Month: July 2014

TOKYO (TIP): A team of Japanese animators and engineers unveiled plans to build a moving 18-metre tall Gundam robot, in a nod to millions of science fiction fans. The “Mobile Suit Gundam” anime series first aired in Japan in 1979, and spin-offs featuring robots locked in intergalactic battles have won legions of enthusiastic fans in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. In 2009, the 30th anniversary of the show saw an 18-metre-tall Gundam statue erected in a Tokyo park.

“When I created Gundam 35 years ago, I used my imagination freely because it wasn’t real,” Yoshiyuki Tomino told reporters in Tokyo. “That is what creativity is for – when you dream of something. Four decades later, Gundam is growing into something new.” Now, the plan is to give a new giant Gundam some moves, and organizers are calling on the public for ideas about how to make it happen. Plausible suggestions would be used in constructing the robot by 2019, the series’ 40th anniversary and a year before Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games.

NEW DELHI (TIP): Voyager 1, the spacecraft that is now over 19 billion kilometers from the Earth, has reported a sudden burst of tinkling bells from around it. Travelling in a region where no manmade spacecraft has ever been before, the instruments aboard Voyager 1 registered this ‘singing’ in the otherwise silent space around it and informed mission control back at Earth. NASA scientists have figured out that this is what happened: the Sun goes through periods of increased activity, where it explosively ejects material from its surface, flinging it outward.

These events, called coronal mass ejections, generate shock, or pressure, waves. Three such waves have reached Voyager 1 since it entered interstellar space in 2012. “Normally, interstellar space is like a quiet lake,” said Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, the mission’s project scientist since 1972. “But when our sun has a burst, it sends a shock wave outward that reaches Voyager about a year later. The wave causes the plasma surrounding the spacecraft to sing.”

Data from this newest tsunami wave generated by our sun confirm that Voyager is in interstellar space – a region between the stars filled with a thin soup of charged particles, also known as plasma. The mission has not left the solar system – it has yet to reach a final halo of comets surrounding our sun – but it broke through the wind-blown bubble, or heliosphere, encasing our sun. Cosmic rays are energetic charged particles that come from nearby stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The sun’s shock waves push these particles around like buoys in a tsunami. Data from the cosmic ray instrument tell researchers that a shock wave from the sun has hit. Meanwhile, another instrument on Voyager registers the shock waves, too. The plasma wave instrument can detect oscillations of the plasma electrons. “The tsunami wave rings the plasma like a bell,” said Stone. “While the plasma wave instrument lets us measure the frequency of this ringing, the cosmic ray instrument reveals what struck the bell – the shock wave from the sun.” Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977.

Both spacecraft flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also flew by Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2, launched before Voyager 1, is the longest continuously operated spacecraft and is expected to enter interstellar space in a few years.

WASHINGTON (TIP): In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have identified the fossilised remains of an extinct giant bird that could be the world’s biggest such. Named “Pelagornis sandersi,” the bird lived 25 to 28 million years ago after the dinosaurs were wiped out but long before the first humans arrived. The creature was an extremely efficient glider, with long slender wings that helped it stay aloft despite its enormous size. “The specimen was so big they had to dig it out with a backhoe.

The upper wing bone alone was longer than my arm,” said author Dan Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina. The new fossil was first unearthed in 1983 near Charleston, South Carolina, when construction workers began excavations for a new terminal at the Charleston International Airport. With an estimated 20-24-foot wingspan, the creature surpassed size estimates based on wing bones from the previous record holder – a long-extinct bird named “Argentavis magnificens”.

It was twice as big as the Royal Albatross – the largest flying bird today. P sandersi was probably too big to take off simply by flapping its wings and launching itself into the air from a standstill. It may have gotten off the ground by running downhill into a headwind or taking advantage of air gusts to get aloft, much like a hang glider. Once it was airborne, the bird’s long, slender wings made it an incredibly efficient glider. “By riding on air currents that rise up from the ocean’s surface, P sandersi was able to soar for miles over the open ocean without flapping its wings, occasionally swooping down to the water to feed on soft-bodied prey like squid and eels,” researchers noted

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers have developed new molten air rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles which have a significantly higher storage capacity than lithium batteries. While electric vehicles offer many advantages, at least one barrier stands in the way: “range anxiety.” Researchers at George Washington University, led by Stuart Licht, have developed what they’re calling “molten air battery.”

These new rechargeable batteries, which use molten electrolytes, oxygen from air, and special “multiple electron” storage electrodes, have the highest intrinsic electric energy storage capacities of any other batteries to date. Their energy density, durability and cost effectiveness give them the potential to replace conventional electric car batteries. Molten air batteries made with iron, carbon or vanadium boride have 0 to 50 times the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery.

NEW YORK (TIP): Imagine walking robots powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical pulses that can give them an unprecedented command over their function. Engineers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a class of “bio-bots” that are powered by a strip of skeletal muscle cells that can be triggered by an electric pulse.

“We are trying to integrate the principles of engineering with biology in a way that can be used to design and develop biological machines and systems for environmental and medical applications,” explained Rashid Bashir, head of bioengineering at University of Illinois.

Skeletal muscles cells are very attractive because you can pace them using external signals, Bashir added. The design is inspired by the muscle-tendon-bone complex found in nature. There is a backbone of 3D printed hydrogel, strong enough to give the bio-bot structure but flexible enough to bend like a joint. Two posts serve to anchor a strip of muscle to the backbone, like tendons attach muscle to bone, but the posts also act as feet for the bio-bot.

A bot’s speed can be controlled by adjusting the frequency of the electric pulses. A higher frequency causes the muscle to contract faster, thus speeding up the bio-bot’s progress. “The ‘bio-bots’ could eventually evolve into a generation of biological machines that could aid in drug delivery, surgical robotics, ‘smart’ implants, or mobile environmental analyzers, among countless other applications,” said Caroline Cvetkovic, a graduate student and co-first author of the paper. The group published its work in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

LONDON (TIP): Nasa’s experimental flying saucer, which was being used to test technologies for future Mars landings, hurtled down and crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Kauai, Hawaii, after its parachute failed to deploy. Nasa called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator’s (LDSD) maiden flight successful but cheers rapidly died down as the gigantic chute designed to slow its fall emerged tangled.

Nasa officials declared it “a good test of technology” that will one day be used to deliver heavy spacecraft and eventually astronauts to Mars. “What we just saw was a really good test,” said Nasa engineer Dan Coatta, who is with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This test was the first of three planned for the LDSD project developed to evaluate new landing technologies for future Mars missions. While this initial test was designed to determine the flying ability of the vehicle, it also deployed two new landing technologies. Those landing technologies will be officially tested in the next two flights involving clones of the saucer-shaped vehicle. Future robotic missions to Mars and eventual human exploration of the Red Planet will require that massive payloads bigger than the Curiosity rover to be delivered to the surface.

Nasa, therefore, is developing new large, sturdy, and lightweight systems to deliver next-generation rovers and landers to Mars. These new technologies would be able to slow larger and heavier landers from the supersonic speeds at Mars atmospheric entry to subsonic ground-approach necessary for a safe landing.The LDSD design borrows from the technique used by the Hawaiian pufferfish-the ‘O’opu Hue — to increase its size without adding mass by rapid inflation.

These systems called low density supersonic decelerators aim to solve the complicated problem of slowing Martian entry vehicles down enough to safely deliver large payloads to the Martian surface without bringing along massive amounts of extra rocket propellant or carrying a large and heavy atmospheric entry shield. Landing on Mars is not like landing on Earth which has a dense atmosphere or on the moon which has no atmosphere.

Mars is somewhere in-between with too much atmosphere to allow rockets alone to land heavy vehicles as is done on the moon but too little atmosphere to land vehicles from space purely with friction and parachutes as is done on Earth. Parachutes for Mars surface-bound craft must be enormous because the atmosphere is too thin to fill a parachute like those used on Earth.

Even with large parachutes, powerful retro rockets or rugged airbags have been required to complete the landing. These are some of the factors that make delivering large payloads to the surface of Mars extremely difficult.During Saturday’s trial, after taking off from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, the balloon boosted the LDSD over the Pacific. Its rocket motor then ignited, carrying it to a height of 55km. After two and a half hours of ascent, when the balloon reached a height of 120,000 feet, it detached the saucer, which fired its engine and rose to 180,000ft, traveling at 3.8 times the speed of sound.

MUMBAI (TIP): In the first-ever mission of its kind which will make 24 measurements each second, Nasa on July 1 launched a flight dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the leading human-produced gas driving changes in the earth’s climate. It will allow scientists to make daily detailed measurements of carbon dioxide at a global level amounting to nearly 100,000 measurements of the gas every day.

To carry out the scientific study, the spacecraft will be positioned 438 miles above earth and the first science observations are expected to begin in 45 days after launch. As the Delta 11 rocket carrying the spacecraft designated as OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) lifted off at 3.30 p.m. (IST) at the Vandenburg Air Base in California, the launch commentator at the mission control centre declared: “OCO-2 will track a greenhouse gas driving changes in the earth’s climate.”

There was just a 30-second launch opportunity on Tuesday afternoon. Nasa explained that the timing had to be precise because OCO-2 will join a constellation of five other international earth observing satellites functioning close to each other and make simultaneous observations of the earth. Had OCO’s launch been too early or late it would have missed the right track. According to Nasa, the mission will produce the most detailed picture to date of natural sources of carbon dioxide as well as what is known as their “sinks” -places on earth’s surface where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere.

The observatory will study how these sources and “sinks” are distributed around the globe and how they change over time. The flight assumes significance because according to Nasa humans release nearly 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. The amount, however, varies from nation to nation, but it averages about 5.5 tonnes per person, according to Nasa. It has pointed out that each time a person gets into a car and when gasoline is burnt, it releases carbon dioxide and other compounds into the air disturbing the earth’s climate.

LONDON (TIP): British researchers have developed a James Bond-style camera that can peer around corners to see people or objects. The technology could someday allow troops to obtain information without breaking cover or be fitted on cars to give advance warnings of obstacles.

The prototype uses short high-intensity bursts of laser light to illuminate a target object and then collects the tiny fraction of that light that is scattered back on to a detector on the camera. The geometry of the setup is similar to that in a conventional periscope, in which light from the target object turns a corner by bouncing off a reflecting surface. In this case, however, the reflecting surface is simply a wall or the floor and, unlike a mirror, which reflects light in clean, straight lines, the light is scattered in every direction.

Normally this scattering of light would make it impossible to reconstruct the shape and position of the target object, ‘The Times’ reported. The new camera overcomes this by recording the incoming light at more than 15 billion frames per second — quickly enough to detect tiny differences in the times at which individual photons arrive back at the camera. To build a picture, the camera fires the laser 4,000 times each second, at many different angles.

A computer algorithm is then used to reconstruct the shape and position of hidden objects around the corner. The prototype will soon be tested in the laboratory to see whether it can be used to distinguish basic shapes, such as cut-out letters. “You could probably read a newspaper headline. It’s very Superman, very James Bond,” said Jonathan Leach, a member of the research team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.