November 12th, 2009

Top three Star Trek-style holodeck experiences

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:24 am

Categories: Computers & Internet, Energy & Environment, Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Nanotechnology, Science & Nature, Space & Aerospace

Tags: User Interaction, 3D, Pixel, StarCAVE, Audio System, Tech Spec, Projectors, Virtual Reality, Hardware, Components

Surround 3D TV is making its way to your living room. To get a sense of what it may look and sound like, look no further than the cutting edge of virtual reality taking shape at academic research centers outfitted with world class data visualization facilities. In this post, we’ll take a look at three (ok, four) of the most remarkable scientific visualization technologies.

Allosphere: University of California, Santa Barbara

The AlloSphere is a spherical space in which immersive, virtual environments allow researchers to convert large data sets into experiences of sight and sound. For example, it allows researchers to “fly” through a hydrogen atom while hearing sonified features of the wavefunction of its single electron to help describe invisible processes of nature.

The facility consists of a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a 3-story cube that’s nearly echo-free. Inside the chamber are two spherical hemispheres that are constructed of perforated aluminum designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. A 7-foot-wide bridge runs across the center, supporting the users. High-resolution video projectors can project images across the entire inner surface enabling seamless stereo-optic 3D projection.

The Allosphere has more than 500 audio components that hang suspended in rings just outside the aluminum shell and are connected to multiple Gigabit Ethernet LAN fibers that lead to a server farm consisting of seven Hewlett Packard 9400 workstations (as of April 2009).

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November 8th, 2009

Laser-powered 'space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 9:29 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Space & Aerospace

Tags: NASA, Elevator, Laser, Cable, Network Technology, Aerospace & Defense, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Networking, Manufacturing

LaserMotive, a Seattle-area company specializing in laser power beaming, has claimed a $900,000 prize with their photovoltaic-powered machine that has climbed nearly 3,000 feet (1 km) at an average speed greater than 2 meters per second, or just over four minutes.

With a payload in tote, the robot climbed a long cable suspended from a helicopter to test ideas that can potentially lead to the realization of space elevators.

The accomplishment took place on the first day of the Power Beaming competition in the 2010 Space Elevator Games at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California’s Mojave Desert.

While the LaserMotive team fell short of reaching NASA’s top-level prize of up to $2 million for climbing the entire length of the cable in three minutes or less (about five meters per second), they still hold bragging rights as the first in the 3-year history of NASA’s space elevator contest to climb a 2,953-foot-long ribbon.

Here is a video of one of LaserMotive’s attempts:

The company doesn’t have plans to use the technology to access space via an elevator climbing a cable, but rather to develop a business based on the idea of beaming power. In fact, the prize will serve as seed money to develop technology and system prototypes for use in aerospace and other industries. For instance, it can potentially be used to provide power to remote areas of military bases or to operate electrically powered unmanned aircraft for extended periods.

Here are additional sources covering the story:

CBS News.com, SmartPlanet, The 2009 Space Elevator Games Blog, PhysOrg.com

September 30th, 2009

Scientists replicate the physics of a stellar jet in laboratory

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:34 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Jet, Magnetic Field, Team Management, Management, Chris Jablonski

Astronomers will tell you that among the most beautiful structures observed in the Universe are the intricate jets of matter speeding away from accreting stars, such as young proto-stars and stellar mass black holes. But they have a hard time explaining it. A pair of professors the University of Rochester is hoping to change that.

Twin Jet Nebula (Credit: NASA)

Earlier this year, Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy and his colleague, Eric Blackman, professor of physics and astronomy, were part of what he called “one of the greatest astrophysical experiments that’s ever been done.” In partnership with a team at Imperial College London led by Professor Sergey Lebedev, they replicated the physics of a stellar jet in a laboratory and matched the known physics of jets “amazingly well.” (See video here).

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September 6th, 2009

Brown University economists measure GDP growth from outer space

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:19 pm

Categories: Social Sciences, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Gross Domestic Product, Growth, Brown University, Economist, Income, Operational Accounting, Personal Finance, Finance, Chris Jablonski

For many developing countries, the data for measuring economic growth is unreliable or incomplete. In response, a team of economists at Brown have suggested a new framework for estimating a country or region’s gross domestic product (GDP) by using satellite images of the area’s nighttime lights. GDP (gross domestic product), is the best known measure of macro-economic activity.

Credit: NOAA and USAF Weather Agency

In the image above, taken from space, you can see increased nighttime lighting which indicates economic growth in Poland and Eastern Europe between 1992 (left) and 2002 (right). Poland is in the top left quarter of each image.
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July 4th, 2009

'EvoGrid' to model life's origins, and maybe answer the big questions

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 4:54 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Science & Nature, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Earth, Soup, Computer, EvoGrid, Life Form, Productivity, Chris Jablonski

EvoGrid is a grid-computing concept that’ll attempt to digitally simulate the primordial soup from which life arose and it may shed light on the origins of life on Earth and in the universe. It may also provide new tools for evolutionary biology, biochemistry, and complexity studies.

Studying the Earth’s rocks, scientists know that life appeared on Earth roughly four billion years ago. They also tell us that for about a billion years before the first discernible life form snapped into existence, the Earth’s environment was a pre-biotic chemical soup. But the conditions and forces present when life began are not that well-understood.

Now, using the power of computer processing, a group of international advisors and Bruce Damer, the founder of a research company that creates 3-D spacecraft and mission simulations for NASA and the space community, are utilizing a large interconnected grid of computers which could plausibly model the primordial soup.

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June 21st, 2009

Futurist pinpoints world's top ten long-term challenges

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 10:42 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Science & Nature, Social Sciences, Space & Aerospace, Uncategorized

Tags: Schwartz, Leadership, Transportation, Manufacturing, Management, Chris Jablonski

With the growth of unpredictability comes forecasts that are harder to believe. But good leaders plan for a wide range of scenarios that are based on trends we see today.

In his recent commencement address to the 2009 graduating class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Tory, NY, Peter Schwartz outlined ten top world challenges that the graduates should consider to make an impact. Schwartz is a business strategist, futurist, and author of The Art of the Long View.

Peter Schwartz is an internationally renowned futurist, business strategist, author, and co-founder and chairman of Global Business Network

He said that today’s number-one challenge—and opportunity—is to develop a long-term solution for our energy needs.

“That means it must be nonpolluting and inexhaustible,” he said.  He believes the world of 2050 will be one of clean and sustainable energy production, transportation, and manufacturing. But to achieve a peaceful and prosperous world will require “monumental innovation, collaboration, and leadership.”

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June 17th, 2009

Scientists envision inflatable alternative to tethered space elevator

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:28 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Space & Aerospace

Tags:

An inflatable free standing tower could one day carry equipment and tourists 20 kilometers above Earth, and it could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, say researchers at York University in Toronto, Canada.

They envision a giant tower assembled with a series of modules made up of Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes that would be made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as hydrogen or helium. This would actively stabilize the giant tower and allow for flexibility. The elevator would support a series of platforms or pods that would launch payloads into Earth orbit.

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April 16th, 2009

New atomic clock loses only a second every 300 million years

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 5:10 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Clock, Atom, NIST, JILA, Team Management, Management, Chris Jablonski

The quest to create the perfect scientific timepiece has led to the development of an atomic clock that researchers from JILA claim to be fifty percent more accurate than results reported last year.

JILA, is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder.

Credit: J. Burrus/NIST

The international team, which included Jan W. Thomsen, a nuclear physicist and visiting professor from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, applied new techniques that resulted in an enhanced strontium atomic clock that would neither gain nor lose one second in more than 300 million years.

This level of accuracy leapfrogs that of the current version of NIST-F1, a cesium fountain atomic clock that neither gains nor loses a second in about 80 million years and serves as the U.S. civilian time and frequency standard.

While some are billing JILA’s clock as the world’s most accurate, in mid-2006, the NIST announced an atomic clock based on a single mercury atom that would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years.

In any case, atomic clocks have been around since the dawn of the atomic age and their accuracy has been increasing by a factor of 10 every decade and they’re used to make the most precise calculations in physics and, increasingly, astronomy.

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December 17th, 2008

Flying robots for better weather forecasts

Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 9:26 am

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Robotics, Science & Nature, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Algorithm, Fleet, Researcher, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Sensor, Robots, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Roland Piquepaille

MIT researchers think that flying robots could be used to improve weather forecasts and to give people more time to prepare for the worst in case of an emergency. ‘With more time for advanced planning, farmers could bring in their crop before a big storm hits. Airlines could adjust their flight schedules further in advance, reducing the impact on customers,’ said one of the engineers. And the team leader added that improving weather forecasting could also save lives because ‘people do get killed in these storms.’

This project hasn’t yet produced any prototypes, so it’s hard to guess when these fleets of robots become available. This research effort is being led at MIT by Professor Jonathan How, Director of the Aerospace Controls Laboratory and in charge of the Autonomous UAV Aerobatics Project at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was helped by Han-Lim Choi, a postdoctoral associate in his research group and by Nicholas Roy, an assistant professor focused on robotics.

So how these fleets of robots could give people more time to prepare for the worst? “The researchers hope to gain some lead-time by improving the way data about current weather conditions are collected. Existing forecasting systems depend on pressure, temperature, and other sensors aboard a single piloted airplane that flies scripted routes. But the data that are collected can’t be processed fast enough to alter the flight plan if a storm starts brewing. ‘The response time is fairly slow,’ How said. ‘Today’s flight path is based on yesterday’s weather.’”

These flying robots would be used to gather data. “Current sensor readings from one plane would be used to guide the deployment of additional planes to areas with especially interesting or changing weather. By gathering information from several key areas at the same time, the researchers believe they could offer more accurate forecasts.”

Of course, this will not be an easy task to achieve

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December 14th, 2008

A sixth region in the magnetosphere?

Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 9:39 am

Categories: Science & Nature, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Ion, Plasma, Region, Vanderbilt University, Team Management, Network Technology, Management, Networking, Roland Piquepaille

As you probably know, Earth’s magnetosphere, ‘the invisible bubble of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds and protects the planet from the periodically lethal radiation of the solar wind,’ was discovered in 1958. Until now, it was composed of five regions, including the ionosphere or the Van Allen radiation belts. Now, a U.S. research team has discovered a sixth region, called the warm plasma cloak. But read more…

You can see above an illustration showing the different regions of the magnetosphere. “The white arrows show the path that individual ions take as they are carried into the magnetosphere by the polar wind and then move from region to region in the magnetosphere.” (Credit: Rick Chappell, Vanderbilt University). Here is a link to a slightly larger version of this picture.

The research team was led by Rick Chappell, research professor of physics and director of the Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University. The other members of the research team are Mathew M. Huddleston from Trevecca University, Tom Moore and Barbara Giles from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Dominique Delcourt from the Centre d’Etude des Environments Terrestre et Planétaires, Observatoire de Saint-Maur in France.

As the Vanderbilt University news release mentioned above is short on details, let’s look at a multimedia version of this story available on Exploration, Vanderbilt’s online research magazine (David F. Salisbury, December 12, 2008, Adobe Flash format).

Let’s start with some comments from Rick Chappell. “Although it is invisible, the magnetosphere has an impact on our everyday lives. For example, solar storms agitate the magnetosphere in ways that can induce power surges in the electrical grid trigger blackouts, interfere with radio transmissions and mess up GPS signals. Charged particles in the magnetosphere can also damage the electronics in satellites and affect the weather by impinging on the upper layers of the atmosphere. These are some practical reasons why it is important to understand the magnetosphere’s structure and behavior.”

But do you have an idea of the size of the magnetosphere?

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