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Domain: primidi.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to primidi.com.
Stories · 340
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Would You Wear Video Glasses?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, an Israeli company has developed a personal video display device that looks like a simple pair of glasses. You can use these glasses with various sources, such as a portable media player or your cell phone. This technology promises to eliminate the dizziness phenomenon usually associated with this kind of display. And with these glasses weighing only about 40 grams, you'll feel that you're viewing a 40-inch screen from a distance of 7 feet." Video screens embedded into eyewear isn't that new, but the footprint of these is smaller than what I've seen before, making them cooler to wear on the subway. -
'Cooking' Carbon Nanotubes Like Spaghetti
Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a technique to force a variety of enzymes to self-assemble layer-by-layer on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with the help of noodle-like polymer molecules. In 'A biosensor layered like lasagna,' the researchers say that this technique can be applied to a wide range of applications. In particular, it will be possible to build other biosensors "that react specifically with other biological chemicals, environmental agents or even microbes." Read more for additional details and the most spectacular scientific image of the month." -
NASA's 20-G Centrifuge Machine
Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientists from NASA and two U.S. universities are using a 20-G centrifuge machine that can simulate up to 20 times the terrestrial gravity to evaluate the effects of hypergravity on humans. This 58-foot diameter centrifuge has three cabins, one for humans -- limited to 12.5 G -- and two for objects and flying hardware. The goal of these experiments is to reduce the adverse effects that space travel can have on astronauts' physical heath. But by studying the health benefits of exercise on astronauts, the researchers also hope to help the rapidly growing senior population who, like astronauts, doesn't exercise much. Read more for additional details and pictures about this NASA's machine." -
New Chip Promises Longer Battery Life
Roland Piquepaille writes "It always happens when you need it the most: the battery of your cellphone just died. But now, researchers of the University of Rochester have developed a wireless chip that needs ten times less power than current designs. The new chip relies on a technology named injection locked frequency divider (ILFD) which dramatically reduces the time needed to check for transmission frequencies which are performed several billion times per second by your current phone. The new chip uses five transistors and can perform divisions by 3 instead of only 2 by previous circuits, allowing a perfect communication between two phones communicating at 2.0001 and 2.0002 gigahertz respectively." -
Virtual Reality Gets Comfy
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you ever participated to some virtual reality (VR) experiments, you know that the environment is quite expensive and not always user-friendly. In fact, in some immersive environments, it's even possible to feel bad because of motion sickness. This is why researchers from Germany and Sweden have developed a new VR environment where the participants believe they're moving while being seated. This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future." -
A New Workhorse For DARPA
Roland Piquepaille writes "Later this month, Carnegie Mellon University and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will unveil the successor of the Spinner, a 7-ton unmanned robotic vehicle. Dubbed Crusher, this new 6.5-ton robot will be able to carry payloads of up to 2 tons on very complex terrains. Crusher will rely on surrounding sensors to keep its balance and learn about its environment. After intensive testings, it should start to perform its duties in 2008. Read more for additional details and pictures of Spinner and Crusher in action." However, I can see they have not yet performed the test of having Sigourney Weaver fight a hitchhiking alien with it, which is obviously crucial to our national defense. -
Automating Future Aircraft Carriers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Britain and France will jointly build three new huge aircraft carriers which will be delivered between 2012 and 2014. With their 60,000 tonnes, these 275-meter-long carriers will be the largest warships outside of the U.S. Navy. They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use. StrategyPage tells us that these ships will need at most a crew of 800 sailors instead of 2,000 for ships of that size today. At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works." -
3D Face Imaging in 40 Milliseconds
Roland Piquepaille writes "Computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, have developed a new face recognition software which can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds. A pattern of light is projected on your face, creating a 2D image, from which an accurate 3D representation is generated. This technology should speed airport check-ins, but it could also be used in banks or for checking ID cards as it allows full identification in less than one second." -
Cicerobot, Your Next Museum Guide
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a brief article, ANSA reports about a robot which will guide visitors in the Agrigento museum in Sicily. Cicerobot is 1.5-meter high and is equipped with wheels, a keyboard, a monitor, video camera and sensors. As many objects in this archaeological museum are very old and precious, a special emphasis was given to navigation. So far, Cicerobot only talks Italian, but it should be soon fluent in other languages. And as it is able to collect data from different sensor locations, it also plays the role of a security guard. Finally, it will also offer virtual tours of the museum via Internet." -
Wired and Wireless At the Same High Speed
Roland Piquepaille writes "The next generation of optical networks needed to satisfy our appetite for bandwidth is currently under development. And researchers from Georgia Tech have built a new architecture which delivers super-broadband wired and wireless service simultaneously. This hybrid system 'could allow dual wired/wireless transmission up to 100 times faster than current networks.' In fact, this optical-wireless network can carry as many as 32 different channels, each providing 2.5 gigabit-per-second service to your home or your office. And companies such as NEC and BellSouth are already working on such hybrid optical-wireless communications networks." -
Robots to Help Farmers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Robots designed to help farmers have been built before, but this time, engineers from the University of Warwick have chosen to develop robots that will reduce farm labor costs. In recent months, they've built a robotic mushroom picker, an inflatable conveyor belt and a grass cutting robot that might also be used by golf course owners." -
Space Jackets Down to Earth
Roland Piquepaille writes "Several technologies used to design the space suits protecting astronauts are now being adapted to protect workers facing extremely hot and dangerous conditions. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), these 'space-cooled' jackets are using three different technologies: special 3D-textile structure, cooling apparatus derived from astronauts' suits, and a special water-binding polymer acting as a coating. Even if these protective clothes are primarily intended for firefighters or steel workers, several applications are possible, such as in sportswear or in cars as parts of air conditioning systems. Read more for additional details and pictures." -
NASA to Start Helping Detectives
Roland Piquepaille writes "With a new photographic laser device developed to check damages on the Space Shuttle, NASA is going to help the FBI to investigate crime scenes. The Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI) was designed to provide a non-intrusive means of adding a scale to a photograph, which is very useful when looking at an object in space when there is no size reference. But the LSMDPI, which weighs only a half-pound and can be attached directly to a camera's tripod, will also be used on Earth in crime and accident scene investigations. It also could be used for oil and chemical tank monitoring or aerial photography." -
Recording Earthquakes on the Sea Floor
Roland Piquepaille writes "The vast majority of the earthquakes are located underneath the oceans where they are not recorded because of a lack of instruments. This is why the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed a new kind of ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) to record both small and large earthquakes on the sea floor. Forty of them will be deployed at the beginning of 2007 in an area of the Eastern Pacific Ocean known to have large earthquakes. One goal of this one-year mission is to better understand earthquake processes, but this technology could soon be used to better monitor other parts of the oceans. Read more for additional details and pictures about this new technology." -
Swarms of Microrobots Over Europe?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Mini robots to undertake major tasks?,' IST Results describes a EU-funded project which allowed to build several kinds of microrobots in the last three years. These robots are very small (about 1.5 cm by 3 cm), have limited on-board intelligence and are wirelessly controlled by a central robot control system. A follow-on project has already started, with an even more ambitious goal: deploy 'real' swarms of up to 1,000 robot clients. Such robot swarms are expected to perform 'a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.' Read more for additional details, pictures and references about this follow-on project not described by the article mentioned above." -
DARPA's 'Social Puppet'
Roland Piquepaille writes "Videogame creators are heavily using software to animate objects or characters without reprogramming them between two scenes. Now, game designers from the University of Southern California (USC) have developed 'Social Puppet,' a computer engine to 'help soldiers learn unfamiliar languages by interacting with animated characters.' For this project, financed by DARPA, the researchers have used their expertise in previous videogames used by the armed forces, such as 'Tactical Iraqi.' But previous games were focused on teaching language and customs while Social Puppet is giving on-screen characters human non-verbal communication behaviors." -
New High-Speed Nano Imaging Device
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a new nano imaging device which is 100 times faster than current technology. Not only is the 'FIRAT' (Force sensing Integrated Readout and Active Tip) much faster than the current 'AFM' (atomic force microscopy), it also is able to take movies and to simultaneously capture several physical properties of nanostructures, such as stiffness, elasticity or viscosity. In fact, the FIRAT probe, which works like a microphone, could one day replace AFM. One of the researchers commented that 'We've multiplied each of the old capabilities by at least 10, and it has lots of new applications.'" -
The World's Fastest Image Processor
Roland Piquepaille writes "This image processor is not your typical digital camera. It took 6 years, 20 people, and $6 million to build the 'Regional Calorimeter Trigger' (RCT) which will be a component of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The RCT will fill several racks of space in order to process 4 trillion bits of information per second while analyzing a billion proton collisions per second. The camera is currently being tested at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before being shipped to Geneva in June to participate in the first experiments in 2007." -
Tracking the Cracks
Roland Piquepaille writes "Israeli physicists from the Weizmann Institute have used a new approach to study how materials break. In a short news release, brilliantly titled "Breaking news", they explain their new method for analyzing the progression of a forming crack. The news release even says that it could have help engineers predict 'exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way.' This method could be used by engineers and material scientists in a vast variety of applications." -
Anatomy of a Virus
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, I'm not talking about a computer virus here, but about a real one, the Epsilon 15, which attacks the bacterium Salmonella. By writing a few lines of computer code, biologists from Purdue University have found a way to control a high-resolution microscope. This allowed them to look inside a virus. While previous teams were able to visualize the highly symmetric outer shell of other viruses, these researchers were able to see the whole structure of Epsilon 15, including its tail, its genome and even its core. This better knowledge of viruses which attack bacteria could lead to great advances in medicine, especially when antibiotics become inefficient because of bacteria resisting them." -
Cooking Dinner From the Road
Roland Piquepaille writes "After 12 years of development and with the help of NASA's Embedded Web Technology software, the TMIO company is delivering its first smart ovens. You can monitor these refrigerator-ovens from any Internet connection. For example, you can adjust and control the oven settings from your cell phone and be sure that dinner is ready when you get home. But cooking from your office or your car won't come cheap: these ovens carry a price tag of $8,699. Right now, they're only available in North America, but I bet there soon will be distributors in other parts of the world. Read more for additional details about these smart ovens." -
Cardiac Patch for a Broken Heart
Roland Piquepaille writes "People who suffered from heart attacks or other heart failures often need transplants because their hearts are essentially non-functioning. But imagine what would happen if it was possible to engineer living heart tissues to fix these broken hearts? This is what bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City are starting to make. According to HealthDay News, their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin. But when these living bandages are ready for cardiac care, they'll have the potential to save millions of lives in the world every year." -
Saving Energy in Small Office Buildings
Roland Piquepaille writes "Precooling a structure in the morning before temperatures rise has been done before. It later saves energy during times of peak demand and you might even have done it intuitively at home. But now, engineers from Purdue University have developed a control algorithm which promises to reduce energy consumption -- and electricity bills -- by as much as 30 percent for small office buildings which represent the majority of commercial structures. So far, this method has only been tested in California, but the researchers say that their control software could be used anywhere after minor adaptations." -
Easier Way to Convert Proteins into Crystals
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you might know, proteins need to be transformed into 3-D crystals before their atomic structures and their properties can be analyzed. And production of high quality crystals from proteins has been a difficult task until now. But scientists in the U.K. have successfully used a porous medium, or 'nucleant,' a material that encourages protein molecules to crystallize. Their first step towards 'holy grail' of crystallography could help speed up the development of new medicines and treatments." -
Nanobatteries Power Artificial Eyes
Roland Piquepaille writes "A new U.S. research center, the National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors, has been opened to promote new ideas in the field of nanomedicine. For example, a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) is developing a nano-size battery to be implanted in the eye to power artificial retina. But this center will also design and build 'nanomedical devices based on natural and synthetic ion transporters -- proteins that control ion motion across the membranes of every living cell.'" -
A 'salty' source of coherent light
Roland Piquepaille writes "Coherent light is produced by a beam of photons that all have the same frequency and are all at the same phase. And today lasers are the only form of technology that we know able to create such light. But by sending shock waves inside a humble crystalline material -- kitchen salt -- researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have found a new way to produce coherent light for the first time in 50 years -- at least in the terahertz frequency range. This could lead to applications in optical communications, quantum computing or shock diagnostics. Read more for additional details and references about this discovery." -
Computers That Feel our Mood
Roland Piquepaille writes "It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006." -
A Unified Theory of Animal Locomotion
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably already know that there is a master equation for all life processes based on metabolism. Now, physicists from Duke University have applied the so-called 'constructal theory' to explain how running, flying and swimming modes of locomotion are similar even if they're apparently unrelated. This single unifying physics theory explains how fast animals get from one place to another and how rapidly and forcefully they step, flap or paddle in relation to their mass. In other words, these scientists argue that the characteristics of animal shape and locomotion are predictable from physics." -
Is This Rembrandt a Real One?
Roland Piquepaille writes "About a year ago, I told you about how computer scientists from Dartmouth college were investigating digital images. But they're also interested in old paintings authentication, as reports Wired Magazine in The Rembrandt Code. Mathematicians are using high-resolution digital cameras and computers to examine old paintings and evaluate their authenticity. Even the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is asking them to discover which of the 42 paintings it owns and that were once believed to be Rembrandts are really authentic. The Wired article is pretty entertaining, but this overview contains more details, pictures and references about this authentication process." -
Biotech Data Mining
Roland Piquepaille writes "In the last ten years, biotech companies have been busy accumulating mountains of data. And it's becoming more and more difficult to find useful information about interactions between genes and proteins for example. It's one of the reasons why the European Union has started the BioGrid project. In Mining biotech's data mother lode, IST Results describes this project. Among current results, the researchers involved in it have delivered a better search engine for PubMed by analyzing over-expressing genes and predicting the protein interactions that are likely occurring. And many of the tools developed by BioGrid are available for public use -- even by yourself. For more information, this overview contains additional details, pictures and references about this project." -
Glass Shapes Can Make Us Drink Too Much
Roland Piquepaille writes "Some people think that a glass is half empty while others see it as half full. But one thing is sure: some glasses are fuller than others. According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), researchers from Cornell University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that short glasses are more likely to lead to over-indulgence. In fact, people pour 20-30 percent more alcohol into short, wide glasses than into tall, narrow ones of the same volume. The researchers obtained similar results with students and professional bartenders. So, as New Year's Eve is coming, remember to use only tall glasses for your party!!!" -
Portable Brain Scanner to Save Premature Babies
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UCL (University College London) are developing a portable brain scanner which could help save the lives of premature and newborn babies in intensive care by avoiding to move them to conventional scanning facilities. A current prototype combines the advantages of both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. It uses optical tomography to generate images showing how the brain is working and a new generation should be ready by 2008 and such scanners should be commercially available shortly after." -
Fantastic Voyage Into the Heart
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), researchers from the Harvard Medical School have written a sequel to 'Fantastic voyage,' the 1966 sci-fi movie. By injecting self-assembling peptide nanofibers loaded with pro-survival factors into rats, they've showed that the animals could be protected from heart failures. So far, the researchers have not extended their experiments to humans." -
Finding a Needle in a Haystack of Data
Roland Piquepaille writes "Finding useful information in oceans of data is an increasingly complex problem in many scientific areas. This is why researchers from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have created new statistical techniques to isolate useful signals buried in large datasets coming from particle physics experiments, such as the ones run in a particle collider. But their method could also be applied to a broad range of applications, like discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud or identifying the carrier of a virulent disease among millions of people." Case Western has also provided a link to the original paper. [PDF Warning] -
Robots With Square Wheels?
Roland Piquepaille writes "About eighteen months ago, I told you about a tricycle with square wheels which needed a specially designed road. But now, Distributed Robotics, a company from Troy, N.Y., is developing robots with square wheels which don't need specific roads. These new 'cars' propel themselves on flat surfaces by taking advantage of gravity. This might sound crazy, but the inventors think it could lead to new robots and toys, and more generally to new micro-machines or MEMS applications." -
Robots With Square Wheels?
Roland Piquepaille writes "About eighteen months ago, I told you about a tricycle with square wheels which needed a specially designed road. But now, Distributed Robotics, a company from Troy, N.Y., is developing robots with square wheels which don't need specific roads. These new 'cars' propel themselves on flat surfaces by taking advantage of gravity. This might sound crazy, but the inventors think it could lead to new robots and toys, and more generally to new micro-machines or MEMS applications." -
Molecular Motors on the Run
Roland Piquepaille writes "In the nanotech world, molecular 'motors' have been heavily investigated during the last decade. And you probably read that these nano-carriers will one day be able to move a useful drug right where it's needed inside your body. But think for a minute to the size gap between yourself and a molecule. It's pretty impressive! Now, according to this news release, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany have developed a theory stating that only a few motor molecules should be enough for directed transport over centimeters or even meters. It's probably a meaningless comparison, but it's like if you were able to walk to the moon and come back." -
Stereo View of the Sun
Roland Piquepaille writes "NASA's STEREO mission will be launched in 2006 with the goal of imaging the sun and the solar winds in 3-D. According to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), two identical spacecrafts will be placed in different orbits to provide us with 'stereo' views of the Sun. After the launch in Spring 2006, the two observatories will be separated after a couple of months, one orbiting ahead of the Earth, and the other staying behind. So we should be able to see the Sun in 3-D in less than a year." -
Smart Optical Fibers Could Save Lives
Roland Piquepaille writes "Lasers are now commonly used for surgery. With them, you can recover a better sense of vision. Or a tumor inside your body can be eliminated. But these laser light beams, which are currently enclosed inside optical fibers, can harm you if they escape from their enclosures. But now, according to Technology Review, MIT researchers have designed smart optical fibers which can monitor their status while the laser is doing its magic inside you and shut it down if a fiber wall is about to break. So far, the technology is only working in labs, but it could be used for medical applications in a few years." -
A New Biopaper for Organ Printing
Roland Piquepaille writes "Organ printing is an emerging branch of medicine which uses healthy cells to repair a damaged or diseased organ. But as its name implies, this new medical technology needs ink, paper and a printer. Now, a new hydrogel -- or biopaper -- developed at the University of Utah has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to speed up this process. This five-year NSF study will initially try to print blood vessels and cardiovascular networks. But its real goal is to build some complex organs, such as livers or kidneys. This technology can potentially help millions of people waiting for transplants." -
Storing Liquid CO2 in the Oceans?
Roland Piquepaille writes "One of the ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to capture carbon dioxide at its source, when it is emitted from power plants for example, and to store it in other places, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs or even the ocean after liquefaction. But, according to Youxue Zhang, a professor at the University of Michigan, there are pitfalls in this last plan. If the carbon dioxide is not injected deep enough, it can come back to the surface and return to the atmosphere, which is obviously not the desired goal. But, even worse, the liquid-to-gas conversion could happen too suddenly, which could cause a potentially dangerous eruption. So Zhang has developed a model which shows that liquid CO2 would have to be injected to a depth of between 800 and 3,000 meters to keep it from escaping from the ocean." -
Smart Bees Continue to Draw Interest
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from University College London (UCL) have shown that bees are able to solve complicated color puzzles. In their study, bees were trained to find artificial flowers containing a nectar reward and colored in blue. Then they removed the nectar and put at random artificial flowers illuminated by yellow, blue, yellow and green lights. But wherever the blue flowers were, the bees continued to select them even if there was no longer a reward. These findings may soon lead to the design of sophisticated visual systems for autonomous robots." -
Can Your Mouth Become Multilingual?
Roland Piquepaille writes "During a videoconference last week between Karlsruhe, Germany, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA, the talk of Alex Waibel, from CMU, was automatically translated in German and Spanish. Both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PPG) and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PTR) attended the conference, took pictures and were impressed by this new 'open domain' speech-to-speech translation. This new computer technology is based on artificial intelligence (AI) and statistical methods. During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course." -
Can Asbestos Help Us Understand Nanotoxicity?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Occupational Hazards is running an interesting article about how using our knowledge of asbestos could help us to assess the risks from nanoparticles, or their nanotoxicity. Today, it's unknown if nanomaterials under development are dangerous to human beings or to our environment. Some people think that nanoparticles can move to our lungs or our brains, presenting a significant threat to our health. Other scientists think there is no danger because we have been exposed to nanoparticles for thousands of years, such as ashes from volcanic eruptions. For example, nanotubes which are now used for many industrial developments, have similar shapes as fibers like asbestos, being long and extremely thin. And like nanomaterials today, asbestos was considered as harmless when humans were exposed to it. While the comparison has some merit, more research needs to be done before drawing any conclusion." -
Pillows Dangerous for Your Health
Roland Piquepaille writes "I guess we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that our pillows are miniature zoos containing millions of fungal spores, with some species able to cause diseases and even death. Researchers at the University of Manchester have studied the fungal contamination of our pillows for the first time in seventy years and discovered that these pillows were hot beds of fungal spores. After dissecting both feather and synthetic pillows in regular use between several months and 20 years, they've "identified several thousand spores of fungus per gram of used pillow -- more than a million spores per pillow." -
Molecular Gastronomy, The Science of Cooking
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Art of Cooking is evolving fast in this 21st century. New food products are being designed with the help of molecular technology, genetic discoveries or space research before arriving in our kitchens. For example, here is a Pravda article which says that NASA is preparing sandwiches which will still be edible after seven years. Companies like Kraft are also using nanotechnology to create food products tailored to users' needs. This is a booming market and, according to Associated Press, dozens of universities in the U.S. are offering degrees in culinology, attracting creative students in their food and science programs." -
The Eyes of the Space Shuttle
Roland Piquepaille writes "Now that Discovery astronaut Steve Robinson has successfully removed two pieces of fabric poking out of the shuttle's heat shield, a question remains: how did NASA discover these anomalies in the first place? In this article, Forbes.com writes that NASA can say thank you to a private Canadian company, Neptec, and its Laser Camera system (LCS). Neptec is working with NASA for ten years now, but it was the first time that its vision technology was used for external damage assessment of a shuttle. As NASA says it may cancel some future shuttle flights, Neptec plans to implement its 3-D imaging technology in military situations and on the battlefield. But read more for other details, references and pictures about this imaging technology." -
The Eyes of the Space Shuttle
Roland Piquepaille writes "Now that Discovery astronaut Steve Robinson has successfully removed two pieces of fabric poking out of the shuttle's heat shield, a question remains: how did NASA discover these anomalies in the first place? In this article, Forbes.com writes that NASA can say thank you to a private Canadian company, Neptec, and its Laser Camera system (LCS). Neptec is working with NASA for ten years now, but it was the first time that its vision technology was used for external damage assessment of a shuttle. As NASA says it may cancel some future shuttle flights, Neptec plans to implement its 3-D imaging technology in military situations and on the battlefield. But read more for other details, references and pictures about this imaging technology." -
Remote-Controlled Robots Explore 'Lost City'
Roland Piquepaille writes "A large team of oceanographers is again exploring 'Lost City,' an hydrothermal vent field located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which was discovered in 2000 and named like this because of the myth of Atlantis. But this time, the oceanographers are not on a ship. Most of them are in a room at the University of Washington in Seattle. And according to this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, they're using high-speed Internet connections to control robotic vehicles exploring the deep Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles away. Thanks to satellites, the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) Argus and Hercules can transmit videos back to Seattle in real time. After analysis, the scientists can move the ROVs to specific areas of interest without having their feet wet. Read more for other details, references and pictures about this project." -
Remote-Controlled Robots Explore 'Lost City'
Roland Piquepaille writes "A large team of oceanographers is again exploring 'Lost City,' an hydrothermal vent field located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which was discovered in 2000 and named like this because of the myth of Atlantis. But this time, the oceanographers are not on a ship. Most of them are in a room at the University of Washington in Seattle. And according to this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, they're using high-speed Internet connections to control robotic vehicles exploring the deep Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles away. Thanks to satellites, the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) Argus and Hercules can transmit videos back to Seattle in real time. After analysis, the scientists can move the ROVs to specific areas of interest without having their feet wet. Read more for other details, references and pictures about this project."