Drones should go where humans can’t. Remotely controlled or autonomous flying robots are at their best when they’re flying into danger, like this wall-crawling, flying drone from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Built to scout the insides of flaming buildings before firefighters arrive, this drone can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius, or 1832 degrees Fahrenheit, for at least a minute. Like this:
Named Fireproof Aerial RObot System, or FAROS, the drone is built specifically for fires inside skyscrapers, which can be hard to access and assess. FAROS builds off of previous KAIST work, specifically their wall-climbing drones. For drones that fly, making them climb walls may seem as redundant as teaching Superman how to shoot a web, but it means the drone can move around obstacles and stay out of the path of falling debris. It’s also good for slipping through narrow cracks, where otherwise the drone’s wide profile would get in the way.
KAIST describes how FAROS works:
The drone "estimates" its pose by utilizing a 2-D laser scanner, an altimeter, and an Inertia Measurement Unit sensor to navigate autonomously. With the localization result and using a thermal-imaging camera to recognize objects or people inside a building, the FAROS can also detect and find the fire-ignition point by employing dedicated image-processing technology.
The FAROS is fireproof and flame-retardant. The drone's body is covered with aramid fibers to protect its electric and mechanical components from the direct effects of the flame. The aramid fiber skin also has a buffer of air underneath it, and a thermoelectric cooling system based on the Peltier effect to help maintain the air layer within a specific temperature range.
That’s a pretty excellent skill set, and it’s not hard to see how a drone that can survive fires, navigate smoke, and identify where a burn started could help in all sorts of firefighting scenarios, not just skyscrapers. Here’s hoping the research leads to some commercial models.
"Robby" the autonomous Audi RS 7 at Sonoma Raceway
While other autonomous vehicle tests are being carried out on closed campuses and simulated streets, Audi has decided to test at the track. Audi engineers will be working with their counterparts at the Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Silicon Valley to test highly automated vehicles – or piloted driving, in Audi’s terms – at speed using Thunderhill Raceway in California.
Like other manufacturers, Audi has also been testing on public streets and highways where it’s been licensed to do so, such as in Nevada. But an autonomous car has to be able to both read stop signs in slow-speed neighborhoods and navigate turns on high-speed roads. The system will be incorporated into the next-generation Audi A8 “in a few years,” according to a press release. That’s in line with the timelines for automated (but not entirely self-driving) vehicles from other manufacturers.
Audi has already proven that its cars can hold their own on the track – on their own. In October 2014, an Audi RS 7 known as "Bobby" completed a lap of the Formula 1 course at Hockenheim without a driver at the wheel. It managed its lap in just over 2 minutes (no official time was released), which stacks up pretty well on the leader board. The record for a production car is 1:46.75, and the fastest production Audi to take a lap at Hockenheim was an R8 4.2 that did it in 2 minutes flat – with a driver.
Another RS 7, this one known as “Robby,” completed high-speed testing at Sonoma Raceway in July 2015, turning in a time of 2:01.01 over the 2.5-mile track. This version of the test car was nearly 900 pounds lighter than Bobby, bringing it more in line with the weight of the current production RS 7. For comparison, the fastest lap record at Sonoma is held by NASCAR driver Jeff Gorgon with a time of 1:16, but that is a pretty high bar for a production car to meet, whether Jeff Gordon is at the wheel or no one at all.
Of course, as fun as it is to race robot cars around a track, it is all in the name of developing safety systems in autonomous vehicles. If a car can complete a twisty lap using sensors and map data at a speed comparable to a car with a human at the wheel, it can probably get you to work on time in traffic while you read your email.
The temperature hovered around freezing in New York City on Tuesday evening and my exposed hands were started to go numb, turning clumsy and slow in the cold. My phone's battery was sluggish in the frigid air, and the screen was lagging. My internet connection, however, was flying.
Yesterday, LinkNYC blessed the streets of Manhattan with free public Wi-Fi, opening four hotspots on Third Avenue. The Wi-Fi kiosks are replacing public pay phones, and according to Link's website, the company plans to install more than 7,500 hotspots throughout the city over the next few years.
To connect to Link's public network, I just had to turn on my phone's Wi-Fi and enter an email address when prompted. The website offers a vague promise of Wi-Fi “up to 100 times faster than average public Wi-Fi and your mobile device’s LTE network.”
My Speedtest on a Samsung Galaxy S5 showed upload speeds of about 115 Mbps and download speeds of 59 Mbps. That means that when I opened up Netflix and hit "resume play," Don Draper immediately started striding through his office in crisp HD, without so much as a second of buffer time.
A Samsung Galaxy speedtest yielded these results while connected to LinkNYC.
Link’s Wi-Fi was certainly faster than what I have at work (upload speed of 33 Mbps and download speed of 45 Mbps according to a Speedtest on a Samsung Galaxy S5), but others trying Link throughout the day reported even faster speeds than what I experienced:
Using Link Wi-Fi on an iPhone and an Asus Memo Pad tablet resulted in similar speeds. Vimeo and Flickr loaded full pages of high-res visuals in seconds. I called my mom to test the Wi-Fi call quality and it passed with flying colors. She called it "close to as good as the old landline quality."
Of course, I was also the only person in sight using Link Wi-Fi, and connection speeds could slow a bit if the network becomes more heavily populated. The kiosks also feature USB charging outlets, a 911 call button, and allegedly, a touch screen tablet for internet browsing, although the one I tried didn't respond to repeated touches.
If the Wi-Fi doesn't turn impossibly sluggish when many people use it at once, and if Link's network covers the entire city eventually, it could have big implications on life in Manhattan. It would mean that most people would have access to faster Wi-Fi outside in the city than in their own apartments. Movie pausing to buffer too often? Skype call quality not top notch? Relocate outside.
The security of fast, free internet everywhere in the city could even lead to some people to abandoning mobile data plans all together and relying purely on Wi-Fi. Plus, making Wi-Fi enabled tablets widely available in the city means that more people than ever will have easy access to all the information and resources available online.
But for now, the public Wi-Fi remains contained to four kiosks on Third Avenue, plus the neighboring establishments close enough to mooch.
When I retreated to the Duane Reade across the street to thaw out, the Wi-Fi didn't even stutter. Don Draper was right where I left him.
X-Wings face-off against TIE Fighters oncemore in the new 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.'
Is your Force awakened enough yet? After managing the twin feats of living up to fan expectations and smashing every box office record placed before it, Star Wars: The Force Awakens ended on a dramatic reveal, and left the path clear for the final two movies of the grand trilogy of trilogies. Fans eager to jump back into the plot will have to wait just a little longer: Disney and Lucasfilm today confirmed that they’re pushing back the release of Episode VIII from May 2017 to December 2017.
In a tweet, Episode VIII director Rian Johnson (previously of Brothers Bloom,Brick, and that great Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias") appeared to confirm the news. Either that, or he has weirdly out-of-season preferences for novelty Star Wars songs.
Never fear, fans of that long ago and far, far away universe: there’s still a wealth of official Star Wars content to fill the extra half-year of waiting. Tonight, the Star Wars: Rebels TV show returns, continuing its tale of a plucky band of young insurgents fighting against the Empire in the years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Like Force Awakens, it appears some old familiar faces will show up:
And in December of this year, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is scheduled for release. Rather than telling the next part of the main plot, it will instead focus on events right before A New Hope, telling, again, the tale of a band of plucky insurgents out to undermine an Imperial superweapon.
Robots are part of the future of war. They’re not the present, yet, and robots replacing all humans on a battlefield is still a long way away in the futue — it if happens at all.
But that doesn’t mean robots aren’t coming. The current phrase-of-choice at the Pentagon is “manned/unmanned teaming”, where human piloted and autonomous vehicles work together to perform a task or take an objective.
Someday, it’s entirely possible that we will simply have unmanned/unmanned teaming, where robot helicopters carry ground robots into battle. And by “someday,” I mean “last October," when the following test was performed in West Palm Beach, Florida.
After the unmanned helicopter lowers the robot onto the ground, the ground robot rolled out to explore the surrounding woods.
The research was conducted by Carnegie Mellon in collaboration with Lockheed Martin-owned helicopter giant Sikorsky, at Sikorsky’s Development Flight Center. So that’s a robotic Black Hawk helicopter dropping off Carnegie Mellon’s Land Tamer amphibious ground scout vehicle.
This project has been in the works since at least the summer of 2014. The video was uploaded earlier this month and the announcement emailed out today, with the demonstrations taking place on October 27th.
The project, it should be clear, was sponsored by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, with a helicopter provided by the Army’s aviation and missile research wing. To make it work, Sikorsky outfitted the Blackhawk with their autonomous kit, which can be added to existing vehicles.
Here’s how Carnegie Mellon described the test:
During the demonstration mission, the unmanned BLACK HAWK helicopter picked up the UGV, flew a 12-mile route, delivered it to a ground location and released it. The drop-zone collaboration between the two autonomous systems demonstrated a uniquely differentiating capability.
Over the course of more than six miles, the UGV autonomously navigated the environment, while using its onboard chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) sensors to detect simulated hazards and delivered this information back to a remote ground station. The UGV was optionally teleoperated to explore hazard sites in greater detail, when necessary.
Like most robots operating on the edge of conflicts and dangerous situations, the ideal use of this team isn’t to replace human pilots and troops in battle. Instead, the robotic scouts can go places humans shouldn’t, like environments where commanders suspect radiation risk or loose chemical weapons, to identify the danger and then see if it’s safe for humans to go. In this role, robots themselves become the future scouts of nightmares, their unfeeling mechanical bodies clearing a path for the war to follow.
An artist's impression of the oldest Jurassic dinosaur ever found in the United Kingdom.
You can find all kinds of things on a beach. Lost sunglasses, loose change, seashells, the fossilized remains of a dinosaur. You know, the usual.
In 2014, fossil hunters found the remains of a dinosaur on a rocky Welsh beach after a storm. They turned the fossil over to National Museum Cardiff, where researchers from the museum and UK universities identified it as a theropod, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.
In a paper published this week in PLOS One, researchers announced that further work on the fossil led them to conclude that this dinosaur, named Dracoraptor hanigani, lived 200 million years ago and was one of the earliest dinosaurs of the Jurassic period. It's also the first Jurassic-era dinosaur skeleton found in the UK.
Why is it exciting that the dinosaur is 200 million years old? There are certainly other, older fossils of dinosaurs out there, dating back into the Triassic period 240 million years ago. But this new dinosaur fossil lived right on the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic, a line in time that paleontologists are still trying to learn more about.
See, dinosaurs lived during a geologic era called the Mesozoic, which lasted from 250 million years ago to around 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct. The Mesozoic is broken into three periods: the Triassic (250 million to 199.6 million years ago), the Jurassic (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago), and the Cretaceous (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago). The divisions between these periods are marked by changes in lifeforms and climate, most notably extinctions.
Early dinosaurs evolved in the Triassic, but they didn't come into their own until the Jurassic, after a huge extinction event that wiped out massive amounts of marine creatures. The cause of the extinction remains unknown, but researchers are always eager to know more about the lifeforms that did manage to survive, or evolved right after an event like this.
Researchers already know a lot about Dracoraptor hanigani. It was a small dinosaur, just 2.3 feet tall, and 6.5 feet long (including its long tail). With bones that were still growing it was possibly a juvenile, and likely was warm-blooded with feathers.
"The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event is often credited for the later success of dinosaurs through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but previously we knew very little about dinosaurs at the start of this diversification and rise to dominance," said co-author Steven Vidovic. "Now we have Dracoraptor, a relatively complete two meter long juvenile theropod from the very earliest days of the Jurassic in Wales."
More on the different types of isotopes you may encounter in a post-apocalyptic scenario next time.
For now, it's important to add that fallout isn't just of the radioactive variety. Here's Phil:
You can get fallout from any light particulate floating through the air. Volcanic ash, fuel smoke coming up the stack from cargo ships, forest fires. If you've ever parked a car near Port Elizabeth and had to clear grime off it after parking overnight, congratulations, you've encountered fallout.
And mushroom clouds aren't just caused by nuclear bombs either. Volcanoes have been known to erupt into great pyrocumulus clouds, and in the late 1780s, a mushroom cloud was featured in a French painting of the Siege of Gibraltar.
Vue du siège de Gibraltar et explosion des batteries flottantes
View of the Siege of Gibraltar and the Explosion of the Floating Batteries, artist unknown, c.1782
On January 12, 2016, the Tianmushan was commissioned as the PLAN's 12th Type 072A LST.
On January 12, 2016, the PLA's "916" Tianmushan, a 5,000 ton Type 072A LST (Landing Ship Tanks), was commissioned into the PLAN. The news is notable in two ways: the first is that it joins the East Sea Fleet, which has responsibility for operations around Taiwan. The second is that it adds further to what was already the world's largest fleet of tank landing ships.
Xinhui, via China Defense Forum
Type 072A LST
Dabieshan, a sister ship to the Tianmushan, is a 5,000 ton amphibious warship that can carry a company of soldiers and vehicles, as well as hovercraft and helicopter straight to a beach under heavy fire.
A LST is essentially a cargo ship with a flat hull and a hull mounted door in its bow; the flat hull allows the LST to beach itself on unprepared shallow waters and unimproved shores (like beaches) and disembark infantry and vehicles from its bow, onto land and straight into combat.
CCTV
CIWS
The H/PJ-17 CIWS uses a 30mm autocannon to defend the Tianmushan against, it can be fired remotely as well as manually.
The Tianmushan, at 119.5 meters long and 16.4 meters wide, balances a significant transport capability while still being able to land on beaches. The Type 72A LST can carry 10 tanks, 4 landing craft, 250 soldiers, a medium helicopter on its helipad. Unlike its sister version, the Type 72-III, it has a stern deck well for carrying a medium hovercraft. It also has a 30mm gun turret which can be used either for defense or for a light fire support capability onshore.
Xinhui, via China Defense Forum
Well and Through
An older Type 072A, the Baxian Shan, unloads motor launched infantry in shallow water. You can see through the hull to the welldeck in the back.
The PLAN already has the world's largest LST fleet, with 12 Type 72As, in addition to 3 Type 72s, 4 Type 72-IIs and 10 Type 72-IIIs; along with 25 smaller Type 73 and Type 74 LSTs. In an amphibious operation, Chinese LSTs are expected to operate along larger 25,000 Type 071 landing platform dock (LPD) ships. However, the carrying capacity of LSTs also means that they can be repurposed for other operations. While the Iranians notably repurposed LSTs as minelayers in the Iraq-Iran War, the Tianmushan and its sister ships could serve as motherships for Chinese manned and unmanned systems.
Shown with 7.62 mm rifle round for size comparison
Giant armored vehicles are hard to hide. When rolling forward, they’re loud, lumbering hunks of metal, but with the dark of night and the engine turned off, they can gain some semblance of discretion, their listening metal hulls hiding from all but those either very alert or immediately nearby. This state, called “silent watch,” means the tank (or infantry fighting vehicle, or troop carrier) becomes a waiting body--its sensors run on low battery and scan the world around it, waiting until it’s needed to power back on and drive forth.
This constant low level of battery power can significantly drain a vehicle (as anyone who’s ever had their car go dead after leaving their headlights on overnight can attest). While the problem is clear, the solution--adding more batteries--isn't so simple. Take the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, a tank-like tracked troop-carrying armored vehicle with a gun in the turret on top. First introduced in 1981, the venerable body is already as full as can be of required parts, so there’s not really any room inside to add batteries.
But what about outside the hull? Between the armored plates that surround the hull and the actual hull itself is a tiny sliver of space. A new battery, patented by Raytheon last September, is thin enough to fit in that space, and it’s flexible and durable enough to still work after the armor its attached to has been hit by bullets.
To better understand this armor, Popular Science spoke with Chuck Betack, a retired U.S. Army colonel and Iraq War veteran who is now Director of Land and Joint Programs at Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems business. Betack emphasized the “silent watch” role of the tech, noting how more battery power to vehicles in the field can keep them ready for action longer.
As to the specific placement of the battery, it can go underneath a Bradley’s first level of armor, right next to the hull, and it could go under an external layer of armor, between that armor and the hull. In place behind the armor, the battery can withstand shots from medium machine gun rounds or modest rifles and keep working. It’s also light, making it a relatively trivial addition to a multi-ton vehicle.
The battery was originally developed to meet a military need, and if the military chooses to incorporate it into their vehicles, it'll first have to go through the U.S. Army's Tank-automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) in Michigan. This will help them figure out how best to integrate it. It need not be limited to military applications, though.
“You could even think about using it on lighting, putting it somewhere that’s far away from any ground source of power and you’re getting power from the sun and storing it up,” says Betack.
As long as the military continues to use old vehicles, they’ll likely need to keep adding more power storage to keep up with the demands of newer electronics. And in new vehicles, finding additional places for batteries could increase their utility and longevity. Sliding in a thin layer of battery is hardly the worst solution. And in the right vehicle, it can turn careful power management into a full night of silent sentry duty.
Photo by Indi Samarajiva via Flickr, licensed under CC By 2.0
Delicious fried potatoes
Extra virgin olive oil imparts increased phenolic compounds fried vegetables
A recent study at the University of Granada in Spain has found that frying vegetables in extra virgin olive oil changes them for the better, adding phenolic compounds, which have antioxidant properties. Boiling and other methods of cooking veggies have no such benefit.
Phenolic compounds are substances produced by plants, and as such are present in many of the foods we eat. In plants, they can serve as a sort of protection against insects or other pests, and they also add color or flavor to the plants. And when we humans eat plants, we reap the benefits of the phenos'antioxidant properties, which have been associated with reducing the risks of certain diseases.
To determine the superiority of frying, the researchers cooked potato, tomato, eggplant, and pumpkin using four different methods: deep frying, sautéing, boiling in water, and boiling in a water-and-oil mixture. Then, the cooked vegetables were analyzed for fat content, moisture, and total phenols. Deep frying and sautéing in extra virgin olive oil, as you might expect, increased the fat content, but the total phenolic compound levels also increased, while the boiled vegetables either had very similar or lower phenolic compound levels when compared to the raw veggies.
The higher level of antioxidants comes from the extra virgin olive oil, which has its own phenolic compounds that are transferred to the vegetables during the cooking process. Don't replace all the water in your soup with oil yet, though. "Boiling is recommended if the vegetables are to be consumed together with the cooking medium (i.e. the water),” Cristina Samaniego Sánchez, one of the study authors, says in a press release.
How many aircraft is it possible to add to the skies in a year? Thanks to the proliferation of small drones, that range of remotely controlled or otherwise unmanned aerial vehicles heavier than half a pound and lighter than 55 pounds, many, many thousands of flying machines joined America’s skies in the last year. In December, the FAA announced that drone owners would have to register online with the FAA, and today, they’re reporting that almost 300,000 people did so.
An important note: that registration counts drone owners, not drones themselves. The FAA, which certifies both pilots and aircraft, chose to register pilots instead of aircraft with its new rules, allowing model airplane enthusiasts with large fleets of small remotely controlled vehicles to just register once. That means it’s not quite an accurate picture of how many drones there are, but it’s a good lower threshold.
Last fall, the FAA estimated that a million drones would be sold by the end of the 2015 holiday season. A separate analysis from April 2015 guessed there would be 1 million privately owned drones in the United States by the end of 2015, with an approach that counted drone sales going back to at least 2013. Finally, with some sales numbers in, the Consumer Technology Association put the number of drones sold during the holiday season at just 400,000. If we go by that lower number, it means as many as three-quarters of drones sold were registered, though there are potentially many many thousands more drones not yet in the system.
“I am pleased the public responded to our call to register,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “The National Airspace System is a great resource and all users of it, including UAS users, are responsible for keeping it safe.”
The agency continues to see a steady stream of daily registrations. While the refund period expired today, the fee will still cover all the small unmanned aircraft that owners intend to use exclusively for recreational or hobby purposes. “The registration numbers we’re seeing so far are very encouraging,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “We’re working hard to build on this early momentum and ensure everyone understands the registration requirement.”
For the first month, the FAA waived the $5 drone registry fee, but that grace period ended on Wednesday. People who bought drones and want to fly them outdoors for hobby or recreational purposes can still register them for the full $5 until February 19th. If purchased after that date, drone have to be registered online before they are flown.
Across the globe, more than 100 buildings have reached a height of 300 meters (the approximate height of the Eiffel Tower) or higher, putting them in a category architects call "supertall." Many of them sprang up in the past dozen or so years, which could be considered the supertall era. But according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, as reported by Dezeen, supertall is SO last decade. Now we're entering the regime of the megatall skyscraper, a category reserved for behemoths taller than 600 meters.
At the moment, only three buildings qualify as megatalls: Dubai's 2,717-foot (828-meter) Burj Khalifa (completed in 2010), the 2,073-foot (632-meter) Shanghai Tower (completed in 2015), and Mecca's 1,972-foot (601-meter) Makkah Royal Clock Tower (completed in 2012). But that number is expected to more than double by 2020, as four more join the list: Shenzhen's Ping An Finance Centre, Wuhan's Greenland Center, Jakarta's Signature Tower, and Jeddah's Kingdom Tower. When the latter is completed in 2018, it will reach over 3,200 feet (about a kilometer) in height and become the new tallest building in the world. Photos and illustrations of all these megatall structures are in the gallery above.
Why are all of these megatall buildings rising in Asia and the Middle East, while North America and Europe avoid the trend? It could be because skyscrapers, in addition to providing extra real estate, give rising powers a potent symbol of wealth and progress. Because these buildings don't just have high price tags—they also incorporate cutting-edge scientific advances.
To build structures that fit comfortably into an urban environment and remain stable even as they stretch to absurd heights, architects rely on: advanced materials, such as specially-treated glass; new tech applications, which could give a building the illusion of an invisibility; and engineering innovations, which may eventually include magnetically levitating elevators. Or maybe western nations are just more worried about buildings that waste space and can melt cars.
A mysterious planet might lurk on the edge of our solar system
Scientists have long suspected that our solar system might harbor a hidden planet. Now, after decades of searching, they may be on to something.
This week, in The Astronomical Journal, astronomer Mike Brown and planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin published what may be a map to the hypothetical planet.
To find it, the pair of scientists analyzed the wonky orbits of 6 dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt--a giant ring of rocky debris, just past Neptune. Something knocked these 6 objects out of alignment, and Brown and Batygin think a large planet could be out there tugging on them. The scientists think this hypothetical 'Planet X' could weigh as much as 10 Earth masses.
Caltech
Evidence of Planet Nine
The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Moreover, when viewed in three-dimensions, they are all tilted nearly identically away from the plane of the solar system. Such an orbital alignment could be caused by a large planet.
This is not the first time scientists have thought they've pinned down a secret planet in the outer solar system, but the evidence is stronger now than it's been before, says Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division.
How Could We Miss Such A Massive Planet?
If Planet X exists, Brown and Batygin have calculated that the closest it would ever come to the Sun is a distance of 200 astronomical units. One AU equals the distance between the Sun and Earth, so at its closest, this hypothetical planet is 200 times farther from the Sun than we are. And at its furthest point, it may be as much as 1200 AU from the Sun.
For context, Pluto is 40 AU from the Sun, and it took ten years for the New Horizons spacecraft to get there. The Voyager spacecraft--the fastest spacecraft ever--have traveled about 120 AU in the nearly 40 years since they launched.
So if Planet X is out there, it's really, really far away.
“These are very long orbitals,” says Green, “right at the edge of visibility with the top telescopes in the world, so it's going to take a little while to work through this.”
How Skeptical Should We Be?
Although Brown and Batygin are careful, respected scientists, it's still possible they could be mistaken.
“Everyone is skeptical because we've cried wolf on this a bunch of times,” says Green. “Wishing doesn't make it so. It has to withstand the scrutiny of the science community, and in the past it's always fallen apart.”
If Planet X is out there, it's really, really far away.
Brown and Batygin's educated guess as to where Planet X might be is based on the crooked orbits of 6 very distant objects. Because they're so far away, it takes them hundreds of years or more to orbit the sun. That means we've only seen a fraction of their orbits, so the scientists' calculations of their pathways may not be entirely accurate.
For comparison, says Green, “when we flew by Pluto last summer, we really didn't know where Pluto was.” That's because it takes Pluto 247 Earth-years to circle the Sun, and since we've only known about Pluto since 1930, we've only seen a small piece of its orbit. Fortunately, the New Horizons spacecraft was able to pinpoint Pluto's position on the fly, “but Pluto could have actually been 1000 kilometers ahead of or behind where it really was. So calculating orbits really is a tough business.”
How Will We Find Out Whether It's Really There Or Not?
In addition to checking the orbits that Brown and Batygin calculated, scientists will be searching for evidence of Planet X in the data they already have. It's a big sky, and now that scientists have a clearer idea of where to look for Planet X, that could help to track down details that might've been overlooked before.
Green says the data from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) could be a good place to start. Large planets tend to radiate heat, so if Planet X is out there, WISE's infrared sensors could have detected the signature.
Scientists have looked for Planet X in WISE data before, “but they were looking at the whole entire sky and not all the wavelengths were checked,” says Green. “So I'm sure there are scientists right now looking back at the WISE data and saying, 'Did we miss it?'”
The next step will be to look for Planet X using a powerful telescope. Brown and Batygin have already secured time on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to do just that.
“If these guys are right, we're going to be looking at Planet X in 2018.”
Similarly, Green is optimistic that if Planet X is out there, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch into space in 2018, could find it. The large infrared telescope is Hubble's successor. “If these guys are right, we're going to be looking at [Planet X] in 2018.”
Finding Planet X will be a challenge since we don't really know how big it is. Although Brown and Batygin estimate that it weighs 10 Earth masses, that mass could potentially be compacted into a small and very dense terrestrial planet, or spread out into a large and easier-to-spot gas giant.
Looking for more dwarf planets with skewed orbits could also provide some helpful hints, perhaps pinpointing exactly where Planet X is hiding, or else show that it was something else that disturbed these objects' orbit.
What Else Could It Be?
The weird orbits of the 6 dwarf planets suggests that something scattered them.
“Sometimes orbital dynamics are like a pool game where you've got two balls that hit each other and it changes their trajectories,” says Green. “But in space they don't actually have to hit each other, their gravity can change their orbits.”
It's too soon to say exactly what was responsible for knocking those objects askew. Could it have been the exiled Planet X, formed in the inner solar system but later knocked out when things got too crowded? Alternately, perhaps it was a series of smaller perturbations that scattered the objects out of alignment, suggests Green, or even a rogue planet—a planet without a star—wandering through our solar system.
Without hard evidence, it's hard to say right now.
“Of course, finding another planet would be pretty spectacular,” says Green.
Huntsville, Alabama is a lot closer to space than most places on the planet. Not, like, literally--the elevation is just 620 feet above sea level--but culturally and metaphorically. During the space race, Huntsville tested and developed many rockets for the Apollo program. Home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center museum, and IMAX, Huntsville wanted to share the joy of space in a way only a town full of rocket nerds could: with a full-size fan-built Millennium Falcon.
Today, visitors to the museum for Star Wars: The Force Awakens can see the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit on display, but the smuggling ship’s origins go back a long long way. Or at least to the time Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released. Started online by a man from Nashville, the project attracted 300 volunteers who assembled bits and pieces of the craft over the years. Then in 2012 a trio from Huntsville took the lead on building the cockpit.
It wasn’t until 2012 that [Greg] Dietrich became the first of the eventual Alabama trio to join Lee’s project. He found out about it after meeting Stinson Lentz, a fan and volunteer located in Philadelphia who had created a full-scale 3D model of the cockpit. Dietrich then reached out to Lee and quickly found he hadn’t missed out on much despite joining the effort after so many years.
That’s when Lee asked [Dan] Valdez, a friend, if he could help out. Valdez agreed and pulled in Polatty, his friend and a fellow Hunstville resident.
“We’re both electronics guys and do home automation, smart home integration for a living, so it comes natural to us to add lights and sound effects and really cool things,” says Valdez.
The project is still very much a work in progress, so if you’re stuck in the blizzard that’s currently devouring the East Coast, no chance you can use it for an escape.
Still, it’s a fascinating labor of love from some dedicated fans to try and replicate the actual physical set of such a beloved franchise. And it’s been built piece by piece. Below, the replica Holochess table.
And at Upvoted’s full profile, there’s even an hour-long video about the project, in case you’re snowed in and need something to do.
A new proposal from Mayor Bill de Blasio aims to ensure every carriage horse in New York City is identified and accounted for.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed a bill to City Council that calls for embedding all carriage horses with microchips and outfitting carriages with GPS devices. This move would help to ensure that horses could be identified and tracked, a response to claims from the anti-horse-carriage lobby that injured horses are being replaced with lookalikes to conceal evidence of abuse, according to the New York Times. It is unclear whether there have been documented instances of horse switching, or whether these concerns are speculative. The NYPD declined to comment when Popular Science reached out.
Implanting a horse with a microchip involves using a needle and syringe to shoot a rice-grain-sized device into a thick ligament that runs from the horse’s head to the shoulders. The chip, encased in biomedical glass, is usually implanted by a vet; the procedure is akin to giving the horse a vaccine.
Horses implanted with chips can be identified using a handheld microchip scanner. When held over the animal's body, the scanner displays the ID number associated with the microchip.
John Wade, a veterinarian and owner of Microchip ID Systems, says that this is one of a limited number of ways to ensure horse identification. Other options include retinal scanning, which tends to be expensive, or tattooing the horse’s lips.
“It would probably be the most practical way to achieve the goal to be sure that people aren’t switching out horses,” Wade told Popular Science.“The lip tattoos, they just fade. And they’re not pleasant to do. And over time they’re just not as reliable as the chip.”
The chips, he says, have the added perk of nearly guaranteed permanence.
“It is not an easy task to remove a microchip, particularly in a horse,” says Wade. “It would be a surgical procedure that would require general anesthesia and something to help you locate the chip.”
This means that officials could make sure carriage horses are who their owners say they are. De Blasio's original plan involved banning horse-drawn carriages altogether, but, in addition to the GPS devices and microchips, his new compromise also calls for eventually reducing the number of horses to 75 and confining horse carriage activity to Central Park.
Photo by Charles Barilleaux via Flickr, licensed under CC by 2.0
Sarah the cheetah doing what she did best
A cheetah named Sarah, who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio was euthanized this week at the age of 15. The Zoo says it was due to her “diminishing quality of life.” Indeed, Sarah was on the older side for captive cheetahs, who on average live to be 8 to 12 years old, according to the National Zoo.
But this cheetah wasn’t just exceptional due to her advanced age. She came to the zoo at six weeks old, and was raised by Cathryn Hilker, the founder of the Cincinnati Zoo’s Cat Ambassador program. From kittenhood, Sarah was raised alongside an Anatolian shepherd dog—a practice that is relatively common for cheetahs in captivity. Sarah made a lifetime companion of her dog friend, who was named Alexa, until the dog passed away a few years ago.
Sarah was also part of the Cat Ambassador program, which meant she worked outreach for her species, visiting schoolchildren and making TV appearances. She also garnered a bit of fame for herself in 2009 when she set a speed record for land animals, running 100 meters in 6.13 seconds. She then broke that record in 2012 at age 11, running 100 meters in just 5.95 seconds.
Beyond Sarah’s physical abilities and social successes, she seemed to have a significant impact on the trainers who worked with her. Hilker wrote her own heartfelt goodbye: “My memories are imprinted in my heart and mind of a tiny brave little cheetah who grew up and turned into the elegant animal that the mature cheetah is.”
The liquefied natural gas plant sits on its own island in the Barents Sea, and its glow can be seen from afar.
In 1974, the mayor of Hammerfest, Norway declared that his small fishing community—the northernmost town in the world—would one day become the center of the oil and gas industry in the Barents Sea. At that time, the oil and gas executives laughed. Today, the town of 10,000 people is fulfilling the prophecy.
Hammerfest is home to the first oil and gas operation in the Barents Sea. The gas gets pumped 89 miles southeast from the gas fields of Snøhvit through an underwater pipeline. It arrives at a processing plant, which occupies pretty much the entire island of Melkøya—one of the handful that comprise the municipality of Hammerfest.
Walking among the massive structures with a guide and a few fellow journalists, I can assure you that it is an impressive operation. My neck almost hurt from the strain of looking up at its towers.
The plant has been in operation since 2007, and produces enough fuel to fill a tanker ship every five or six days. That means that it produces the same amount of energy every week that the hydroelectric power plant in the nearby town of Alta produces in 1.3 years.
What is Liquefied Natural Gas?
LNG is mostly methane (CH4) that is compressed and cooled to a liquid state. That way it's easier to transport and store. Because LNG burns cleaner than oil, and produces less CO2, some say it’s the most environmentally friendly fossil fuel there is.
It is also said to have half the environmental footprint of coal. By replacing coal with LNG, it’s estimated that Europe could eliminate 450 megatons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. Not bad for a fossil fuel.
How the Plant Works
After navigating through multiple security checkpoints with badges and PIN codes, we gathered for a talk with Knut Gjertsen, the director of operations, over coffee and traditional Norwegian potato pancakes called lefse. He says the plant functions like a big refrigerator. Once the gas arrives via pipeline, the CO2, water, and mercury are removed. It is then pre-cooled and liquefied. As a liquid, it takes up only 1/600 the volume it takes up as a gas. But to keep it that way, the LNG has to be stored at -261 degrees F. That's really cold, even for the Arctic.
For this reason, being located on the Barents Sea is a real advantage. The cold waters can cut the time and cost for cooling down the gas significantly.
To make the operation more eco-friendly, the CO2 extracted from the gas gets injected into the seafloor. This on-site carbon capture and storage is unique among LNG plants, and prevents some 650,000 tons of CO2 a year from entering the atmosphere. That’s the same as taking 400,000 cars off the road.
The Snøhvit plant is one of the most energy-efficient there is, but that doesn’t mean it's emissions-free. It is still producing fossil fuel, after all. Norwegian legislation now requires the company to pay high fees on all its CO2 emissions. Since their global competitors don’t have such fees, they are a real incentive to be efficient in order to stay competitive. "They don't pay a dime,” Gjertsen says. “We pay a lot."
A Rocky Start
Long before this efficiency and environmental mindset kicked in, though, the decision of whether or not to build the plant was hotly contested. Over a lunch of open-faced sandwiches in the city hall, Alf Einar Jakobsen, Hammerfest’s current mayor, described how it took 22 years for Hammerfest to finally pull the trigger and get the project rolling.
Over the years, as the fishing industry continued to decline and the local population started dropping off, a deal was eventually struck between the city and Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company. “Even the fishermen said yes to Snøhvit,” he says.
Breanna Draxler
The Big Refrigerator
Cooling down the natural gas is a major engineering feat.
Despite the protests of national environmental groups, construction began on the plant in the early 2000s. The city’s deputy mayor, Marianne Sivertsen Næss, remembers seeing fires at the site, and ash raining down on Hammerfest. Having just given birth four days before, Næss was questioning the impact this new industry would have on the blueberries she imagined her daughter picking in the nearby mountains, or the snow for forts she would one day build.
“At the beginning, people asked, ‘God, what have we done?!’” says Roger Kristoffersen, who works in the city’s planning and development department.
But Mayor Jakobsen says the plant cleaned up its act and has since contributed immensely to the town. And not just in the form of jobs. Starting in the 1980s, Statoil paid for special vocational classes to be taught at the local high school. They wanted to prepare their future workforce, of course, but education also improved in the process.
Næss, who, in addition to being the deputy mayor is also the principal of the secondary school in Hammerfest, says the students trained in the chemical process line program are now the most skilled in the country. That may be in part because they have on-site training once a week at Snøhvit.
Today, the city of Hammerfest collects 193 million Norwegian Krone ($22 million) a year from Statoil’s property taxes, which has translated to major investment in the city’s schools, housing, and other infrastructure as well.
A Surprising Success
Back at Snøhvit, Gjertsen says the plant is doing even better than expected. The gas reservoir turns out to have 100 billion cubic meters more gas than predicted. And the market is paying higher prices than expected.
Back when the idea of the plant was conceived, all of its gas was intended for U.S. markets, but since the discovery and exploitation of America's own natural gas deposits, not a single boat of LNG has been shipped there.
This major shift in the market highlighted another benefit of LNG: its delivery is not dependent on pipelines. It can go wherever the market is. The main customers today are in Europe: the Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, Lithuania, and others. An LNG tanker can unload at any port with the infrastructure to receive it.
Breanna Draxler
Cold Storage
These storage tanks keep the liquefied natural gas at -163 degrees Celsius until the next ship arrives. Each storage container can hold 125,000 cubic meters or 33 million gallons of LNG, but a tanker can hold even more.
The fuel is used to power ferries, factories, and even the tankers that carry it.
Another bonus with gas is that spills are not an issue. Unlike with oil, spills simply can’t happen with gas. That’s not to say that gas leaks aren’t risky. A security guard had to check the condition of my camera battery before I was allowed into the plant, and I was not allowed to bring my cell phone due to the fire hazard. But avoiding an oil spill is always a good thing.
The opening of the plant has also brought other happy surprises, in this case environmental. The kittiwake was an endangered species of bird, with only 40 nesting pairs left on Melkøya when construction began. But the excavation during the construction process created ideal nesting habitat on newly exposed rock faces. Now there are 2,000 pairs of the birds. "This red-listed species is really a pain in the ass for us," Gjertsen says, laughing.
Long-Term Vision
Both Statoil and the city of Hammerfest are aware that LNG is not a forever thing. Snøhvit should have enough gas to produce LNG through 2050. And then what?
By the time the gas runs out, Hammerfest hopes to have moved on from fossil fuels. “In the end, we want to get to a renewable state,” says Kristoffersen, from the planning department. “We don’t want to be dependent on oil and gas, but they’re financing that transition.”
They're actively working toward renewables, too. A team of researchers in Hammerfest developed a tidal energy system that powered the grid here for five or six years, says Mayor Jakobsen. It has since been exported to Scotland where the tides are more powerful.
The municipal government has also tried to get wind energy on the hills surrounding the city. But the proposal was turned down since the native Sami people graze their reindeer on those grasses in the summer.
Statoil is investing heavily in offshore wind energy too. And that’s important to Gjertsen. "I'm home free, but my kids are not,” he says. “It does actually matter to me. The world needs energy, and it does make a difference how and where we get it."
This hyperspectral image cube (layers of the image in hundreds of different EM wavelengths) of terrain allows for detailed analysis of the imaged area, since anomalies and features (such as mineral deposits) of the land would react differently to different EM wavelengths.
While SEAL Team 6 descended upon Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011, they used hyperspectral imaging to gain an edge in nighttime urban combat. But China is soon bringing that advantage to space, preparing to launch the world's most powerful hyperspectral imaging satellite.
China National Space Administration
Many Eyes in One
Hyperspectral cameras, such as this one launched in 2008 on the HJ-1B microsatellite, share technology with spectrometers, which measure the material composition of objects through the unique signature that each material has to a certain EM wavelenght.
Electro-optical devices like cameras and infrared sensors generally observe only one band in the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. cameras observe the band visible to human eyesight and infrared cameras view the infrared band. Hyperspectral cameras and sensors, on the other hand, can simultaneously view hundreds of electromagnetic bands for a single image, building a layered 'cube' of the image in different electromagnetic wavelengths. The use of such a wide range of wavelengths provides the ability to observe objects which conceal their emissions in one part of the spectrum (i.e. stealth aircraft and thermally suppressed engines) or are hidden (such as underground bunkers).
RADI
Chang'e 1 Lunar Scans
The Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter used a hyperspectral camera to identity different layers of mineral deposits in the lunar crust.
Since the 1970s, China has a strong history of scientific and civilian utilization of hyperspectral imaging. Space based platforms include the Chang'e lunar missions and Earth observation from the Tiangong space station and HJ-1 small satellite. Aircraft mounted hyperspectral imagers are used for tasks such as environmental surveys, oil prospecting, disaster relief and crop measurement. As computer processing power improves and hyperspectral sensors get smaller, Chinese civilian and military applications are likely to expand.
Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth
CCRSS
The CCRSS's hyperspectral camera will be the most powerful in orbit, with a 15 meter resolution across 328 electromagnetic bands, once launched later this year.
A key in this program is the China Commercial Remote-sensing Satellite System (CCRSS), to be launched later this year. It can collect data on 328 electromagnetic bands, offering very high resolution of up to 15 meters, according to the researchers from the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth in Beijing. In comparison, the U.S. TacSat 3, launched in 2010, collects only 300 electromagentic bands, at a lower resolution. While it is being launched for commercial users, like most other Chinese earth observation satellites, it would also be available for military use.
South China Morning Post
Congratulations
Professor Xiang Libin, of the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites, shakes Chinese President Xi Jinping's hands after received an unspecified decoration in the 2016 National Science and Technology Awards.
Notably, on January 8, 2016, hyperspectral expert Professor Xiang Libin of the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites, received an award from President Xi Jinping during the 2016 national science and technology awards ceremony, for an unspecified project. Interestingly, Professor Xiang's none mention on the awards program mirrors the scrubbing of a 2015 Feng Ru aeronautic award handed out to Professor Wang Zhengguo for developing China's first scramjet hypersonic engine.
National Defense Magazine
You Can't Hide
U.S. Army troops already use hyperspectral imagery (often obtained from aircraft) to locate hidden hazards like IEDs (across many different EM wavelenghts, IEDs and other man-made objects give off a different imagery from natural features).
Broader Chinese advances in hyperspectral imaging can be expected to have a variety of military uses. Hyperspectral imaging can be a valuable tool for finding submarines and underwater mines in shallow waters. On land, they can determine the actual composition of object to distinguish decoys (hyperspectral imaging can capture the differences in EM signature of a wooden decoy vs. an actual missile launcher). In the air, hyperspectral sensors can passively detect even thermally shielded stealth aircraft. For counter-WMD missions, hyperspectral imaging can be used to detect nuclear and chemical weapons production, as well as locating the underground tunnels and bunkers that would house those strategic assets. For China, hyperspectral imaging is opening up a whole new world.
People who live north of the Arctic Circle experience two months each year with no direct sunlight. During the dark winters, the only natural illumination people experience is twilight, which tends to have a bluish color. So in 2007, cognitive neuropsychology specialist Bruno Laeng set out to see how this might affect the vision of these northernmost inhabitants.
Laeng and his colleagues gathered about 250 people, mostly undergraduates from the Arctic University of Norway (where Laeng, now at the University of Oslo, was a professor at the time), and split them into two groups: those who were born above the Arctic Circle and those born below it. Both groups took a test measuring color discrimination, in which they had to arrange more than 85 color tabs according to the progression in their hues.
Those born in polar regions made more mistakes arranging the yellow-green and green tabs, but far fewer mistakes arranging the blueish ones. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the prevalence of red-green color blindness is higher in populations that live farther from the equator.)
Language also supports Laeng’s findings: Ohio State University psychologist Angela Brown looked at dictionaries for various populations—more than 450 languages in all—to see which ones had distinct words for the color “blue.” She found that the closer people lived to the poles, the more they distinguished between the blues.
