May 11th, 2008
A sailing robot to cross the Atlantic
The Times of London reports that seven robotic craft will compete in a race across the Atlantic Ocean in October 2008. One of them, ‘Pinta the robot sailing boat,’ has been designed at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Pinta is expected to sail for three months at a maximum speed of four knots (about 4.6 mph or 7.4 kilometers per hour). Its designers hope the Pinta will become the first robot to cross an ocean using only wind power. This 150-kilogram sailing robot costs only £2,500 (US $4,900 or €3,200). The transatlantic race will start between September 29 and October 5, 2008 from Viana do Castelo, Portugal. The winner will be the first boat to reach a finishing line between the Northern tip of St. Lucia and the Southern tip of Martinique in the Caribbean. But read more…
You can see above Beagle B, the previous sailing robot developed at Aberystwyth University. It had a length of 3.65 meters, weighed 280 kg, and was built for a cost of £40,000 (about US $78K or €50K). (Credit: Aberystwyth University). Here is a link to additional details about this sailing robot.
These sailing robots have been designed at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK, by Mark Neal, Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and member of the Intelligent Robotics Group. For more information about what he does, you can read two pages about Biologically Inspired Robotics and
a previous autonomous sailing robot.
Here is a quote from Mark Neal about these sailing robots. “This is the first time anybody has attempted to sail across any ocean with an automated boat. The big issue in robotics at the moment is longevity and flexibility in a complicated environment. Something that can survive for two to three months completely unassisted while doing something interesting is a major challenge. If it does get there I will be seriously cheerful. It will open up all the oceans to environmental monitoring by robots.”
In fact, and if the robots finish the race, the autonomous boats used in this Microtransat Challenge could help scientists to collect data about climate change and the oceans. “Sensors would be able to measure the carbon dioxide content of the water, chlorophyl content, pollution, air pressure, air and sea temperatures, and wind speed. The data gathered would provide invaluable information to scientists, and events such as plankton blooms and oil spills could be tracked by the robots to monitor their progress. Scientists are able to gather such information already but the robots would offer a much cheaper and more flexible option. And because no one is on board it would be easier to operate them in dangerous conditions.”
Here are some links to follow if you want to learn more about this transatlantic robotic race.
- The Microtransat Challenge
- 2008 Transatlantic Race Details
- Competitors in the world’s first transatlantic robot sailing race to test at Aberystwyth (Aber News Online, August 31, 2007)
- Robot boats in ocean race trials (BBC News Online, September 3, 2007)
Sources: Lewis Smith, The Times, UK, May 10, 2008; and various websites
You’ll find related stories by following the links below.
May 10th, 2008
A new career: isotope designer
According to a Michigan State University (MSU) news release, ‘Made-to-order isotopes hold promise on science’s frontier,’ nuclear physicists can now start a new career as isotope designers. These scientists can build specific rare isotopes to solve scientific problems and open doors to new technologies. The lead researcher says this approach has already given us the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan technology. He’s now going further, saying that he wants to build objects 100,000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus. He calls this ‘femtotechnology.’ Fascinating, but read more…
This research work has been led by Bradley Sherrill, a University Distinguished Professor of physics and associate director for research at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at MSU. You can see above the layout of the Superconducting Source for Ions (SuSI) under development at NSCL. (Credit: MSU) Here is a link to a larger version of this illustration.
And a mechanical drawing of the Radio Frequency Fragment Separator (RFFS) currently under construction at the NSCL is shown above. (Credit: MSU) “The ions experience a transverse RF electric field between the two plates held by the resonator wedges centered in the tank. The two coarse tuners, the fine tuner (bottom left), and the RF coupler (top right) are also shown.” Here is a link to a larger version of this figure.
Here is a short excerpt from the MSU news release. “Sherrill said this type of basic science — science to examine the core nature of the elements of life — holds its own gold mine of potential.
May 9th, 2008
Neil Young gives his name to a spider
Canadian rocker Neil Young made headlines this week for appearing at the JavaOne conference and for releasing his musical archive on Blu-ray discs. But he was also honored by a East Carolina University (ECU) professor of biology, who named a newly discovered trapdoor spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi after the legendary rock star. According to the strict rules established by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the second word defining a new species must end in ‘i’ if it’s named after a person. So the researcher didn’t break the naming scheme. It also was the case in 2005 when Cornell University named several beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. But read more…
You can see above a male specimen of Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi living in Santa Rosa Co., Florida. (Credit: American Museum of Natural History [AMNH])
And here is a picture of a female specimen of Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi living in the same area. (Credit: AMNH)
This new trapdoor spider species has been discovered in 2007 in Jefferson Co., Alabama, by Jason Bond, an ECU professor of biology. “‘There are rather strict rules about how you name new species,’ Bond said. ‘As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice.’”
Bond co-wrote a paper on this new spider with Norman I. Platnick, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
This paper was published by American Museum Novitates under the name “Taxonomic review of the trapdoor spider genus Myrmekiaphila (Araneae: Mygalomorphae: Cyrtaucheniidae).”
Here is a link to the abstract. “The mygalomorph spider genus Myrmekiaphila comprises 11 species known only from the southeastern United States. The type species, M. foliata Atkinson, is removed from the synonymy of M. fluviatilis (Hentz) and placed as a senior synonym of M. atkinsoni Simon. A neotype is designated for M. fluviatilis and males of the species are described for the first time. Aptostichus flavipes Petrunkevitch is transferred to Myrmekiaphila. Six new species are described: M. coreyi and M. minuta from Florida, M. neilyoungi from Alabama, M. jenkinsi from Tennessee and Kentucky, and M. millerae and M. howelli from Mississippi.”
For more information, here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 32 pages, 8.97 MB). The illustrations above have been extracted from this document.
Finally, if you’re fascinated by spiders, you should read Platnick’s World Spider Catalog. You’ll learn that Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi belongs to the Cyrtaucheniidae family.
Sources: East Carolina University news release, May 8, 2008; and various websites
You’ll find related stories by following the links below.
May 8th, 2008
NASA’s lunar breathing system
When six astronauts share a 15 cubic meters spacecraft for weeks, how is it possible to avoid to be bothered by your fellows sweating and breathing? I’ve already written about staying clean in space, but NASA is going further this time. Its scientists are testing a lunar breathing system. The CAMRAS system (short for ‘Carbon-dioxide and Moisture Removal Amine Swing-bed’) has been tested by 23 volunteers who stayed inside a test chamber from April 14 to May 1, 2008. It looks like that the results are satisfying NASA which could use it for its Orion crew capsule and its Altair lunar lander. But read more…
You can see above how NASA “volunteers were bolted inside a test chamber and sweated for NASA scientists at Johnson Space Center in Houston to test a new system being developed for future space vehicles. The system, known as the carbon-dioxide and moisture removal amine swing-bed, or CAMRAS, is designed to make air breathable and the living space more comfortable by controlling carbon dioxide and humidity inside a crew capsule.” (Credit: NASA) Here is a link to a larger version of this photo. And here is another link to a video of the CAMRAS test.
May 7th, 2008
UAVs will study Californian smog
The California Energy Commission is funding a research effort named CAPPS, short for California AUAV Air Pollution Profiling Study. CAPPS will use autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) to gather meteorological data as the aircraft fly through clouds over Southern California. The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution. The first flights started in April 2008 and data collection will continue until January 2009. But read more…
You can see above technicians preparing a CAPPS autonomous unmanned aircraft for a flight at Edwards Air Force Base. (Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Here is a link to
a larger version of this photo.
This research work is being led at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego by Professor V. (Ram) Ramanathan, who already used AUAVs over the Maldives in 2006.
May 6th, 2008
A new robotic tasting device
According to the latest American Chemical Society (ACS) Weekly PressPac, French researchers have developed an artificial mouth that chews apples like you and me. Here is a link to this PressPac, from which you’ll be able to read a very short note titled ‘Munch-o-matic: Scientists develop the artificial mouth.’ The tasting device is able to reproduce the effects of chewing by analyzing a number of factors which are involved in the release of aromatic and flavor compounds in the mouth, such as the release of saliva or the rate of food breakdown. If this machine can chew food like us, it might pave the way for future machines which can learn to taste food and improve quality. But read more…
You can see above a schematic representation of the artificial mouth. “The artificial mouth is composed of a sample container (600 mL), a notched plunger, and variable-speed motors to control precisely the speed of compression and rotation movements. The container is maintained at 37 °C by means of a laboratory thermostat (Bioblock Scientific) via an outer layer. The container is sealed with a cap maintained by a circlip.” (Credit: Gaëlle Arvisenet and colleagues, via ACS). Hre is a link to a larger version of this diagram.
This research work has been led by Gaëlle Arvisenet at the French ENITIAA school which trains engineers for the food industry sector. Unfortunately, Arvisenet has not her own research page on the University site.
The ENITIAA research work is available online from the ACS’s Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry under the name “Effect of Apple Particle State on the Release of Volatile Compounds in a New Artificial Mouth Device.” It should appear in the printed version in the May 14, 2008 issue of the scientific paper.
May 5th, 2008
From fungus to fuel
An international team of researchers led by some U.S. Department of Energy’s research labs has decoded the genetic sequence of a fungus named Tricoderma reesei. The team has found how this organism breaks down plant fibers into simple sugars and how to use this fungus to produce fuel. ‘The finding could unlock possibilities for industrial processes that can more efficiently and cost effectively convert corn, switch grass and even cellulose-based municipal waste into ethanol.’ But read more…
You can see above a photo showing “a microscope image of the fungus Tricoderma reesei growth filaments. In the image, proteins in fungal cells are stained red, while chitin, a component of the cell walls, is stained blue.” (Credit: Mari Valkonen, VTT Technical Research Center, Finland) Here are two links to a larger version of this photo and to the Wikipedia page about Trichoderma reesei.
Here are some of the interesting discoveries of the research team. “The organism uses enzymes it creates to break down human-indigestible fibers of plants into the simplest form of sugar, known as a monosaccharide. The fungus then digests the sugars as food. Researchers decoded the genetic sequence of T. reesei in an attempt to discover why the deep green fungus was so darned good at digesting plant cells. The sequence results were somewhat surprising. Contrary to what one might predict about the gene content of a fungus that can eat holes in tents, T. reesei had fewer genes dedicated to the production of cellulose-eating enzymes than its counterparts.”
So how this fungus could be used to produce fuel?
May 4th, 2008
Brain waves used for faster image sorting
Computers are fast for many tasks, but humans are faster for identifying objects or people in images. But is it possible to combine the speed of a computer with the sensitivity of the human brain? According to a IEEE Spectrum Online article, ‘A Brainy Approach to Image Sorting,’ several teams at Honeywell, Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, and Columbia University think so. They’re working on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s program called ‘Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts’ (NIA). One of the teams said intelligence analysts can sort images six times faster than before. But there is a culprit: they’ll need to carry for hours a 32-electrode EEG cap which detects their brain activity. But read more…
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s program, Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA), in its third and final stage. At the end of this stage, one of the teams mentioned above will be selected. OGI Deniz Erdogmus, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the OGI School of Science & Engineering of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is working with the Honeywell team on the NIA project. You can see above some pictures used by Erdogmus in his lab to speed up sorting. (Credit: Unknown photographs, via IEEE Spectrum Online)
According to Erdogmus, “it takes humans about 300 milliseconds to consciously recognize specific information in a picture — an adult face among children, for example. It takes another 200 ms for the person to react physically, say, by pushing a button as an analyst would do. But even before a person is conscious of what he or she is seeing — about 150 ms after being shown an image — the electrical activity in the brain’s visual cortex has already spiked. The activity is called an event related potential, or ERP.”
With these facts in mind, Erdogmus designed his experiments.
May 3rd, 2008
Extracting the structure of networks
Networks are used to represent the structure of complex systems, including the Internet or social networks, but often these descriptions are biased or incomplete. Now, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it’s possible to extract automatically the hierarchical structure of networks. The researchers say their results ’suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.’ They also think that their algorithms can be applied to almost every kind of networks, from biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) to communities in social networks. But read more…
You can see on the left “a hierarchical network with structure on many scales, and the corresponding hierarchical random graph. Each internal node r of the dendrogram is associated with a probability pr that a pair of vertices in the left and right subtrees of that node are connected. (The shades of the internal nodes in the figure represent the probabilities.) (Credit: SFI) Here is a link to a larger version of this figure.
This technique has been developed by three Santa Fe Institute (SFI) researchers, Aaron Clauset, a post-doctoral fellow at SFI, Cris Moore, who is also an associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico, and Mark Newman, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan.
Here is an excerpt from the SFI news release about this work. “Unlike much previous work in this area, Clauset, Moore, and Newman propose a direct but flexible model of hierarchical structure, which they apply to networks using the tools of statistical physics and machine learning. To demonstrate the practical utility of their model, they analyze networks from three disparate fields: the metabolic network of the spirochete Treponema pallidum (the bacteria that causes syphilis), a network of associations between terrorists, and a food web of grassland species. Even when only half of the connections in these networks were shown to their algorithm, the researchers found that hierarchical structure can predict missing connections with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.”
May 2nd, 2008
Growing nano pine trees in Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin-Madison chemists have accidentally created nano pine trees with trunks and branches. As said the lead researcher, ‘At the beginning we saw just a couple of trees, and we said, ‘What the heck is going on here?’ They were so curious.’ In fact, this could lead to an entirely different way of growing nanowires. The researchers think that it will give them ‘powerful means to create new and better nanomaterials for all sorts of applications, including high-performance integrated circuits, biosensors, solar cells, LEDs and lasers.’ But read more…
You can see on the left some of these spiraling pine tree-like nanowires. (Credit: Song Jin, UW-Madison) Here is a link to a larger version of this photo and another one to more pictures.
These nanotrees have been developed in chemistry professor Song Jin’s
research group. The two other main contributors to this study are graduate students Matthew Bierman and Albert Yue-Kong Lau.
Now, let’s discover why this way of growing nanowires is new. “Until now, most nanowires have been made with metal catalysts, which promote the growth of nanomaterials along one dimension to form long rods. While the branches on Jin’s trees also elongate in this way, growth of the trunks is driven by a ’screw’ dislocation, or defect, in their crystal structure. At the top of the trunk, the defect provides a spiral step for atoms to settle on an otherwise perfect crystal face, causing them stack together in a spiral parking ramp-type structure that quickly lengthens the tip.”
Here is a more detailed explanation.
Recent Entries
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