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Mars Base

Japanese researchers build robot with most humanlike muscle-skeleton structure yet (w/ ... - 0 views

phys.org/...ike-muscle-skeleton-video.html

scibyte75 robot

shared by Mars Base on 12 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Called Kenshiro, the robot has been demonstrated at the recent Humanoids 2012 conference in Osaka, Japan
  • previous effort resulted in a robot they called Kojiro
  • Kenshiro was preceded by a robot concept the team called Kenzoh
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the team found that simply adding artificial muscle and bones generally tended to create weight problems
  • upper body alone came to 45 kg
  • with the idea of mimicking human bone and muscle at the individual body part level, i.e. a backbone, calf, or knee joint
  • Each part was custom designed to fall within the weight parameters of actual human limbs and other parts of the body.
  • a robot sized to approximate the average 12 year old Japanese boy
  • bones made of aluminum
  • connected together
  • the way human bones are connected
  • artificial ligaments
  • and a collection of muscles that mimic very closely those in the human body
  • Kenshiro has 160 muscles that are constructed using a single actuator motor for individual muscle groups
  • appears to be a collection of parts cobbled together to form a single whole
  • The robot can walk, but just barely
  • can do deep knee bends, but the rest of the body seems out of sync
Mars Base

End of the World: 10 Disasters That Could End It All At Any Given Second - Best of the ... - 0 views

botw.org/endworld.html

scibyte75 End-of-the-World

shared by Mars Base on 13 Dec 12 - Cached
  • Gamma-Ray Burst
  • Gamma-ray bursts are extremely powerful, estimated to have 10 quadrillion times more energy than our sun
  • They are created by the collision of two collapsed stars
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • it is almost impossible to visualize collapsed stars making it even more difficult to predict the location of a gamma-ray burst
  • A burst 1,000 light years from the earth (further away than most of our stars) would create an explosion as bright as our sun and bring a hasty destruction to earth
  • atmosphere and the ozone would provide protection at first it would soon be cooked away by the radiation. UV rays would kill the photosynthetic plankton in the ocean, which provide most of the earth's oxygen
  • At least one burst can be seen each day when watching our sky with gamma-ray vision; it can't be too long before there is one closer to home
  • earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the consequences of these potentially lethal flares
  • The sun emits solar flares, also known as coronal mass ejections, towards earth frequently
  • These flares are large magnetic outbursts which contain high-speed subatomic particles
  • evidence has been found that sun-like stars far from our solar system can briefly increase in brightness by 20 times
  • hypothesized that these increases are caused by super-flares, which are millions of times more powerful than the common solar flare
  • If our sun were to emit one of these super-flares it would literally fry the earth
  • if our sun's activity were to decrease by a mere 1% (which has been known to happen to many sun-like stars) we would be flung back into another ice age
  • Solar Activity (Super-Flares and Decreased Activity)
  • Particle Accelerators
  • When electric fields are used to accelerate protons they could collide at speed fast enough to create black holes or bits of altered matter
  • These small black holes would slowly engulf our planet
  • pieces of altered matter, called strangeletes, would destroy any ordinary matter they came in contact with, eventually annihilating the entire planet
  • most scientists assure that none of the particle accelerators being used at the present are strong enough to bring about these events
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