Group items tagged

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought. That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

That age-old question, "where did life on Earth start?" now has a new answer. If the life between the mica sheets hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book.

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

Anthony Daniels, the actor who brought the droid C-3PO to life in the Star Wars movies, visited St. Louis Thursday for a concert to celebrate the music of the popular Sci-Fi series. Joining the 86-piece orchestra will be several movie props including C-3PO's costume which Daniels said was "ouch" every time. He used tin-snips to make modifications during filming because only he knew exactly where all the pokes, pinches and jabs were.

The consumer handheld market is growing by leaps and bounds. With more processing power and increased support for more applications, portable products are cross-pollinating with traditional computing systems even as the product life cycle has decreased considerably in this market segment. As a result, especially in this era of economic slowdown, it is imperative that new products meet the time-to-market window to gain maximum acceptance. A decrease in product life cycles requires a reduced development cycle and an increased emphasis on reusability and reprogrammability. The emerging handheld market is also seeing interesting trends in which each individual device in a family has lower volumes but there is more customization across the series of devices, effectively upping the total unit volumes. The key challenge then becomes how to develop a system that is widely reusable and also customizable. These requirements have led designers increasingly to turn to the FPGA for handheld-product development. The FPGA has become more powerful and feature-rich, while gate counts, area and frequency have increased. FPGA development and turnaround cycles are considerably shorter than those of custom ASICs, and the added advantage of reprogrammability can make the FPGA a more compelling solution for handheld embedded systems.

Now that Harry's the prime suspect in the killings he was charged to solve even his best friend doesn't trust him. And it could cost Lt. Murphy her life! Can Harry reach her in time?The Dresden Files: Storm Front rolls on with its hallmark mix of mystery and adventure that made Jim Butcher's novels a smash hit!

To paraphrase helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky: If you're in trouble, an airplane can fly over and drop flowers, but a helicopter can save your life. It can deftly maneuver through tight spots and alight in remote places. It can float next to a mountain to search for the lost. And the best sound a wounded soldier can hear is that telltale rotor beat, just minutes before being evacuated to a hospital. When roads are impassable, bridges have been destroyed, and the electricity has been knocked out, helicopters can still deliver supplies and rescue people.

Robot motion planning has traditionally been used to avoid collisions when moving a robot arm. Avoiding collisions is important, but many other desirable criteria are often ignored. For example, motions that minimize energy will let the robot extend its battery life. Smoother trajectories may cause less wear on motors and can be more aesthetically appealing. There may be even more useful criteria, like keeping a glass of water upright when moving it around. This summer, Mrinal Kalakrishnan from the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at USC worked on a new motion planner called STOMP, which stands for "Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Motion Planning". This planner can plan paths for high-dimensional robotic systems that are collision-free, smooth, and can simultaneously satisfy task constraints, minimize energy consumption, or optimize other arbitrary criteria. STOMP is derived from gradient-free optimization and path integral reinforcement learning techniques (Policy Improvement with Path Integrals, Theodorou et al, 2010).

A new development in virtual cameras at the University of Abertay Dundee is developing the pioneering work of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar using a Nintendo Wii-like motion controller – all for less than £100.Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time, used several completely new filming techniques to bring to life its ultra-realistic 3D action. Now computer games researchers have found a way of taking those techniques further using home computers and motion controllers.James Cameron invented a new way of filming called Simul-cam, where the image recorded is processed in real-time before it reaches the director’s monitor screen. This allows actors in motion-capture suits to be instantly seen as the blue Na’vi characters, without days spent creating computer-generated images.

The MiniZeni series from Sharp radiates high efficiency, deliver high color rendering index (CRI) values of up to 87 and boast a long service life whilst measuring only 15x12x1.6mm. The six new models of the MiniZeni series are characterised by four special features: they have compact outer dimensions and are extremely flat, economical and bright.

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful three-dimensional protein). They could watch the action unfold, so to speak, in a test tube but weren’t sure how close the pace conformed to real life. A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, however, have developed a system to move the observation out of in vitro and into in vivo.

At three separate industry events last week, engineers said they are gearing up to deliver in 2011 chips that can handle serial data streams running at 25 Gbits/second to drive next-generation 100 and 400 Gbit/second networks. But they say it's still a mystery how—or if—they can deliver follow-on components for the terabit networks today's Internet data centers are already demanding. The kinds of jobs required to run today's Web 2.0 services such as Google and Facebook can completely overwhelm current 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links in the warehouse-sized data centers those companies use. Such data centers could use hundreds of 100 Gbit/s Ethernet links today, although standards for such networks are still being completed.

Everyone knows holograms from their everyday life, for instance the ones applied to credit cards as security indicators. Unlike a photography of an object which only records the amplitude of the light wave coming from the object, the hologram also includes local information about the light wave's phase. In appropriate lighting, the initial wave front is reconstructed in proper phase and the spectator has a three dimensional sensation of the object. But it is not this characteristic of holography that is central when it comes to the imaging of small structures, but the fact that for the recording of a hologram no lenses are required at all. In order to conduct research on nanometer scaled objects, light of an equally small wave length is needed (soft X-rays). The only lenses working in this wave spectrum (so-called Fresnel zone plates) are very sophisticated in design and still yield a quality of imaging one scale inferior then lenses for visible light. The modus operandi of recording holograms without the use of lenses is to superimpose the light wave having radiated the object at the time of recording with a reference wave having a known and stable (coherent) phase.

RobotShop, the World's Leading Source for Personal and Professional Robot Technology. Here you will find personal robots, professional robots, robot toys, robot kits and robot parts for building your own robots. If you are looking for robot pet care, robot floor cleaners, robot vacuums, robot pool cleaners or robot mowers, to do your household chores, this is the site for you. We also bring robots back to life™ via our Robot Repair Center.

Space robotics may appear to be a purely scientific endeavor -- brave little rovers exploring planets in search of life -- but it turns out there's a multi-million dollar market in space just waiting for the right kind of robot. This market is satellite servicing. Geostationary communication satellites fire small thrusters to stay in orbit. When they run out of fuel (typically helium or hydrazine), or when a battery or gyroscope fails, these expensive satellites often have to be abandoned, becoming just another piece of space junk, even though their mechanical systems and electronics work fine.

LED luminaires require precise power and heat management because LEDs convert most of the electrical energy they receive into heat rather than light. Without adequate thermal management, this heat can degrade the LED's life span and affect color output. Also, LEDs can fail short because they are silicon devices, so they may require fail-safe backup in the form of overcurrent protection. Resettable PPTC (polymeric-positive-temperature-coefficient) circuit-protection devices have demonstrated their effectiveness in a variety of LED-lighting applications. Like traditional fuses, they limit current after they exceed specified limits. However, unlike fuses, PPTC devices can reset after the fault clears and the power cycles.

Breadboarding a new circuit is a key skill and an important step in many projects—especially early on, when you need to move wires around and substitute components. But that very flexibility also makes it easy to knock wires out. Eventually, if your project is a keeper, you’re going to want something with a bit more permanence. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) solve all those shortcomings. But most people don’t even consider translating a one-off project into a PCB design. For one thing, PCB fabrication has traditionally been expensive, viable only in commercial quantities. (One alternative is to do it yourself with etches and silk screens, a messy and time-consuming process.) Also, there are technical constraints involved with PCB designs that are daunting to the casual hobbyist. But it turns out that nowadays you can produce a professional PCB very inexpensively.

Analog Devices, Inc., has introduced a pair of Class-D audio amplifiers for smart phones, GPS units and other handheld electronics where premium sound quality offers a major competitive advantage. The SSM2375 and SSM2380 amplifiers provide audio system designers with the option of fixed or programmable gain settings combined with low noise and superior audio performance. The SSM2380 low-power, stereo Class-D amplifier is the first in its class to incorporate an I²C interface, which allows gain stages to be set from 1 dB to 24 dB (plus mute) in 47 distinct steps with no other external components required. The programmable interface also enables independent L/R channel shutdown, a variable low-EMI (electro-magnetic interference) emission control mode, and programmable ALC (automatic level control) functions for speaker protection. The SSM2380 achieves a 100-dB SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and extends battery life by achieving 93 percent power efficiency at 5 V while running at 1.4 W into an 8-ohm speaker.