NASA's Prototype Mars Space Suit Gets a Frosty Antarctic Performance Test

NASA's Prototype Mars Space Suit Gets a Frosty Antarctic Performance Test: "

Mars is one seriously cold rock, so where better in the world to test a new spacesuit design then the permafrost of Antarctica? NASA researchers recently took the NDX-1 spacesuit prototype, designed at the University of North Dakota by Argentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon, for an Antarctic test drive where the suit was exposed to 47 mile per hour winds and frigid polar temperatures.

The NDX-1 has been under development for several years now at UND's Space Suit Laboratory, but this was its first test-drive in harsh, Mars-simulating conditions. The idea wasn't just to take the suit somewhere cold, but also somewhere isolated 'so that if something went wrong we couldn't just go to the store,' De Leon said to Reuters.

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Not that you could patch the NDX-1 together at the local hardware store. The $100,000 suit (funded by NASA) contains more than 350 materials, including weight-reducing carbon fiber and Kevlar.

A team of NASA scientists, including De Leon himself, took the suit through the paces of simulated spacewalks during which they collected samples and operated tools like drills--the very kinds of activities the first humans on Mars very well might undertake. If, that is, we ever get there. With NASA's purse strings tightening, developing an interplanetary space vehicle may not be in cards for quite a while, leaving America's astronauts all dressed up in their NDX-1s with no place to go.

[Reuters]

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Video: Simon the Robot Can Tell When It's Being Ignored, And Try To Get Your Attention

Video: Simon the Robot Can Tell When It's Being Ignored, And Try To Get Your Attention: "

Simon Says Excuse me. Um, hello? Look at me, please. Stop ignoring me! via YouTube

Excuse me? Hello?

A new robot can tell when it's being ignored, and it politely and subtly gets a person's attention. Researchers say the new computer vision system could help robots and humans interact more effectively, by allowing robots to use the same social cues as people.

Simon the robot, developed at Georgia Tech's Socially Intelligent Machines lab, uses a camera to figure out when a person is interested in interacting with it. It watches their behavior and uses some form of gesture, like waving its hand, to get noticed.

Then it has to figure out whether it actually captured the person's attention. Using only the camera as a guide, Simon achieved about 80 percent accuracy in determining when he had gotten someone's attention, according to Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

Check out the video below in which a volunteer constructs something out of colorful blocks, under Simon's watchful eyes. Simon's timid wave interrupts his concentration, and he waves back.

The goal is to help robots understand when to sit and be quiet and when it's appropriate for them to get a human's attention. People can figure this out pretty easily with simple body language, but it's not as obvious for a robot. Remember Furby and its insistent, insipid desire to play, even when you didn't feel like it? Simon is apparently a little more polite.

'In order for these robots to work with us effectively, they have to obey these same social conventions, which means they have to be able to perceive the same things humans perceive in determining how to abide by those conventions,' Bobick explains.

Other roboticists at Georgia Tech are helping robots learn whether they want to deceive other robots or humans, and then carry out a deceptive strategy to that effect. No word on whether these technologies would ever be combined, so robots could figure out when we humans aren't paying attention and then carry out their devious world-dominating plans.

[International Business Times]

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Largest Undersea Cable Ever Could Export Iceland's Abundant Geothermal Power to the Rest of Europe

Largest Undersea Cable Ever Could Export Iceland's Abundant Geothermal Power to the Rest of Europe: "

Geothermal Borehole House in Iceland Teratornis via Flickr

Hoping to take advantage of its violent volcanic heritage, Iceland is contemplating building the world's biggest undersea electric cable, so it can sell geothermal power to other European nations. If it works, it could export enough electricity to power 1.25 million homes.

Landsvirkjun, Iceland's state-owned energy company, is studying the feasibility of building a cable to countries like Great Britain, Norway, the Netherlands and Germany, according to AFP. Depending on the recipient country, the cable would be between 745 and 1,180 miles long. Such a plan would help Iceland's economy recover both from the worldwide financial collapse and from the impacts of last year's massive eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.

As PopSci explained in 2009, it's easy to produce geothermal energy in Iceland. The island is essentially a big volcano, its land mass bubbling up from the seafloor over the millennia. Tapping the heated water below the crust is as simple as digging a well and putting a power plant over it. Steam spins a turbine that drives a generator, just like any other power plant - except no coal or natural gas is burned to generate the steam, because it all comes from the ground.

This is different from other geothermal projects in the U.S. and Switzerland, which inject water through cracks in bedrock, where the water can be superheated. That method has been shown to cause earthquakes. The Icelandic version uses water that's already in the ground, which absorbs rainfall.

In 2009, Geologists and engineers were drilling into Krafla, an active volcanic crater, in the hopes of reaching superheated water and turning it into electric power. But when they hit 6,100 feet, they were stymied by magma flowing into the borehole. The drilling stopped, but not to be undone, the scientists used a National Science Foundation grant to study using magma as an energy source. In a study published in this month's issue of Geology, scientists report the dry steam from magma wells like the one at Krafla could generate 25 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 25,000 to 30,000 homes.

Iceland already derives about a third of its electricity from geothermal plants, and almost all the rest comes from hydropower - the country uses hardly any fossil fuels, according to Landsvirkjun (with Google Translate). Nearly all Icelandic homes are heated with geothermal energy. So extra energy from wells like Krafla could conceivably be exported to other countries that are more dependent on fossil fuels.

The Landsvirkjun study aims to export five terawatt-hours per year, according to AFP. At current energy prices, that could be worth $350 to $448 million every year - a nice infusion of cash for a country that saw all its banks fail back in 2008, and which was hammered by Eyjafjallajökull's ash clouds last spring.

[AFP]

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New Algorithms Match Police Sketches to Real Mug Shots, Helping Nab Suspects

New Algorithms Match Police Sketches to Real Mug Shots, Helping Nab Suspects: "

Sketch and Photo A new facial recognition system matches a police artist's sketch with a photograph. MSU

The new computer system found a match 45 percent of the time

A new set of algorithms could make it easier to hunt down criminal suspects by matching police sketches to a database of mug shots.

When police are trying to find a suspect in a serious crime, a police sketch artist may be called in to interview witnesses and come up with a rough sketch of the person's features. Witnesses are asked about a suite of features, like crooked mouth, pointy nose and so on. But in some cases, beyond classifiers like age and race, it can be hard to come up with an accurate depiction. There are a few software programs that generate a composite image, but they can be less accurate than a trained forensic artist, according to Michigan State University.

Enter the algorithm, which combines artist sketches with crime databases and sniffs out suspects based on their features. It works by identifying structural similarities between the sketch and a photo, like the shape of the eyes, nose and chin, according to Anil Jain, director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing lab at the MSU engineering department.

The researchers tested it using a database of 10,000 mug shot photos and some sketches provided by the Michigan State Police, and it performed better than a commercial face-recognition system, MSU said. It got the right person 45 percent of the time. That's not exactly perfect, but it's not bad, either, considering some people might not be in a mug shot database at all.

Witnesses' memories can be unreliable, especially in the violent situations that would normally warrant a police sketch. But combining a police sketch with real mug shots could speed up the process of finding suspects and arresting the right person.

All the sketches were from real crimes where the suspect was later identified, so the team could check the computer's results.

The researchers plan to field test it with real suspects next year, MSU says.

[MSU News]

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Japan Is Building Artificially Intelligent Rockets, Hoping to Streamline Operations and Cut Costs

Japan Is Building Artificially Intelligent Rockets, Hoping to Streamline Operations and Cut Costs: "

Epsilon Rocket JAXA

Artificially intelligent rockets could perform self-diagnostics and self-repairs, lowering the cost of future space launches. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency is working on an intelligent rocket to supplement its current lift vehicle, and it would be cheaper and simpler to use, engineers say.

Most spacecraft have intelligent capabilities, like adjusting their trajectories, evaluating their status and deciding whether to conduct tasks, and putting themselves in safe mode when something unexpected happens, among others. Last year, NASA uploaded software onto the Opportunity Mars rover that allows it to decide for itself which rocks it should investigate.

But so far, rockets are nothing better than automated. They can notify engineers when something is wrong, but they can't do anything about it. Most designs still use decades-old technology, and as such are 'a showcase of deficiencies,' as Yasuhiro Morita, project manager for the new Epsilon rocket, said in a JAXA news release.

Epsilon would be able to check itself out, find out what caused a malfunction, and in some cases, fix itself, according to TechNewsDaily. One example could be electrical currents that control the rocket thruster's orientation, which controls its direction. Intelligent rocket systems could guard against electrical surges, or correct for them to make sure the rocket doesn't go off course.

Epsilon is a three-stage solid fuel rocket intended for light to medium-sized payloads, which would mostly consist of science spacecraft. Its first mission will be 25 percent cheaper than a comparable launch on Japan's M-V rocket.

Perhaps it will decide for itself which asteroid to go hunting next.

[Space.com]

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Mind-Controlled Musical Instrument Helps Paralysis Patients Rehabilitate

Mind-Controlled Musical Instrument Helps Paralysis Patients Rehabilitate: "

Music Through the Mind Eduardo Miranda

Paralysis patients could play music with their minds, using a new brain-control interface that senses brain impulses and translates them into musical notes.

Users must teach themselves how to associate brain signals with specific tasks, causing neuronal activity that the brain scanners can pick up. Then they can make music.

It's a pretty unique use of brain-computer interfaces, which are already being used to do things like drive cars, control robots and play video games. The device was developed by Eduardo Miranda, a composer and computer-music specialist at the University of Plymouth, UK. A composer by trade, Miranda said he was captivated by the idea of using a musical brain-controlled interface for therapeutic purposes. 'Now I can't separate this work from my activities as a composer,' he told Nature News.

Patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's can use music to walk to a rhythm or even to trigger memories or emotions. But stroke patients or those with locked-in syndrome can't interact with music beyond just listening to it. With this system, patients with physical limitations might be able to use music for therapy, too - truly making music the medicine of the mind.

Like other brain-computer interfaces, a user calibrates the system - and his or her brain - by learning to associate certain brain signals with a stimulus. While wearing an EEG cap, patients focus their attention on four small buttons on a computer screen, each of which triggers a series of musical notes. The user must direct his or her gaze at the target corresponding to the action he or she would like to perform, Miranda and colleagues explain.

Miranda and computer scientists at the University of Essex tested the system on a patient with locked-in syndrome, who learned the system in about two hours and was soon playing notes along with a backup track.

By varying levels of concentration, she learned to vary the amplitude of the EEG, which allowed her to choose among the different notes, like striking piano keys.

A future version of the system would not require calibration, relying on advanced algorithms to sense a user's neuronal response to each button, the researchers say.

The work is reported in the journal Music and Medicine.

[Nature News]

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