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Robot

NASA Outlines Big Plans For Humanoid Robot

Dauna Coulter
NASA Science News
Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:22 UTC
R2 Pumps Iron
© NASA
R2 pumps iron
Astronauts on board the International Space Station will soon have a new roommate--and it's not human.

It's a humanoid.

In Nov. 2010, space shuttle Discovery will deliver Robonaut 2--"R2" for short--to the ISS, where it will become the first humanoid robot to travel and work in space.

Developed jointly by NASA and General Motors, R2 looks a bit like C-3PO of Star Wars fame but lacks the chatty robot's gift of gab. That's okay, because the humans on board need a worker that can wield more useful tools than a sharp tongue.

"Our goal is for R2 to perform routine maintenance tasks, freeing up the station crew for more important work," explains Ron Diftler, Robonaut Project Manager at Johnson Space Center. "Here's a robot that can see the objects it's going after, feel the environment, and adjust to it as needed. That's pretty human. It opens up endless possibilities!"

Comment: We truly live in the future! What other amazing projects can we expect from NASA and its buddies at the Military Industrial Complex?

To be fair, everything is likely to go just fine - that is, until the thing learns how to lie about its sensor readouts - or the health status of its visual system.

Not likely to happen? This one already learnt how to lie about another robot's rubber ducky!

Have a look at this fabulous PR job from General Motors:


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Eye 1

Blue light taps directly into your emotions


New Scientist
Sat, 30 Oct 2010 22:50 UTC
Image
© Elemental Studios/Alamy
Feeling blue
We're all happier on sunny days, but why? It seems that light taps directly into brain areas that process emotion - good and bad.

Although light is used to treat mood disorders, we don't understand how this works. While rods and cones in the eye process visible light, a third type of photoreceptor, particularly sensitive to blue light, mediates non-visual responses such as sleep cycles and alertness. So light may make us feel better because it helps regulate circadian rhythms.

Gilles Vandewalle at the University of Liège, Belgium, and colleagues wondered whether this pathway directly affects our emotional state too. To find out, they scanned the brains of volunteers exposed to green or blue light while a neutral or angry voice recited meaningless words. As expected, brain areas responsible for processing emotion responded more strongly to the angry voice, but this effect was amplified by blue light (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: link).
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Telescope

Amazing Haloes


Space Weather
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:33 UTC
On Oct. 30th in Kittilä, Finland, photographer Sauli Koski witnessed a brief but unforgettable display when the rising sun shone through a morning cloud of wintery ice crystals. Fortunately he had his camera:

Image
© Sauli Koski
"These were the best ice haloes I have ever seen," says Koski. "They were there for only about 10 minutes and then gone. What a delight!"

"It was a gem of a halo display," agrees atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "Koski saw at least 13 different arcs. Some, including two types of Parry arc, are rare. Three more arcs, the helic, Parry supralateral, and Moilanen are exceedingly rare. See the key for the arc identities. With winter fast approaching, now is the time for outstanding halos."
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Saturn

Giant Waves Solve Saturn Ring Mystery

Lisa Grossman
Wired.com
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:57 UTC
Saturn's Rings
© NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Saturn's largest ring appears to behave like a mini spiral galaxy. NASA's Cassini spacecraft caught enormous waves sloshing back and forth across Saturn's B ring, similar to waves believed to give galaxies their spiral shapes.

"This is a major result," said Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute. "Saturn's rings are tiny tiny tiny compared to a galaxy, but we see the same physics."

The new observations also show two warped regions, including a tall arc of spiky peaks that rise almost two miles above the ring plane. These perturbations may have been sculpted by small moons that migrated across the ring disk, a process believed to be important in shaping planetary systems.

Saturn's most massive ring, the B ring, has baffled astronomers since the Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1980 and 1981. Those observations showed the B ring was sculpted into a flattened football shape with a sharp outer edge by the moon Mimas. But even in the Voyager images, it was clear the B ring was too complex and chaotic to be shaped by Mimas alone.
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Telescope

Mars volcanic deposit tells of warm and wet environment

Sarah Kidwell
Brown University
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:31 UTC
Image
© NASA, Viking Project, US Geological Survey.
Roughly 3.5 billion years ago, the first epoch on Mars ended. The climate on the red planet then shifted dramatically from a relatively warm, wet period to one that was arid and cold. Yet there was at least one outpost that scientists think bucked the trend.

A team led by planetary geologists at Brown University has discovered mounds of a mineral deposited on a volcanic cone less than 3.5 billion years ago that speak of a warm and wet past and may preserve evidence of one of the most recent habitable microenvironments on Mars.
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Telescope

Dangerous Beauty


spaceweather.com
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:16 UTC
Image
© Henry Mendt
As November begins, Venus is passing almost directly between Earth and the sun, an event astronomers call "inferior conjunction." The view through a telescope is both beautiful and dangerous. Henry Mendt of Maracaibo, Venezuela, took this daylight picture of Venus only 7o from the blinding sun on Oct. 31st.
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Magnify

Ancient tombs discovered on school construction site

Kurt Sansone
The Times of Malta
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:13 UTC
Image
© Jason Borg
The Punic tombs discovered during construction work at the seminary in Tal-Virtù.
A group of ancient tombs dating back to the Punic period were discovered during excavation works for the construction of a new primary school at the Archbishop's Seminary in Tal-Virtù, The Times has learned.

According to Nathaniel Cutajar from the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, the discovery is of "great scientific interest" and "confirms the archaeological importance" of the Tal-Virtù area in Rabat.

The superintendence is responsible for all scientific investigation of cultural assets, including archaeological excavations. An investigation of the discovery is under way by its team of archaeologists.
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Info

Dazzling, rare molecule common in space

Tom Beal
Arizona Daily Star
Mon, 01 Nov 2010 02:34 UTC
Donald Huffman
© Dean Knuth/Arizona Daily Star
Retired UA professor Donald Huffman is back in the lab doing research. Buckyballs were identified on Earth in 1985.
The buckyball, the crystalline form of carbon described as the world's most beautiful molecule, is rare on Earth, but apparently quite common in space.

Astronomers have recently discovered scads of them - enough floating around one single star, they say, to create three planets the size of Mercury.

Retired UA Regents Professor Donald Huffman knew they were there.

It was, in fact, the puzzling signals he and other physicists were getting from space that propelled them to look for buckyballs in laboratories on Earth.

They were found in 1985 by Sir Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley - a discovery that won the team a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.

Five years after that discovery at Rice University in Texas, Huffman and a German colleague, Wolfgang Krätschmer, figured out how to make buckyballs in a process so simple that it was quickly duplicated in high school chemistry labs:

Zap some graphite rods with electricity in a helium-filled atmosphere and presto - buckyballs.

The Rice team got the Nobel Prize and shortly after that a first patent on the process for making them.
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USA

U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents

Andrew Pollack
The New York Times
Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:28 UTC
dna genetics
© Unknown
Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

"We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA," the brief said.

It is not clear if the position in the legal brief, which appears to have been the result of discussions among various government agencies, will be put into effect by the Patent Office.
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Magic Wand

Scientists seek ancient cosmic 'strings'


UPI
Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:25 UTC
U.S. scientists say they may have evidence of the strangest structures believed to exist in the universe: ancient cosmic strings from the time of the Big Bang.

First predicted by astrophysicists in the 1970s, cosmic strings are believed to be enormous cosmic fault lines that formed billions of years ago just moments after the Big Bang when the universe was still an amorphous mass of hot matter, Inside Science New Service reported.

As different regions of the expanding universe cooled in different ways and at different rates, defects formed between the regions, like cracks in the ice on a frozen pond. These defects, scientists believe, were the cosmic strings.
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