Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 238

The inevitability of intensifying global warming isn't just a problem for humans - it's a problem for the world's livestock too. Now, to make chickens a little less susceptible to the heat, one team of scientists has started research to breed poultry that are born bald.

Carl Schmidt, a geneticist at the University of Delaware, is embarking on a mission to Uganda and Brazil, where chickens have naturally shed their feathers over the years, according to Gizmodo UK. Schmidt's worried about feeding the world by 2050, adding that it'll be made even worse "if the climate does continue to change."

"We're going to be seeing heat waves that are both hotter and longer," Schmidt said in an interview with Modern Farmer. "We need to learn how to mitigate the effect of climate change on animals - we need to figure out how to help them adapt to it." For now, Schmidt plans a programme of selective breeding rather than alterations to their core genetics. But as well as breeding a whole new race of heat-resistant super-chickens, Schmidt and the team are also investigating other elements of selective pressure. "We're isolating the genetic variants that have allowed them to survive," Schmidt said.

Just minutes after the Big Bang, scientists theorize that the universe blinked itself out of existence - that's the current, new theory, anyway. After spending $10 billion, decades of research and tests, and the world's largest particle accelerator, scientists theorize the universe itself doesn't exist, or that it shouldn't exist.

One of the researchers said thanks to finding the Higgs Boson particle, it shows that the universe may have blinked out of existence moments after the Big Bang itself. This researcher continued: "This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory ... if this had happened, we wouldn't be around to discuss it!"

Australian astrophysicist Dr Alan Duffy says: "I love this idea of bringing together two discoveries found at the biggest extremes of size you can imagine. From studying the Higgs Boson at tiny scales much smaller than an atom to (potentially) measuring Inflation by searching into the distant past of our enormous universe".

The European Commission has claimed it's launched the world's largest ever civilian research and innovation programme in robotics.

Teaming with 180 companies and research groups under the umbrella of euRobotics, today saw the official announcement of the EU initiative - which will cover manufacturing, agriculture, health, transport, civil security and households. The initiative is called SPARC and aims to build and strengthen Europe's position in the worldwide robotics market.

In an official statement, the European Commission's VP Neelie Kroes said that Europe must "be a producer and not merely a consumer of robots."

NASA and a group of amateur astronomers are working together to put an old satellite back on task. When the little satellite, known as ISEE-3, flies back by the Earth next month, scientists will have a short window to attempt to communicate with the old satellite and get it back to work on its original mission. The problem for NASA with getting the satellite back on task was that it didn't have the resources to take on the project due to a tight budget.

Amateur scientists stepped up and took up the challenge of communicating with the satellite. NASA has endorsed the group, known as ISEE-3 Reboot Project. The original mission for the satellite was created in the Carter Administration. ISEE-3 stands for International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 and was launched in 1978.

The mission for the satellite was to monitor the solar wind. Originally, it was paired with ISEE-1 and ISEE-2, but ISEE-3 was pulled from that original mission in an attempt to encounter Halley's Comet. After that comet mission was successful, the satellite took a 30-year route to bring it back near the Earth. Amateur scientists crowd funded $125,000 for the project. The team will have to create virtual software versions of the communications gear used to communicate with the satellite because that original gear no longer exists. If the team misses the satellite, it will take another 30-40 years before it passes close by the Earth.

NASA and many other organizations are searching the universe for evidence that life exists on other planets. while the near term search is focusing on looking on and under the surface of Mars and other planets in our solar system, other researchers are looking much further away.

One of the planets being closely looked at for signs of possible life is called Kepler-186f. This is the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. That means it is the right distance from the sun for liquid water to pool on the surface.

SETI is one of the research groups that is looking for signs of extra terrestrial life. SETI researchers believe that in the next 20 years, alien life will be discovered. SETI is looking at half a dozen other world's that might have life, including Kepler-186f. Naturally, SETI scientists say that the discovery will depend on financing. That gives SETI an out if no alien life is discovered in the next 20 years; they can just say the financing wasn't there.

For more than 100 years now, astronomers have gazed into space and attempted to figure out what fuels the massive hurricane-like storm that orbits just below Jupiter's equator. During the 1800's the storm was estimated to measure more than 25,000 miles across, and recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is just a mere 10,250 miles across today. To put that into perspective, back in 1890, three Earth's could fit inside the storm, and today only one would could squeeze in.

At the moment, scientist have no conclusive theory on why the storm is shrinking, it has been able to figure out that the storm is shrinking faster as they years go by, and that it is currently losing about 580 miles in diameter per year. One early theory suggest that Jupiter's atmosphere is losing some of its volatility and bleeding off energy, which in turn is causing the storm to slowly die down. The video below from Videos From Space shows just how fast this shrinkage is taking place.

"In our new observations, it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm," Amy Simon, associate director for strategic science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change, by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot."

According to reports, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX Elon Musk agreed to help fund the Nikola Tesla Museum, thanks to Matthew Inman's illustration in The Oatmeal.

Inman led the fundraising via Indiegogo to bring up a museum based on Nikola Tesla's invention by using one of his facilities which was going to be torn down. Inman was able to successfully raise $1.5 million to buy the property in time. He needed to raise $8 million more so that the facility can be converted into a museum.

Recently he posted a two-part comic about owning a Tesla Model S. In part One he called it as a 'magical space car' and in Part 2, it was about asking Tesla Motor's Elon Musk to help him fund for the museum via twitter. Inman explained why it would be a good gesture for the electric car company to help fund this project.

For countless decades, scientists have been gagged and bought when it comes to "global warming" or "climate change". You might not want to hear it, but if you dig deep enough, the rabbit hole begins to make sense. For those who have never heard of "Suspicious0bservers" on YouTube, you might want to check out his videos - he's quite the expert and spokesperson to the masses.

Suspicious0bservers, or Ben Davidson, has over 180,000 subscribers on YouTube, but his latest video "Why Global Warming Failed" should be an eye-opener for you. The video above has plenty of data and links to papers he cites from, with some very large points to be made. It's not just the Earth that is experiencing changes, but virtually every single planet in our solar system is going through some form of change. Those planets aren't having changes due to man now, are they?

We, mankind, are causing some form of pollution and "climate change" but it is in no way near the numbers scientists, governments and corporations are reporting. During the video (at around the 8:30 mark), you can see the CO2 levels on Earth are skyrocketing - something that man is surely doing. But, the temperature - "global warming" - is right on the models that have been tracked over the last 300,000 years. We're actually seeing the temperature in Antarctica dropping a few degrees in the last 300,000 years - where every 100,000 years we're seeing a drop of a couple of degrees.

Scott White from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been working on something quite incredible: a plastic that is lined with something similar to an artificial vascular system, just like the veins and arteries that see the blood flow through your body, that can repair for larger breaks.

This new system features two different liquids, with the first containing long, thin molecules, and the other with three-sided molecules, in separate channels. Once these fluids mix, a reaction sees them joining together to create a scaffold, which forms a thick gel. Mixing in some other ingredients causes the gel to solidify over a few hours.

Once the plastic is fractured, the vascular system is damaged, with the two liquids pouring out. The liquids mix together, forming a restorative gel. This gel can fill a 4mm hole with 35mm of surrounding cracks within 20 minutes, hardening in a 3-hour span of time. The patch that is created is around 60% as strong as the original plastic, so we're not talking about a complete 100% strength, but this is an incredible feat nonetheless.

As NASA and other space programs ramp up Mars research, the U.S. space agency is interested in creating a plant-growth experiment in mid-2020. As part of the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX) project, it could be an important step towards potential manned missions and colonization endeavors.

"In order to do a long-term, sustainable base on Mars, you would want to be able to establish that plants can at least grow on Mars," said Heather Smith, MPX deputy principal investigator, in a statement. "This would be the first step in that... we just send the seeds there and watch them grow."

MPX would focus more on being a self-contained project, rather than trying to plant seeds in the Martian dirt. The rover would provide water and researchers will check back within 15 days to see if the greenhouse project is successful.

NASA takes a lot of time to kill bacteria and other contaminants on spacecraft that it sends into space. It's particularly important to kill off any bacteria that might be on a spacecraft that will land on the surface of another planet to prevent contamination. The problem NASA is having is that some of the bacteria on spacecraft are nearly impossible to kill.

In fact, some have proven so resilient that NASA is looking for new ways to kill bacteria on future spacecraft. Some of those bacterial spores can survive space and NASA fears that it might be sending life out into space away from Earth. This poses problems for future missions that may send probes to other world's.

One specific bacterium called Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032 has a high resistance to the techniques used to clean spacecraft such as peroxide treatment and UV radiation. Those spores can also survive in the vacuum of space. NASA placed these spores outside the ISS and they survived for 18 months. One of the big challenges for NASA is to develop methods of killing bacteria on smaller spacecraft that can't survive the heat of NASAs currently approved dry heat microbial reduction. Some believe that in the near term this is a moot point because bacterial exchange between mars and Earth has been going on for millennia.

The Pentagon has been building itself some robots, with a new Terminator-like rescue robot that would be deployed into disaster situations, where it would search for survivors.

The 6-foot 2-inch robot named Atlas is one of the entrants in a contest that is designed to build a robotic hero, thanks to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The competition sees entrants' robots capable of finding their way through rough terrain and entering buildings. The competition was created after the magnitude-9 earthquake in Japan which crippled the Fukushima nuclear plant and sent a tsunami into the country.

DARPA is The Pentagon's go-to research department, which has just shown off its Atlas robot - featuring LED lighting, but was switched off and simply in a "static" display for the competition. Head of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, Brad Tousley, told US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Hollywood has portrayed an unrealistic expectation in peoples' minds about what robots are capable of - at least at this point in time.

Wireless power is something I simply can't live without, but I can only charge one or two devices at once. But, over in Daejeon, Republic of Korea, scientists have used something they call the Dipole Coil Resonant System to charge 40 smartphones simultaneously, even if the power source is up to 5m away.

We already know about MIT's Coupled Magnetic Resonance System (CMRS) which was unveiled in 2007, which used a magnetic field in order to charge devices - but it had an envelope of 2.1m. CMRS had some major technical limitations for commercialization, most of which haven't been solved: "a rather complicated coil structure (composed of four coils for input, transmission, reception, and load); bulky-size resonant coils; high frequency (in a range of 10 MHz) required to resonate the transmitter and receiver coils, which results in low transfer efficiency; and a high Q factor of 2,000 that makes the resonant coils very sensitive to surroundings such as temperature, humidity, and human proximity".

Chun T. Rim, a Professor of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering at KAIST, along with his team, developed the "Dipole Coil Resonant System" or DCRS. This system is for an extended range of inductive power transfer, at up to 5 meters between transmitter and receiver coils. Professor Rim's solution to CMRS' problems are all but solved with DCRS.

In something that feels like it's right out of HBO's 'True Blood,' we're looking at a future of artificial blood, mass manufactured on an industrial scale - in the near future.

Wellcome Trust is behind the research, with scientists working on getting to the point of reaching a trial stage of using artificial blood made from human stem cells. Principal researcher, Marc Turner, has said that his team has made red blood cells that are capable of being used in a clinical transfusion. Professor Turner has talked of a technique to culture red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells - cells that have been taken from humans, and 'rewound' into stem cells.

From there, biochemical conditions that are similar to what happens inside of the human body are recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells - best of all, in the universal blood type O. Prof Turner explains: "Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being".

Well, it looks like the military is having some fun above the skies of Texas, where defense technology blog Ares is reporting on a mysterious, unidentified flying object flying over the skies of Amarillo, Texas, back on March 10.

Bill Sweetman, Aviation Week's defense experts is perplexed, but he is convinced it's real. "Three of us here-myself, Graham Warwick and Guy Norris-concur that the photos show something real. Guy and I have known Steve Douglass for a long time, and know that the reason that he sees (and monitors by radio) unusual things is that he spends time looking for them. Here is Steve's account of one of his better radio intercepts. This is more than a random image.

The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn't than what it is. The size is very hard to determine, for example, although the image size at contrailing height suggests that it is bigger than an X-47B. However, the basic shape-while it resembles Boeing's Blended Wing Body studies or the Swift Killer Bee/Northrop Grumman Bat unmanned air system-is different from anything known to have flown at full size, lacking the notched trailing edge of Northrop Grumman's full-size designs".

Mayim Bialik isn't just a leading cast member of the hit CBS show "The Big Bang Theory," she's also a neuroscientist and strong advocate for helping develop science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) interest in the United States. Bialik plays the role of "Amy Farrah Fowler," a neurobiologist, enjoying her time studying animals as part of her research.

Bialik continues to strengthen her leadership in driving interest in US STEM programs, especially for women trying to break into the field.

"Right now, research shows that more than half of high school freshmen who declare interest in STEM-related fields lose interest by the time they graduate," Bialik recently told TweakTown. "For female students, the problem continues into college. One-third of women who enter STEM bachelor's degree programs switch their major to a non-STEM field by the time they graduate,"

It's no secret that Google has been swooping in and buying robotic companies left and right, and one of those acquisitions is making headlines today. Schaft Robotics, a company Google bought last year has made it to the finals of a DARPA sponsored robotics competition, and today Google announced that it would not accept funding for the competition that the US government had previously offered.

In a statement released by the DARPA last Friday, the government says that Google has switched to Track D of the program which means it will be fully funding the program from its own bank account, and no government funding will be accepted. The DARPA Robotics Challenge or DRC is a competition that challenges companies to create a robot that can handle disaster zone task such as navigating heavy debris, opening a door, climbing a ladder, and even turning off gas and water valves.

Google's Schaft Robot will be competing in the finals which are scheduled to be held some time between December 2014 and June of 2015. Google's other robotics company, Boston Dynamics, will also be competing in the event with its bipedal robot, Petman. This is one competition I would love to watch live, and I hope to get that chance during the next round!

Back in December, the ISS had a significant problem with its cooling system. The issue required a couple spacewalks to repair. It appears that whatever the problem with the ISS coolant loop is, the issue has returned.

NASA has confirmed that a coolant loop problem has again reared its head aboard the orbiting space station. NASA says that on Wednesday one of the two coolant loops on the space station shut down. A NASA spokesperson said that at no time was the crew aboard the ISS in any danger.

As a result of the coolant issue, some non-essential equipment aboard ISS modules was shut down. Some of the equipment was also changed over to use the other coolant loop. NASA believes that the coolant issue is linked to a valve problem, which was the same sort of issue that caused the coolant problems late last year. Presumably, a space walk will be needed to fix the coolant system, but no announcement has been made at this time.

The future is filled with technology, and especially robots and artificial intelligence, something that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently talked about. Gates spoke at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, DC, where he said that both governments and businesses need to prepare for a world where people will be fighting for jobs with robots.

Gates said: "Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses... it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower-end of skill set... 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don't think people have that in their mental model."

The Microsoft co-founder even talked about what governments would do to prevent social unrest because of the mass unemployment, where he said they should basically get on their knees and beg big businesses to keep employing human beings instead of robots. This could lead to a future without payroll tax and corporate income taxes, while keeping the minimum wage low enough that businesses continue to employ people cheaply, versus using an automated, never-sleeping, non-demanding robot.

Time-lapse videos of nature are one of my favorite genres of internet video to watch, especially when shot the right way. A new video released recently by Project Yosemite is just the type of time-lapse that I love. The video features expansive views from deep within Yosemite National Park during both the day and the night. Breathtaking shots of the Sierra Nevada mountain range framed by a very bright and sharp Milky Way take this video above and beyond.

Project Yosemite is a coloration between Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill, two videographers who met through Vimeo that decided to shoot the undeniable beauty that is Yosemite National Park. The videos are a compilation of more than 45 days spread over ten months of work to generate the five minute video. The pair hiked over 200 miles to get the shots seen in the video and had to carry more than 70lbs of camera gear with them. The video below is simply amazing. I highly recommend setting it to HD, cranking up the sound and going full screen when viewing it for the first time.

A shorter four minute version is on Vimeo as well and it is no less spectacular than the first. Do you know of any other amazing time-lapse videos that are breathtaking? Share them in the comments below!