Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 242

Since its release, the Raspberry Pi has been changing the DIY landscape much like the Arduino did in 2009-2011. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been hard at work developing the most anticipated add-on module it has developed to date, the camera module.

Today Raspberry Pi released a blog post detailing how the upcoming $25 camera module was created, and in that document we learn some interesting information about the camera. A fixed focus 5MP sensor capable of 2592x1944 stills, but also 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p60/90 video is featured. The lens is fixes so that means no auto focus will be present.

The camera will connect to the Raspberry Pi via two connections. I2C will handle the basic functions like start, stop, change resolution, and adjust exposure time. The much higher bandwidth CSI bus will handle the pixel data from the sensor back to the processor.

Defense Distributed has received a federal firearms license, with company head Cody Wilson announcing this would allow his company to manufacture and sell the group's guns. The news comes from Defense Distributed's Facebook page, where they uploaded a photo of the license with a note saying "The work begins!"

Wilson has said that the Type 7 license he received will allow him the same rights as other manufacturers, where he adds: "I can sell some of the pieces that we've been making. I can do firearms transactions and transport." Wilson will be required to, of course, keep records on what his company makes and sells, but he doesn't have plans to sell anything until he receives a supplemental license to make a broader range of firearms.

Defense Distributed seem to be the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to 3D-printed gun companies, successfully testing 3D-printed rifle lowers and high-capacity magazines.

Last week I reported on a comet that was set to make an appearance in our twilight skies and even though it has dimmed past naked eye visibility, those with binoculars, telescopes and DSLR's can still view the spectacular Comet Pan-STARRS. Astronomers, astrophotographers and photographers across the US have captured some stunning images during it's week long visit and I want to share them with you.

First up is an image taken from Sumter, South Carolina by my good friend and fellow astrophotographer Hap Griffin (source #1). He captured the image which includes Pan-STARRS and the crescent moon in a single frame as they set behind a tree line near his home.

Up next is a breath-taking shot of Pan-STARRS that was taken by photographer Chris Cook (source #2) at First Encounter Beach, Massachusetts. The shot features Cook and his son standing on a hill gazing in wonderment at such a beautiful scene.

Whether you like Arduino or not, you have to admit that the small Italian company founded my Massimo Banzi has truly revolutionized the way the DIY world does things. Today Arduino released its next official product, the GSM Shield.

Arduino has paved the way for things such as cheap, easy to use development boards, all the way to DIY gaming controllers, and now they are looking to truly connect the internet of things wherever you may be. The GSM Shield partnered up with Telefonica Digital to "design a tool that is greatly simplifying the process of building Internet of Things applications based on the GSM mobile phone network".

The GSM Shield also includes a Telefonica SIM card that includes a worldwide data tariff which can be used anywhere there is a cellular signal. Features include the ability to have the Arduino send an SMS message when a sensor or data set reaches a specific threshold, or even send and receive voice calls directly to your Arduino based project.

NASA's Curiosity rover has been doing burnouts all over Mars' surface for a while now, but it looks like it has hit a snag - the rover will be switching to its backup computer in the coming days after it suffered a corrupted file that caused the primary "A-side" computer to glitch.

This all happened on February 27, with Curiosity not sending its daily dump of data back to Earth - instead, it switched into sleep mode. Mission Control of course had to act, and made the decision to switch the rover over to its backup, suspending their scientific research until the rover is fixed. NASA posted through their Twitter acccount:

In five years time, Dennis Tito's plan of a private flyby of Mars will come to fruition, and as any journey into the dark beyond that is space, there are logistical issues that will have to be planned for its 501-day journey.

One of the most important issues is blocking the crew from deadly radiation, so how would you do this? Well, Tito's idea is to use human waste. Yes, human waste as in your bodily fluids. The Inspiration Mars spacecraft will be built with its walls lined in water-filled bags that would eventually be filled with the crews' waste, protecting them against cosmic rays. The water-filled bags will eventually get replaced with the crews' waste, which will then be dehydrated, purified and prepared as drinking water.

Water-based materials are better at stopping the deadly radiation, so it's a better solution than pure metal. It definitely sounds like an interesting way to solve the issue, but would you want to float through space knowing that your walls are covered in not only your waste, but your crew mates' waste? Delicious. In space, no one can hear you scream, I guess.

It's that time again folks - Science Friday is here, and today's post is coming a little early thanks to SpaceX. At 10:10am EST, Elon Musk's successful space flight company will be launching its next Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule on its way to the International Space Station and we can all watch it live!

Beginning at 9:30am EST, SpaceX will begin streaming live from the launch pad located at NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Dragon capsule is scheduled to dock with the ISS on March 2nd and is filled with about 1,200 pounds of supplies including materials for about 160 new experiments.

When it returns to Earth three weeks later, on March 25th, it will be carrying about 2,300 pounds of spent cargo, trash and completed experiments. If everything goes as planned, this will be SpaceX's third successful trip to the ISS. For the true space geeks out there, each Falcon 9 rocket weighs 735,000 pounds, generates a thrust of 1,320,000 foot-pounds and cost roughly $133 million each mission.

We've been hearing about flexible smartphones and displays, but before we can even imagine them in the consumer space, we need batteries to be flexible and stretchable. Well, it looks like that wait might be getting closer to an end, with researchers announcing the development of such a technology.

Using a process called "ordered unraveling", John A. Rogers from the University of Illinois and Yonggang Huang from Northwestern University say that their battery can be stretched by up to 300% of its original size, all without losing any functionality. Energy storage islands and "serpentine" wire connections are placed in a sheet of polymer. Polymer is flexible and stretchy by default, with the overlapping wiring can be installed without being damaged.

What can we expect in terms of battery life? According to the engineers, their solution performs close to a standard lithium-ion battery of the same physical size. So we're looking at around 8-9 hours, as well as the ability to charge it wirelessly, but the current prototype they're using loses some capacity after just 20 recharges.

It's no secret that 3D printing is one of the hottest trends in recent history, and it should be no surprise that anyone and everyone is coming up with new ways to capitalize on the 3D printing revolution. Makexyz is a new service that has been launched to help connect those who need 3D printed items with 3D printer owners.

Makexzy creator Nathan Tone told VentureBeat "Instead of being printed at some Orwellian factory, our objects are printed by real people." Tone said the idea for the service came to him when a part he designed, took weeks to be printed and shipped to him through traditional 3D printing services. "Theres's a big benefit to just printing locally. Objects are half as expensive and you get them twice as fast", he said.

Tone says that services like Shapeways take too much time and cost over double as something printed on a personal machine sourced locally. With most services charging as much as $1.50 per cubic centimeter having something printed is just out of reach for some designers. "We've been careful to make sure that our prices are lower than working through a big company", Tone said.

The highly destructive meteorite that blasted into Earth's atmosphere last week, exploding near Chelyabinsk, Russia is quite the event according to NASA. The US space agency have said that it is one of the biggest to strike in over 100 years.

The actual size of the object was 10,000 tons with the energy released from the event hovering at around 500 kilotons - nearly 30 times the size of the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. The meteor impact that previously wielded this type of power, was in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia.

The Voice of Russia has reported that over 1200 people have been injured, and 3724 buildings damaged by the impact. On top of this, a combined 200,000 square meters (2.15 million square feet) of shattered glass is the result from the intense shockwave. Damage is pegged at an estimated $33 million.

Scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory are working on something truly incredible, where they are converting plastic bags into batteries - yes, you read that right. Vilas Pol, a Chemist with the laboratory was interviewed by Al Jazeera, where he cut a plastic bag and eventually turned it into a battery.

Pol did this by cutting plastic bags into bits, puts the pieces of plastic bag into a metal tube, adds a 'catalyst', and heats it to 700C. In three hours, a fine black-colored powder - carbon. This carbon sells for $150 per gram, making it worth more than gold. Within a few minutes, the carbon can be converted into a watch battery. Scientists are now working on making this technology cheaper.

The more energy pushed into the battery, the cheaper the battery can get - which is the main driving force of storing more energy into the battery itself. The US government is set to invest $120 million into the project, to create smaller batteries that would eventually be used in smartphones, right up to electric cars.

It's no secret - I am a huge astronomy buff. So much so that I even endeavor into the complex realm that is astrophotography. I say "complex" because taking a clear, crisp and vibrant image of the cosmos is quite challenging, and requites many hours to produce a single 2D image.

Finnish astrophotographer J-P Mestävainio has taken these complexities and mastered them, but he did not stop there. Mestävainio wondered what the Nebula he was photographing looked like in the third dimension and set out to create what can only be described as breathtaking. Seen below is IC 1396 or the Elephants Trunk Nebula.

These animated GIF images are in all actuality an artist interpretation of how he thinks the nebula would appear if passing by. The GIFs are created by adding interpretations and educated guesses based on the formation of the nebula and a rule-of-thumb that brighter stars are closer than darker ones to known data about the nebula, like distance and the location of certain stars around it to create a 3D model of the nebula.

We all love our consumer technology, but scientific breakthroughs like this are just extraordinary. Later this year, we'll see the first bionic hand that will give an amputee the ability to feel their hand again.

This will be quite the moment for artificial limbs with sensory perception, where the first man to get the new touch-sensitive bionic hand will be a man in his 20s living in Rome, who lost the lower part of his arm in an accident. The wiring of this bionic hand will be connected to his nervous system, where they hope he'll be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receive touch signals from the bionic hand's skin sensors.

This is coming from Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he's also added that the hand will be attached directly to the patient's nervous system through electrodes clipped onto two of the arm's main nerves - the median and ulnar nerves.

After multiple space agencies have been tracking the asteroid that fled just past Earth waving hello and goodbye, Russia was attacked by space rocks late last week. The meteroid broke up in our atmosphere, but still crashed into Earth injuring over 1200 people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

Because of this, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee in Washington are planning to hold a hearing soon "to examine ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth."

NASA have said that the rock that smashed into the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, which is around 950 miles east of Moscow, was around 15 meters in diameter, and it was moving at an astonishing 18 kilometres per second. It lasted around 30 seconds in our atmosphere before it broke apart, and wasn't detected by any Earth-based telescopes. NASA scientists have said that it is virtually impossible for telescopes to see a meteorite that size in the daytime sky.

3D printers are the new everything right now, where we've heard about moon bases being 3D-printed, buildings being 3D-printed and even stem cells - what next? Houses. Yes, houses.

A London-based design firm, Softkill, has just talked about their entry into the rat race that is 3D-printed houses, with a structure they claim would take just three weeks to build. From the picture above, it looks like a million spiders have crawled in and just spun a house out of their webs, but this is all part of what Softkill call their ProtoHouse, and will reach the prototype stage by the middle of the year.

During an interview with Dezeen, Softkill's Gilles Retsin didn't like the idea of their rival project by Universe Architecture, where he said:

While some hard-core Star Wars fans might be upset by Disney's announcement, others will certainly be pleased. Disney has confirmed that there will be at least two spinoffs that focus on individual Star Wars characters. These movies will be in addition to the upcoming episodes, the first of which--Episode VII--will be directed by J.J. Abrams.

Basically, Disney is trying to make as much money as possible from their $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm. Nothing has been said about which characters these spinoffs will focus on, though rumors suggest that Yoda or Jabba the Hutt could be the potential stars.

If you are anything closely related to a science geek, space nerd, casual star gazer or hard core astronomer, you have most likely heard of Comet ISON. NASA has just released awesome video of the comet streaking through space. ISON could prove to be the largest comet the Earth has seen in recorded history later this fall.

Later this year, Comet ISON will make a close pass to Earth and as it approaches the sun, its tail will glow as well as grow. Many leading authorities believe that ISON will be the largest comet ever witnessed from Earth's surface. At its peak it could be brighter than the full moon, and its tail could stretch the width of 96 full moons.

Chances are high that ISON might even be bright enough to be visible during the daytime, which is virtually unheard of. I for one have set aside several days in November and December to photograph and observe the great comet, which is believed to have originated in the Oort Cloud and has an orbit of several hundred thousand years.

3D printers are huge right now, where we're not only looking towards the world's first 3D-printed building, but we have the European Space Agency talking about a 3D-printed base... on the Moon. The latest 3D printing news is scientists working with 3D-printed embryonic stem cells that could one day lead us toward lab-made organ transplants.

A team at the Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh, Scotland are the ones who have developed a method for 3D printing clusters of human embryonic stem cells in various sizes. Researchers have previously, and successfully printed 3D cells before, but this is the first time that embryonic cell cultures have been build in 3D.

With human embryonic stem cells capable of replicating pretty much any type of tissue in the human body, this is huge news. The scientists at the Heriot-Watt believe that lab-made versions could one day found their way into organ transplants, making donors unnecessary.

Dyson's latest and greatest invention is an update to their Airblade line of hand dryers, the Airblade Tap. Dyson's Airblade Tap integrates the drying functionality directly into the faucet itself, thanks to some great size reductions in the technology required to integrate the drying functionality into the faucet. Sir James Dyson, founder of Dyson said:

Dyson's Airblade Tap sports a smaller 1600W motor that is capable of drying hands in under 12 seconds as it's capable of pushing air out at an incredible 420mph. The hand dryer also cleans the air before blowing it onto your hands, with Dyson stating that it makes it much more convenient to use than regular hand dryers. The included HEPA filters reportedly pick up 99.9% of bacteria and viruses in the bathroom air, too.

Finnish smartphone maker Nokia have received a tidy $1.35 billion grant which will see them attempt to develop the strongest material ever constructed - how incredibly exciting! Currently, graphene is a class 2D structure measuring just a single atom thick.

This is an incredible feat, and it is currently the strongest material ever produced. Graphene is 300 times tougher than steel and is also one of the lightest conductors available. Nokia is leading the pack of the Graphene Flagship Consortium, which includes 73 other companies and academic institutions from a number of mediums.

Nokia's grant will see them research and develop graphene for practical applications, where the European Union for the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) the ones behind the $1.35 billion grant. Research Leader at Nokia Research Center, Jani Kivioja, says: