robotics.
The lab's work was published in PLOS One. In the study, the researchers gave a robot the task of designing a robot capable of movement using blocks and a motor. See an instance of the experiment below:
The robot mother would build 10 children, and see how far they moved in a given time. The fastest were kept as they were, while the slower ones were scrapped and redesigned. At the end of the experiment, the fastest robots in the brood were twice as fast as the best robots from the first generation.
“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” lead researcher Fumiya Iida said in a press release. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.”
This afternoon, a helicopter serving as an aerial ambulance encountered a drone, and had to take evasive action to avoid it. The helicopter was flying at 1,000 feet, just two miles from Fresno Yosemite International airport, and the pilot reports that the drone was at the same altitude. Model aviation guidelines, published by the FAA, urge hobbyist drone pilots to operate at least 5 miles from airports, and never more than 400 feet above the ground. Despite its recommendations and awareness campaigns, earlier today the FAA released a statement saying that in 2015, helicopter and airplane pilots have already reported more than twice as many close calls with drones as they did in all of 2014.
Pilot reports of unmanned aircraft have increased dramatically over the past year, from a total of 238 sightings in all of 2014, to more than 650 by August 9 of this year. The FAA wants to send out a clear message that operating drones around airplanes and helicopters is dangerous and illegal. Unauthorized operators may be subject to stiff fines and criminal charges, including possible jail time.
This year, 138 pilots reported seeing drones at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet during the month of June, and another 137 in July.
In conjunction with the release from the FAA, the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International sent out a response, urging better rules for small drones, education campaigns, and stricter enforcement. From the AUVSI:
[T]he FAA needs to finalize its small UAS rules, which would require all UAS operators to follow the safety programming of a community-based organization or abide by new UAS rules for commercial operators. Once the rules are finalized, consumers will no longer be able to fly without any oversight or education.
Dave Mathewson, executive director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, a major organization representing the interests of drone and remote control plane hobbyists, also released a statement, reinforcing the FAA’s overall message but also calling for better education of newfangled ‘drone’ pilots and clearer laws. From their statement:
[O]ne of the most immediate things the FAA can do to increase safety is to finalize its small UAS rules. ... For nearly 80 years, our members have safely operated model aircraft through community-based safety guidelines. Our more than 176,000 members know where to fly and where not to fly. Unfortunately, the same is not always true for the legions of new ‘drone’ flyers increasingly taking to the skies.
The AMA also called for more transparency in the FAA’s numbers, saying that “More detailed information [on ‘drone’ sightings] will enable UAS stakeholders to more precisely target their education and other efforts to enhance safety.”
Even as hobbyists and industry groups coordinate with the FAA to make sure that unmanned aviation is safe and fun for all in the sky, there are visible frustrations with a lack of clarity or progress on the rules that govern drones. The question isn’t whether people are going to keep flying drones; that seems pretty inevitable. The question is whether the law will be finalized in time to effect human behavior.
Measuring biodiversity on the ground takes a lot of time and a lot of money. If you've ever tried counting how many types of trees are in a forest or the number of animals that live there, you would find that it's an almost insurmountable task.
But satellites could make the grunt work go away. Satellite imagery gets better and more ubiquitous every day as new satellites are launched and old ones are updated. The European Space Agency just launched the Sentinel-2 satellite at the end of June and it’s already sending back incredible images that scientists are using to monitor biodiversity.
Over the past several years, scientists have been actively involved in getting biodiversity to the forefront of interest. In 2010, a United Nations convention set 20 biodiversity targets for countries to meet by 2020, ranging from halving the rate of habitat loss to sustainably harvesting fish. The problem is it’s tough to know if nations have met these goals without knowing what to measure and how to measure it.
Last month, more than a dozen conservation biologists wrote an op-ed in Nature, published online July 22, calling for a universal method of measuring biodiversity via satellites. The authors proposed 10 variables to measure, from wildfire frequency to species abundance. This November, the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network, an international consortium that counts NASA and others as a partner, plans to meet and hopefully agree on essential variables to measure biodiversity from satellites.
NASA’s Applied Sciences Program has used satellites to study Earth’s ecology for years, according to its 2014 annual report released today. One tool highlighted in the report is EnvDATA, a database where researchers can input their data on species’ movements and compare it to satellite imagery and data on weather patterns, vegetation, and human population density. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Montana are using EnvData to study condor migration, for example.
Here are a few other ways satellites are helping to measure biodiversity:
Presidential candidate Martin O'Malley tries on a VR headset at the Iowa State Fair.
The 2016 presidential election is a little more than a year away, but one candidate took a quick break from policy discussions and hand-shaking to try out virtual reality.
While we don’t think former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley will be billing himself as the virtual reality candidate (as much as we would love that), the Democratic presidential hopeful took a few moments at the Iowa State Fair today to try Iowa State University’s VR experience.
Luckily, NBC producer Frank Thorp V caught the moment, or else we never would have seen the moment virtual reality entered the 2016 race for the White House.
Yellow mine waste from the Gold King Mine is seen in the river waters near San Juan County, Colorado, in an EPA photo captured on August 7, 2015.
They say no good deed goes unpunished, and the recent Gold King Mine spill in Colorado is a case in point. Earlier this month, on August 5, workers under EPA supervision were investigating the mine as part of a broader plan to prevent contaminated water from reaching Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River near the town of Silverton. Instead, the activity touched-off a spill of approximately 3 million gallons of mine water, colored bright orange by dissolved metals and other contaminants.
The spill sparked a media firestorm in anticipation of an ongoing environmental disaster at the hands of a much-maligned federal agency, but little more than a week later the worst of the crisis has faded.
Though metals settling into the sediment on the river bed remain a concern, the initial “pulse” of contamination dissipated in about an hour. By August 10, the EPA was reporting that the plume of orange was no longer visible downstream.
In an early-morning press release on August 13, the EPA stated that its analysis showed that water samples collected earlier in the week in the Silverton area had returned to “pre-event conditions," and later that evening announced that downstream conditions were also “trending” to previous levels.
In addition, containment ponds hastily constructed by EPA are, providing partial treatment to the “normal” runoff from Gold King. Mine water from Gold King now flowing into Cement Creek is less contaminated than before the accident occurred.
As for those “pre-event” conditions and that “normal” runoff, therein lies the real story.
The dream of the '90s
Gold King is just one of hundreds of abandoned mines dating back to the 1850s in the Silverton area, known to EPA as the Upper Animas Mining District. Generations of unregulated discharges in the area have left Cement Creek, and the upper Animas River, largely devoid of fish and other aquatic life.
Since the 1990s, a number of these sites have been the object of remediation efforts aimed at improving water quality in the Animas. Those efforts coincided with the 1991 closure of the Sunnyside Mine, the largest and last remaining “major” operation in the area.
Local and mine industry stakeholders successfully lobbied EPA to keep the area off the Superfund National Priorities List, partly out of concern for the region’s tourist industry. Instead, cleanup efforts have been coordinated by a volunteer consortium called ARSG, the Animas River Stakeholders Group.
The seeds of trouble for Gold King were sown in 1996, when Sunnyside was permitted to shut down its treatment plant— an effective but expensive way to stop pollution from mine discharges — and switch to the less costly method of simply plugging the mine works with concrete.
According to Mark Williams, Professor of Geology at the University of Boulder, the results were predictable. “The current state of the art for mine discharges is to collect the water and pipe it to a treatment plant,” explains Williams, a seasoned expert in mountain range research and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s expensive and it’s permanent — as soon as you stop doing it, everything goes to hell.”
The work on Sunnyside took place between 1998 and 2002, but while the plug solved problems at there, it apparently kicked off a classic case of whack-a-mole.
The hole story
In 2002, ARSG reported that the nearby Gold King mine was beginning to discharge “significant amounts of acid mine drainage.” The current rate is 213 gallons per minute.
EPA notes that two other nearby sites — the Red and Bonita Mine, and the Mogul Mine — also experienced “significant increases” in discharge, coincident with the Sunnyside work.
EPA Map of Red and Bonita Mine region near Animus River
In particular, Red and Bonita discharged only about five gallons per minute before Sunnyside was closed. That figure zoomed up to 300 gallons per minute after the plug, making Red and Bonita one of the two biggest sources of mining-related metals in Cement Creek (Gold King is, at times, the other one).
Meanwhile, according to the EPA’s current information, water quality in the Animas stopped improving after 2005 and has “declined significantly” for a stretch of at least 20 miles below the river’s confluence with Cement Creek.
To Williams, the results of the Sunnyside mine plug were predictable.
He suggests thinking of the mountain occupied by Sunnyside and the three other mines as a multistory building, with Sunnyside on the first floor. As Williams describes it, rain and snow fall on the roof and trickle down to the first floor, and run out the door. When the door is plugged, the water has nowhere to go and it will continue to rise floor by floor, from Sunnyside to Red and Bonita, Gold King and Mogul.
While hazardous conditions in Red and Bonita have prevented efforts to determine exactly how the water could rise from one mine to another, natural fractures and uncharted mine shafts are the likely culprits.
According to Williams, the EPA had warned state officials of this very potential before the Sunnyside work began.
That is not to say that mines should never be plugged. The lesson is that such work should be undertaken with a Plan B prepared in case of unintended consequences, namely, discharges from other potentially connected mines.
Evidently, ARSG had no Plan B. That left the EPA to play catchup.
Remediating the increased discharge at Red and Bonita became a priority, and that brings the story back around to Gold King.
The future is murky
The work at Gold King was designed to monitor and prepare for unintended effects of the Red and Bonita remediation. The project — which, like Sunnyside, involves a cement plug — was on track for this year. However, those plans are now most likely on hold.
On August 12, EPA Chief Gina McCarthy announced a moratorium on virtually all mine remediation work nationwide until the cause of the Gold King blowout can be determined. Which means, once again, it looks like a long road is ahead for fixing the Animas River once and for all.
These speakers use laser-like ultrasonic waves to make your music easier to hear, even through loud ambient noises.
Problem
Everyday speakers—whether they’re in a cellphone, TV, or radio—scatter sound waves as soon as they leave the cone. A single wave can bounce off dozens of surfaces, slamming into other signals and degrading along the way, before reaching your ear in a muddled mess. Adding to this audio chaos, most midrange TVs only emit sound from rear or downward-facing speakers. So turning them up just doesn’t help. Gamers and TV obsessives often turn to soundbars and directional speakers for relief, but even those don’t offer a true high-fidelity fix.
Solution
HyperSound Clear speakers aim sound waves directly at a listener using a tightly focused beam. It uses ultrasonic waves, which don’t disperse as quickly or easily as standard sound waves. Embedded in that signal is high-fidelity audio with zero disruption. That means a movie’s epic surround sound can be directed straight at your ear—just like a laser. HyperSound speakers were designed for the hearing impaired, and like hearing aids, they must be tuned by a doctor. However, in 2014, gaming audio giant Turtle Beach merged with HyperSound’s parent company, raising hopes in the gaming world that laser-focused high-fidelity will be coming to Cheetos-crusted couches one day soon.
This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Speakers That Cut Through Noise.”
Astro Teller, the head of X Labs (formerly known as Google[x]), lead teams through the development of Google Glass, self-driving cars, and Internet-delivery balloons.
Earlier this week, Google shocked the science and technology world when it announced that it was restructuring itself to operate its moneymaking search products separately from its loftier, long-term initiatives. Astro Teller, the visionary head of X Labs (formerly Google X), that builds those projects, spoke to Popular Science a few weeks before the announcement. He talked about dealing with investor skepticism, how to solve big problems, and much more. Here's an excerpt:
Popular Science: Skeptics and Google’s own investors say these projects take too long. How do you respond to them?
Astro Teller: Our goal is not to produce immediate results. We’ve been tasked with producing long-term results. That means that there’s more risk in any individual thing we take on. But we still aspire to a strong return on investment. We don’t take on Google Glass or the self-driving car project or Project Loon unless we think that on a risk-adjusted basis, it’s worth Google’s money to do it. But because these things don't happen overnight, we have to use surrogates for the value that’s being produced during the process where we’re building them.
So in the case of Project Loon, let’s say, how long are the balloons staying up? How much do they cost for us to make? How much bandwidth can they beam to the ground? How much bandwidth can they beam between them? And then we can use these things to estimate how much network traffic we could carry, how many users we could service; we can look at the potential business opportunity and the risks associated with that. And we can get estimates on the value that has been produced, the remaining risk.
We can look at how much we’ve spent on those things and ask ourselves, roughly, whether there’s a good return on investment. So Google[x] is no different from any other part of Google; it has to produce value at a good pace or Google will put its money somewhere else. But that’s different from saying we have to produce liquid value by today or it’s all worthless. That’s not the spirit of long-term best and Google[x] is intended to be one of the parts of Google that places really long-term bets.
It's unclear where Teller's comments stand in the context of the Alphabet reorganization. For the full interview, check out the next issue of Popular Science.
It's identical to a natural one, and doesn't have to be mined
A clear, sparkling diamond is rare. That’s part of its appeal. Those mined today formed billions of years ago. But a new method can grow gem-quality diamonds on demand in just three months. They’re identical to their natural counterparts and cost 30 to 40 percent less. That’s promising for anyone in the market for an engagement ring. And it bodes well for the future of electronics too.
—Ariel Baruch, jeweler at Diamonds by Israel Standard Inc., which sells lab-grown diamonds
Global demand for diamonds is currently on the rise, thanks in part to a growing middle class in countries such as India and China. But it’s been a decade since a large diamond mine has been discovered. By 2019, demand is projected to outstrip supply by 5 to 6 percent.
Luckily, diamonds can also be made in a lab. In the 1950s, scientists first created diamonds by replicating the intense heat and pressure that forms them underground. The stones tend to be discolored and small (in some cases just a powder), but they retain a natural diamond’s defining properties.
Diamond is one of the hardest known materials. It can withstand high levels of radiation and doesn’t trigger an immune response. This makes it useful in construction, nuclear engineering, and medicine. In 2013, industry used about 1,500 tons of diamond, 99 percent of which were lab-grown.
To make purer gems, diamond-grower IIa Technologies refined a process called chemical vapor deposition. In a vacuum chamber, they shower a fingernail-thin diamond “seed” with microwave rays and methane and hydrogen gases. These build up layers of carbon bonds.
In March, IIa opened the world’s largest diamond-growing facility in Singapore. It’s capable of cranking out more than 300,000 carats a year, using half the energy of diamond mining. Plus it has far less environmental impact. To the naked eye, the diamonds are indistinguishable from natural ones. But they’ll still be a tough sell for jewelry, where lab-grown make up less than 1 percent of the market. “They’re seen as inauthentic, no matter that they are objectively identical,” explains Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at Yale University.
Diamond’s unsurpassed thermal conductivity makes it an ideal heat sink for electronics. It transfers about twice the heat and can carry more current than the silicon usually used in semiconductors. IIa is working to grow diamond plates that will enable smaller, more-powerful devices that don’t overheat. “It will take time,” says physicist Devi Shanker Misra, who invented IIa’s technique, “but I hope that it will replace silicon.”
This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science under the title "Lab-Grown Diamonds to Keep Electronics Cool.”
Mental Canvas is a new technology that reimagines static images in a whole new dimension: 3D. While pictures on screens tend to be flat 2D objects layered on 2D objects, the project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation on research headed by Yale computer scientist Julie Dorsey, creates sketches that can be navigated in three dimensions. Ever wanted to look around the corner in a comic book? If it was rendered by Mental Canvas on a tablet, one could.
Here, take a look:
image courtesy of Julie Dorsey, Mental Canvas
In the works since 2007, the software takes drawings and adapts them to 3D. Unlike 3D modeling, where the entire object is created in 3D at the time, Mental Canvas builds up from the art that's already there and creates either a very minimal rendering or a very advanced doodle, depending on perspective. Think of it like an architect drawing on the back of a napkin to explain a building sketch to a client.
Here’s how Julie Dorsey describes it:
One example is an adaptation of the children’s picture book, “The Other Side” by Istvan Banyai. In the print book, the conceit is that the perspective of the art changes with the flip of every page. In Mental Canvas’ software, that flip becomes something a reader gets to explore, moving a parallax image around and then diving forward to see where it goes. Watch it in action, here:
image courtesy of Julie Dorsey, Mental Canvas
The release from the National Science Foundation is a little vague on how the product itself works, but they expect a commercial version of the product to go on sale later this year, with specialized versions to come in the future.
Setting up a colony on the moon might be possible in our lifetime. But if that doesn’t happen, maybe you can still make it there in the afterlife.
This week, the company Elysium Space announced that they can send a portion of your cremated remains to the moon for prices starting at $11,950. But — act now! The first 50 people to sign up will get a lunar burial for the low, low price of $9,950!
By comparison, Celestis, a rival space burial company, will make the moon your final resting place for $12,500 for one gram of ashes.
Celestis has been sending cremated remains into low Earth orbit since 1997, with plans to go the moon by 2018. Elysium’s first foray to low Earth orbit is scheduled for later this year, and it looks like the company is planning to reach the moon in 2016. Both companies will hitch a ride on a lunar lander being developed by Astrobotic Technology--a company that formed as part of the Google Lunar X-Prize competition. In addition, Celestis plans to ride along with Moon Express, another X-Prize contender.
Unfortunately, drilling (or shoveling) on the moon is no easy feat, so these won’t be moon burials. Instead, your remains would sit, like space litter, in a box on the surface of the moon.
It’s one of every parent’s worst nightmares: while pushing your child around in a stroller, the carriage slips from your hands and careens down the street into danger. So when Volkswagen asked what other products they could improve that aren’t cars, one suggestion was “strollers that automatically brake.” The idea was so basic, Volkswagen decided to go ahead and make it. And then they went a step further, turning it into a self-driving baby carrier. Because nothing smacks of “safety” like handing a baby to a robot.
Here’s the video Volkswagen made of the project:
At face value, the video shows a stroller that not only brakes on its own, but one that can drive on its own — following a parent a couple of paces behind as they walk about.
Claiming it borrows an adaptive cruise sensor for a VW Golf, the stroller ostensibly always stays an exact distance behind the parent, even if he or she is running or walking. As it goes on, the scenarios in the video appear increasingly less realistic, ending with a robo-stroller moving back and forth as it keeps up with a child in a swing.
There also doesn’t appear to be a baby on board. Maybe, like other recent high-tech unveils by car makers, there’s more magic happening behind the curtain than on-screen. While it appears to be a viral stunt, the idea itself isn't impossible: we're already seeing driverless cars, and autonomous robots, so a robot stroller remains within the real of possibility.
Even if this isn’t real, a stroller than automatically breaks when rolling away is a great idea. Here’s hoping someone makes it. No need for a robot brain alongside baby, necessarily.
The Naval Research Lab is testing a flying drone that can land on water and then travel like a submarine below the surface. Designed to carry sensors into places difficult or dangerous for regular vehicles, it’s a bird-inspired amphibian that may find hostile submarines, detect chemicals or swim to inspect oil spills. They’ve named this combination machine, somehow, Flimmer.
Earlier this month, the NRL released a video showing the robot fly and swim. One of the major challenges is incorporating both flippers for swimming and wings for flying without having either interfere with the function of the other. Here, you can see the flippers folded up perpendicular to the wings in flight.
In order for it to swim under water, those flippers will fold down, propelling future Flimmers as they dive beneath the surface.
