Space-age underwater hotel to be built in Maldives

With its luminous body seemingly hovering above the water, and five spidery legs plunging underwater, this futuristic building could be the mothership in a sci-fi film.

In fact, it’s the design for one of the world’s largest underwater hotels — and it could be coming to a beach near you.

Introducing the Water Discus Hotel, a luxury multi-million dollar resort featuring 21 moveable rooms found in the heart of spectacular coral reefs.

Maldives to Dubai

The space-age hotel is now set to be built on the remote — and postcard perfect — tropical island of Kuredhivaru in the Maldive Islands, with the National Ministry of Tourism giving the go-ahead to the ambitious plan last week.

The United Arab Emirates may soon be the next home of the high-tech hotel, with a Dubai construction company also in negotiations to build the surreal structure.

“There are many people who will never have the courage to dive to these beautiful reefs,” designer, Pawel Podwojewski, said.

“But here you will have the chance to explore an underwater world from the comfort of your bedroom.”

Space-age seascape

Described as “Star Trek meets the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau,” the remarkable building — valued at up to $50 million — is the brainchild of Polish company Deep Ocean Technology, backed by Swiss investors.

The luminous hotel features two large disc-shaped lounges seven-meters above the water, housing a luxury restaurant and spa.

The lounges are connected to a glass tunnel plunging 30-meters below the water, leading to 21 opulent bedrooms.

“A lot of people have said it looks like something from a James Bond film,” said Podwojewski. “I’m a big fan of the movies, so perhaps that was an inspiration.”

“I wanted to keep it as sleek and simple as possible — so the sphere shape is very efficient.”

Deep end

The cutting-edge hotel may plunge deep beneath the ocean, but its luxury facilities are sky-high, including a helicopter landing pad and rooftop swimming pool.

Guests can sit back and enjoy views of vibrant reefs and tropical fish, all from the comfort of their bed.

Those wanting to explore the spectacular underwater world, can also dive straight in from the hotel’s airlock compartment, including its own decompression chamber.

The more adventurous can even take a ride in a three-passenger deep-sea submarine.

Moving on up

Not only does the hotel look like a spaceship — it actually moves like one, with the largest underwater saucer-shaped room able to slide to the surface in emergencies.

“If you need to replace a window for example, it’s very difficult underwater,” explained Podwojewski. “So we wanted to build a building that can surface any time for maintenance or safety.”

“It’s a bit like a balloon underwater — when we let go of the water from the room’s huge tanks, the balloon will surface automatically. It doesn’t need to rely on electricity.”

Environmental concerns

Developers hope to limit the impact on coral reefs by laying the foundation in as few points as possible.

There are also plans to rebuild coral reefs, by growing the vibrant eco-systems in a special plantation before relocating them around the hotel.

“To preserve the natural environment we have developed couple of kinds of foundations depending on the local conditions,” said Podwojewski. “The key is to touch the sea ground in just few points.”

“Most probably the hotel will land on a flat sand area to reflect the sun rays inside the rooms and the reef will be additionally planted around the hotel rooms to enrich the view.”

The space-age design might seem like something from the future. But it seems this unique underwater hotel will be much closer than you think.

Space-age underwater hotel to be built in Maldives

World’s biggest gingerbread house still open for you

The world’s largest gingerbread house is turning tons of sweetness into thousands of dollars in charitable goodness in Texas.

Proving the saying that everything is bigger in Texas, the Texas A&M Traditions Club enlisted the help of the community of Bryan to set a Guinness World Record for the largest gingerbread house on Nov. 30. The tasty construction project is now being used as a tourist attraction to raise money to fund a new facility to for the trauma program at nearby St. Joseph Health System.

Guinness World Records has verified that the 39,201.8-cubic-foot structure on the grounds of the Traditions Club that was unveiled last week has surpassed the previous record of 36,660 cubic feet set at the Mall of America in Minnesota in 2006.

“I’m both a Food Network junkie and a Google guy, and twelve to fourteen months ago I saw something about gingerbread houses, and it spurred me to find out what the largest one ever built was,’’ Bill Horton, the general manager of the Traditions Club, told TODAY.com. “In June, I was at a luncheon with St. Joseph’s Hospital, and I got this crazy idea to build the world’s largest gingerbread house and combine it with their drive to build a center for their trauma program, and they bit.”

A local home builder and architect created the design, and Horton said almost all of the materials, from lumber to butter, have been donated. The structure also needed to get the proper permits and approval by the fire department from the city of Bryan.

WHAT’S THE MASSIVE GINGERBREAD HOUSE MADE OF?

Butter: 1,800 pounds

Eggs: 7,200

Flour: 7,200 pounds

Brown Sugar: 3,000 pounds

Candy: 22,304 pieces

Total Calories: 36 Million

“Basically it has everything but indoor plumbing,’’ Horton said. “It was a lot of fun and had a lot of challenges.”

The entire exterior is made of gingerbread and icing, which was required in order to set the Guinness World Record. The house is 60 feet by 42 feet and 20.11 feet tall at its highest point.

“Being in Texas, we had some challenges building outdoors,’’ Horton said. “We had some high humidity and had to reduce the amount of butter we used to make it harden up. Now we’re facing a big winter storm, and I’ve tossed and turned all night about how to cover it. We acquired a 6,500-square-foot tarp, and putting that on to cover it should be a challenge in itself.”

In less than a week, the house has raised more than $150,000 for the St. Joseph Level II Trauma Center, Horton said. The house has attracted about 600 visitors a night, with some writing large checks to donate to the trauma center.

The gingerbread home is open from Tuesdays through Sundays from 6 to 10 p.m. and will remain open until Dec. 14. Admission is $3 for adults and $2 for children.

World’s biggest gingerbread house still open for you

World’s first glow-in-the-dark-plant – Starlight Avatar!

‘Starlight Avatar,’ the first autoluminescent plant from biotechnology company Bioglow.

But the light-producing plant was only available in a limited quantity of 20 plants, which auctioned off to the public via the Bioglow website.

Starlight Avatar is a nicotiana plant with a two- to three-month lifespan. Light emitted from ‘Starlight Avatar’ is described as comparable in strength to starlight, with a dim, ambient glow that is best-appreciated in a darkened room.

THE STARLIGHT AVATAR PLANT:

*The genetically engineered plant was created by splicing genes from bioluminescent bacteria with a pot plant called Nicotiana alata.

*Its creators claim it is the first light-emitting plant.

*The glow is best described as being a strong as starlight and can only be seen in a dark room.

*Starlight Avatar grows best in temperatures of around 35C in indirect sunlight.

*Direct sunlight will damage the plant within days and the company warns it is unlikely to survive outdoors.

* Starlight Avatar has a life cycle of between two and three months.

*Specimens auctioned and shipped in transparent boxes containing nutrient-rich gel.

*The light-emitting pathway created by the scientists cannot be transferred by pollen to other plant populations.

 

Opening bids started at $100 per plant and buyers required to purchase plants under a limited-use license, thereby agreeing to use Starlight Avatar for “personal, ornamental, non-research and non-commercial use only.”

Bioglow was founded by molecular biologist Dr. Alex Krichevsky, who has worked for more than six years to develop the world’s first autoluminescent or light-producing plants. Krichevsky’s original work was first published in a 2010 article in PLoS One, an international, peer-reviewed science journal. Greenhouse Grower covered his research in the 2010 article, “Glowing Plants: The Next Big Opportunity.”

According to Bioglow, several plants have been described as having a glowing effect over the past 30 years; however, these plants were either painted with dye, required chemicals or needed ultraviolet light to induce a temporary light emission effect. Bioglow claims its plants are the first “autonomously luminescent,” or autoluminescent, plants that emit light on their own without the need for chemicals or UV light.

“Similar to fireflies and other luminous organisms found in nature, the autoluminescent plant’s light emission machinery is encoded on a cellular level, allowing the plant to constantly emit visible light during its lifecycle,” the company’s website explains. “Bioglow’s work is dedicated to bringing a cleaner, sustainable and affordable plant-based light alternatives to the world.”

Next steps for the company include continued work on producing additional glowing plant varieties and enhancing the light output on future Bioglow plants. Currently, plants emit blue-green colored light, and additional colors including yellow and red may be introduced in the future. Bioglow envisions the use of its plants for lighting backyards, driveways and highways, among others.

World’s first glow-in-the-dark-plant – Starlight Avatar!

Smart chopsticks let you check the safety and quality of food

Smart chopsticks report meal’s nutritional value and flash red if the ingredients aren’t fresh.

Glow-in-the-dark pork, expired chicken parts, goose feet painted with inedible pigment—no one wants to know what’s coming next. And Baidu certainly doesn’t, either.

The Smart chopsticks, which the firm says can tell consumers whether the food in front of them is safe to eat, was born of an April Fool’s video, a spokesman said.

At a glance about Smart chopsticks :

   *Baidu said it first created smart chopsticks as an April Fool’s joke

*But group is now taking gadget seriously and has created prototypes

*Sensors in the smart chopsticks detect any contamination in oil and water

*smart chopsticks can also display the foods nutritional value on a smartphone app

*It only has a few prototypes and no release date or price has been set

Is It Safe To Eat Food With Hair In It?

It’s obviously disgusting to contemplate — who wants to see hair in their food? — but is the occasional stray follicle in a plate of foodstuff really going to harm you?

Baidu at the time had “no serious intention of actually pursuing this,” the spokesman told AFP of the stunt it released earlier this year. “But it generated a lot of excitement both internally and externally.”

The latest stage of development was revealed this week, with a new video released by the company showing a user placing the electronic chopsticks in three different cups of cooking oil. Sensors in the implements detect the oil’s temperature and its fitness for consumption, with the findings displayed on a smartphone app.

The smart chopsticks flash a red light when cooking oil has a higher than 25 percent level of TPMs, or total polar materials, an indicator of freshness, the spokesman said.

Poor food safety is a major concern in China, with one of the country’s worst food scandals seeing the industrial chemical melamine illegally added to dairy products in 2008, killing six children and making 300,000 people ill.

“Gutter oil” is a particular concern — cooking oil illegally made by reprocessing waste oil or by dredging up leftovers from restaurants and marketing it as new.

Health authorities last year launched a crackdown on the use and manufacture of such oil, with more than 100 people arrested and 20 imprisoned — two of them for life — as part of the campaign.

It was not clear whether the smart chopsticks would go into commercial production. The company has only made a limited run of prototypes, the spokesman said, and no release date or price has been set.

China’s social media users lauded the company’s innovation Thursday, but lamented the need for the device in the first place.

“Is it really a good thing that they invented these?” wrote one user. “Can we still enjoy our food?”

“If I carried these chopsticks around with me everywhere, I think I’d die of hunger,” wrote another.

Smart chopsticks let you check the safety and quality of food

Apple has unveiled a smartwatch along with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus

Apple has unveiled a smartwatch – the Apple Watch.

Apple also unveiled two new handsets that are larger than previous models.

The iPhone 6′s screen measures 4.7in (11.9cm) and the iPhone 6 Plus’s 5.5in (14.0cm) – a change that analysts said should help prevent users migrating to Android.

The Apple Watch comes in two sizes and is controlled by what Apple calls a “digital crown” – a dial on its side that allows content on its screen to be magnified or scrolled through, and can also be pressed inwards to act as a home button.

Apple Watch:

Apple Watch The watch’s rear features LEDs and sensors to detect the user’s heart rate.

The display is a touchscreen that can detect the difference between a light tap and heavier pressure from the user’s fingers. In addition, the device runs Siri – Apple’s voice-controlled “personal assistant”.

It offers a variety of different watch faces, can alert the user to notifications, act as a heart rate monitor and show maps.

Apple said that apps could be processed on an iPhone, but displayed on the watch in order to extend battery life. It did not say how often the device needed to be recharged.

Although some of these features are available from competing products, one observer said the device had the potential to ignite the wearable tech sector.

“I’m sure that for many people, waiting to see what Apple did was a first step before going out and buy a wearable technology product, whether or not it’s an Apple one they get,” said Tim Coulling, senior analyst at research firm Canalys.

Motorola’s president, Rick Osterloh, told the BBC last week that he welcomed the idea of Apple “growing” the smartwatch market, even though it would compete with his own product, the Moto 360.

The watch – which comes in three different editions – relies on its user owning an iPhone 5 or more recent model.

It will cost $349 (£216) – which is more than recently announced Android Wear watches from Motorola, Sony and others – and will not be available until “early 2015″.

New Phones:

While Apple Watch was the most anticipated product, the company’s new handsets are likely to be its biggest earners.

Apple saw its global share of smartphone shipments slip from 13% to 11.7% between the second quarters of 2013 and 2014, according to research firm IDC, while Android’s share grew.

“The main benefit for Apple in going to a larger size of screen is not so much to woo people over to its devices, but to prevent its customers defecting, particularly to devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy Note,” said John Delaney, head of IDC’s European mobility team.

“But one should bear in mind that Apple’s decline is relative – the smartphone market has expanded, and most of the expansion has taken place in the lower price bracket that Apple doesn’t address.”

Apple had previously justified the 3.5in and 4in screen sizes of its existing iPhones as being suited to one-handed use. In 2010, the company’s co-founder Steve Jobs went so far as to say “no-one’s going to buy” a phone that they could not get a single hand around.

But one expert said a market had developed for so-called phablets.

“Watching video is definitely something that appeals on a bigger display, as well as gaming. And for business customers, having more space to do emails properly and look at and edit presentations helps,” said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Apple said that the A8 chip featured in the new phones would provide 25% faster compute performance than before.

The improved resolutions – dubbed “retina HD” – mean that the iPhone 6 offers 326 pixels per inch and the iPhone 6 Plus 401ppi. While better than before, the resolutions are still beaten in terms of raw numbers by Samsung’s flagships – the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4 – and the HTC One.

New sensors include a barometer, which Apple said would help fitness apps distinguish whether the owner was running up a mountain or along a flatter surface.

The M8 co-processor can now estimate distances as well, which should also help provide more accurate readings.

The handsets will be available for sale on 19 September.

Apple has unveiled a smartwatch along with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus

How secure is your iCloud account? 4 Ways to keep iCloud Data Safe

Are you worried about security of your iCloud account?

The recent iCloud cyberattack that leaked nude photos of more than 100 celebrities — Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Ariana Grande and Victoria Justice, to name a few — has rocked both Hollywood and the tech world, putting into question the safety of the personal data users keep on Apple’s cloud storage service.

While you may not be worried about naked pictures being leaked and sold online, the security exploit puts anyone who uses iCloud at risk. From confidential business documents to files containing sensitive customer information, anything you back up on iCloud can be easily compromised. To make sure your data is safe, here are four ways to keep your iCloud account secure.

1. Create a Secure Password

This particular cyberattack wasn’t an iCloud breach per se. Rather, hackers used brute force attacks that exploited a security hole on the iCloud service Find My iPhone. This exploit gave hackers access to celebrities’ usernames and passwords, allowing the hackers to test one password after another until they got it right.

So just as with any other online account, creating strong, unique passwords and making them secure is key to keeping your iCloud account safe.

To that end, Apple requires that passwords:

*Have at least eight characters, including at least one number and an uppercase and lowercase letter.

*Not repeat any characters more than three times consecutively.

*Not be the same as the account name.

*Be uncommon and new (haven’t been used within the past year for the same account.)

Additionally, Apple recommends the following best practices to keep iCloud passwords secure:

*Make passwords stronger by adding unique characters and punctuation marks.

*Don’t use the same password for your email, social media and other online accounts.

*Don’t keep the same password forever.

*Don’t share your password with anyone.

*Change passwords regularly and never recycle.

*Don’t send passwords or other sensitive account information by email.

2. Turn on Two-Step Verification

Two-step verification adds another layer of security to iCloud by requiring users to enter both a password and an additional form of verification using one of their devices. By asking for a physical form of ID, two-step verification prevents unauthorized users from accessing and making changes to iCloud accounts even if the password has been compromised. This also keeps hackers from making purchases on your account at the iTunes Store, App Store or iBooks.

To use two-step verification, you’ll need to register a trusted, SMS-enabled device. When two-step verification is turned on, Apple will send that device a four-digit verification code that you’ll need to enter with your password in order to gain access to iCloud.

To turn on two-step verification, visit My Apple ID and click on “Manage your Apple ID.” Choose Password and Security, then click on Get Started under Two-Step Verification.

3. Disable My Photo Stream

When you take or save photos and other images on an iPhone, they are automatically uploaded onto iCloud using a feature called My Photo Stream. This makes the images available to anyone with access to both your iCloud account and iCloud-enabled devices.

Although automatically pushing photos and images to iCloud is useful when you want to be able to access them on any of your devices, it may not be the best option if they contain sensitive information.

To keep photos and other images strictly on your device and out of iCloud, you can completely turn off My Photo Stream for any or all of your devices. From the Settings menu, go to iCloud, select Photos and switch My Photo Stream to off.

4. Mind Your Email Addresses

Your iCloud account relies heavily on your email address. When you need to register, log in or reset your password, your email address is your key to securing your iCloud account. Because of this, iCloud users need to make sure they always remember and have access to the email address associated with iCloud. They should also keep that account safe from cyber-attacks.

First, Apple recommends keeping your Apple ID current at all times. For instance, if you end up no longer accessing the email address you used when you registered, make sure to update your Apple ID account with an email address that you currently do use. The same applies to places that reissue email addresses, such as Internet providers, mobile carriers and employers. That way, you’ll always have access to any emails and alerts from Apple, which is especially important if you’ve forgotten or need to reset your password.

Apple also suggests adding a “rescue email address” to your Apple ID account. In the event that your primary email address (the one you used to register your Apple ID) is compromised, the rescue email address is your key to resetting your password, changing your contact information and protecting your account.

Lastly, Apple advises users to always make sure they follow email best practices to secure their inboxes and online accounts against hackers. This includes dodging phishing scams by not opening emails from unknown senders, never clicking on suspicious links and avoiding providing personal information to unfamiliar websites.

For more information on how to keep your iCloud account safe, check out Apple’s iCloud security and privacy overview.

How secure is your iCloud account? 4 Ways to keep iCloud Data Safe

RoboBrain: a Massive Online Brain for All the World’s Robots

RoboBrain, a kind of online service packed with information and artificial intelligence software that any robot could tap into.

If you walk into the computer science building at Stanford University, Mobi is standing in the lobby, encased in glass. He looks a bit like a garbage can, with a rod for a neck and a camera for eyes. He was one of several robots developed at Stanford in the 1980s to study how machines might learn to navigate their environment—a stepping stone toward intelligent robots that could live and work alongside humans. He worked, but not especially well. The best he could do was follow a path along a wall. Like so many other robots, his “brain” was on the small side.

Now, just down the hall from Mobi, scientists led by roboticist Ashutosh Saxena are taking this mission “RoboBrain”several steps further. They’re working to build machines that can see, hear, comprehend natural language (both written and spoken), and develop an understanding of the world around them, in much the same way that people do.

Today, backed by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, Saxena and his team unveiled what they call RoboBrain, a kind of online service packed with information and artificial intelligence software that any robot could tap into. Working alongside researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Brown University, and Cornell University, they hope to create a massive online “brain” that can help all robots navigate and even understand the world around them. “The purpose,” says Saxena, who dreamed it all up, “is to build a very good knowledge graph—or a knowledge base—for robots to use.”

Any researcher anywhere will be able use the service wirelessly, for free, and transplant its knowledge to local robots. These robots, in turn, will feed what they learn back into the service, improving know-how of RoboBrain. Then the cycle repeats.

These days, if you want a robot to serve coffee or carry packages across a room, you have to hand-code a new software program—or ask a fellow roboticist to share code that’s already been built. If you want to teach a robot a new task, you start all over. These programs, or apps, live on the robot itself, and that, Saxena says, is inefficient. It goes against all the current trends in tech and artificial intelligence, which seek to exploit the power of distributed systems, massive clusters of computers that can power devices over the net. But this is starting to change. RoboBrain is part of an emerging movement known as cloud robotics.

The concept of RoboBrain was popularized in 2010 by Google’s James Kuffner, one of the engineers behind the tech giant’s self-driving cars. In the years since, the idea has slowly spread.

In 2011, the European Union’s research arm, Seventh Framework Programme, launched RoboEarth, an initiative that lets robots “share knowledge” via a world-wide-web-style database and “access powerful robotic cloud services,” according to the RoboBrain project’s website. The source code is available online, and the team already has made strides building a kind of remote brain. Then, last year, Kuffner and Ken Goldberg, a RoboBrainer at Berkeley, published a paper describing a robotic grasping system powered by Google’s object recognition engine and other data sources.

Data Problem

Still, hurdles remain. Unlike technologies like Apple’s Siri voice assistant or Google’s speech recognition or image-tagging systems, robots must juggle many types of data from many sources. Like humans, they’re “multi-modal systems,” and this creates unique challenges. “The first challenge is how do we come up with a storage layer that will support different modalities of data,” says Aditya Jami,  lead infrastructure engineer of RoboBrain.

This is what RoboBrain seeks to create. Building the right online storage system, Jami says, is a crucial step to integrating the 100,000 data sources and various types of supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms the researchers hope to merge into one huge online network.

Jami—who previously built large-scale computing systems at Netflix and was part of the Yahoo team that spawned various big-data systems, such as Hadoop—says he is developing a storage layer that can merge separate learning models. A deep neural network that lets robots “see” things or grasp objects, for instance, can dovetail with another system that examines the relationship between different types of objects.

today, he says, things don’t always work this way. Disparate AI systems are often developed independently, and don’t use standard data formats. (Though this too is starting to change thanks to deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks to mimic how the brain works. Part of the great promise of deep learning, experts say, is the emergence of a common language and formulas for speech, vision and natural language processing.)

Jami’s ambition is for RoboBrain to become a platform like Hadoop—a de facto standard everyone can use and contribute to. Having this sort of common language, he says, will speed up the development of robotics algorithms, spur collaboration, and help usher in the age of multi-modal artificial intelligence.

RoboBrain: a Massive Online Brain for All the World’s Robots

New biochip promises more accurate development of drugs

Imagine if scientists could recreate you—or at least part of you—on a chip called “biochip”.

That might help doctors identify drugs that would help you heal faster, bypassing the sometimes painful trial-and-error process and the hefty costs that burden our healthcare system.

Right now, inside a lab at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers are working to make that happen. They’re trying to grow human organ tissue, like heart and liver, on tiny chips. These aren’t your standard computer chips. They’re miniature networks, derived from adult skin cells coerced into becoming the type of tissue scientists want to study, that grow on miniscule pipe-like plastic chambers glued atop a microscope slide.

The research is designed to find ways to get that tissue to live and mimic how real human organs function. If so, they could provide a cheap and quick way of weeding out treatments that are toxic or just don’t work. The aim is to weed them out early on, in the lab, replacing at least some of the tedious years of testing on animals and humans.

What’s more, because drugs traditionally are developed with a one-size-fits-all approach, clinicians often don’t know how well medications will work on individual patients. According Anurag Mathur, one of the Berkeley researchers, these biochip could lead to “a personalized medicine, patient-specific readout of any drug you want to test.”

The research is designed to find ways to get that tissue to live and mimic how real human organs function.

Funded by $1.2 from the Cures Acceleration Network—a new agency established by the “Obamacare” federal health law—the Berkeley project is part of a larger effort to explore what are called “organoid chips” or biochip. The Cures is funding several other biochip projects, and in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine this past May, scientists from Harvard University and other researchers used a “heart-on-chip” approach to research Barth syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects cardiac tissue. This type of research is still in the early stages, but if it’s successful, it could significantly streamline drug studies and maybe even reduce drug prices.

Right now, it can take billions of dollars and years to develop a single medication. For every one that gets the Food and Drug Administration’s approval, 40,000 others don’t make it through the process. That raises companies’ expenses, and experts often point to these bleak trends as one of the root causes for the high prices for new drugs. If the organoid research pans out, there could be as much as a 10-fold improvement in the speed, cost, and accuracy of developing new drugs, according to Dr. Chris Austin, the director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), an agency within the National Institutes of Health that oversees the Cures Acceleration Network.

Living Semiconductors

The technology borrows from techniques developed by the semiconductor industry decades ago to make transistors—the building blocks of the modern computer. The ability to print ever smaller transistors at faster speeds allowed computers to shrink from expensive room-sized behemoths into cheap, widely available portable machines with many more uses than the inventors ever imagined. That revolution was seeded with money from the nation’s space program, and now, some scientists say, biotech has a similar opportunity.

Once the blueprint is set for specific types of biochip—ones that mimic the structure of the liver or gut, for instance—manufacturing them could eventually cost as little as a few bucks, says Peter Loskill, one of the Berkeley scientists. The difficult—and expensive—part is making sure that the cells assemble themselves properly and that these microtissues work like the real thing. That’s what the Berkley lab, run by bioengineer Kevin Healy, is focusing on now.

Eventually, scientists believe they could run multiple experiments on different drug candidates and various doses in different tissues at once. It would be something like the equivalent of a massive parallel computer, but for biology. Mathur and Loskill are starting with building a combination chip containing heart and liver tissue in collaboration with another bioengineer, Luke Lee, and his lab at Berkeley. If their work is successful, they hope to collaborate with other groups in the Cures Acceleration Network to hook up various proto-organs, Lego-style, to create a very simple model of the human body. This type of work could give scientists insights into how and why medications work on individual organs and how they affect whole systems.

In Lieu of Animals

Certainly, some experts are skeptical. Fundamentally, they question how well these biochip mimic real organ structure and function. After all, they lack blood vessels, so they live only for months at most. Plus, they don’t replicate all the intricacies of real organs and organ systems. In the case of those that mimic the brain, researchers have said that the full-fledged circuitry underlying adult brain function isn’t entirely there.

Meanwhile, others question whether this work will ultimately translate into lower prices. “Right now, for  any drug that’s discovered, people can charge what they want because there’s no competition,” says Atul Butte, a data scientist at Stanford University and co-founder of NuMedii, a Palo Alto-based startup that is looking for new ways to use existing medications.

But if they come to fruition, organoids could lead to even larger opportunities, beyond the speed of drug research and the price of medications. Today, much pre-clinical work is done in animals and doesn’t always yield results that mimic how human systems work. “The knowledge gaps we face in biomedical research are enormous. We just don’t know all that much about what causes diseases,” says Bernard Munos, the founder of the Innothink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation who also sits on the Cures Acceleration Network board.

New biochip promises more accurate development of drugs

Hoverbike : a Giant Quadcopter Drone

Hoverbike is not  yet ready for your daily commute, but in pushing to get closer to that point UK-based company Malloy Aeronautics has perhaps made the next-best thing: a drone version.

Drone 3 is a functioning drone in its own right, but it’s also a 1/3-sized scale model of MA’s real, human-sized Hoverbike.

The Hoverbike has been in development for years, but the drone showcases the latest design shift to a quadcopter model, much like many of the existing consumer drones on the market. The company originally built the drone as a proof of concept for the real thing, but as they had a lot of public interest in their scale models, they realised it would make the perfect reward for their new Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to further develop the actual Hoverbike.

Inventor Chris Malloy claims the Hoverbike is the world’s first flying motorcycle. It’s actually classified as a helicopter: That is, it’s an aircraft, not just a hovercraft that buzzes along a bit over the ground. The company plans to start flight-testing the latest version of the bike in a few months, and will then build a final prototype to apply for certification from aviation authorities so that anyone could ride it (with sufficient training).

The bike shown in the video is the old bicopter design; the new one will look pretty much just like the drone, but bigger. The company explained that the move to a quadcopter design was mainly a matter of cost. “After extensive testing involving the manned vehicle and scale models, we moved to a proven quadcopter design, because with current technology we could not design a bi-copter cheap enough for safe and competitive sales,” the company told me in an email. “The bi-copter is an elegant solution and vehicle—however the available technology is not ready yet for a practical vehicle of this bi-copter design.”

The new prototype uses a patent-pending quad system of overlapping blades, which they say reduces weight and platform size (the bit in the middle of the blades, where you’d sit). There’s ducting around the propellers for obvious safety reasons.

While it’s still too early to apply for your hoverbike license, the scale model drone is a decent toy in itself. At just over a metre long, it’s controlled by a Pixhawk motor controller and can also fly along a set path or be used in a follow-me mode. Its platform is nearly 30cm long and it can carry around five kilos, which means it can do some useful (or at least fun) tricks. The campaign video shows it delivering a drink, pouring water on a barbecue, and serving as a plane for a parachuting teddy bear.

MA has useful applications in mind for their full-sized vehicle, too, and really, a helicopter might be a more accurate comparison than a motorbike. “The Hoverbike has been designed from the very beginning to replace conventional helicopters such as the Robinson R22 in everyday one man operational areas like cattle mustering and survey,” they explain on their site.

The full-size bike will be able to carry a 120kg payload, and like the drone you’ll be able to fold it down to a third of its size for transportation. It’s intended to be a cheaper, more practical helicopter for everything from search and rescue to farming; a “low level aerial workhorse with low on-going maintenance.”

And of course, it’s bound to make for a pretty sweet ride. The Hoverbike campaign aims to make £30,000 (just over $50,000), and you’ll need to pledge £595 ($1,000) to get a stripped-down version of the drone, or at least £715 ($1,200) for a ready-to-fly model.

More than anything, what the drone does is show that hoverbikes are more than just a sci-fi dream. As MA points out, none of the technology used to make the Hoverbike is really new—it just needs to be put together. I’ll believe the full-sized version when I see it in action, but envisaging a giant drone makes it suddenly seem a lot more feasible.

Hoverbike : a Giant Quadcopter Drone

Scientists solved the mystery of sailing stones of Death Valley

One of Death Valley’s most enduring mysteries “the mystery of sailing stones” has been solved by what one researcher called “the most boring experiment ever.”

For decades, people have puzzled over Racetrack Playa, where hundreds of rocks weighing as much as 700 pounds roam across the surface of the dry lake bed, leaving meandering tracks hundreds of yards long.

Researchers have investigated the phenomenon of sailing stones since the 1940s, but all they ever produced was speculation. No one ever actually saw the sailing stones move.

The first ever observations, which came in December, are documented in a new paper published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE by a research team that set out to solve the mystery, once and for all.

“We expected to wait five or ten years without anything moving, but only two years into the project, we just happened to be there at the right time to see it happen in person,” said Richard Norris, a paleobiologist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s just the most amazing thing to see all that play out.”

It turns out the key ingredient for moving rocks or sailing stones in North America’s hottest place is floating ice.

The process works like this: First, the playa must fill with just the right amount of water, deep enough for floating ice to form during cold winter nights but shallow enough to expose the rocks. Then the pond freezes into sheets of “windowpane” ice thin enough to move freely but thick enough to maintain its strength.

When the ice begins to melt, it breaks into large floating panels that even light winds can drive across the shallow pool. As the ice sheets move, they slowly push the rocks in front of them, causing them to leave trails in the soft, slippery mud below the water’s surface.

“It’s like the Goldilocks thing. Everything has to be just right,” Norris said.

He and his cousin and co-author James Norris were the first to actually see the process in action, though they never expected to. They traveled to the remote Eastern California playa on a rough dirt road more than 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas to check their test subjects: 15 specially quarried stones embedded with motion-activated GPS sensors and placed on the dry lake two years earlier, with Park Service permission.

The Norrises arrived to find the Racetrack covered with water. Then, just before noon on Dec. 21, they watched in astonishment as the ice started to crack and break apart, and the rocks began, ever so subtly, to shift.Jim Norris managed to capture the action in series of still pictures that he strung together to make a one-of-a-kind movie.

“Jim and I were just grinning at each other when we finally came off the mountainside,” Norris said.

The researchers eventually charted individual rockslides that lasted from a few seconds to 16 minutes. They also recorded sailing stones three football fields apart that moved simultaneously for more than 200 feet in a single trip.

In the process, they may have solved another mystery: tracks left in the mud with no rock in sight. The Park Service has long suspected that tourists were stealing  sailing stones from the playa, leaving behind tracks with no rocks at the end of them, but the researchers found that the ice panels themselves appear to carve trails in the mud before melting without a trace.

Previous theories for the strange sailing stones movements at the Racetrack and a handful of other spots, including Bonnie Claire dry lake in Nevada, involved hurricane-force winds, dust devils, slick algal films or ice sheets thick enough to lift the stones up and drag them along a flat dry lake bed.

“We all thought it was really powerful wind that was driving the rocks,” Norris said.

Instead, they discovered that the sailing stones could be pushed by winds of just 10 mph and ice no thicker than window glass.

But this is far from a real racetrack. The rocks only move a few inches per second, a speed almost imperceptible when you’re standing on the shore of the soupy, wet playa and watching from a distance. Norris said it’s entirely possible that visitors have been there before when it was happening but just couldn’t see it.

“It doesn’t look like they’re moving, but they’re moving very slowly,” he said.

The “most boring experiment ever” comment came from another of the paper’s authors, Ralph Lorenz of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, and he was not wrong. The project promised years of monotony punctuated by regular trips to the hard-to-reach playa to replace batteries on the GPS units and download data from the weather station the researchers built nearby.

“We had a three-year permit from the park for our experiment, and we had every expectation that we would have to renew it one or more times,” Norris said.

Now that they have their answer, he said it’s hard not to feel slightly wistful over the loss of one of the Mojave’s most compelling mysteries. But there’s no denying they were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Norris said what happened in December was probably the best “move event” the playa has seen in 15 years. And Dec. 21, the day they finally caught the phenomenon on camera, was Jim’s birthday.

At least one puzzle remains. Though researchers recorded sailing stones moving five different times over 10 weeks, including one event that involved hundreds of sailing stones, they never caught so much as a budge from any of the “really big boys” out on Racetrack Playa. Which leads Norris, as ever, to a question: “Does that work the same way?

Scientists solved the mystery of sailing stones of Death Valley

The Barisieur will wake you up with a bespoke cup of coffee

You’ll Never Hate Alarm Clocks Again. The Barisieur Is So Polite It Brews You Coffee.

Wouldn’t you hate your alarm clock so much less if it woke you up with a steaming hot cup of joe? Like, you’d still hate it a little, because waking up is the worst, but you’d have fresh-brewed coffee waiting for you inches from your face!

That’s the idea behind Barisieur, an alarm clock/coffee brewer hybrid engineered by London-based industrial designer Josh Renouf. The base is just an average digital alarm clock — but the important part is what’s resting on top. It looks like a mini version of those chemistry sets nerds play with in movies — you know, when they’re doing “experiments” in their bedrooms instead of developing social skills or whatever. Anyway, here’s how it works, according to PSFK:

”The sleek device has stainless steel ball bearings inside a bespoke hand blown glass beaker that boils water through induction heating. The boiling water is pushed out of the beaker through a slim glass tube and is poured over the ground coffee which is placed in a sustainable stainless steel coffee filter. The coffee then drips through the filter and into a glass cup. In the middle of the tray is a small glass container that holds the milk or cream.

Renouf is now in the process of developing the Barisieur for commercial use. The estimated retail price is between £150 and £250 (or around $250 to $420).

So basically, this thing wakes you up with the gentle sounds of metal clinking against glass paired with the aroma of coffee. It’s trying to ease you into a state of awakeness rather than aggressively force you into it like most alarms. Plus, it’s a very safe way to wake up to a nice smell. Remember that time on The Office when Michael burned his food trying to wake up to the smell of crackling bacon?

The Barisieur will wake you up with a bespoke cup of coffee

Google investing in building of world’s fastest trans-Pacific cable

Google is going to invests in 60-terabit $300-million trans-Pacific cable to protect its growth in Asia.

Tech giant Google has announced that it has joined five other companies to build a trans-Pacific cable system that connects the west coast of the U.S. to the cities of Chikura and Shima in Japan. Known as FASTER, the cable system is estimated to cost $300 million. FASTER addresses the traffic demands for broadband and mobile content on the trans-Pacific route. FASTER will be designed with 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies with an initial capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs).

The other five investors in FASTER include China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel. NEC, the top vendor of submarine cable systems with over 200,000 kilometers of cables, will be the system supplier for FASTER.

Let’s have a look at the main facts of this project:

*The $300 million (£178 million) global project is called Faster

*It will involve laying cable 5,000 miles (8,000 km) under the ocean

*The trans-Pacific cable will run from the west coast of the US and Japan at depths of around 7,000 miles (11,200 km)

*It will link up with local cable systems already in place in the US and Japan

*This will improve the network beyond Japan and into Asia

*On the US side, the cable will connect networks in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle

“At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it’s for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform. And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean,” said Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow, Urs Hölzle, on Google+. “That’s why we’re investing in FASTER, a new undersea cable that will connect major West Coast cities in the US to two coastal locations in Japan with a design capacity of 60 Tbps (that’s about ten million times faster than your cable modem).”

Submarine Cable :

*A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations.

It is laid by specially designed ships that can carry thousands of miles of coiled cable in their holds and can lay it as it travels across the ocean.

The first commercial cables were laid in 1850 to send telegraphy traffic. Since then the cables have been used to send telephone traffic, and most recently data traffic.

Many of the modern cables are made of fibre optic.

Trial cables were laid in 1842 in New York harbour and were insulated with tarred hemp and rubber. Nowadays, cables are protected using polyethylene.

Traditionally the cables were owned by service providers, yet websites have also started buying submarine cables to control their networks including Google and Facebook. *

FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world,” FASTER chairman Woohyong Choi said in a press release. “These cables collectively form an important infrastructure that helps run global Internet and communications. The consortium partners are glad to work together to add a new cable to our global infrastructure. The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world. The agreement announced today will benefit all users of the global Internet.”

Construction of FASTER will begin immediately and the system is targeted to be ready-for-service during the second quarter of 2016.

This project is not new ground for Google, according to the Wall Street Journal. The search engine firm took part in a similar $300-million cable project in 2010.

Private networks are most often used for home, office and businesses because of data security offered and because it cannot be accessed by devices outside the network. Public networks, on the other hand, enable anyone to gain access to other networks or the Internet.

Much of Google’s bandwidth is set aside for its private ‘B4’ network. The B4 network is used to send e-mails and transmit YouTube videos and other data, the WSJ said.

Google investing in building of world’s fastest trans-Pacific cable

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The First Trailer for Stephen Hawking Biopic 'Theory of Everything' is now available

Now it’s time to bring science and love together with the movie on Stephen Hawking. The very first trailer of ‘The Theory of Everything’ teases romance, tragedy.

“The Theory of Everything,” in which the famed physicist is played by Eddie Redmayne, is a movie that appears to meld science and romance.

The full-length trailer for the Hawking biopic, called “The Theory of Everything,” was unveiled on 6th august. The 2.5-minute trailer suggests that the film, which comes out in November, focuses heavily on the relationship between Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, whom he met while a graduate student at Cambridge University in England.

“The Theory of Everything” is directed by James Marsh, the British film-maker behind Man on Wire and Shadow Dancer, the film is due to be screened in the special presentations section at the upcoming Toronto international film festival. It stars Les Miserables’ Eddie Redmayne as Hawking, with Like Crazy’s Felicity Jones as his wife Jane.

Marsh shows us Hawking and Jane’s first encounter at Cambridge University in 1964 and his early academic successes, culminating in a doctorate after he advanced theories about spacetime singularities at the centre of black holes. He is diagnosed with motor neurone disease and told he may have just two years to live.

It is not entirely clear from the trailer which periods the biopic covers, though it appears to run until at least 1985, when the physicist became desperately ill with pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy by doctors to save his life. The trailer shows him hearing his now-famous synthesized voice for the first time, the dramatic moment lightened when Jane expresses alarm that the computer program features an American accent.

The trailer of “The Theory of Everything” does not touch on Hawking’s later personal travails, which included divorce from Jane in 1995 and a second marriage to his former nurse, Elaine Mason, which also ended in divorce. Cambridge police investigated allegations that the second Mrs. Hawking had abused her husband in 2004, but the case was dropped when the scientist issued a statement saying they were false.

An earlier television film about the physicist’s early life, Hawking, starred Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. It was produced by the BBC and screened on BBC2 in 2004. Last year’s biographical documentary, also titled Hawking, featured Nathan Chapple as the scientist, with Hawking himself discussing his life from childhood, struggle with illness and later worldwide fame.

The Theory of Everything also stars David Thewlis, Emily Watson and Harry Lloyd. It is due in US cinemas on 7 November, timing which suggests an awards-season run, and arrives in the UK on 1 January.

Now we have to wait to see the combination of classic themes — love, tragedy, defying the odds will work or not.

The First Trailer for Stephen Hawking Biopic 'Theory of Everything' is now available

Origami robot is self-assembled and moves without human intervention

For years, a group of researchers has been working on origami robot — reconfigurable robot that would be able to fold itself into arbitrary shape.

Folding robot is nothing new, but scientists from Harvard and MIT (MIT recently successfully developed robotic fingers & 3D ice cream printer) have taken it to the next level, by designing one that assembles itself and walks away to do its job with zero human input. Starting from a flat plane, the tiny robot can fold itself into a three-dimensional form, and start traveling in less than five minutes.

“Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” researcher Robert J. Wood said in a press release.

“We have achieved a long-standing personal goal to design a machine that can assemble itself,” Daniela Rus, an MIT roboticist and one of the study’s authors, said about the robot.

Origami (from ori meaning “folding”, and kami meaning “paper” (kami changes to gami due to rendaku) is the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, which started in the 17th century AD at the latest and was popularized outside of Japan in the mid-1900s. It has since evolved into a modern art form. The goal of this art is to transform a flat sheet of paper into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques, and as such the use of cuts or glue are not considered to be origami.

The robots start out as a flat sheet of paper and polystyrene plastic (which you most likely know as Shrinky Dinks) etched with strategically placed hinges. Since those materials aren’t enough to make a full-fledged robot, the scientists also placed a flexible circuit board in the middle (with circuits extending to every hinge), two motors, a microcontroller and two batteries. It’s the microcontroller that’s in charge of activating the circuits to produce heat on command, which then leads to the flat sheet folding itself like an origami. When the hinges cool after a few minutes and the polystyrene hardens, the microcontroller commands the robot to scuttle away and do its thing.

The same team of scientists created a foldable robot worm and a robot lamp in the past years, but this is their first creation that’s capable of performing a function after it builds itself. It’s far from being perfect, though, and still has a ways to go before anyone can use it for a particular purpose. For instance, the assembly process is triggered by slotting a battery in, but the researchers plan to modify the robot so that it starts folding itself based on environmental cues like changes in pressure or temperature. Also, the mechanical critters could use a different polymer other than polystyrene, one that requires less heat to start folding. At this point in time, the prototypes are prone to bursting into flames, since they use so much energy — in fact, just the assembly itself depletes a whole AA battery.

0ne fascinating thing about this process is how cheap it is. The robot itself, all told, only costs about $100 to make as a prototype. And building a robot to function in a particular way takes little more than an hour. The research team also plans on experimenting with other polymers to enable different types of folding and function.

When more applications have been developed for the robot, the team envisions a commercial application in which people are able to buy cheap, functional robots on demand, which can be easily stored in a flat shape until they need to be used.

“You would be able to come in, describe what you need in fairly basic terms, and come back an hour later to get your robotic helper,” Wood noted in the release.

Another potential application discussed by the team might be for space applications, where many of the robots are stored easily in their flat shape, then deployed into orbit or to other planets, autonomously fold themselves and go about the tasks they need to complete. recently researchers also focusing on self-assembled furniture.

Now it’s just a matter of time to build the fiction transformers in real.

Origami robot is self-assembled and moves without human intervention

A new green energy plant at St Asaph will be powered by food waste

Wales’ largest anaerobic digestion (AD) plant, powered by food waste from three North Wales counties, has begun generating renewable electricity.

Anaerobic digestion specialist Biogen has successfully completed commissioning of the plant which will process an impressive 22,500 tonnes of food waste every year, at the Waen, near St Asaph.

Biogen Waen will process the food waste collected weekly from Conwy, Denbighshire and Flintshire, generating 1MW of green energy, enough to power 2,000 homes.

The AD plant has the largest capacity for food waste anaerobic digestion in the country, and is Biogen’s second plant in North Wales following the completion of its GwyriAD plant in Llywyn Isaf near Caernarfon last year.

As well as generating renewable energy, the plant will also produce a biofertiliser as part of the process, which will be supplied for use on nearby farmland.

Julian O’Neill, chief executive of Biogen, said: “We’re delighted to be working in partnership with Denbighshire County Council, Conwy County Borough Council and Flintshire County Council to help the authorities, and Wales as a whole, lead the way in recycling food waste.

“It’s great to see separate food waste collections operating successfully for residents and businesses across all three local authorities, which has contributed to Wales reaching its food recycling target ahead of schedule.

“The Waen plant and our other projects in Wales are also making a significant contribution to the target of meeting 15 per cent of the UK’s energy demand through renewable sources by 2020.”

Construction work on the plant, which is located on the site of a former abattoir, began in 2012, taking just over a year to complete.

The anaerobic digestion plants will help councils prevent food waste from being lost at landfill, as well as helping Wales and the UK reach its target of producing 15 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Sam Bates, waste operations manager at Denbighshire County Council, said: “We are very proud of the AD plant and also pleased that residents across the three counties will have access to the scheme. We’ll be encouraging householders to make full use of the kitchen caddies with the knowledge that their food waste is being put to such good use to create renewable energy.”

The plant brings the total amount of food waste processed by Biogen in Wales to approximately 34,000 tonnes per year, with a third plant due to begin operations in Rhondda Cynon Taff next year.

Case study

The Twamley family, from Rhuddlan, are one of the households across Conwy, Denbighshire and Flintshire whose waste will be turned into renewable energy at the Biogen Waen plant.

Lyndsey Twamley and her two children have made recycling food waste a part of their everyday routine, and are excited at the prospect of their waste being transformed into renewable energy just a few miles away from their home.

“Recycling food waste has become a normal part of our routine now,” Lyndsey said.

“We’ve recycled ever since it was introduced, but I hadn’t really given much thought to what happens after it’s been collected. It’s good to know that leftover food from within the county is being recycled and turned into energy locally, which is so much better than it going to waste.

“I have two children aged four and seven, who both know that their leftovers goes into the kitchen caddy under the sink. It’s good that recycling is second nature to them now, they also learn about recycling in school and just do their little bit to recycle any waste that’s left over.

“Recycling food has made me think more about what we throw away, and I think in some ways it’s even helped us save money by shopping smarter, so there’s less waste at the end of the week.

“It’s also great that there’s no longer leftover food that can start to smell bad in the main kitchen bin because my food waste bin gets emptied weekly and knowing that it is not being lost at landfill can only be positive.”

A new green energy plant at St Asaph will be powered by food waste

Recently Rosetta spacecraft became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet

Euro spacecraft Rosetta prepares to land on icy comet after 250 million mile journey.

After a 10-year chase taking it billions of miles across the solar system, the Rosetta spacecraft made history on 6^th august as it became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet on its journey around the sun.

“We’re at the comet,” Rosetta’s flight operations manager, Sylvain Lodiot, declared in a webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.

“After 10 years, five months and four days travelling toward our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometers, we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” ESA‘s director general Jean-Jacques Dordain announced.

“Europe’s Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet, a major highlight in exploring our origins. Discoveries can start.”

Some facts about the mission and Rosetta:

*Total cost of the mission is said to be 1.3bn euros

*Paris-based Esa is preparing for Rosetta’s arrival at its target on Wednesday

*It has released images showing the comet’s surface in unprecedented detail

*Images confirm ‘rubber duck’ shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

*They were taken from a distance of just 620 miles (1,000 km) away

*Publication of images follows controversy over Esa’s release policy

*One science writer had compared Esa’s refusal to make images and data publicly available to not showing the World Cup live on TV

*But a compromise has been reached with Esa releasing an image a day

*The probe weighed in at 3,000kg at liftoff back in 2004, with over half of that made up of propellant

*It has two 14m long solar panels to provide electrical power

• The orbiter carries 11 experiments
  


• 
  

  The lander, Philae, carries nine experiments including a drill to sample beneath the surface

  
  

Starting now, Rosetta is no longer chasing a comet, it is traveling along with it.

 

“We have been approaching 67P for such a long time, it is almost surreal to now actually be there,” Holger Sierks of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a statement. “Today, we are opening a new chapter of the Rosetta mission. And already we know that it will revolutionize cometary science.”

Rosetta and its comet are currently out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, about 250 million miles from Earth. Together at last, they are hurtling through space at 34,000 mph along one stretch of 67P’s 6.5 year orbit around the sun.

Rosetta has flown a long way to get to this moment. It blasted off from Earth in March 2004, and has followed a convoluted and looping path through the solar system before finally meeting up with the comet 10 years later. Along the way, it picked up three gravity assists from the Earth, one from Mars, and passed through the asteroid belt twice. All told, the spacecraft has flown 4 billion miles so far. And yet, in some ways, its work has just begun.

Other spacecraft have made comet flybys in the past, but a mere flyby is not what Rosetta is after. The ambitious mission first concocted in the 1970s and approved in 1993, entails not only escorting the comet along part of its orbit, but actually landing on it as well. To that end, Rosetta is carrying a lander called Philae that the ESA hopes to send down to the comet’s surface in November.

“Arriving at the comet is really only just the beginning of an even bigger adventure, with greater challenges still to come as we learn how to operate in this unchartered environment, start to orbit and, eventually, land,” said Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft operations manager in a statement.

As Rosetta got closer to the comet in the first days of August, it sent back intriguing images of the comet’s bizarre landscape.

“It’s incredible how full of variation this surface is,” Sierks said. “We have never seen anything like this before in such detail.”

Rosetta is currently maintaining a distance of about 60 miles from the comet, but in the coming weeks and months it will trim that orbit down to 30 miles, and then to 18 miles. As it flies closer, the spacecraft will continue to gather more information about the comet’s surface, as well as scout potential sites for Philae to land.

After Philae begins its work on the comet’s surface, Rosetta will continue to tag along with 67P until the end of December 2015. Using its suite of instruments, the spacecraft will measure how the comet changes as it nears the sun, and what gases it will expel from its icy nucleus, and at what rate.

Ultimately, scientists hope that by studying the comet, they may learn more about the building blocks of the solar system, and whether bodies like this were responsible for bringing water and complex molecules to Earth.

Recently Rosetta spacecraft became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet

Google admits it scans your Gmail accounts for child porn to identify criminals

Google Catches Sex Offender with Gmail Scan, But Raises Privacy Concerns.

Recently Google’s automatic email scanning technology has tipped off authorities about a 41-year-old man in Texas who was allegedly distributing explicit images of children via his Gmail account.

It has revealed the identity of a user after discovering child abuse imagery in the man’s Gmail account in Houston, Texas, according to a local news report.

According to a local TV station news report, Google detected a Houston man using Gmail allegedly to send explicit images of a “young girl” to his friend.

The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant reportedly alerted the authorities, who then allegedly found more child pornography on the suspect’s phone and tablet after obtaining a search warrant, KHOU reported.

The suspect, identified as John Henry Skillern, is being held on a $200,000 bond, according to the TV report, which said Skillern is a registered sex offender.

The arrest raises questions over the privacy of personal email and Google’s role in policing the web. It raises the controversy: How did Google scan the man’s inbox for child porn? And more importantly, does this mean Google is scanning everyone’s inbox for child porn and other illegal materials? Is there some gross invasion of privacy going on here?

David Drummond, the chief legal officer for Google, has previously said that Google helps fund the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which is tasked with “proactively identifying child abuse images that Google can then remove from our search engine”.

Google works with the IWF and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children extensively, he said, adding: “We have built technology that trawls other platforms for known images of child sex abuse. We can then quickly remove them and report their existence to the authorities.”

Google automatically scans email accounts to provide ads within Gmail, which has more than 400 million users worldwide.

In April, Google updated its terms and conditions to say: “Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

In April Google also stopped scanning more than 30 million Gmail accounts linked to an educational scheme following reports that the scans might have breached a US privacy law.

Google claims it doesn’t divulge information on individual queries or cases, and they remain adamant that this system is only actively searching Gmail for child pornographic content.

This occurred after a class-action lawsuit against the company over email scanning was dismissed earlier this year. At the time, Google said that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties”.

Google admits it scans your Gmail accounts for child porn to identify criminals

6 advices of experts to prevent your phone to blow up

Don’t want your phone to blow up? This article is for you.

We recently covered the story of a young Texas girl’s Samsung Galaxy smartphone incinerating near her head as she slept. Her phone was ruined, but the fire didn’t spread beyond the underside of her pillow, so she and her family were not harmed. Of course, not all chargeable electronics fires end without injury.

Obviously, these are extraordinary circumstances. Your smartphone isn’t just going to up and explode on you in 99 percent of scenarios.

Still, we were curious as to what you, dear reader, could do to prevent similar smartphone combustion. And so we talked to the device experts at iFix, a New York-based gadget repair service.

Here’s the advice to avoid battery meltdown and smartphone explosion:

 

1. Stay away from low-quality batteries.

One of the potential issues pointed out with the Samsung Galaxy S4 that caught fire in Texas was that the phone’s battery was swapped for an aftermarket model. The expert says low-grade smartphone batteries can be a bad idea because, in terms of quality and care in construction, “they do not follow the same standards as original manufacturers.”

When replacing your phone’s battery, you’ll probably want to skip the cheapest option on eBay or Amazon and instead seek out the same one with which your Samsung, HTC, or LG phone came (from what is often referred to as the “OEM,” or original equipment manufacturer).

If you must go with a third-party replacement battery, we consider Anker a trusted brand.

2. Keep your phone in a well-ventilated place while charging.

The second no-no with the Texas case: The charging phone was under a pillow.

Our experts’ advice: “Do not cover a charging phone with a pillow.”

For obvious reasons, this isn’t good for the goal of keeping your phone from overheating. A rule of thumb would be to place a charging phone in an area away from insulating fabrics or other heat-emitting electronics (maybe not on top of a cable box, for example).

 3. If you get your phone wet, have it checked by a professional.

We all know it’s possible to bring a soggy smartphone back to a working condition, but the iFix team says that, despite your rescue attempts, corrosion or short circuiting can still occur inside the phone, undetectable to the naked eye. These conditions could lead to dangerous overheating of the device.

 

The solution: Most repair services like iFix offer diagnostics services (sometimes for free) that can detect these types of problems for you. Of course, don’t expect the actual repair of corroded parts or shorted circuits to be free. Still better than waiting for an accident to happen, we say.

4. Don’t overuse your phone while it’s charging.

Juicing up draws a great amount of heat to your phone, making it plenty hotter than it is during normal use. Because of this, our iFix experts say that hardware-heavy activities like graphic-intensive games, WiFi tethering, or even searching for service in a low-signal area — processes that will also warm your phone up — shouldn’t be done while your device is plugged in.

Overusing the phone while charging “can create additional stress on the device and the charger,” iFix says.

A good rule of thumb: If you are Crushing some Candy while your phone is charging, and you feel the back get toasty, put the thing down. And not under your pillow, either.

 5. If your phone takes a nasty drop, don’t just dust it off and move on.

Similar to the “wet phone” scenario, you shouldn’t just assume that your phone is A-OK because it still powers on after an unfriendly meeting with the concrete.

Some possible problems caused by a nasty drop: a small crack in an internal component, a damaged or split battery, or exposed internals via a cracked display.

Having your phone taken apart by a specialist after it’s suffered some trauma is going to be the best way to go. And as smartphone screen repair by third-party services gets cheaper and cheaper, the option is now both safe and budget-friendly.Oh, and also, you won’t be constantly made fun of by your friends.

 6. If you notice any overheating or sudden battery drain, you may have a problem.

iFix also filled us in on a problem that’s becoming more common among its customers. Phone owners are contacting its service and complaining that phones “suddenly start overheating. No water damage. No dropping.”

In the recent case of a year-old iPhone 4s, the phone suddenly began heating up and losing “a couple percent [charge] every minute.”

Since the phone was not covered under AppleCare, the team assessed the possible problems and eventually decided to resolder parts of the phone’s main chip board and install a new battery.

“So far it works just fine. We don’t quite know what the problem was, maybe a micro-crack on the board or chip, a loose connection, or a defective battery,” iFix said.

Much the way you want a good mechanic for your car, it’s not a bad idea to have a good phone repair shop in your Rolodex for when problems like the above surface. No one is fond of the thought of forking over hard-earned money for “smartphone maintenance.” But the alternative may be too hot to handle.

6 advices of experts to prevent your phone to blow up

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover will attempt to make oxygen on Mars

NASA has revealed details about the highly anticipated Mars 2020 rover.

According to NASA, Mars 2020 rover will give us a way to know the red planet better. The rover that NASA is sending to Mars in 2020 will carry seven instruments geared including a device that produce oxygen.

NASA has sent a series of robotic vehicles to Mars — the latest is the Curiosity rover which launched in 2012 — and hopes to have people exploring the surface of Earth’s neighboring planet by the 2030s.

Six years from now, there will be a new NASA robot heading to the Red Planet: the Mars 2020 rover. On 31^st July, NASA announced the seven instruments that will be carried on the unnamed rover to Mars in six years. These instruments were selected out of a whopping 58 proposals received last January, and include technologies developed in international partnerships.

“Today we take another important step on our journey to Mars,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent statement. “Mars exploration will be this generation’s legacy, and the Mars 2020 rover will be another critical step on humans’ journey to the Red Planet.”

“While getting to and landing on Mars is hard,” he added, “Curiosity was an iconic example of how our robotic scientific explorers are paving the way for humans to pioneer Mars and beyond.”

Facts about Mars 2020 Rover:

*New Curiosity rover set will feature seven powerful instruments

*Vehicle will journey to Mars in 2020 to take incredibly detailed images that will ‘knock your socks off’ with an improved MastCam

*SuperCam and Sherloc will detect organic compounds in rocks

*Next generation rover will also include ‘Moxie’ – a machine that converts carbon dioxide to pure oxygen for rocket fuel

*Vehicle will bring intact samples back to Earth without crushing them

*Rover will have a life span of one full Martian year – 687 days on Earth

*Nasa hopes the  Mars 2020 rover will demonstrate technology for a human exploration of the planet and look for signs of life

About the instruments:

One of the scientific payloads is called Mastcam-Z, a camera with panoramic, stereoscopic and zoom abilities. Another called SuperCam can analyze the chemical and mineral composition of rocks, while the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) can determine the elemental composition of surface minerals. The third one called Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) uses UV light to detect organic compounds, while Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) will attempt to produce oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide. Then there’s the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) that will monitor the environmental conditions on the planet, and finally, the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Exploration (RIMFAX) equipped with a ground-penetrating radar that’ll give us a glimpse of what’s beneath the planet’s surface.

Michael Meyer, Lead Scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, offers an analogy: Say you want to analyze a slice of Boston cream pie. The coring system would preserve the carefully laid layers of custard and chocolate, whereas the grinding system would provide you a light brown paste. By maintaining the structure of the rock, scientists can learn more about the history and environment of the rock’s formation, explains Meyer. There are currently no definitive plans to retrieve the samples Mars 2020 collects, but sealed samples can be stored for upwards of 20 years.

Mars 2020 is an international effort involving more than 50 institutions around the world. The entire mission will cost approximately $1.9 billion U.S., with $130 million devoted to developing the seven instruments onboard. That’s a big chunk of change, but it’s worth noting that the Curiosity mission cost nearly $2.5 billion. NASA mission planners explain that reproducing the basic infrastructure of Curiosity for Mars 2020, including using leftover parts; will significantly decrease the cost of the new mission.

On the other hand NASA hopes to eventually have a man on Mars within the next two decades, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently expressed his confidence that humanity will reach Mars by 2026.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover will attempt to make oxygen on Mars