Zipping through space at nearly a million miles per day, NASA's New Horizons probe is halfway to Pluto and just woke up for the first time in months to look around. An artist's concept of New Horizons. "Our spacecraft is way out in exotic territory, in the middle of nowhere," says Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "And we have a lot to do." It's the perfect opportunity to test New Horizon's instruments before the probe reaches Pluto in 2015. "We don't want to miss a single breathtaking moment during the Pluto encounter," he says. "So we're checking everything out now to make sure we're ship-shape and ready to go." The 9 weeks of testing commenced on May 25th. Mission controllers plan a thorough checkout and recalibration of all seven science instruments onboard. First up is LORRI, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, one of the largest interplanetary telescopes ever flown. "On July 14, 2015, the date of closest approach, we'll be able to distinguish objects on Pluto as small as a football field," says Weaver. "That's about 300 times better resolution than anything we have now."

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) present an efficient and inexpensive alternative when it comes to implementing complete embedded systems along with important peripheral functions. The reconfigurable logic circuitry of an FPGA offers tremendous flexibility. A lesser known feature is that the outputs of a digital FPGA also permit various analogue applications.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.

An all-optical integrator, or lightwave capacitor, is a fundamental building block equivalent to those used in multi-functional electronic circuits. Associate Professor David Moss, a senior researcher within the Institute for Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS), leads an international team which has developed the optical integrator on a CMOS compatible silicon chip. The device, a photonic chip compatible with electronic technology (CMOS), will be a key enabler of next generation fully-integrated ultrafast optical data processing technologies for many applications including ultra-fast optical information-processing, optical memory, measurement, computing systems, and real-time differential equation computing units.

Engineers aim to deliver within a year a broad suite of standards needed to build smart electric grids. They reported on their stepwise progress at the end of Connectivity Week here. Beyond the standards, the industry needs to create new regulations and business models and show consumers the benefits of a smart grid to make the transition to a digital, networked grid happen, said attendees and presenters at the event. The good news is the standards are underway.

Menta SAS and LIRMM have taped out what they believe is the of worlds first MRAM-based FPGA which has patent-protected circuitry enabling compact integration of MRAM and embedded-FPGA solutions. Researchers at the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM), in France, claimed in October that they had developed a FPGA circuit based on non volatile resistive memory cell.

California-based company Anybots continues work on a telepresence robot that can take communication to a whole new level by eliminating the need for people to actually be present at board meetings or conferences. Because God knows executives work hard enough. The idea behind QA, the robot, is to interact with people, such as clients or partners, from anywhere in the world, which will save a lot of money on travel costs and different remote-communications equipment. Designed not unlike a sophisticated Skype program, QA relies on a Wi-Fi connection to allow users to interact through video, sound and diagrams projected from and onto the robot’s interface. With a sleek white exterior design, the armless 5-foot robot looks just about how you would expect a robot tailored for the boardroom to look. His rectangular-shaped face with two big eyes reminds a bit of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., so people should warm up to it fairly quickly.

You might think that some devices in the modern age have reached their maximum development level, such as the common desk-lamp, but you would be wrong. Natan Linder, a student from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a robotic version that can not only light your room, but project internet pages on your desk as well. It is an upgrade on the AUR lamp from 2007, which tracks movements around a desk or table and can alter the color, focus, and strength of its light to suit the user’s needs. The LuminAR comes with those abilities, and much more. The robotic arm can move about on its own, and combines a vision system with a pico projector, wireless computer and camera. When turned on, the projector will look for a flat space around your room on which to display images. Since it can project more than one internet window, you can check your email and browse another website at the same time.

Justin is a dexterous humanoid robot that can make coffee. Now it's learning to fix satellites. Justin was developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Wessling, Germany. The robot has different configurations, including one with wheels. The space version has a head, torso, and arms, but no wheels or legs, because it will be mounted on a spacecraft or satellite. The goal is to use Justin to repair or refuel satellites that need to be serviced. Its creators say that ideally the robot would work autonomously. To replace a module or refuel, for example, you'd just press a button and the robot would do the rest. But that's a long-term goal. For now, the researchers are relying on another approach: robotic telepresence. A human operator controls the robot from Earth, using a head-mounted display and a kind of arm exoskeleton. That way the operator can see what the robot sees and also feel the forces the robot is experiencing.

A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they've found the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey's Mount Ararat (map). But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah's ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.

The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure's center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard! Created by Raffaello D'Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

Humans have been coming up with innovative ways with which to plunder the Earth and its resources for as long as we have existed, so perhaps its time we give back a little. Leading aquatic animals, such as fish, away from underwater power plant turbines seems like a good place to begin, and a researcher at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University has designed a robot that will help just with that. Assistant professor Maurizio Porfiri studied the characteristics of small schools of fish to learn what exactly they look for in a leader, and he designed a palm-sized robot that possesses these traits. By taking command, this leader can be programmed to guide the fish away from danger, but the tricky part is getting the animals to accept the robot as one of their own.

Given the maturity of MOSFETs, selecting one for your next design may seem deceptively simple. Engineers are familiar with the figures of merit on a MOSFET data sheet. Selecting a MOSFET requires the engineer to use their expertise in scrutinizing different specifications for individual applications. In an application such as a load switch in a server power supply, the switching aspects of a MOSFET matter little because the MOSFET is on almost 100% of the time. The on resistance (RDS(ON)) may be the key figure of merit in such an application. Still other applications, including switching power supplies, use MOSFETs as active switches, and cause the engineer to value other MOSFET performance parameters. Let us consider some applications and their prioritization of MOSFET specifications.

On June 23, the new Xtext version 1.0 will be released as part of Eclipse's annual release train. During the last year Xtext has grown from a tiny DSL editor generator, to a full-blown language development framework. With Xtext 1.0 you can develop complex programming languages and you not only get an advanced editor, but a complete integrated development environment (IDE) based on Eclipse. The new workspace indexer and the builder infrastructure enable sophisticated IDE features, as we will demonstrate in this webinar. The new JVM-types allow you to link to and integrate with any Java element and Eclipse's JDT. During the webinar we will give a short overview on Xtext and how it works behind the scenes. We will demo different aspects of the framework’s features and show how to implement an interpreter for arithmetic expressions. The 60 minutes will be a great opportunity for you to get in touch with the Xtext core committers, ask questions and learn about the new and noteworthy features in version 1.0.

“CMS” stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, a general-purpose particle physics detector built on the Large Hadron Collider. The CMS project posted a few comics which provide a nice, simple (if somewhat cheesy) explanation of what the CMS/LHC does. The LHC generates massive amounts of data of all different varieties, which is distributed across a worldwide grid. It sends status messages to some of the computers, job monitoring info to other computers, bookkeeping info still elsewhere, and so on. This means that each location has specialized queries it can do on the data it has, but up until now it’s been very difficult to query across the whole grid. Enter the Data Aggregation System, designed to allow anything to be queried across all of the machines.

Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

Complex computer models can involve thousands of variables. But paradoxically, adding more variables can sometimes make them easier to work with.

In Stack Machines, Expression Evaluation, and the Magic of Reverse Polish, I showed how expressions can be evaluated by rewriting them in reverse Polish and translating this into machine-code instructions for a stack machine. I demonstrated with a stack-machine interpreter that I'd written as part of a working model of a Pascal compiler. But as well as expressions, the compiler needs to compile assignments and jumps, so — in my progress towards explaining the compiler — I'm going to extend the machine code so it can handle these. I'll demonstrate by interpreting a program that calculates five factorial.

Recent advances in the size and performance of FPGAs, coupled with advantages in time-to-market, field-reconfigurability and lower up-front costs, make FPGAs ideally suited to a wide range of commercial and defense applications [6]. In addition, FPGAs generality and reconfigurability provide important protections against the introduction of Trojan horses during semiconductor manufacturing process[8]. As a result, FPGA applications increasingly involve highly-sensitive intellectual property and trade-secrets, as well as cryptographic keys and algorithms [7].