Science & TechnologyS


Robot

Robotic insect RoboBees make first controlled flight

Caroline Perry
Harvard Science
Thu, 02 May 2013 08:21 UTC
RoboBees
© Harvard ScienceInspired by the biology of a fly, RoboBees with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second.
In culmination of a decade's work, RoboBees achieve vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering

Last summer, in a Harvard robotics laboratory, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paper clip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. - subject line: "Flight of the RoboBee."

"I was so excited, I couldn't sleep," recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

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Airplane

UN human rights council calls for end to use of drones


Press TV
Fri, 03 May 2013 05:03 UTC
drone
© Press TVUS killer drone
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has called for a global freeze on the use of drones as the US killer drone strikes continue to take innocent lives in several countries.

The UNHRC report published on May 2 seeks a moratorium on the "testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use" of fully or semi-autonomous weapons including drones and robots until an international forum can establish rules for their use. The use of drones violates international law, the report stated.

Christof Heyns, a South African professor of human rights law and author of the report, said the United States, the UK and the Israeli regime in particular have developed killer robots dubbed Lethal Autonomous Robotics (LAR) that can attack targets without any human input.
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Comet 2

A new view of Comet ISON

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 02 May 2013 23:31 UTC
Comet Ison
© Ernesto Guido & Nick Howes, Remanzacco ObservatoryView of Comet ISON on May 1, 2013.
Here's a new image of Comet C/2012 S1 ISON, as seen on May 1, 2013 by Ernesto Guido and Nick Howes of the Remanzacco Observatory. They used the 2 meter La Palma Telescope. Their initial approximation of the tail length is around 28 arcseconds, which Howes told Universe Today is bigger than some recent reports from smaller scopes.

As of May 2, Comet ISON was approximately 3.885 AU from the Sun, which is about 581 million kilometers (361 million miles) distant from the Sun. ISON will makes its close approach to the Sun when it passes within 1.2 million km (730,000 miles) of the Sun on November 28, 2013.
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Info

The hunt for elusive gravity waves heats up

Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com
Thu, 02 May 2013 16:57 UTC
Gravity Waves_1
© Henze/NASA3D visualization of gravitational waves produced by two orbiting black holes.
In the next five years or so, scientists are poised to discover proof that space and time can wrinkle in the form of gravitational waves. These waves were predicted almost 100 years ago by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, but have yet to be seen.

That could change soon when the latest, most sensitive experiments hunting gravitational waves come online. "There's so much activity and excitement in the field right now," said Mansi M. Kasliwal, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Calif. "The momentum is really building."

Kasliwal is the author of a paper published online today (May 2) in the journal Science describing the burgeoning field of gravitational wave studies.

According to general relativity, massive objects warp space and time around them, like a bowling ball dropped onto a sheet of rubber, causing passing objects, and even light, to travel along curved paths.

When two extremely dense objects, such as neutron stars (stars so dense the protons and electrons in their atoms collapse to form neutrons) or black holes, orbit each other in binary pairs, their interactions should create ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves. The most powerful waves would arise when two neutron stars or black holes merge together.
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Info

Earliest great ape had posture like humans, fossils suggest


LiveScience
Thu, 02 May 2013 13:53 UTC
Ape Fossil
© Moya Sola Et Al 2004 ScienceAn examination of the pelvis of the oldest known great ape fossil suggests the creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes.
The oldest known hip from a great ape is now shedding light on the evolution of hominids, revealing the ancient creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes, researchers say.

Scientists discovered the fossil skeleton of an ape near Barcelona in Catalonia in northeastern Spain in 2002, when a bulldozer was clearing the land for digging. They named it Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, or the ape from near the village of Els Hostalets de Pierola in Catalonia.

The researchers estimate the ape lived about 11.9 million years ago. Analysis of its skeleton and teeth suggest it was male, weighed about 77 lbs. (35 kilograms) and dined on fruit.
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Fireball 5

Possible meteorite fragments from 1908 Tunguska explosion found

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 02 May 2013 12:41 UTC
Tunguska Fragments
© Universe TodayImage of potential meteorite fragments from the Tunguska event, from a paper by Andrei E. Zlobin, ‘Discovery of probably Tunguska meteorites
at the bottom of Khushmo river’s shoal.’
The 1908 explosion over the Tunguska region in Siberia has always been an enigma. While the leading theories of what caused the mid-air explosion are that an asteroid or comet shattered in an airburst event, no reliable trace of such a body has ever been found. But a newly published paper reveals three different potential meteorite fragments found in the sandbars in a body of water in the area, the Khushmo River. While the fragments have all the earmarks of being meteorites from the event - which could potentially solve the 100-year old mystery - the only oddity is that the researcher actually found the fragments 25 years ago, and only recently has published his findings.

Like the recent Chelyabinsk airburst event, the Tunguska event likely also produced a shower of fragments from the exploding parent body, scientists have thought. But no convincing evidence has ever been found from the June 30, 1908 explosion that occurred over the Tunguska region. The explosion flattened trees in a 2,000 square kilometer area. Luckily, that region was largely uninhabited, but reportedly one person was killed and there were very few people that reported the explosion. Forensic-like research has determined the blast was 1,000 times more powerful than a nuclear bomb explosion, and it registered 5 on the Richter scale.
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Light Saber

Did Asteroid Impacts Spark Life's 'Left-Handed' Molecules?

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00 UTC
Image
© National Astronomical Observatory of JapanLeft-handed amino acids are favored in Earth lifeforms over right-handed molecules.
The mysterious bias of life on Earth toward molecules that skew one way and not the other could be due to how light shines in star- and planet-forming clouds, researchers say.

If correct, these findings suggest the molecules of life on Earth may initially have come from elsewhere in the cosmos, scientists added.

The organic molecules that form the basis of life on Earth are often chiral, meaning they come in two forms that are mirror images, much as right and left hands appear identical but are reversed versions of each other.

Strangely, the amino acids that make up proteins on Earth are virtually all "left-handed," even though it should be as easy to make the right-handed kind. Solving the mystery of why life came to prefer one kind of handedness over the other could shed light on the origins of life, scientists say.
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Info

Crazy World: Antimatter might just fall up

Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience
Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00 UTC
Antimatter
© Chukman SoDo atoms of antihydrogen weigh the same as atoms of ordinary hydrogen? Could they even have "negative" weight? To find out, physicists "weighed" antimatter to understand how it interacts with gravity.
When it comes to antimatter, what goes up doesn't necessarily come down. In a new study, physicists weighed antimatter in an effort to determine how this strange cousin of matter interacts with gravity.

Ordinary matter atoms fall down due to the pull of gravity, but the same might not be true of antimatter, which has the same mass as matter, but opposite charge and spin. Scientists wondered whether antimatter atoms would instead fall up when pulled by gravity, and whether such a thing as antigravity exists.

"In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upward, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works," Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Fajans and his colleagues at the Alpha experiment at Switzerland's CERN physics lab made the first experimental measurements of the gravitational mass of antihydrogen - the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, made of an antiproton and a positron (the antimatter counterpart to an electron).

Conducting experiments on antimatter atoms is difficult, because when matter and antimatter meet, the two annihilate. Thus, any experimental apparatus that came into contact with the material being studied would be instantly destroyed. Scientists get around this predicament by building traps for antimatter made with magnets, which force antimatter particles to stay in a certain area. As soon as the magnets are turned off, the antimatter falls onto the walls of the trap and eviscerates.

But which direction does it fall toward?
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Saturn

Watch a continent-sized hurricane whip around Saturn's north pole

Adam Mann
Associated Press
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:02 UTC
Scientists have gotten their first close-up view of the enormous hurricane that has been churning for years at the North Pole of our solar system's ringed beauty Saturn.

The whirlwind sits at the center of a large and mysterious structure known as Saturn's hexagon, a polygon-shaped stream whose each side is larger than the entire Earth. Astronomers used NASA's Cassini spacecraft to fly right over the hexagon and captured the gigantic hurricane within. The eye of the system alone is 2,000 kilometers across, about half the length of Australia or - as Wolfram Alpha kindly points out - a bit bigger than the distance the Proclaimers would walk, just to be the man that walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door.

Though 20 times larger than an average Terran twister, the hurricane is very similar to the ones we see on Earth. Both have central eyes with low-hanging clouds surrounded by a wall of higher clouds spiraling around. Saturn's hurricane winds are four times stronger than those on Earth, whipping by at 530 kmph (330 mph). Cyclones on our planet also tend to move around but Saturn's polar storm has nowhere to go, remaining stuck in place for years.

Scientists were unable to see much of the storm until now because Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, when the planet's Northern Hemisphere was in its winter darkness. Spring arrived in 2009 and Cassini's planners had to choreograph the gravitational swings needed to get the spacecraft to fly by the maelstrom and get a good close-up view years in advance. A couple of mind-blowing false color images of the storm are below.
Image

Scientists have color coded the clouds in Saturn's North Pole hurricane. Red clouds are lower while green clouds are higher in the atmosphere.

Image
A false-color wide view of the North Pole hurricane and surrounding hexagon.
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Fish

Fish use 'sign language' to help out hunting buddies

Douglas Main
LiveScience
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:49 UTC
Coral Grouper
© Klaus Jost (via University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web) The Red Sea roving coralgrouper (Plectropomus pessuliferus marisburi), which can use "sign language" to hunt.
Two types of fish have been shown to use gestures, or sign language, to help one another hunt. This is the first time these types of gestures have been found to occur in animals other than primates and ravens.

Both types of fish, grouper and coral trout, are known for hunting cooperatively with other kinds of animals. Whereas the grouper hunts with giant moray eels and a fish called the Napoleon wrasse, coral trout partner up with octopuses to snag prey. A study published last week in the journal Nature Communications found that the fish are able to "point" their heads toward prey, to help out their hunting buddies.

After observing the fish in the wild for many hours, the researchers found that when a prey fish escaped its hunting party, a grouper occasionally moved over the place where the fugitive prey was hiding. The grouper would then rotate its body so that its head faced downward, and it would shake its head back and forth in the direction of the potential meal, in what researchers call a "headstand" signal. Coral trout make a similar sign, the researchers found.
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