Quantcast
Channel: Popular Science | RSS
Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live

Scientists Capture The Sounds Of Underwater Migrations

0
0

Roberto Arias via Wikimedia Commons

Orange moon jellies

Whales have their calls, and dolphins have their whistles. And now, researchers have eavesdropped on another group of underwater species. In a study that will be presented on Monday at the Ocean Sciences Meeting, the researchers describe a different set of noises from within the ocean. The strange sounds are made during the daily migration of fish, shrimp, jellyfish, and squid as they make their way to the water's surface where they eat. Collectively, this mass of organisms weighs about 10 billion tons, but as the American Geophysical Union notes, the researchers don't yet know which animal is responsible for the low frequency hum, but small bony fish are probably the culprits.

The hum is pretty quiet--only 3 to 6 decibels louder than the ocean's background noise, so we humans would not likely be able to hear any of it. But if we could hear it, we'd have to be within a few kilometers from the source, and the timing would have to be just right, since the dim humming only lasts for a couple of hours. Luckily these scientists deployed highly sensitive instruments to pick it up.

While we would have to try really hard to make out the sounds, predators might be specially attuned to the low hum, and since these migrating organisms are an important element in the food chain (read: they eat and get eaten), this new aural discovery could reveal a lot about the inner workings of the foodchain.

You can hear the sounds of this migration over at the American Geophysical Union's site.


Today Is The Last Day To Register Old Drones With The FAA

This Is Virgin Galactic's New Spaceplane, VSS Unity

0
0

Virgin Galactic

VSS Unity

Virgin Galactic's newest spaceplane.

Today, spaceflight company Virgin Galactic unveiled a new spaceplane. VSS Unity is the flashy new sibling of the VSS Enterprise, which was destroyed in a fatal accident in 2014. The company hopes to one day carry tourists into suborbital space.

Unity is not much different from her predecessor.

But one of the ship's key improvements will prevent another disaster like the November 2014 accident that killed pilot Michael Alsbury.

At the time, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Alsbury deployed a feathering re-entry system too early, and that Virgin Galactic hadn't planned ahead for such human errors. The new spaceplane has safeguards in place to make sure that doesn't happen again, and the company is emphasizing a renewed commitment to careful testing.

The new spaceplane shows that Virgin Galactic is not out of the private spaceflight game just yet. And they still have at least one willing customer:

Afghanistan To Fly American Drones Next Month

0
0

Boeing Scan Eagle

Joseph M. Buliavac, U.S. navy Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Boeing Scan Eagle

For Americans watching at home, drones defined the War in Afghanistan under Obama’s tenure. Variously depicted as cartoonishly inept or maliciously evil robots, the spectre of armed unmanned aerial vehicles animated heated campus discourse about what, exactly, America was doing overseas.

Since the early 2010s, military drones have faded from the minds of much of the public. In that time, other nations like Iraq and Nigeria and Pakistan have joined America as wielders of armed remotely piloted aircraft. And even more nations have adopted unarmed drones as flying cameras to guide their military. The latest country to join that list is none other than Afghanistan.

A U.S. military official announced yesterday that Afghanistan is expected to field its own drones starting in March. Rather than the menacing armed Reapers or the plane-sized missile-carrying Predators, Afghanistan’s army will fly the modest ScanEagle. At just 5 feet long and with a 10-foot wingspan, these hardy drones are launched not from runways but from truck-mounted catapults. That makes them much easier to deploy than airplanes, and when they need to come in for a landing, a specially set up sky hook will snag them out of the air. Despite only weighing 50 pounds, ScanEagles can fly for up to 24 hours, and they fly slow, cruising around 60 mph. This makes them a useful tool for watching open spaces from a lofty height of nearly 20,000 feet. Think less like a hawk, more like a vulture.

The United States is currently training soldiers in Afghanistan’s army in piloting the aircraft, so that the country can use them in the fight against the still insurgent Taliban on its own. The U.S. is providing eight ScanEagle units, each with six drones and the systems needed to operate them, for a total of 48 ScanEagles. The drones have powerful cameras that feed live video to operators on the ground, giving commanders a bird’s-eye-view of the battlefield. Much like the unarmed American drones that flew over Afghanistan before them, these ScanEagles are primarily useful tools for fighting insurgents.

Apple Cares About Your Privacy, Unless You Use iCloud

0
0

Xavier Harding

Apple has been lauded this week as crusaders for smartphone privacy, after the federal government compelled the company to install a backdoor into its own software (which Apple promptly denounced).

Despite its refusal, Apple has already divulged a potential trove of private information from the San Bernardino shooter's phone, which includes the iCloud backups and all associated iCloud data. This is standard practice for Apple, which as a (normally) law-abiding company provides law enforcement with all data relevant to investigations, even extracting information from phones multiple times in the past.

Tim Cook confirmed this protocol in his now-infamous missive “A Message To Our Customers.”

“When the FBI has requested data that’s in our possession, we have provided it. Apple complies with valid subpoenas and search warrants, as we have in the San Bernardino case,” Cook wrote in the letter.

As noted in the court’s original motion, the FBI executed a warrant and obtained iCloud information from Apple, dated until October 19, 2015.

To be clear, there are two concepts in play here: security and privacy. Both are important ideas to consider, but the motivations behind them are separate.

Security is making sure people (the government, Apple, or third parties) don’t have the means to access any device, and privacy is making sure the user data retained on Apple servers are not seen by anyone but the users. In a way, security begets privacy.

This is a different issue than main point of contention between Apple and the federal government, which would be giving the FBI the means to crack a physical device themselves.

Cook also claims in his letter that Apple does keep data secure (which, in this case, is a privacy matter, since it is ensuring whomever has access to data but not integrity of security or encryption).

“For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business,” Cook wrote.

That, by the virtue of the iCloud backups provided to the government, is not entirely true.

In fact, the FBI very well might have data surpassing the October 19 backups mentioned.

iPhones are actually more tied to iCloud than appears on the surface. Users can of course turn of automatic syncing of entire phone backups, and even individual services like syncing notes or future calendar appointments. However, according to a white paper on iOS security released late 2015, other services — i.e. iMessage — use iCloud as an route for data like large messages containing photos and other media.

Depending on iOS version, the method used to send iMessages can only send messages up to 4 KB or 16 KB in size. To be fair, that’s not very large file size limit when sending images or audio or videos. Apple encrypts these with a secure 256-bit key, and sends the communication through iCloud. However, iMessages are queued for delivery in Apply servers, and are stored for up to 30 days on these servers, which means the FBI could have (albeit potentially encrypted) messages from up to the day of the shooting on December 2, 2015.

Apple

iMessages larger than 4KB or 16KB are transmitted over iCloud.

In the court documents that compel Apple to provide alternative software for the iPhone 5C in question, federal agent Christopher Pluhar vaguely describes what data has actually been recovered from the iCloud services.

“I and other have been able to obtain several iCloud backups for the Subject Device, and I am aware that a warrant was executed to obtain from Apple all saved iCloud data associated with the subject device,” Pluhar writes in his report.

Screenshot

A court document requesting Apple give the FBI the ability to hack into an iPhone recovered from one of the San Bernardino shooters.

We don’t know that FBI has beyond the vague haze of “all saved iCloud data” and the associated backups before October 19. But based on information about the data the FBI received from the warrant, we can tell they have access to that data, meaning it's unencrypted to some extent.

The New York Times brings up the same point about unencrypted iCloud backups in its story about Apple CEO Tim Cook's stance on security.

"Mr. Cook has told colleagues that he still stands by the company’s longstanding plans to encrypt everything stored on Apple’s myriad devices, services and in the cloud, where the bulk of data is still stored unencrypted," write Katie Benner and Nicole Perlroth.

However, Apple does outline everything that iCloud backs up in the same security document — with every setting turned on, iCloud stores:

  • Information about purchased music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books, but not the
  • purchased content itself
  • Photos and videos in Camera Roll
  • Contacts, calendar events, reminders, and notes
  • Device settings
  • App data
  • PDFs and books added to iBooks but not purchased
  • Call history
  • Home screen and app organization
  • iMessage, text (SMS), and MMS messages
  • Ringtones
  • HomeKit data
  • HealthKit data
  • Visual Voicemail

This is because don't know which settings the alleged shooter had turned on prior to October 19, or which unintended settings were left on that didn't fully back up data but instead transmitted data through iCloud. The FBI could also have all of this data as "all saved iCloud data," as they are only claiming to have iCloud backups (full restore points for the phone) until October 19.

For iPhone users, the San Bernardino case can serve as a wakeup call to where the information you may think only lives on your phone actually goes, and who would have access to that information in case of a court order.

It’s not a terrible thing that Apple has done this, but when thinking about the balance of privacy and security when it comes to Apple’s stance, it’s important to remember that the situation is more nuanced than either Apple or the FBI would care to admit. Also, when storing something on a remote server or cloud, you do lose control of that information.

Apple has not responded to comment.

Companies Are Using Big Data To Track Employee Health And Pregnancies

0
0

San Luis Obispo County California

Firms that monitor employee information can give employers data on the workforce's health, including the number of workers who could be pregnant.

Companies are hiring outside firms to track data about employees’ medical claims and prescription drug use in order to monitor their health and pregnancies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The ostensible goal of these firms is to reduce companies’ healthcare costs by providing employees with healthcare information and helping them make informed decisions. For example, Castlight Healthcare, which serves companies such as Walmart, can identify when employees may be considering costly spinal surgery and send them information about cheaper fixes or ways to delay the procedure but still help their condition, such as doing physical therapy.

But Castlight also has a program that attempts to predict when employees are pregnant or trying to conceive by monitoring their search queries and scanning their insurance claims to find workers who have stopped filling their birth-control prescriptions. A screenshot featured on Castlight’s website shows how the firm presents these results to employers, giving the number of workers who are “normal-risk pregnancy,” “high-risk pregnancy,” and “considering pregnancy.”

Castlight says that it does not share individual employee names with clients and only gives out employer's numbers. Employees have to give permission in order for the firms to send them medical information through an app or email, but it’s not clear if they’re explicitly told how their data will be used, or if that information is buried in the fine print. Although Castlight responded to Popular Science’s initial interview request, they have yet to set an interview up.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) protects confidentiality of personal healthcare information. But Janine Hiller, a law professor at Virginia Tech, notes in an interview with Popular Science, that if the firms only present employers with aggregated data and use sources such as search queries, the data they collect is no longer considered protected health information and is not covered by HIPAA.

Nicolas Terry, a law professor at Indiana University, told Salon that this is an area that remains somewhat unregulated. “There is almost no law that controls what data these big data companies can access. There isn’t much law controlling what they can do with it.”

So although giving this data to employers is legal, the implications of sharing sensitive medical information remain a concern.

"Health data can often be used in discriminatory ways," says Hiller, who researchers the intersection of law, ethics, and technology. "There are good reasons for trying to encourage people's healthy lives, but when you're monitoring people's behaviors and how they live, it just becomes more intimate."

Artist Tattfoo Tan Uses Food Waste to Create Survival Supplies

0
0

Courtesy of Tattfoo Tan

Miso Vegetables Soup: Portion serve two. Made on October 18, 2012.

On a shady street in Staten Island, New York, a man is preparing for the apocalypse. Sort of. Tattfoo Tan is an artist seeking to reclaim skills lost in the inexorable drive towards new technology, teaching people to be ready for the next Hurricane Sandy.

This winter, I visited his white-painted, high-ceilinged studio. He led me past a gallery of folded and draped tents to his kitchen. He opened his freezer to show me dozens of freezer bags stuffed with raspberries, one of the few crops that will grow in his shady garden. He then handed me nettle, oatmeal, and raspberry leaf tea he had hand dried and blended before we settled in to talk about all he had learned— the “things your grandparents should have taught you—but didn’t,” he said.

One of his projects, a shelf-stable, military-style ration, he made from refuse. Tan was looking for a way to make use of food waste. He calls the leathery strips New Earth Meals Ready to Eat (NEMREs).

Courtesy of Tattfoo Tan

Beet with Onions, Anchovy, Fennel and Balsamic Vinegar: Portion serve two. Made on January 7, 2013.

Tan asked supermarkets for produce grocers would ordinarily throw away because they were blemished or weirdly shaped but still fresh. He brought home five-gallon buckets stuffed with apples, carrots, and potatoes. He used an enormous dehydrator to suck all the water out of the produce to prevent spoiling. Apparently, the plastic counter-top dehydrators you might find at a home store don't cut it. “It takes 12-16 hours to dehydrate something and while you are, the other food you’ve collected is rotting,” he told me. “It’s really stressful.”

Tan added flavor to his apple leather, soups and mashed potato dishes by adding spices like curry, ginger, or sage. He then vacuum sealed the crunchy remains in plastic pouches. In the end, Tan had MREs just like soldiers in war carry.

He has also experimented with another survival food: pemmican, which is a greasy ball of meat and fat that Antarctic explorers like Ernest Shackleton brought on the ice. Tattfoo dehydrated 5 pounds of meat, grinding it to a powder and forming a paste with fat. The final block of dried meat fits into an Altoid tin.

The NEMREs and pemmican are currently on display as part of the Value of Food exhibit at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. They’re part of Tan’s obsession with survival arts from blacksmithing to archery to herbalism and his ambition to teach these skills to young people to prepare them for adulthood. As part of that ambition he teaches classes in knife skills so children will be able prepare their own meals.

“A lot of people say technology, more gadgets, will save us,” he says. Instead, Tan says we need to take a look backward in order to be able to choose the best path forward.

“What are you going to do, call me when things go bad? No. Be able to make your own.”

This Is The Defining Photo Of Virtual Reality (So Far)

0
0
Mark Zuckerberg at Samsung's presentation at Mobile World Congress 2016

Mark Zuckerberg at Samsung's presentation at Mobile World Congress 2016

The Facebook CEO took the stage to talk about virtual reality. Meanwhile, the audience wore Samsung Gear VR headsets.

Virtual reality has never looked cool. For all of the technology's far-reaching promise, from the time when VR as we know it first began appearing regularly in film and TV in the late 1970s, the technology has always seemed pretty goofy: a person sitting slack-jawed, wearing a goofy helmet, spasmodically reacting to unreal apparations that only she or he could see.

Later attempts to make virtual reality look dark and edgy in the 1990s, in films such as Lawnmower Man and The Matrix and the other, often overlooked Keanu Reeves cyberspace movie, Johnny Mnemonic, succeeded less in making VR look appealing, than in making it look threatening and dystopic. Last year, virtual reality's buffonishness reached an apex when Palmer Luckey, the young founder of Oculus VR, appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine in an illustration that was quickly mocked and Photoshopped into silly memes around the web.

Now that virtual reality is finally becoming widely publicly available — in the high-end forms of Facebook's Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive Pre, and Sony's Playstation VR; on the low end, Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard— it's fitting that the defining image of our blossoming era of "real" virtual reality falls somewhere in between these depictions: at once both lame and deeply unsettling.

The photo above, taken yesterday by someone at Facebook during Samsung's presentation at the Mobile World Congress tech conference in Barcelona, Spain, shows Facebook CEO and VR evangelist Mark Zuckerberg walking through the audience to get to the stage.

Before the event started, Samsung gave all the seated attendees their own Samsung Gear VR headsets, and told them to put them on as the presentation got underway. Zuckerberg was there to talk about Facebook subsidiary Oculus VR and its collaboration with Samsung on the Gear VR headset, and he later posted the photo to his public Facebook page.

There are several aspects of the photo that made it immediately striking to me, and have made it downright haunting now that a few hours have passed since I first saw it:

  1. Everyone in the audience has their vision blocked by Samsung Gear VR headsets which means...
  2. ...they can't see what's going on around them, allowing Zuckerberg to pass by completely unnoticed.
  3. Zuckerberg's face has an odd expression on it, what I would characterize as some mixture of intense focus, manic glee, and trepidation. (To be fair, he has repeatedly admitted over the years that he gets nervous before big public talks.)
  4. It's not just that everyone in the audience has their vision blocked; they are also all looking in different directions and have various expressions, each of them lost in his or her own (mostly his) view of the virtual world.
  5. Altogether, the photo is eerily reminiscent of fictional depictions of an enslaved or pacified population. It doesn't help that Zuck, who has stated world-changing ambitions and counts 1.6 billion active users of Facebook the social network, is the only one pictured without a headset...

As the top Facebook comment on Zuckerberg's post succinctly puts it: "Damn, It's kind of creepy."

Others in the media have had similar reactions to the photo. And I don't mean to get too carried away. Lots of new technology seems weird and even scary at first. I've tried a few virtual reality headsets, including the Gear VR pictured and an earlier version of Facebook's Oculus Rift, and both were definitely entertaining and novel, though they quickly grew tiresome.

In some ways, the photo is not very different from any scene you could photograph in any public space in America today, except instead of people immersed in virtual reality, they're immersed in their smartphones. Before smartphones, it was TV that was supposedly going to ruin, or ruining, society. Come to think of it, it reminds me a lot of this old photo you've probably seen, of a bunch of people on a train car wholly absorbed in their paper newspapers, also completely ignoring one another.

So I don't want to make the leap that one unflattering photo is representative of a coming VR dystopia. But photos like this do make you think about the role technology is playing and should play in our lives, the kind of world we want to live in. It's sort of ironic that virtual reality, which promises to make us feel transported to new worlds in ways that other, older media never could, has been so thoroughly summed up in a single, 2D photo — a technology that has been around for about 200 years.

Yet this photo does a great job of capturing virtual reality as it stands today: promising and potentially appealing to masses, but still pretty weird IRL.


Lasers Could Send A Wafer-Thin Spaceship To A Star

0
0

Lasers are now advanced enough to help launch interstellar space probes, researchers say.

Scientists calculate that a gram-sized laser-propelled space probe could reach more than 25 percent of the speed of light and arrive at the nearest star in about 20 years.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is finally leaving the solar system after 37 years of flight at a speed of roughly 38,000 miles per hour or less than 0.006 percent the speed of light. This suggests that with conventional propulsion technology, humanity will never reach even the nearest stars, says experimental cosmologist Philip Lubin at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lubin and his colleagues suggest that, instead, lasers could accelerate small probes to relativistic — that is, near-light — speeds, reaching nearby stars in a human lifetime. "No other current technology offers a realistic path forward to relativistic flight at the moment," Lubin says.

The problem with all thrusters that current spacecraft use for propulsion is that the propellant they carry with them and use for thrust has mass. Interstellar spacecraft require a lot of propellant, which makes them heavy, which requires more propellant, making them heavier, and so on.

Photon drives instead involve equipping spacecraft with mirrors and depending on distant light sources for propulsion. Solar sails rely on light from the sun, while laser sails count on powerful lasers.

Lubin acknowledges that photon drives are nothing new — in a letter to Galileo Galilei in 1610, Johannes Kepler wrote, "Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse." What is new, Lubin says, is that recent, poorly appreciated breakthroughs in laser technology suggest they can now accelerate spacecraft to relativistic speeds.

Breakthroughs in laser technology suggest they can now accelerate spacecraft to relativistic speeds.

The advance that Lubin's approach depends on involves laser arrays. Instead of building one extremely powerful laser — a technologically challenging feat — researchers now can build phased arrays that are made of a large number of relatively modest laser amplifiers that can sync up to act like a single powerful laser. This strategy also eliminates the need for a single giant lens, replacing it with a phased array of smaller optics.

The researchers envision a phased array of currently existing kilowatt-scale ytterbium laser amplifiers that can scale up gradually, adding lasers over time. For instance, a current 1- to 3-kilowatt ytterbium laser amplifier is about the size of a textbook and weighs roughly 5 kilograms.

Eventually, the scientists calculate that a 50- to 70-gigawatt array that is 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers large in Earth orbit could propel a gram-sized wafer-like spacecraft with a 1-meter-wide sail to more than 25 percent of the speed of light after about 10 minutes of illumination, which could reach Mars in 30 minutes and Alpha Centauri in about 20 years. The researchers suggest this array could launch roughly 40,000 relativistic wafer-sized probes per year — each "wafersat" would be a complete miniature spacecraft, carrying cameras, communications, power and other systems.

The same array could propel a 100-ton spacecraft — about the mass of a fully loaded space shuttle, sans rockets — with a 8.5-kilometer-wide sail to about 0.2 percent of the speed of light after about 15 years of illumination. However, it would take about 2,200 years to reach Alpha Centauri at those speeds. Lubin suggests a larger array would make more sense for a human interstellar trip in the distant future, "but I personally do not see this as a priority until many robotic probes have established a need to do so."

A major problem with this strategy is braking — the researchers currently have no way to slow down these laser-driven spacecraft enough for them to enter into orbit around the distant planets that they are dispatched to. The first missions that accelerate to relativistic speeds may have to simply fly by targets and beam back their data via lasers, Lubin notes.

Lubin notes there are many additional uses for such a laser array other than space exploration. For example, it could deflect asteroids away from Earth, or blast debris out of orbit to prevent it from threatening spacecraft, astronauts and satellites.

They are currently testing to show that small lasers can stop asteroids from spinning.

The researchers stress that they are not proposing to immediately build the largest system. They are currently testing small lasers on asteroid-like rock samples to show that such systems can stop asteroids from spinning, work that could help one day wrangle asteroids for exploration.

If lasers are the only practical route for interstellar travel, Lubin and his colleagues suggest that alien civilization may currently use lasers to help explore the cosmos. They suggest that SETI projects should look for telltale signs of such technology.

Lubin presented his latest work in a talk on January 25 at Harvard.

Earth May Be Unique In The Universe

0
0

NASA

Lonely Planet

A view of Earth from the space station

Of the 2,000 or so planets that have been discovered in other solar systems, only a few are similar in size to Earth. For years, scientists have assumed that more rocky, Earth-like planets are out there, and that we just haven't spotted them yet because they're small. But a new paper, posted to the arXiv and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal raises the question, What if there aren't other "Earths" out there?

After completing a census of the cosmos, a research team based in Sweden thinks that Earth may be more special than we thought. Scientific American's Shannon Hall explains:

Astronomer Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University and his colleagues created a cosmic compendium of all the terrestrial exoplanets likely to exist throughout the observable universe, based on the rocky worlds astronomers have found so far. In a powerful computer simulation, they first created their own mini universe containing models of the earliest galaxies. Then they unleashed the laws of physics—as close as scientists understand them—that describe how galaxies grow, how stars evolve and how planets come to be. Finally, they fast-forwarded through 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

What they concluded was that Earth may be unique, among the universe's estimated 700 million trillion rocky planets. The other rocky planets' older ages and locations in foreign galaxies may make our planet one-of-a-kind. But there are a lot of uncertainties, as the researchers themselves admit.

For one, we may not have an accurate view of how common terrestrial planets are. Out of the estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, we've only seen 1000 of them--just a tiny, infinitesimal sample of the total. Plus, smaller, Earth-sized planets are harder to detect, so who knows how many we're missing. And we've only really zoomed in on the planets in one small piece of the sky, within just one galaxy. It's like trying to guess the composition of a big, complex jigsaw puzzle when you only have one or two pieces in your hand.

So it still seems quite early to make generalizations about how common Earth-like planets may be. But if these researchers are correct, what does that mean for the search for extraterrestrial life?

If we assume that organisms on other worlds require the same basic things that life on Earth does--food, water, sunlight, a solid planet to live on, etc.--then there may be fewer places in the universe where life could potentially evolve. And since intelligent life evolves even less often, the universe may indeed be a very lonely place.

But perhaps life could even evolve in environments that are completely different from Earth--such as on Saturn's moon Titan, where rivers and lakes are filled with hydrocarbons instead of water. Our neighbors in the universe may exist after all... but in a form unlike anything we have imagined.

An Egg-Shaped Drone Built To Nestle Into A Backpack

0
0

PowerEgg

PowerVision

PowerEgg

Drones mock the very existence of birds. These clumsy noisy human-built flying machines put human eyes into previously avian domains, scaring bears and provoking all sorts of naturalanimalrage. PowerVision Robot’s new drone isn’t just an attempt to usurp the sky from its feathered forebearers. No, their elaborate flying camera has the audacity to be egg-shaped, an affront to the entire lifecycle of the beasts of the sky.

PowerVision is headquartered in Beijing. They believe their PowerEgg will be light enough to fit in a backpack, complete with a “360° Panoramic, 4K HD Camera, 3-axis Gimbal,” according to their press release. It is also, notably, egg-shaped. Four limbs with rotors fold out of the egg-body, and the bottom slides away to reveal a camera. The presentation is sleek, but we’ve seen similar attempts at the functionality before, with Sprite, a cylindrical drone for backpackers that raised money on Kickstarter in 2015.

Watch a short video about PowerEgg below:

Burn After Shooting: Army Employees Patent Self-Destructing Bullets

0
0

Figures From "Limited Range Projectile" Patent

United States Patent and Trademark Office

Figures From "Limited Range Projectile" Patent

When fired, the path of a .50 caliber bullet is the shortest and deadliest line between two points. For the soldier firing the weapon on the battlefield, this is generally good news. Yet as battles move into cities, bullets that go farther than necessary can injure and kill innocent bystanders just as easily as foes. Perhaps that's why researchers have just patented a bullet with a limited range.

This isn’t science fiction, though it is something science fiction has explored. The patent was developed by employees of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center. These “Limited Range Projectiles” could be useful for three very different groups of gun users. The first are people who practice shooting at firing ranges. For safety, firing ranges need to be built large, which limits where they can be built. Limited-range bullets would mean fewer limitations on firing ranges.

Police and troops in combat (as well as the civilians around them) are the other large groups that stand to benefit. Bullets, especially pistol bullets, are only accurate at short distances, but the kinetic force that propels them out of the gun’s barrel is enough to carry them much, much farther. This is why it’s important to stay inside during gunfights on the street, preferably behind a couple of walls.

Limiting the range of bullets to protect bystanders (while making them still work, as, you know, bullets) is not new. The patent authors note that adding fins to the ends of projectiles or altering the shape of the front of the bullet can hinder the range, but they also note that, when it comes to reducing the range of .50 caliber bullets, such modifications can reduce the existing range to just over 2 miles. Since machine guns using .50 cal bullets aren’t usually fired at targets more than a mile away, they’d need to do something different to limit the range for urban firefights.

The key is pyrotechnics. Here’s how the patent authors describe it:

A limited range projectile includes pyrotechnic material and reactive material. The pyrotechnic material is ignited at projectile launch. The pyrotechnic material ignites the reactive material. If the projectile reaches a maximum desired range prior to impact with a target, the ignited reactive material transforms the projectile into an aerodynamically unstable object.

Essentially, when the bullet is fired, something inside the bullet ignites, and then burns for the amount of time needed to travel a desired distance, and then the bullet turns to garbage and falls to the ground. Rather than having troops calibrate individual bullets in battle, they could get specific rounds designed with this patent that fire for only a few thousand feet, or ones that only go for 500 feet. Until that range, the bullets would work like bullets. Then, once they’ve gone too far, they’d stop being bullets, and fall harmlessly to the ground.

Should bullets like this ever be made, it’ll be great news for soldiers and police. It’ll be even better news for everyone else around them.

Godawful Video Offers First Glimpse At Disney's 'Star Wars' Theme Park

0
0

Star Wars Experience Concept Art

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Star Wars Experience Concept Art

In prose at least as wooden as that in the Star Wars prequels, Harrison Ford (or a Harrison Ford-like robot) announces an imperial consolidation long in the works: Disney’s theme parks are adding a Star Wars section. With concept art unveiled as part of last night’s Disneyland 60 event, we can see interactive battles, familiar space weapons, and of course, "authentic locales":

These "authentic locales" are the exact opposite: mass-market reproductions of patched together sets for a film. They will evoke a sense of the world, but they are not real. Nothing is real. It is an imitation of an illusion designed to trigger a memory.

We would be more forgiving, and even excited about this theme park, if we didn't hate this video so badly.

“Imagine actually firing the laser cannons of the Millennium Falcon,” the enthusiastic voiceover declares. “You’re in complete control!” it shouts, to describe a simulation in which the user is, at best, only superficially in control.

The illusion is what we are paying for. The expansions are in development at both Disneyland and Disney World, and each will be 14 acres of carefully calibrated illusion.

“Star Wars is, for a lack of a better word… awesome,” Harrison Ford says with all the enthusiasm of an undercooked ham. There are better words, dictionaries full. Star Wars is a pleasant dystopia, an idle illiterate world inside which we find many delights of childhood.

The experience will sell itself, as movies about plucky orphans facing down evil empires sell themselves. The theme park's marketing pitch alone does not sell it, and it does not need to. It must merely exist, and exist it does.

[via Vulture]

Gallery: Hands On With The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge

0
0

Samsung completed its yearly update of its Galaxy S smartphone line this weekend at the Mobile World Congress tech conference in Barcelona, introducing the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. The new line is visually similar to its predecessors, but pack a bunch of improvements, like full waterproofing and improved camera performance. We'll have more when we can test the devices for longer, but here's a first look at what the new phones look like up close.

NASA Wants To Send Your Artwork To An Asteroid

0
0

Art Supplies

Art Supplies

Even if you weren't one of the record number of people to apply for NASA's astronaut program, you can still leave your mark on the cosmos.

As a part of the OSIRIS-REx (sic) mission to sample the asteroid Bennu (185911.61 miles away from Earth at its closest point), NASA will send along artwork from Earth loaded onto a hard drive.

NASA is asking artists to come up with artwork based on one (or more) of these three "big questions":

  • What does it mean to be an explorer like OSIRIS-REx?
  • What might this mission teach us about ourselves and our universe?
  • How are we as a people stretched and deepened by explorations beyond our Earthly home?

Your masterpiece doesn't have to be Starry Night to earn it's space on the hard drive. It doesn't even have to be a painting. It can be a song, a video (uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo), a poem, a photograph or just about anything else. Videos need to be under 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Submitting your work is easy. Just mention the hashtag #WeTheExplorers when you post your artwork to Twitter (mention @OSIRISREx) or Instagram (@OSIRIS_REX). Submissions will be accepted until Sunday, March 20, 2016 at 11:59 pm PDT or until the hard drive fills up.

OSIRIS-REx will launch in September 2016. It is expected to rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu in August 2018, where it will take measurements and collect data. The next year, it will collect a sample for Bennu's surface. It will leave Bennu in 2012 and arrive back on Earth in 2023.


Gallery: A First Look At Samsung's Gear 360 Camera

0
0

Samsung rounded out its virtual reality hardware set at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, by announcing the Gear 360, a new mobile 360 degree camera. The orb is meant to be used with Samsung's Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge and the company's virtual reality headset, the Gear VR. It has two 15 megapixel cameras, to capture 3840x1920 video, or 30 megapixel still images. Samsung hasn't announced the pricing, or which other smartphones it will work with, but the company has said that it will be a relatively affordable accessory like the Gear VR, which sits at $99.

Death Valley Is Covered In Flowers

0
0

Even in the most inhospitable places, life finds a way.

Thanks, Jeff Goldblum. In Death Valley, renowned for it's exceptionally hot and dry weather, flowers are blooming.

They are blooming in such large numbers that some of the park's rangers are anticipating the possibility of a 'superbloom'--a once-in-a-decade event that happens when the dry desert receives a decent amount of rain. Wildflower blooms happen every year in the desert, but a deluge in October, followed by brief rain showers have brought these stunning flowers to the desert floor in unusually large numbers.

Not only are some of the flowers blooming in large numbers, this year's flowers are also "super-sized". In a wildflower update by the National Park Service, the author noted:

What is most exciting to me this spring is not necessarily the number of flowers we have blooming early, or the vast number of tiny plants filling in behind them. It is the way some of the plants that have not yet bloomed or are just beginning to bloom, are super-sized. Jack-in-the-Beanstalk stems of Desert Gold (Geraea canescens). Basal rosettes of Gravel Ghost (Atrichoserus platyphylla) that are more than a foot in diameter. Notchleaf Phacelia standing nearly three feet high. Desert Five-Spot (Eremalche rotundifolia) plants with three dozen buds on just one plant. It's mind-boggling.

Watch park ranger Alan Van Valkenburg talk about those brief moments when "the valley of death becomes a valley of life".

To see more gorgeous images of this year's desert flowers, check out the #Superbloom hashtag on Instagram and Twitter where visitors to Death Valley are sharing images of the flowers.

Brazil May Zap Mosquitoes With Gamma Rays To Combat Zika

0
0

Jan Gott/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Sterilizing Insects To Combat Diseases

Net cages containing mosquitos pictured in the secured rooms of the Insect Pest Control at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Seibersdorf, Austria. Male insects, which transmit diseases such as Zika, Dengue and yellow fever, are being there.

To stop the spread of the Zika virus, the Brazilian government has tried numerous methods to slow the spread and control the population of the aedes mosquito, which spreads the virus. But as outbreak shows no hint of decline, officials may attempt a new approach: to sterilize millions of male mosquitoes by zapping them with gamma rays, according to a report today by Reuters.

The method would involve first breeding 12 million male mosquitoes a week, then sterilizing them by exposing them to gamma radiation using a device called an irradiator, and releasing them into target areas. Once there, the sterile males would mate with wild females, who would then lay dud eggs that don’t produce offspring.

Jan Gott/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Male insects, which transmit diseases such as Zika, Dengue and yellow fever, are being sterilized at the Insect Pest Control at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Seibersdorf In Austria.

The approach has already been used to control fruit flies in Madeira, an island off of Portugal, as well as other agricultural insect pests like screw worms and moths, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If Brazil approves, the IAEA would ship the device to Juazeiro, a city in northeastern Brazil.

According to Reuters, the Brazilian government would first do a trial run in about a dozen towns near the city of Juazeiro. If successful, they would decide whether or not to scale up that approach and release the sterile mosquitoes to a wider area--possible by releasing them in the air via drones.

Similarly, in another attempt to breed sterile mosquitoes, a group of Brazilian researchers at the biomedical research institute are instead using radiation and releasing those mosquitoes off the coast of northeastern Brazil.

While researchers around the world are fervently trying to create a successful vaccine, none are available yet, and it's still unclear when one will be ready. Meanwhile, the virus continues to spread throughout Brazil and other areas in South America and cases of microcephaly, believed to be linked to Zika continue to increase. Whether or not this new approach will work remains to be seen, but Brazilian officials are desperate to stop the outbreak, especially as the 2016 summer Olympics which are set to be held in August in Brazil, creeps closer.

If all goes according to plan, though, zapping mosquitoes could prove to be a successful control method.

Lightweight Drone Sees In Infrared To Find Lost Hikers

0
0

Sentry Drone

Riderless Technologies

Sentry Drone

Woods are good at hiding people. That's great for those who don’t want to be found, but for hikers that fall off the beaten path or otherwise find themselves lost, the impenetrability of forests hinders rescue efforts. A new drone, created by Canadian engineer Stefan Weissenberg, wants to help rescue workers find people lost in the woods quickly.

The pilot tosses the cylindrical Sentry drone into the air and then takes control. Video from the drone’s HD camera is fed live to screens for a second person to watch. The drone can optionally carry an infrared camera, which is good for finding warm bodies hidden amidst cold nature. The drone folds up into a compact cylinder, thought not in a way as aesthetically pleasing as some other foldaway quadcopter designs. It weighs just barely more than two pounds. With a flight time of 15 minutes, it’s useful for scanning an area, but not the kind of drone that can conduct day-long searches on its own.

Built by Weissenberg’s Riderless Technologies, the Sentry with infrared camera is priced at about $5,000 Canadian. Buyers can also pay in Bitcoin. There are other drones in a similar price range that offer infrared capability, though they tend to be less rugged or compact.

Recently, Riderless Technologies teamed with Kaslo Search and Rescue to test the drone in a search for a dummy. The video is delightfully Canadian, from accents to diligently following safety best practices at the end. Watch below:

You Can Now Play Laser Tag With Your Smartphone

0
0

I can't find a single person who hates laser tag. I've asked a bunch of people, and they all get excited about it. Whether it's the fact that you get to point a fake gun at another human being with no remorse, or just an affinity for neon, laser tag is nearly universally regarded as awesome.

When I asked one coworker if there was any good laser tag around us, he said the closest place to play he knew was on Long Island. Others had no idea of venues near us in Manhattan, a place that undoubtedly has a laser tag course.

With Father.io, you can play laser tag anywhere. The park, around a neighborhood, indoors--the world is literally your game board.

The augmented reality smartphone game wants to bring laser tag into the 21st century. You look through your smartphone which uses the camera to show you the world overlaid with a floating arm with a gun, your health, ammo, and a map of players around you. There's a little widget with infrared blasters that you have to attach to the front of your phone, which Father.io calls an Inceptor. It also uses GPS to locate your position in the world.

Dave Gershgorn/ Popular Science

Father.io is an augmented reality game that turns your world into a laser tag match.

There are two ways to play: either a typical game of laser tag with two predetermined teams, or a story mode where you can find and interact with 12 million points of interest around the world.

The basis of the story mode is standard dystopia--an A.I. gets a virus and now cybernetic humanoid machines are trying to exterminate humankind. Visiting real-life buildings like banks and hospitals can help your team gain points and influence, but there's no evident shooting.

The Inceptor is the key to making the game work, and it may be Father.io's fatal flaw. It's both an infrared emitter that acts like your "gun", and a sensor that determines whether you've been shot. You connect it to your phone with Bluetooth, and it clips to your phone facing the direction you want to shoot. It fires about 50 feet, the upper limit for IR at this scale. The Inceptor is only needed to play standard laser tag games, and the story is mostly governed by GPS.

Dave Gershgorn/ Popular Science

Father.io's Inceptors are tiny infrared modules needed to play the game.

However, its existence is a gamble that people are willing to pay $20-$25 on external hardware to essentially play an enhanced smartphone game. There's a competitive aspect, and everyone loves laser tag, but this doesn't turn your smartphone into anything that feels like a gun (nor should it if you're running around in public), and part of the appeal of laser tag is the atmosphere.

Then again, it's easy to see kids running around a neighborhood with these IR blasters and iPhones, shooting each other with the satisfying animation on screen.

Father.io launched its IndieGogo campaign today, and plans to ship Inceptors by summer 2016.

Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images