On August 5, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover will touch down on the surface of the Red Planet. Or that's what we all hope, because it will be the craziest landing in the history of space exploration. The landing sequence alone requires six vehicle configurations, 76 pyrotechnic devices, the largest supersonic parachute ever built by anyone, and more than 500,000 lines of code. It's such an intense undertaking that the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, call it The Seven Minutes of Terror.
How it Works?
When I read that the UFO looking Mars Science Laboratory's aeroshell would use a floating crane called Sky Crane by NASA to softly land the rover on Mars, We couldn't believe it. It's the most awesome idea I can possibly imagine for a landing of a rover. In fact, looking at the video and NASA's hyperrealistic simulation showing how the mechanism actually floats, lowers the rover, and then flies away, I still can't believe it. 1. First, the rockets of the aero shell a protective armor that will protect the MSL and guide it through its descent—will fire to steer the capsule towards the desired angle.
2. When this is achieved, a long parachute will open to slow down the Mars Science Laboratory as it zooms down the Martian atmosphere.
3. Then, as soon as the capsule slows down, the heat shield will eject, leaving the rover exposed inside the aeroshell, attached to the floating crane mechanism.
4. That's when the whole landing process gets cray cray: The floating crane's rockets will fire up, further slowing the descent.
5. The top part of the aeroshell will then detach completely, leaving the sky crane alone holding the MSL rover, slowly descending towards the planet's surface.
6. A few hundred meters above the terrain, the floating sky crane will start lowering the rover down using "a trio of bridles and one umbilical cord" until it touches down.
7. At that time, the sky crane will detach from the rover and fly away to crash far from the landing site.
Technology that Work
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Road works. Inconsiderate drivers. Congestion. Today’s drivers have
their fair share of stress already. But now there is a new malaise for
the modern motorist: range anxiety. That is the term given to drivers of electric cars that are struck by
the sudden fear that their vehicle does not have enough charge to reach
its destination. Most of us have experienced that sinking feeling when
the little orange indicator light comes on to tell us we are low on
petrol, but there is not a gas station in sight. Imagine that, combined
with the feeling that you get when your cellphone starts beeping because
the battery is low, and you are nowhere near a plug. That gets you
close to the feeling of range anxiety.
It is an interesting phenomenon, particularly when you begin to look at how many of us actually use our cars. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Studies,
78% of drivers do less than 40 miles (65km) a day – a trivial distance
for many of today’s electric cars. In fact, the poster child of electric
cars – the Tesla – has a range of 300 miles (485km) using some
batteries.
According to, Dr Richard Sassoon, of Stanford University, there are
“three main reasons” that many of us choose the internal combustion
engine over its cleaner, quieter alternative. “One is the short range that an electric vehicle can travel between
charges, and that’s based on the size of the battery,” he said. “The
second is the lack of a sufficient charging infrastructure, and the
third is that even if you can charge, it takes a long time to charge –
several hours. That means you’re going to have to take a break in your
trip in order to charge your vehicle.”
Researchers and firms are trying to tackle all of these problems. Firms, such as Better Place,
have started building battery “switching stations” that allow drivers
to pull in and swap their batteries as easily as filling up with gas,
whilst countless researchers are developing more efficient batteries. But Dr Sasson believes there may be another answer: recharging roads.
Engineers in his lab are developing a way to wirelessly charge electric
cars from magnetic coils embedded into the road. The car would pick up
the power via another coil, meaning – in theory – that you would never
have to make a charging stop again.
The system works using a technique called “magnetic resonance coupling”.
You can think about resonance as the phenomenon that allows an opera
singer to smash a glass using only the power of their voice. In that
case, when the singer hits a note that has the same resonant frequency
as the glass, they couple and energy begins to build up in the glass,
eventually causing it to smash. Instead of using acoustic resonance, the Stanford team use the resonance
of electromagnetic waves. A coil in the road that is connected to a
power line is made to vibrate with the same resonance frequency as the
coil on the bottom of the car, allowing energy to flow between them.
Traffic charge
It builds on pioneering work done at MIT in 2006
which showed the technique could be used in stationary situations, to
power televisions and other gadgets. The Stanford system now claims to
have upped the efficiency dramatically. They have come up with designs
of coil that allow 97% efficient transmission of power over a distance
of about 2m (6ft). Using models, they estimate they can transfer up to
10kW of power. “That number is about the number we’d probably want to transfer to vehicles” says Dr Sasoon.
And to turn this principle into a practical “recharging road” is not as difficult as it seems, he says. "Road
beds are made of asphalt or concrete, but there is often a lot of steel
in the roads - a lot of rebar, a lot of ties between the segments of
the road and so on,” he said. "What we want to do is use that to our
advantage."
He believes they could use much of the metal in the roadbed as part
of the transmitter, and then the receiver would use the metal of the car
body, again avoiding too many extra structural components.
It may take years, if not decades, until roads are retrofitted in this way. But various firms, including an MIT spin-out called WiTricity,
are already taking the first steps by building charging stations for
car parks, garages and beyond. And it has already caught the attention
of car firms, including Toyota, Mitsubishi and Audi. “We aim to
offer our customers a premium-standard recharging method – easy to use
and fully automatic, with no mechanical contacts,” said Dr. Bjorn Elias
of Audi Electronics Venture GmbH (AEV), a subsidiary of the car company
that is working with WiTricity, recently. “Wherever you park the car, its battery will be recharged – perhaps even at traffic signals.”
Audi
– and others – are working to create a public standard and believe that
the first units – for use in garages – will go into production in a few
years’ time. At that time, Dr Sasoon believes, electric cars will
become the technology of choice, displacing our current love of gas
guzzlers and banishing the concept of range anxiety forever. “You never need to worry about stopping and filling up,” he said.
"From a the "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" asks
Regina Dugan, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the
extraordinary projects -- a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm
controlled by thought, and, well, the internet -- that her agency has
created by not worrying that they might fail"
“Since we took to the sky, we have wanted to fly faster and farther. And
to do so, we’ve had to believe in impossible things and we’ve had to
refuse to fear failure.”
(Regina Dugan)
Regina Dugan directs the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA), the DoD innovation engine responsible for creating and
preventing strategic surprise.
Mohenjo Daro (lit. Mound of the Dead, Sindhi: موئن جو دڙو, pronounced), situated in the province of Sindh, Pakistan, was one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Mohenjo Daro was built around 2600 BC and and continued to exist till about 1800 BC. The ruins of the city were discovered in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who believed it to be a stupa. In the 1930s, massive excavations were conducted under the leadership of John Marshall, K. N. Dikshit, Ernest Mackay, and others.
When excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro reached the street level, they discovered skeletons scattered about the cities, many holding hands and sprawling in the streets as if some instant, horrible doom had taken place. People were just lying, unburied, in the streets of what once happened to be a sprawling metropolis. And these skeletons are thousands of years old, even by traditional archaeological standards. What could cause such a thing? Why did the bodies not decay or get eaten by wild animals? Furthermore, there is no apparent cause of a physically violent death. These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on par with those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An ancient, heavily populated city in Pakistan seemed to have been instantly destroyed 2,000 years before Christ by an incredible explosion that could only been caused by an atomic bomb.
At one site, Soviet scholars found a skeleton which had a radioactive level 50 times greater than normal. Other cities have been found in northern India that show indications of explosions of great magnitude. One such city, found between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, seems to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses of walls and foundations of the ancient city are fused together, literally vitrified! And since there is no indication of a volcanic eruption at Mohenjo-Daro or at the other cities, the intense heat to melt clay vessels can only be explained by an atomic blast or some other unknown weapon. The cities were wiped out entirely.
The David Davenport Angle to Mohenjo Daro Extinction [Quotes adapted directly from his works]
An ancient, heavily populated city in Pakistan was instantly destroyed 2,000 years before Christ by an incredible explosion that could only been caused by an atomic bomb. That’s the mind bogging conclusion of a British researcher, David Davenport, who spent 12 years studying ancient Hindu scripts and evidence at the site where the great city – Mohenjo Daro once stood. What was found at the site of Mohenjo Daro corresponds exactly to Nagasaki, declared Davenport, who published his startling findings in an amazing book, “Atomic Destruction in 2000 B.C.”, Milan, Italy, 1979.
There was an epicenter about 50 yards wide where everything was crystallized, fused or melted, he said. Sixty yards from the center the bricks are melted on one side indicating a blast. the horrible, mysterious event of 4,000 years ago that leveled Mohenjo Daro was recorded in an old Hindu manuscript called the Mahabharata, “White hot smoke that was a thousand times brighter than the sun rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes, the account reads. Water boiled…horses and war chariots were burned by the thousands.. . the corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings…”. The description concludes, “it was a terrible sight to see … never before have we seen such a ghastly weapon”.
Based on his study of many ancient manuscripts, Davenport believes that the end of Mohenjo Daro was tied to a state of war between the Aryans and the Dravidian. Aryans controlled regions where space aliens were mining minerals and exploiting other natural resources, he believes. Because it was a Dravidian city, the aliens had agreed to destroy Mohenjo Daro on behalf of the Aryans. The aliens needed the friendship of the Aryan kings so that they could continue their prospecting and research, explained Davenport. The texts tell us that 30,000 inhabitants of the city were given seven days to get out – a clear warning that everything was about to be destroyed. Obviously, some people didn’t heed the warning, because 44 human skeletons were found there in 1927, just a few years after the city was discovered.
All the skeletons were flattened to the ground. For example, a father, mother and child were found flattened in the street, face down and still holding hands. Interestingly, the ancient texts refer repeatedly to the Vimanas, or the flying cars, which fly under their own power, he added. Davenport’s intriguing theory has met with intense interest in the scientific community. Nationally known expert William Sturm said, “the melting of bricks at Mohenjo Daro could not have been caused by a normal fire”. Added professor Antonio Castellani, a space engineer in Rome, “it’s possible that what happened at Mohenjo Daro was not a natural phenomenon”.
David Davenport, who spent 12 years studying ancient Hindu scripts and evidence at the ancient site of Mohenjo-Daro, declared in 1996 that the city was instantly destroyed around 2,000 BC. The city ruins reveal the explosion’s epicenter which measures 50 yards wide. At that location everything was crystallized, fused or melted. Sixty yards from the center the bricks were melted on one side indicating a blast… the horrible mysterious event of 4000 years ago was recorded in the Mahabharata.
How did man 2000 tears before Christ have the the knowledge of not only producing such high degree of heat, but also harness the power of such high temperatures? If Mohanjo Daro was destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe, who designed and manufactured them? If not then what was used to produce such heat that vitrified rock and bricks? What could be attributed to the high degree of radioactive traces in the skeletons? How did all of them die, in one instant? Its up to us whether we need answers to these questions or continue to live in a sanitized view of the world, as provided to us by mainstream scholarship.
Hardly a week goes by without an amazing new robot video showing up on the web. After diligently watching well over a hundred of them, I’ve collected a number of videos that demonstrate the incredible capabilities of modern robotics. Think of this as a primer on awesome robot videos as well as a refresher on some of the most viral technology videos to hit the web recently.
Quadcopters are definitely cool, like the construction ‘copters we wrote about earlier this year. Nanocopters, though, bring awesomeness to a new level, with their maneuverability and dare I say cuteness. As robots go, they aren’t the smartest on their own — since they rely on nearby computers for high-level programming and in this case their vision — but as a system they are capable of some amazing stunts. These two quadcopters, shown in the ETH’s Flying Machine Arena in Zurich, can respond to the ball more quickly than a human pilot would be able to. To give you a better idea of what swarms of nanocopters are capable of, here is a video from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP lab, featuring a variety of solo and “swarm” stunts.
However, if you think humans are about to let a bunch of plastic ‘bots take the formation crown, think again. These Japanese show that humans can perform in unison as well:
If you’d like to learn more about what it takes to program a swarm of nanocopters, there is an excellent TED Talk on the how to of building and programming nanocopters:
Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet, robots indeed have their own version of silly kitty videos. Here the University of Pennsylvania’s swarm is programmed:
Injection via needle and syringe is the quickest way to transfuse medicine and fluids into one's body, but not everyone is a fan of shots. Many people have a fear of needles -- "aichmophobia," it's called -- while others frequently self-inject and simply don't want to inject themselves all the time. While completely understandable, it's a dilemma that scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are setting out to solve.
MIT researchers unveiled a prototype device on Thursday that uses a new way to administer drugs, replacing the common needle with a tiny, highly-controllable jet injector, which sends a high-pressured stream directly into the skin. The jet can both inject into and aspirate from tissue, and the device is controlled via a computer interface, which can control the volume of the drug delivery, and the velocity at which it moves.
"We were able to fire the drug out at almost the speed of sound if we need to -- the speed of sound in air is about 340 meters per second," said professor Ian Hunter, who runs the bioinstrumentation lab at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "It's capable of pressurizing the drug up to 100 megapascales (MPas), and we can do that in under a millisecond."
Hunter worked on this project with MIT colleague Dr. Catherine Hogan, as well as a handful of "talented post-docs and others in the lab." Hogan explains how the device works: "There's a magnet in the center of our jet injector that's surrounded by a coil of wire, and when we apply a current to the coil, we create a Lorentz Force that pushes this piston, which forces the drug out of the ampoule," Hogan said. "This gives us a tremendous amount of control depending on how much current we put in, so that we can successfully deliver a wide variety of volumes of drug at a wide variety of velocities with a very low degree of error, something a needle can't do."
There are other advantages of MIT's jet injector over needles: For instance, doctors would be able to control the speed of the injection throughout the duration of the delivery, so it can be quickened or slowed depending on the drug and the patient. "We can also change the velocity over the course of a single injection, so it breaches the skin at one velocity, and then disperses the drug at another," Hogan said. "We accelerate the coil to the desired speed, hold it there for a defined time, and the decelerate to a lower velocity to disperse and absorb the drug into the tissue."
But besides giving doctors better control over injections, the best part of this technology is that it is virtually painless -- in fact, patients won't feel much of anything at all. Hunter explains why: "The drug comes out of this fine jet -- about the same diameter as a mosquito proboscis -- and as many of you know, you don't feel when a mosquito inserts its proboscis into your skin because it's so very narrow," Hunter said. "Our jet is of a similar diameter."
The thinness of the jet makes it perfect for some of the most scariest procedures that involve needles, which is why MIT's research team is developing other ways to utilize this technology. "We've also developed this device so it can for delivery of drugs right through the eye into the retina," Hunter said. "We've succeeded in delivering drugs through the tympanic membrane in your ear, so that we can deliver drugs to the middle and inner ear. And we've also done something that we think is pretty cool: We can take a drug in powdered form, put it in this device, and the device -- because of its very, very fast response -- is able to vibrate that powder so it behaves like a liquid, and then we inject it into tissue as though it was a liquid, even though it's a powder."
Even though this is not the first attempt to create a painless needle, or a new take on the needle, MIT believes this technology is superior with its highly-controlled system for limiting the injection velocity and dosage, but also it's ability to bring ease to patients with needle phobias. An instantaneous, painless injection beats a stinging shot any day of the week.
Although On paper, it looks like a blindingly obvious idea: take a version of a wind turbine and plant it on the seabed so that its blades spin in the flow of the tides and so generate electricity. The turbines, well below the waves, are also out of sight and probably out of mind. And the tidal currents are of course utterly carbon-free. For an island nation surrounded by some of the world's most powerful tides, optimistic estimates say this form of power could - and should - play a big part in keeping British lights on. It is one reason why Scotland has been described as a Saudi Arabia of renewable energy potential. Well, I've been to the baking Saudi oil fields and it was hard to conjure up a resemblance during a visit this week to Orkney, the front line of tidal energy research to the north of the Scottish mainland.
A launch took us between the islands where the waters surge at high speed between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea and back again every six hours.
In Tough climate
The first challenge is the weather. This is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. As we lurched through a heavy swell along the shores of the tiny island of Eday, icy winds racing at up to 40mph brought a succession of heavy showers of rain, sleet and even hail. In the middle of May. Harnessing this massive source of energy looks like a no-brainer but will be a lot harder than laying a pipeline in the desert. We were being taken to see one of the latest devices to go through the trial of everything Orkney could throw at it: a Norwegian turbine called the Hammerfest 1000, a giant three-bladed propeller perched atop nearly 1000 tons of steel structure sitting on the seabed. Except that we couldn't see it because it is well below the surface, deep enough to avoid any shipping.
Only the ghostly images from a remotely-operated vehicle - a robotic submarine - confirm that the giant machine is down there, spinning in the turbulent sea. This turbine is being tested by the energy firm Scottish Power. It was chosen because it had survived off Norway for half-a-dozen years without falling apart. In an infant industry, that counts for something. Scottish Power's plan is to deploy ten of the devices off Islay next year and then, later, up to 100 in the Pentland Firth. As the boat heaves in the waves and the gusts tear at our waterproof clothing, I shout questions to the company's senior man on board, Keith Anderson.
The most obvious is one about scale, and it is something that relates to the dozen or so different marine renewable technologies now being tested in Orkney. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then wouldn't you need 1000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station? Could one really imagine great armies of turbines scattered across the ocean floor?
Predictability challenging
The real aim is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained. "We believe the UK is in a fantastic place to capture all the advantages for manufacturing and investment." Maybe he is right but by this stage we're sheltering near the stern of the boat, clinging to the railings and wedging our boots against coils of rope to avoid sliding on the wet deck.
Some Weird inventions
The first challenge is survival. And the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), established in Orkney in 2003, is hosting trials of a range of weird and wonderful inventions so that companies can investigate which of them can cope. When I first visited EMEC in 2009, only a handful of technologies was being tested. Now all 14 of its 'berths' - areas of sea connected by cable to the shore - are booked, a sign of growing interest in this fledgling source of power.
More significant is that the list of companies involved in this work has been transformed from a collection of relatively small and little-known concerns, bravely struggling with the elements and unconvinced investors, to a roll-call of some of the biggest names in engineering and energy. Rolls Royce and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are among the giants now exploring the development of tidal power. Voith Hydro, makers of the vast turbines fitted to gargantuan dams like the Three Gorges in China, is also involved. Siemens is now backing SeaGen, the first commercial tidal system, deployed at Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. The attraction for most is a gold rush of generous subsidies. Each unit of power fed into the grid from a marine renewable machine earns about five times more than power generated by a fossil fuel. The question is whether this will create a mature and viable set of technologies, and how soon.
New revolution
This must be a little like the pioneering days of steam or aviation: the earliest creations have passed the first credibility test and now the big powers of industry are getting interested. As we roll and lurch back to shore, most people on board, including this reporter, felt more subdued than at the start of the journey, and more admiring of the teams determined not just to endure Orkney's wild seas but to harness them. A final thought: if this particular industrial revolution does take shape, and these machines multiply across the ocean floor in an unprecedented change in the seascape and the way we get our power, we'll need a new word to describe them.
'Farms' wouldn't quite serve for a collection of a thousand giant machines. Earlier, I mentioned 'armies' but maybe that's too militaristic. 'Hordes' is perhaps slightly pejorative. 'Fleets' is suitably marine but these things won't move as ships do. There is no rush however: deployments on this kind of scale are at least a decade away, probably more.
