Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.
Seven days, 26,000 lightyears, 637 languages, two groups of terrorised rats and one computer that never, ever crashes. We're light on intro, heavy of the numbers. You know the drill by now, this is Alt-week.
Google certainly has pockets deep enough to trick out self-driving cars with any kind of pricey gear, but researchers at the University of Oxford have begun testing a solution that aims to keep things affordable. Currently, the system leverages an array of low-profile stereo cameras and lasers that rings up at about £5,000 (approximately $7,750), but the next goal is to knock the price down to £500, and eventually to a cool £100 (roughly $150). "Really, we do need to solve the engineering challenges of not relying on expensive sensors, but relying on cheap sensors," Professor Paul Newman told the Telegraph. "But doing some really smart things with those cheap sensor feeds."
Rather than a vehicle that acts as a chauffeur at all times, Newman's vision for the modified Nissan Leaf, dubbed RobotCar, is for it to take control on select occasions. While drivers go about their commute, the system composes a 3D map of the car's environs and commits it to memory. When the auto identifies a familiar setting and feels confident about its ability to take the reigns, it could let the driver know it's ready to assume control. Right now, the automobile's been tested on private roads, but the team behind it is working with the UK's Department of Transportation to roll it onto public streets. Head past the jump for a glimpse of RobotCar in action.
We've long known that the Large Hadron Collider would need to take a break, but that doesn't take the edge off of the moment itself: as of Valentine's Day, the particle accelerator has conducted its last test for the next two years. The giant research ring will undergo sweeping repairs and upgrades that should should give it the superconducting connectors needed to hit the originally planned 14TeV of combined collision energy, versus the 8TeV it's been limited to almost since the beginning. CERN's machine arguably earned the downtime. After a rough start, it went on to produce rafts of collision data and healthy evidence of the elusive Higgs boson. If you're still down, think of the hiatus as doing us a favor -- it postpones any world-ending disasters until around 2015.
We've already had a meteorite shower to remind us that Earth is just a small part of a much, much larger universe. If that wasn't enough perspective for you, PBS is offering a follow-up through NOVA's newly streaming "Earth From Space" documentary. The two-hour show illustrates how our planet's individual climates and ecosystems are really part of one larger unit, with ripple effects that we didn't always anticipate until an abundance of earth observation satellites made them clear. You'll have to be an American to watch before the documentary, at least before it arrives in disc form on April 2nd. Every Earth citizen can still watch the trailer after the break.
If you fancy getting cosy with an asteroid that's got the destructive power of a nuclear arsenal, today's your lucky day. The wittily-named 2012 DA14 will sail past Australia at a distance of 17,510 miles early this afternoon, and while it won't be visible with the naked eye, NASA's got a few telescopes that'll do the job. It'll come into range at around 2:00pm ET, and is expected to be at its brightest about 25 minutes afterward. If your boss is sympathetic and you don't wanna miss a thing, head on past the break to catch the livestream, which started at 12:00pm ET. As for us? We're gonna spend the next few hours looking for Bruce Willis' phone number.
A meteorite shower has crash landed across Russia's Ural region, injuring over 250 900 people and damaging buildings in six cities. Residents in Chelyabinsk reported shaking ground, windows shattering and car alarms going off as the rocks fell to Earth. Officials in the country say that the shower began after a larger meteor disintegrated in the lower atmosphere, causing the fragments to wreak the (currently) non-lethal havoc. If you'd like to compare how wrong (or right) Michael Bay got it in Armageddon, head on past the break for some footage.
If you think it's hard putting the "Lego Discovery Fire Station" together, how about building and wiring a fully-functioning Mindstorm EV3 robot? To give you a leg up, the Danish toy outfit's joining forces with Autodesk to put together 3D interactive building instructions for the latest generation of Mindstorm mechs. The effects and 3D software firm will use its Inventor Publisher software to create interactive plans that run on iPads, Android devices and web browsers for five different 'bots. That way, you'll be able to actually put on your builder's hat and not just giggle enthusiastically at the final result.
Ready for a new radar system? The UK could be, if a new study is deemed a success. Thales, a French aerospace company which manufactures traditional radar systems, has received funding from the UK's Technology Strategy Board to study the feasibility of using TV signals to locate planes and choppers through a technology called "passive radar." According to the BBC, the system would monitor the timing of TV signals reflected from aircraft, which would enable equipment to display an exact location, while measuring the Doppler effect would provide speed and direction information.
Though it's not based on GPS, the new system would reportedly be more accurate and efficient than what's in use today, while also serving to free up spectrum that could be used for an upcoming 5G network. Unconvinced frequent fliers need not worry, however -- the country's existing radar infrastructure would remain intact throughout the test period, and air traffic control officials won't be switching to the new system unless it's sanctioned, which, considering the significance of such a move, could take some time.
Lag: it's the bane of video chats, VoIP calls and Call of Duty players trying to keep a streak going. The European Commission must be as irked by delays and drops as we are, as it's giving €3.6 million ($4.8 million) over three years to help three universities, Alcatel-Lucent Bell, Institut Mines-Telecom and Simula Research Labs defeat lag through the RITE (Reduce Internet Transport Latency) Project. The initiative hopes to find new ways to cut lag on both the network itself as well as endpoints, like servers. If the networking research alliance hits the jackpot, it hopes to make standards of any proposed changes. Without a specific direction, it's not clear that RITE will lead to instant-response connections. Should there be much success, however, we'll only have ourselves to blame for flaky gameplay.
Historic audio recordings aren't exactly easy to access and play back since they're often in obscure or aging formats and sit within giant repositories and private collections, but the Library of Congress is gearing up to help change that for researchers and the average joe. The outfit's freshly announced National Recording Preservation Plan is headlined by a recommendation to create a publicly accessible national directory of sound recordings that'll act as an "authoritative discography" with details regarding their production and where copies are housed. You'll still have to take a trip to a library to hear the recordings for the time being, but the Library of Congress is hoping to hammer out licensing agreements that would allow for online streaming. Developing new preservation standards and creating university-based degree programs for audio archiving are also among the 32 short- and long-term recommendations spelled out by the document. Click the second source link to peruse the paper yourself.
[Image credit: Ray Tsang, Flickr]
It's easy to find work on gene-based storage; finding genes that will do any of the heavy lifting is another matter. MIT believes it has a genetic circuit that will finally get to work, and then some. In using recombinase enzymes to alter DNA sequences serving as logic gates, researchers have developed a cellular circuit that not only mimics its silicon cousins, but has its own built-in memory. As the gate activation makes permanent changes to a given DNA sequence, any gate actions stay in memory for up to 90 generations -- and will hang around even if the cell's life is cut short. MIT sees its technique as having ultimate uses for areas where longer-term memory is important, such as environmental sensors, but could also see varying output values helping with digital-to-analog converters and other devices where there's a need for more precision. While there's no word on imminent plans for real-world use, the development raises the possibility of processors that could skip the traditional memory cache as they pass info down the family tree.
When Raytheon isn't busy building a railgun or tinkering with exoskeletons, it apparently spends some time coding software to help keep tabs on what folks are doing online. The Guardian got ahold of a video from 2010 that reveals a Raytheon employee demoing such software with the moniker Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or Riot for short. Instead of sifting through streams of tweets and Foursquare checkins to figure out a person's haunts and schedule, Riot collates data for users and displays it in everything from maps (saved in .kml files) and charts. Riot is even savvy enough to pull out location information saved in the exif data of photos posted online. One visualization feature in the program arranges a target's info in a spider web-like view and highlights connections between them and people they've communicated with online.
According to The Guardian, Raytheon shared the Riot tech with the US government and "industry" organizations in 2010 through a research and development initiative that aimed to build a national security system that could analyze "trillions of entities" online. Raytheon says it hasn't sold the software to any clients, but we think this is a fine reminder that your friends, family and secret admirers may not be the only ones interested in your tweets and check-ins. Head past the jump to catch a video of Riot in action.
While climbing mountains and helping disabled tourists are fine pursuits, Cyberdyne's HAL robot suit has found an even nobler occupation: helping patients rehabilitate from debilitating nerve and muscle illnesses. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten hospitals in Japan will start the first clinical trials of the lower-body suit version we saw last year, designed expressly for use by health care professionals. It works by detecting weak bio-electrical signals from patients' muscles which drive small motors and power units, and will be tested on 30 adults to see if it can help them re-learn to walk. Cyberdyne's wares will be trialed in European hospitals too -- which would be a lot of good service for a company with such an evil moniker.
P4 and P5 aren't the sorts of names that impart the manner of excitement space exploration companies and organizations are looking to inspire in the next generation of enthusiasts (nor the customers, philanthropists and tax payers destined to fund those explorations). The SETI Institute, a private non-profit, best known for its ties to the eponymous search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, is looking to add a little bit of audience participation to the act of naming Pluto's newly discovered moons, which sport those rather uninspired alphanumeric designations.
Beginning today, SETI will open up an online contest to name the moons, both of which were discovered via the Hubble Telescope fairly recently. As with the rest of the dwarf planet's moons, the organization's asking that the names be associated with Hades (the underworld), with ties to Greek or Roman mythology. SETI will pre-select candidates and is also allowing for write-in candidates (though it's retaining editorial discretion here, so, for better or worse, we're not likely to see a Baba Booey moon in the near future).
On a recent trip to the Bay Area, we had the opportunity to speak to Mark Showalter, the senior research scientist at the organization's Carl Sagan Center, an astronomer who played a key role in the discovery of the celestial bodies. You can check out that interview just after the break, before heading off to vote. Showalter is also co-hosting a Google+ Hangout with astronomer Hal Weaver today at 2PM ET.
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.
The lure of gold, the unpredictable weather and the power of invisibility. What do these three things have in common? We'd argue their almost universal appeal to the human race. Science makes headway in all three of these areas in this edition. On top of that there's a really, incredibly, massive prime number. This is alt-week.