Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

[Fenrir]

CERN's "Cosmic Piano" Makes Music Out of Raw Particle Data

At Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival in July, jazz pianist Al Blatter found himself jamming with an unusual collaborator: the so-called “cosmic piano,” an instrument developed by physicists at CERN that relies on data generated by cosmic rays to make beautiful music. Whenever a particle passes through a detector pad on the instrument, the result is a musical note and a flash of light.

It’s the latest creative use by particle physicists (among others) of sonification, the process by which raw data is converted into sound. In the past, music has been generated using data from the rings of Saturn, the Northern lights, the solar wind, the cosmic microwave background radiation, infrasonic “voices” of volcanoes, and black holes, to cite just a few. A few years ago, British composer Alexis Kirke created a duet between a live violinist and the radioactive subatomic particles produced inside a cloud chamber. NASA’s latest endeavor is a streaming Internet radio broadcast — where you can listen to the live sonification of raw data — called CRaTER (Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation), constantly converting data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter into music.

Last year, to mark its 60th anniversary, CERN showcased the LHCChamber Music project, in which scientists — playing harp, guitar, two violins, a keyboard, a clarinet, and a flute — performed a composition by Domenico Vicinanza, based on data from the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. (Vicinanza previously composed a piece drawn from the data that helped physicists discover the Higgs boson, as well as magnetometer readings from the Voyager mission.).

CERN’s cosmic piano is the brainchild of physicist Arturo Fernandez and his collaborator Guillermo Tejeda, using components from the ALICE experiment to build it. According to Physics World, the instrument looks “a bit like a fancy staircase” and sounds like R2-D2. And it’s proved so popular that several such instruments have been sold since it debuted at a CERN open house in 2013. (Retail price: around $2500.)

So how did the Montreux festival performance go? As freewheeling polyrhythmic jam sessions go, pretty well, despite the challenges the musicians faced trying to match the sonic outpourings of random cosmic rays. As CERN physicist Steven Goldfarb puts it in the video below, “The cosmos doesn’t really have much of a rhythm.”

 

[Fenrir]

The Largest Air Purifier Ever Built Sucks Up Smog And Turns It Into Gem Stones

What’s 23 feet tall, eats smog, and makes jewelry for fun?

In Rotterdam this week, the designer Daan Roosegaarde is showing off the result of three years of research and development: The largest air purifier ever built. It’s a tower that scrubs the pollution from more than 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour—and then condenses those fine particles of smog into tiny “gem stones” that can be embedded in rings, cufflinks, and more.

Each stone is roughly equivalent to cleaning 1,000 cubic meters of air—so you’re literally wearing the pollution that once hung in the air around Roosegaarde’s so-called Smog Free Tower. In the designer’s words, buying a ring means “you donate a thousand cubic meters of clean air to the city where the Smog Free Tower is.”

The project has been in the offing for a long time. We wrote about the idea more than two years ago when the Dutch designer first publicly announced the project, which was originally planned for Beijing after the city’s mayor endorsed the idea. Roosegaarde and his team have spent the past few years developing the first prototype in Rotterdam, where it was unveiled this month. “It’s really weird that we accept [pollution] as something normal, and take it for granted,” Roosegaarde explains.

The white, oblong tower—slatted with louvres protecting its electronic innards—will still eventually make its way to Beijing, which of course is notorious for its smog. It’ll also make stops in Mumbai and Paris, and possibly other cities (you can suggest your own using the project’s hashtag on Twitter).

To fund the travel, the studio launched a Kickstarter campaign where you can buy jewelry and cufflinks made with its tiny smog gems—which, theoretically, would eventually become diamonds if they were compressed with much more extreme pressure.

But for now, the tower sits on a patch of grass next to Roosegaarde’s studio in Rotterdam, whose mayor and local government supported the project with grant money.

The process taking place inside its walls is powered by 1,400 watts of sustainable energy, which is comparable to a water boiler, and the studio says it hopes to one day integrate solar PVs into the design to power the process—which works not so differently than some ionic air purifiers. Roosegaarde explains:

By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface -the counter electrode- will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust that would normally harm us, is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower. This technology manages to capture ultra-fine smog particles which regular filter systems fail to do.

Now that the working prototype is up and running, the next step is figuring out how to bring it to other cities—including the city that started it all, Beijing. The team’s Kickstarter, where the studio is raising funds for another eight days, is closing in on doubling its goal—you can get your own smog gems by donating here.

That cash will go directly to transporting the tower, publicizing the design in cities around the world. Eventually, that attention could lead to copycats and spin-off designs—one day, these ungainly white tower might be fixtures in our parks and playgrounds.

That we need super-sized air purifiers to live in super-polluted cities is certainly a pretty grim prospect. But at least someone is thinking hard about not only how to clean the air, but how to get people excited about funding that process.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Now you can dictate to Google Docs, and it really works | Komando.com

Give your fingers a break! Now you can type using your voice in Google Docs, and it's completely free. Not only that, but the software really works well. You can try it for yourself right now.

Simply open a new document in Google Docs, then enable Voice Typing from the Tools menu. Then start dictating. Voice Typing recognizes commands like "comma," "period" and "new paragraph" as well.

Other improvements include a host of new templates for Google Docs, and a "see new changes" feature for documents that multiple people are working on. Will these improvements boost your productivity? Let us know what you think of them in the comments below.

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This would be great for closed-captioning.

 

[Fenrir]

Here's How You Move a 400-Ton, 404-Year-Old Japanese Castle

400: That’s about how many years old Japan’s Hirosaki Castle is. It’s also how many tons it weighs. And yet it was successfully lifted two feet in the air and 230 feet down the road.

That’s the insane restoration feat accomplished last week in Japan’s Hirosaki City in Aomori prefecture on the main island’s northern tip. The Wall Street Journal reports that it’s all part of a six-year plan to repair the aged stone foundation on which the castle sits. Or sat, as the case would be: Starting last Thursday, city officials lifted the tower up and away, and estimate that the castle can be returned to its position in five years.

To move the building, which was built in 1611, the team used steel hydraulic jacks and moved it with a simple dolly. Considering the castle seems to be hugging a ledge leading to a river, I’d have been especially nervous, but the process was successful.

The process itself, though, is far from new or novel: It’s called “house-moving,” and involves plucking a building from its original establishment and plopping it somewhere else. You can disassemble the structure and rebuild it later, or use dollies to lift the thing whole, then ferry it short distances. CBSreported earlier this year that it’s apparently becoming popular among American homeowners. There are entire companies devoted to it, and there’s even an International Association of Structural Movers. And Hirosaki Castle isfar from the only historic gem to be moved in such a fashion.

It’s official: Howl isn’t the only one with a moving fortress in Japan.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Apple unveils $799 12.9" iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessories

After years of rumors and speculation, Apple on Wednesday finally unveiled its jumbo-sized iPad Pro, boasting a 12.9-inch display, a new A9X processor, a four-speaker audio system, a stylus dubbed the Apple Pencil, and a Smart Keyboard that connects via a new docking port.

• 12.9-inch Retina display
• A9X processor
• Apple Pencil, Smart Keyboard accessories
• Priced from $799 to $1,079
• Ships in November

The Pro's screen is large enough to run two full-size iPad Air apps side-by-side. It boasts 5.6 million pixels, which is even more than the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.

The bigger display also allows for a full-size software keyboard, making typing easier. The Pro also takes better advantage of iOS 9 features such as Split View, picture-in-picture, and improved multitasking.



The A9X chip is said to be 1.5 times faster than a comparable desktop processor, and graphics performance is twice as fast as the A8X in the iPad Air 2. Apple claims, in fact, that the iPad Pro is faster than 80 percent of the portable PCs that shipped in the last 12 months.

Despite the speed and screen improvements, Apple still claims 10 hours of battery life, as with other iPad models.

The product is 6.9 millimeters thick, slightly more than the 6.1-millimeter iPad Air 2. It weighs 1.57 pounds, just a fraction heavier than the first-generation iPad's 1.57 pounds.

It also includes an 8-megapixel iSight camera, a FaceTime HD camera on the front, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Touch ID. Color options include silver, gold, and space grey.

It starts at $799 for 32 gigabytes of memory. A 128-gigabyte version is $949, while a LTE-capable model — likewise with 128 gigabytes — is $1,079. An official launch is scheduled for sometime in November.

Apple will also offer a new $169 Smart Keyboard designed specifically for the iPad Pro. Integrated into a Smart Cover, the keyboard will connect magnetically to the tablet via a new Smart Connector port that transfers both power and data.

The Pro is further joined by a $99 accessory dubbed the Apple Pencil, capable of reading tilt, pressure, and more, and which exploits greater sensitivity and reduced latency in the tablet's display. A Lightning connector can be inserted into the Pro and used to quickly recharge the stylus.

In Wednesday's presentation, Apple invited Microsoft to the stage to show off some of its productivity apps, such as Office, and how they will work with the Pro and the Pencil. In an onstage demo, content was copied into a PowerPoint presentation.

Shapes were drawn in PowerPoint via the Pencil, and the app automatically converted drawings into shapes. More than 20 different types of shapes will be supported in Office, Microsoft said.

Also on stage was Adobe, showing off new iPad Pro-optimized versions of its creative suite. One demonstration had design director Eric Snowden quickly edit a photo, create a sketch, and lay out a composite document by switching between three Adobe apps using iOS 9's multitasking tools.

Like the Microsoft demo, drawing rough shapes in Adobe's composition app allowed for the quick creation of content areas. Each app supported input via standard touch or the Pencil for increased precision.

 

[Fenrir]

You Can't Steal Data From a Chip That's Self-Destructed

Losing a flash drive full of family photos is unfortunate; losing an encryption key that gives access to sensitive data could be a catastrophe. So researchers atXerox’s PARC have developed chips that can self-destruct on command, making them completely unusable once they shatter.

The key to making chips that can just shatter into a million pieces on command is using a material that’s best known for shattering: glass. In this case, the researchers started with Corning’s Gorilla Glass, but modified it to become tempered glass under extreme stress.

For demos at a recent DARPA event held in St. Louis (they fund all the coolest stuff) a small resistor at the bottom of the chip was used as the self-destruct mechanism. When heated by a laser, the entire chip would immediately shatter due to all of the invisible stress on it surface. But the smaller bits would actually keep on shattering after the initial explosion leaving nothing but a pile of unrecognizable dust behind.

Exploding chips are an extreme solution to the problem of electronic security, but one that undoubtedly works. And while the first customers of the technology will no doubt be the government and the military, one day you might be able to send a simple command to a stolen smartphone to leave the thief holding nothing but a shell full of useless electronics dust.

 

[Fenrir]

DARPA's Robotic Landing Gear Could Revolutionize How And Where Helicopters Land

The Pentagon’s bleeding edge technology development office, DARPA, and Georgia Institute of Technology are working on a way to solve one of the biggest limitations of helicopters: landing on grades and rough, uneven or even moving terrain.

Tipping rotor discs into a steep hillsides, rocky terrain and rocking ships are all challenges helicopter pilots can face. A level landing is always the goal, but doing so in some extreme cases takes super-human coordination. Other times, it can result in disaster. That’s why having the helicopter’s landing gear adapt to the terrain, instead of having the pilot adapt to it, is so attractive.

Robotic Landing Gear to make this happen is already flying on an RC model helicopter, and in the not-so-distant future, it could be sized to manned helicopter proportions. Such a system could allow helicopters to access many areas they cannot today, vastly opening up landing options around the globe.

The idea behind the Robotic Landing Gear is to replace standard skids or wheeled landing gear with an adaptive system via the use of automatically articulating legs. These legs can fold in tight to the fuselage while cruising, then during landing, they splay out and “feel” for the ground as the helicopter descends. Force sensors tied to a central computer determine the right angle for each leg so that the helicopter stays as level as possible relative to the terrain.

DARPA says the landing gear could be adapted to many helicopters without a huge impact on the craft’s weight and will allow helicopters to land on slopes up to 20 degrees. Supposedly, it will also reduce the risk of damage from hard landings by 80 percent and allow helicopters to land on pitching and rolling ship decks without a winch system. Additionally, many boulder strewn landscapes and disaster areas would be accessible with a robotic gear-equipped helicopter that can currently only be access via winching people up and down, if at all.

DARPA and their partners at the Georgia Institute Of Technology will continue sub-scale tests, and if they continue to go well, we will hopefully see this potentially game-changing technology on a manned chopper soon.

 

[Dubious]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=413223468876015

 

[indiatester]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=413223468876015

I can see why this is controversial. The procedure is not kind to the donor and the surrogate dogs. Also it does not explain what happens to the other pups in the litter (they said 15 embryos)

 

[Dubious]

they said 15 embryos

not all embryos develop but yea it doesnt tell what happens if multiple embryos develop

 

[indiatester]

https://twitter.com/x/status/643814927581360128

 

[Gauss]

This thread is technology related but as i take liberty to consider it a thread for anything that doesnt merit its own thread, i post a small excerpt from The Penguin History of the World.

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The deepest roots of Indian religious and philosophical synthesis go very deep indeed. One of the great popular cult figures of the Hindu pantheon today is Shiva, in whose worship many early fertility cults have been brought together. A seal from Mohenjo-Daro already shows a figure who looks like an early Shiva, and stones like the lingam found in modern temples, the phallic cult-object which is his emblem, have been found in the Harappan cities. There is some presumptive evidence therefore for speculating that the worship of Shiva maybe the oldest surviving religious cult in the world. Though he has assimilated many important Aryan characteristics, he is pre-Aryan and survives in all his multifaceted power, still an object of veneration in the twenty-first century. Nor is Shiva the only possible survival from the remote past of Indus civilization. Other Harappan seals seem to suggest a religious world centred about a mother-goddess and a bull. The bull survives to this day, the Nandi of countless village shrines all over Hindu India (and newly vigorous in his modern incarnation as the electoral symbol of the Congress Party).

Vishnu, another focus of modern popular Hindu devotion, is much more an Aryan. Vishnu joined hundreds of local gods and goddesses still worshiped today to form the Hindu pantheon. Yet his cult is far from being either the only or the best evidence of the Aryan contribution to Hinduism. Whatever survived from the Harappan (or even pre-Harappan) past, the major philosophical and speculative traditions of Hinduism stem from Vedic religion. These are the Aryan legacy. To this day, Sanskrit is the language of religious learning; it transcends ethnic divisions, being used in the Dravidian-speaking south as much as in the north by the brahman priests. It was a great cultural adhesive and so was the religion it carried. The Vedic hymns provided the nucleus for a system of religious thought more abstract and philosophical than primitive animism. Out of Aryan notion of hell and paradise, the House of Clay and the World of the Fathers, there gradually evolved the belief that action in life determined human destiny. An immense, all-embracing structure of thought slowly emerged, a world view in which all things are linked in a huge web of being. Souls might pass through different forms in this immense whole; they might move up or down the scale of being, between castes, for example, or even between the human and animal worlds. The idea of transmigration from life to life, its forms determined by behaviour, was linked to the idea of purgation and renewal, to the trust in liberation from the transitory, accidental and apparent, and to belief in the eventual identity of soul and absolute being in Brahma, the creative principle. The duty of the believer was the observation of Dharma - a virtually untranslatable concept, but one which embodies something of the western ideas of a natural law of justice and something of the idea that men owed respect and obedience to the duties of their station.

These developments took a long time. The steps by which the original Vedic tradition began its transformation into classical Hinduism arc obscure and complicated. At the centre of the early evolution had been the brahmans who long controlled religious thought because of their key role in the sacrificial rites of Vedic religion. The brahmanical class appears to have used its religious authority to emphasize its seclusion and privilege. To kill a brahman soon became the gravest of crimes; even kings could not contend with their powers. Yet they seem to have come to terms with the gods of an older world in early times; it has been suggested that it may have been the infiltration of the brahmanical class by priests of the non-Aryan cults which ensured the survival and later popularity of the cult of Shiva.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

This thread is technology related but as i take liberty to consider it a thread for anything that doesnt merit its own thread, i post a small excerpt from The Penguin History of the World.

I wont tell you what to post, and I don't have the authority to direct your posting anyway, but I would like this spirit of this thread to remain void of politics or religion. While it's at present a place to share scientific news, it doesn't have to be, as stated in the title you are afforded leway to determine your own definitions.

But because religion and politics tend to attract foul discourse, I'd prefer them to be left out of this thread.

I leave the ultimate decision in your hands however.




The Marines Are Sending This Robotic Dog Into Simulated Combat

The battlefield can be one of the most useful places for robots. And now, the US Marines are testing out Spot, a robo dog built by Boston Dynamics to seehow helpful the ‘bot could be in combat.

Remember Big Dog, also from Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics? Well, Spot is a tinier, more agile iteration: At 160 pounds, it’s hydraulically actuated with a sensor on its noggin that aids in navigation. It’s controlled by a laptop-connected game controller, which a hidden operator can use up to 1,600 feet away. The four-legged all-terrain robo pup was revealed in February. Robots in combat aren’t new, but Spot signals a quieter, leaner alternative that hints at the strides made in this arena.

Last week, the mechanized canine was put through the wringer in a battery of simulated combat scenes, from forests to urban fighting situations. Ars Technica reports that in one scenario, Spot was sent into a building ahead of the humans to scope out any danger, a task that the military might’ve used actual dogs for previously. The tests were conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) alongside Marines from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

Spot highlights the United States’ forte in militaristic robots, but the reveal comes at a time where Asian and European companies are more actively pursuing friendly personal robots designed to live side-by-side humans, like Pepper in Japan. In addition to industrial exoskeletons and combat drones, Spot illustrates how different American robotics might be from other countries on the robotic forefront, like France and Japan. But for infantry, ‘bots like Spot can make a life-saving difference. Not only can they clear rooms and scout for threats, but they can help keep troops safe.

Spot himself isn’t destined for the real-life battlefield, but he’s helping the Warfighting Lab come up with new ways of using robots in combat. According to a press statement on its website, the Marines “have been very receptive to the new technology,” so we’ll see what kind of combat-ready machines they try out next.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

This Terrifying Robotic Dog Has a Built-In Drone That Launches From Its Back

The future of autonomous robots is inching ever-forward–look no further than this combination of drone and autonomous quadruped that has me both freaked out and scratching my head.

A new video illustrates a new concept for robo-drones. Remember BigDog, the unnervingly agile quadruped Terminator robot? Well, here we’ve got a smaller version of this type of marching quadruped; except this time, it’s got a quadcopter tethered to its back, which can take to the sky from its perch and then come back to nest. It’s almost like a bird that rides along on the back of a hippo.

The combination quadcopter-quadruped is the product of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Having a little quadcopter attached to your ground robot could have many advantages. For example, the quadcopter could take to the the air to do visual recon. Or it could be deployed to retrieve something that’s out of reach for the ground bot. Perhaps one day we’ll use this frankendrone for more mundane purposes, like retrieving cats from trees.

Future: We await you.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

This Plane Will Soar to the Edge of Space on Giant Air Currents

A glider designed to float to the edge of space on air currents will attempt its first flight on Wednesday. Next year, the Perlan Mission II will launch to soaring altitudes of 90,000 feet, where it’ll harvest invaluable data on Earth’s atmosphere and climate.

Sponsored by commercial airplane manufacturer Airbus Group, the Perlan Project is on a quest to soar to record heights using its Perlan Mission II glider. The first Perlan Project set the the existing manned glider altitude record of 50,722 feet in 2006, by taking advantage of air currents known as “stratospheric mountain waves”— basically, the ocean waves of the sky. Our friends over at Flightclub explain:

From 1992-98, Perlan’s founder and NASA test pilot Einar Enevoldson collected evidence on a weather phenomenon that no one at the time even knew existed: stratospheric mountain waves. Like huge ocean waves, these waves of air are kicked off by strong winds blowing over the tops of high mountain ranges like the Andes. These waves of air then shoot straight up towards space. As a pilot, Einar quickly figured out that you can use a glider to ride those waves all the way up to near space. And he set out to prove it.

The Perlan Mission II, which began in 2014, intends to best its own record by a wide margin, gliding well into the stratosphere after launching from a gusty mountain ridge in the Andes. The team will be trekking down to Argentina next year in search of a launch site close to the southern polar vortex, an air current that drives mountain waves into the stratosphere.

Gliding to the edge of space will give scientists a chance to study interactions between different layers of the atmosphere, which could pave a path toward high-altitude commercial flight. It’ll also afford researchers the opportunity to study Earth’s climate from a dizzying new perspective:

“Currently climate change models are based on a theoretical understanding of how different layers of the atmosphere interact with each other,” James Darcy, a spokesperson for Airbus, told Climate Central. “Models are perhaps more simple than they should be. The scientific aim of Perlan will be to better understand the weather in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and build a more accurate model of what’s happening. That will drive more accurate predictability with respect to climate change.”

But first things first, the little glider needs practice. Next week — weather permitting — a small jet will tow the Perlan 2 to an altitude of 5,000 feet, where it’ll be released to fly around for about 45 minutes before landing. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!