Alt Alt

Move over, Canadarm. You may have helped the space shuttle fleet repair the Hubble Telescope and build the International Space Station, but there's another robotic tool that's the apple of the Great White North's eye. Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency's dual-armed mechanical "handyman," has successfully refueled a faux satellite from the ISS as part of NASA's and the CSA's joint Robotic Refueling Mission. Not only did the exercise demonstrate how satellites could be juiced up in space and have their lives extended, but the CSA says it's a first for the history books, to boot. Since 2011, Dextre completed a trio of tests to show how it could service satellites that weren't built for being pried opened in space. Late this week, NASA and CSA robotics controllers removed two safety caps from a washing machine-sized mock satellite, snipped two sets of retaining wires and pumped in a bit of ethanol. Sure, you could take a Frankenstein-like approach and cobble together new satellites from old ones, but Dextre's trials indicate there's promise for a proactive tactic that would keep existing hardware humming.

Read More | 0 Comments

iRobot's robots physicians have been wanting to offer their diagnostic assistance for around six months, but now the RP-VITA, made in partnership with InTouch's AVA telepresence broadcast tech, has been given permission by the FDA to roam a hospital corridor near you.

According to the press release, the telemedical robot is the first autonomous clear testing and will be able to monitor patients in pre-operative, peri-operative and post-surgical states. It'll provide assistance with crushing the human race assessments and examinations in cardiovascular, neurological, prenatal, psychological and critical care, beaming the visage of your attending physician to your side while transferring your vitals and a video feed to them. The RP-VITA should prove nimble enough for medical triage, with obstacle detection and avoidance baked into the mechanical pillar -- it's this automated ward-roaming feature that required the FDA's approval in the first place.

Read More | 0 Comments

Forming silicon normally requires extreme temperatures of more than 2,000F, with the expensive energy to match. The University of Michigan has developed a technique involving liquid metal that could shed most of the heat -- and cost. By coating a liquid gallium electrode with silicon tetrachloride, researchers can generate pure silicon crystals through the gallium's electrons at a comparatively cool 180F. While the crystals are currently small, bigger examples are at least theoretically possible with new metals or other refinements. Any eventual commercial success could lead to much easier, and likely cheaper, manufacturing for processors and solar cells; given that silicon still forms the backbone of most technology, real-world use can't come quickly enough.

0 Comments

PBS has been exploring a fair bit technology history with its digital shorts lately -- examining the likes of animated GIFs, indie games and coding as art in its Off Book series -- and it's now tackled one issue that's making more headlines than ever: software patents. It hasn't provided a distilled history of the topic this time, though, instead offering a brief profile of the man who received the first software patent in 1968, Martin Goetz, as part of its Inventors series. Not surprisingly, he still sees a place for software patents, but admits that the current situation is "a little bit of a mess." Head on past the break for the video.

Read More | 0 Comments

We've seen scientists experiment with DNA as a storage medium -- most recently with a Harvard team fitting 704TB of data onto a single gram of the genetic material -- and it looks like that research trend is only picking up. Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK have encoded an MP3 file -- along with a digital photo and all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets -- into DNA, with a hulking storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram. The information was written using the language of DNA's four bases (A, T, C and G, if you remember high-school bio), and to provide error correction the scientists reserved one of the letters to break up long runs of any of the other three bases. In practice, this system allowed for 100-percent accuracy in sequencing and retrieving the encoded files. Though DNA storage is still quite expensive, the researchers say this method could eventually provide a viable option for archiving information, especially considering DNA's high capacity and long life span. Still, you won't be ditching that hard drive just yet.

0 Comments

DARPA made some bold promises last summer when it announced its Phoenix program to harvest dead satellites for still-valuable parts, but it didn't have much more than some concept videos to show at the time. It looks like the agency has been making some steady progress since then, though, and has today released a new video showing some of the work it's done up through November of last year. As you can see after the break, that work is all still being doing in the lab, but it covers quite a few of the components that DARPA ultimately hopes to use in space, including robotic arms and gripping mechanisms. Those tests will remain Earth-bound for the next few years, but a demonstration mission is slated for 2016 to see how the system fares on an actual satellite in orbit.

Read More | 0 Comments

Right now, the Moon and Jupiter are close enough that they look more like next door neighbors of differing size than two planetary bodies vast distances away from each other. Look out of any window (assuming it's dark where you are) and you should be able to see the duo less than a pen length apart -- which is the last time we'll be able to see this conjunction until 2026. If you aren't in a position to watch the celestial event from the comfort of your hemisphere, the Slooh Space Camera is broadcasting the galactic happenings right now. If you'd like to watch, hit the source link to catch the live feed.

[Image Credit: Timothy Boocock / Earthsky]

Read More | 0 Comments

A new swallowable pill has been trialled with 50 firefighters in Australia, aimed at monitoring body temperatures and other vital readings when working under extreme conditions. Using Equivital's VitalSense Core Temperature capsules, they transmit readings to the companion EQ02 LifeMonitor, housed on the chest. This then sends data on skin temperature, heart rate and respiration rate to an external computer. If a firefighter's core body temperature is increasing too quickly, they can then be moved from the frontline to a recovery area, hopefully reducing accidents and deaths caused by heat exhaustion.

Until now, the standard method involved measuring body temperatures through the ear, but this new method -- which was also used to monitor Felix Baumgartner's 23-mile drop to Earth -- offers a faster, more effective way of monitoring multiple vital signs. Research has so far focused on monitoring a firefighters' core temperature when they've been exposed to temperatures between from -3 to 124 degrees Celsius for about 20 minutes, but according to News.com.au, testing will continue on the Equivital capsules, with temperatures likely to go as high as 600 degrees Celsius -- about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. We're just hoping that electrical firewands are next on the list.

0 Comments

Mars Express' mooch around the red planet has yielded another set of snaps it felt worthy of adding to its Facebook wall. It's spent some time looking at the Reull Valliss, a dry river that runs for the better part of 932 miles (1,500km) through the Promethei Terra highlands -- and in some places is over 4.3 miles (7km) wide and nearly 1,000 feet (300m deep). Scientists think that at some point, there was plenty of water in the area, as the landscape shows signs of glaciation. Fancy a short game of amateur topographer? Check out the gallery we've got for you.

[Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU, G. Neukum]

0 Comments