Really Rocket Science

Wanna buy a robot fish? How about a pregnant robot? I don’t think the first one’s for sale, but the last one is gonna cost ya about $20,000. These were two of the robot-related items that landed in my news reader this morning; the former casued me to ask "why would someone build this?", while the latter had me asking "why not?"

Notes from the Technology Underground clued me in to the existance of MITs’ RoboTuna, and pointed me to  Pink Tentacles’ post about a robotic carp recently turned loose in a Japanese aquarium.  While it seems like a pretty cool thing to invent, and maybe it will help scientst learn more about the "phsyics of swimming" as Bill puts it at Notes, I’m kinda left wondering what the point of the whole exercise is, other than invention for inventions sake. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) 

The pregnant robot, found via The Raw Feed (which also links to the robot’s instruction manual), is probably stranger the RoboTuna, but the reasons for building it are easier for me to grasp. 

The full-sized, blond, pale mannequin is in demand because medicine is rapidly abandoning centuries-old training methods that use patients as guinea pigs, turning instead to high-tech simulations. It’s better to make a mistake on a $20,000 robot than a live patient.

… Noelle, from Miami-based Gaumard Scientific Co. Inc., is used in most of Kaiser’s 30 hospitals nationwide, and other hospitals are putting in orders. The Northwest Physicians Insurance Co. is sponsoring similar training programs in 22 hospitals in Oregon and Idaho, rolling out Noelle initially at five of them.

Other companies make lifelike mannequins to train paramedics in emergencies, but Noelle appears to be the only high-tech, pregnant model available.

Not a bad idea. A robot will probably not react to hearing an "Oops" during deliver in the same way an actual person would. I’ll say it again; people build the craziest things, and for reasons I don’t always get but that sometimes end up making sense.

As I’ve said before, I’m not really a DIY kinda guy. Putting together IKEA furniture and my kid’s toys are about as good as it gets. But I admire people who do roll up their sleeves and make stuff. So, every Friday I’m going to try and find a few cool DIY projects to feature here. 

Speaking of kids’ toys, by the way, I stumbled across a pretty impressive project involving a kid’s toy over at I Make Stuff, where the blogger interviewed a guy who usually makes "robots that kill other robots" but recently did something pretty cool with an Etch-a-Sketch.

I had one of these growing up, but could never make a decent picture with it. Little did I know that all I needed were some pulleys, foot pedals, and a laptop to control it all. But you still have to shake it to wipe out the picture. Check out the video podcast at I Make Stuff, recorded at Seattle Battle Bots IV, as well as  more pictures of the CNC controlled Etch-a-Sketch.

Oh, and if you’d prefer something that’s not only cool but useful as well, DIY Happy has a link to instructions on how to build your own Segway-like scooter. I had a scooter growing up too, but nothing like this. There’s video there as well, and details on the version 2 of the scooter includes an amusing picture of some people engaged in a game of Segway Polo.

The European Space Agency released their first images from the Venus Express mission, including our first view of the south pole.

As reported by the AP’s Melissa Eddy in The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.):

"We can see there is a swirl here that is similar to the one we know from the north pole," said Horst Uwe Keller, who leads the team operating the craft’s wide-angle camera – one of seven instruments aboard the Venus Express.  

Using infrared technology that allows the camera to peer though the clouds, scientists hope to be able to determine how the sulfuric acid that swathes the planet was formed, and pinpoint the cause of the high-speed winds that sends it swirling in massive clouds.

 

The ESA has some really cool images and 3-D videos on their site, too.

Not that I’ll need that service any time soon, but apparently Masten Enterprises are the people to call if you need to send something into space. For a fee, they’ll blast your stuff into the stratosphere. There’s even a video of how it works.

The prices seem pretty reasonable at first glance. 

350 gram CanSat – $99
1 kg Custom Payload – $250
2 kg Custom Payload – $500
5 kg Custom Payload – $1250

If you’re like me you’ll need a translation. 

0.77 lbs – $99
2.20 lbs – $250
4.40 lbs – $500
11.02 lbs – $1250

Then again maybe not. Seems like a lot of money to send something ranging from the size of a soda can to a well-fed cat into space. And how do you get your stuff back once it’s up there? Or do you just send up stuff that you no longer need? And if so, this is better than throwing it away or recycling it how? 

It sounds like a cool idea, but unless someone can explain to me just how useful it is, my advice to anyone who has something they no longer need and want to send into space is pretty simple: hold a garage sale.

Via Make.

Before I had a kid of my own, I used to shake my head at parents who used "tethers," that looked like old fashioned telephone cords, to keep their toddlers from toddling off in public. Three years into parenthood, I haven’t succumbed to the "urge to tether" yet, but I’m a little less judgmental about the whole thing.

I have enough trouble keeping up with my three-year-old now. I’m already wondering how I’m going to keep up with him when he’s a teenager with enough subway fare to go where he wants. The answer is simple than I thought: GPS. If it can help find lost pets, it ought to work with kids too. So, though my little one isn’t big enough for a cell phone yet, I was relieved to read on Mobile Wireless News that Sprint just rolled a GPS-driven kid locator service for parents.

Using the Global Positioning System, the service allows parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child’s phone, displaying the location on a road map.

Parents can also set alerts, automatically warning the parent if the child isn’t at a certain place, such as school or soccer practice, at a specific time.

The child’s phone also displays a text message, letting the child know they’ve been searched for and found.

Of course, there are other uses, like keeping track of elderly parents (as the article notes) or keeping tabs on a wandering spouse, which leads to charges that Big Brother is in the house.  I guess there’s two sides to every technology, and whether it’s used benevolently or not depends on whose pushing the buttons. But, as a parent, if kids can’t remember to be in the house when the streetlights come on, this seems like a pretty good way to remind them, when yelling down the street isn’t an option.

In an effort to create a truly zero-emissions vehicle, Nevada-based Hunt Aviation is exploring ways to use gravity as a powersource– for an airplane:

In order for the GravityPlane to become airborne, gas bags inside a pair of rigid, zeppelin-like structures are filled with helium from storage tanks inside the vehicle. This causes the aircraft to become lighter-than-air, and it rises from the ground. Compressed-air jets on the sides of the craft add further propulsion, pushing the vehicle skyward and decreasing the craft’s overall weight by releasing the stored air which acts as ballast. Once the craft reaches the altitude where the helium is no longer lighter than the surrounding air– theoretically as high as ten miles up– it is unable to climb any further. Some of the stored compressed air is then expanded into the dirigible areas, decreasing the buoyancy effect of the helium and starting the aircraft’s descent phase.

Hunt Aviation has a video explaining the concept of how the plane works. On one level it’s a simple idea– combining lighter-than-air technology to get the vehicle aloft and then gliding from extreme height to the destination. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and the video reveals the technical complexity that is often involved in implementing a "simple" idea.

Commenters at this blog were relatively unimpressed by the concept. What do you think? 

The Planetary Society and Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz pointed a giant telescope at the sky for the first time yesterday, beginning a systematic search for light signals from an alien civilization. Science A-Go-Go reports:

Housed beneath a retractable roof situated high atop a wooded ridge in Harvard, the telescope isn’t what most people would expect when they visualize a powerful optical telescope. But what may look like a mish-mash of metal bars and mirrors to the uninitiated represents a truly ambitious project that would make Planetary Society founders Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Louis Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, extremely proud….

[T]he powerful 72-inch SETI optical telescope pointed its giant mirror at the sky for the first time on April 11, and began a systematic search for light signals from an alien civilization.

The telescope has some impressive computer muscle behind it, with the developers claiming that it can process the equivalent of all books in print in a second. Its optical detectors are cutting edge as well, with a sensitivity that can detect a billionth-of-a-second flash of light. The formidable technology driving it should allow the new telescope to scan the entire northern hemisphere sky over the course of a year.

The Planetary Society says that the observatory represents the biggest SETI project it has ever sponsored… [D]espite many years of scanning the skies for radio signals, there has been little in the way of any definitive ET activity, hence the Society’s interest in the visible spectrum. "We have been listening for alien signals for decades," said Friedman, "it’s time we started to watch for signals as well."

It is now common among SETI advocates to argue that alien civilizations are just as likely to communicate with light signals as they are with radio waves, and not without good reason, as there are a number of advantages to using light as a form of interstellar communication. Unlike radio waves, a laser-like beam suffers little interference as it travels through space, not to mention the vast amount of data that can be transmitted using such a beam. Additionally, a laser’s unidirectional quality coupled with its brightness – capable of reaching intensities 10 times greater than the sun – make it easier for receivers to both see and track the beam to its source. And aside from the initial outlay, the optical SETI project is simpler, cheaper and will cost far less to maintain than its radio counterparts.

But one of the project’s major strengths is also one of its biggest weaknesses, because unless an extraterrestrial beam is pointed our way it is unlikely that it will be detected. But despite this limitation, the Society are happy that they are now covering yet another possible avenue of communication in their search for alien civilizations.

Here’s something I hadn’t thought about. (And I’m willing to bet few people have.) Ever consider how many things us earthbound folks take for granted, but would require some additional thought in space?

Sure. Astronauts have to eat and sleep in space, along with all the other things they normally do on earth, but without the benefit of gravity.  According to New Scientist Space, simple procedures like getting blood samples are a little more complicated when human health emergencies arise in space. 

Taking blood from arteries can be crucial in diagnosing problems in health emergencies – but doing so in the microgravity of space is tricky and potentially dangerous.

Now researchers have come up with a potential solution – a thumb-sized gadget that collects a sample from the earlobe.

Blood is easiest to collect from veins, but this blood is on its way back to the heart and has been de-oxygenated and altered in the body’s tissues. This means it is not as useful for monitoring serious health problems as blood coming fresh from the heart in arteries.

"But the technique to collect blood from the artery is complicated and needs a lot of training," says Thais Russomano, at the Microgravity Laboratory of PUCRS University in Brazil. "It can also be painful and blood clots or infection can result. So it can be a bit dangerous to perform that in space."

So Russomano and her colleagues created the device to collect samples of "arterialised blood" from the earlobe. This serves as an accurate substitute for arterial blood. The system clips onto a subject’s earlobe and contains both a small cutting blade and a collection chamber, to ensure no blood can spill and contaminate the spacecraft. The device is operated with a twist and is said to be virtually painless.

Kinda gives the term "space needle" a whole new meaning doesn’t it? 

Maybe you should take it with a grain of salt, as New Scientist Space also reports that they were duped some art students who claimed to have invented a "cell phone tooth" by implanting a vibrating radio receiver in a human tooth.  So were a a few others, including Time magazine and Wired, the latter of which just exposed the fraud. 

Then again, maybe no one should be embarrassed by this. After all one person’s idea of a joke is often turns into someone else’s idea of "crazy enough to work." Scoble recently posted about a guy who implanted an RFID chip into his hand and posted a video about it.  (It’s been done before, of course.) And if you believe The Register, Belgian scientists have embedded RFID chips into — wait for it — human teeth. 

So, hoax or no, the "cellphone tooth" isn’t all that far fetched. And if it comes to pass, those who were duped before can claim "we always new it was possible" and claim the cutting edge.

Ever hear that something is “physically impossible?”  It carries a lot more weight coming from physicists. How do you respond? Can the speed of light be exceeded?
 
According to an annual award presented by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the fanciful dreams of interstellar travel using a real “hyperdrive” might indeed be possible. Based largely on the work of the late Burkhard Heim, a theoretical physicist whose advanced theories still baffle most physicists today, we could be on the verge of a propulsion revolution:

 
This paper is the third one in a series of publications, describing a novel and revolutionary space propulsion technique, based on a unified field theory in a quantized, higher-dimensional space, developed by the late Burkhard Heim and the first author, termed Heim quantum theory (HQT) in the following. It is interesting to note that this theory shares a similar physical picture, namely a quantized spacetime, with the recently published loop quantum theory (LQT) by L. Smolin, A. Ashtektar, C. Rovelli, M. Bojowald et al. [11, 24-28]. LQT, if proved correct, would stand for a major revision of current physics, while HQT would cause a revolution in the technology of propulsion.

 
The paper, “Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory,” goes into considerable detail. What got physicists buzzing in January was a piece in New Scientist, overwhelming all who are familiar with Heim’s work with hundreds of questions and unprecedented attention.
 
It’s this type of game-changing new science that NASA was looking for. The story was picked up by The Scotsman, interviewing some who worked on the AIAA submission:
 

Prof Hauser, a physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, cautioned it was based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics. "It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.

Some people look at Heim’s work like it came from another planet. Maybe it did.

Propelling through multidimensional hyperspace might afford the possibility of exploring the closest earth-like exoplanet, discovered a couple of years ago, orbiting mu Arae, a sun-like star. The planet is 14 times the mass of earth and is a mere 50 light years away.

Punch the hyperdrive and we can get there in less than 11 years.

U.C. Berkeley astronomy professor Imke de Pater tells Red Orbit:

The newly discovered outer ring of Uranus is bright blue, for the same reason the Earth’s sky is blue — it is made up of tiny particles, astronomers said on Thursday.

It is "strikingly similar" to Saturn’s outer ring, which astronomers last month confirmed was probably generated by one of the planet’s moons, Enceladus.

Like Saturn’s ring, the Uranus ring also has a small moon in it, called Mab. But Mab is too small and too cold to be spewing a geyser of ice that contributes to the ring as Enceladus is now believed to be doing.

"The outer ring of Saturn is blue and has Enceladus right smack at its brightest spot, and Uranus is strikingly similar, with its blue ring right on top of Mab’s orbit," said Imke de Pater, a professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley, who helped lead the study.

"I think there is no chance that the blue ring is caused by geyser activity," added de Pater, whose report is published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Originally named after King George III of England, Uranus is the 4^th largest planet by mass. Found some animation and images of interest, courtesy of the SETI Institute.