MORPH International Exercise: Underwater UAV drones explore the Med

MORPH, the world's first fleet of "marine drones" is being put through its paces in the Mediterranean port of Toulon.

Five European countries -- France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal -- have sent prototypes here under a four-year, four-million-euro ($5.32-million) programme to build a squad of unmanned underwater rovers.

The MEDUSAS, first launched in 2010, has been thoroughly tested at sea and its autonomy and reliability have been instrumental in other projects. 

In previous missions, equipped with one acoustic modem, it collected data sets that are currently being used to test the efficacy of single beacon navigation algorithms. 

Deployed from a surface vessel, but communicating among themselves and using artificial intelligence, the wireless scouts would spread out in a surveillance network.

Using video cameras and echosounders, the explorers would help to create 3D maps of underwater terrain, benefitting oceanographers, archaeologists, offshore oil and gas drillers, pollution monitors, marine biologists and other civilian users.

But there is an obvious naval use too, for a flexible network of small, hard-to-detect drones would multiply the surveillance capacity against mines and other threats.

Vincent Rigaud

"Underwater robots are not new -- we've been involved in them for years," said Vincent Rigaud, director of underwater systems at the French Institute for Research for Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer), one of the world's top names in oceanography.

"What is new, though, is creating a fleet of them, with autonomous capacity."

Achieving this means overcoming two major hurdles, Rigaud explained.

One is software: creating artificial intelligence programmes that give the options for cooperating in a group and coping with the uncertainties of the marine environment, with its tides and currents.

The other is communications. Airborne drones can talk to each other, and to their controller, by the instant means of radio.

But radio waves do not penetrate underwater, which leaves sound the only option for communication among the marine drones.

Rather like a school of dolphins chirping to each other, the robots use acoustic signals to swap information and instructions -- and as experiments have shown, this is not an easy thing.

The communication is frustratingly long because the data flow is so slow, and the tenuous sound link is easily disrupted by other sources of noise, such as a passing vessel.

Pere Ridao

"It's like going back to modems in the dawn of the computer age," said Pere Ridao of the University of Girona in Spain.

"The maximum flow rate is about 100,000 times slower than a typical ADSL connection. It takes several minutes to send a picture."

On a mission, the robots would share a rough map of the underwater terrain, showing major obstacles to avoid, but would then work by themselves within designated parameters.

What they see and monitor would be stored in onboard memories which would then be downloaded after they are recovered.

Powerful computers would crunch the raw data into useable applications.

Antonio Pascoal

"The vehicles are not physically connected but virtually connected," explained Antonio Pascoal, a professor at Portugal's Superior Technical Institute (IST).

"The idea is for them to dialogue and adapt to marine geometry without human intervention."

The programme, called MORPH (Marine Robotic System of Self-Organising, Logically Linked Physical Nodes), was launched in February 2012 with the help of the European Commission. Thirty-two scientists are taking part.

Massage has beneficial Affect on Gene Activity: Reduces Muscle Inflammation

New research conducted at the McMaster University in Canada has indicated that apart from inducing deep relaxation, kneading sore muscles after a vigorous exercise can help them recover faster.

The scientists, through a series of experiments on young test subjects, have found that massaging sore muscles affected the activity of certain genes in the body. These genes were found to have a direct impact on reduced inflammation of the concerned muscles.

In fact, this "gene-stimulating" technique reportedly has the same effect on sore muscles that drugs like Ibuprofen or Aspirin boast.

Researchers tested 11 young men, who were asked to undergo "exhaustive aerobic exercises" by riding stationary bikes till they reached the point of exhaustion.

After the completion of the sessions, each subject was given a Swedish-style massage on one of their legs.

The other received no such treatment and was treated as point of comparison. The test subjects then underwent gene-profiling techniques in order to check the chemical changes in their muscle cells.

The first impact was that it switched on the genes involved in inflammation reduction. In addition, it activated the genes that promote the creation of mitochondria - structures that are the energy factories inside cells. The fitter a muscle cell is the more mitochondria it tends to have.

NASA ISS Commander Burbank Exercises with aRED

NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, exercises using the advanced Resistive Exercise Device (aRED) in the Tranquility node of the International Space Station.

NASA ISS Crew: Living and Working in Orbit

Commander Dan Burbank (right) and Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov work in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA TV

The International Space Station’s Expedition 30 crew – Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin – performed science experiments and participated in an emergency drill Tuesday.

Burbank, a NASA astronaut, began his workday almost immediately after the crew’s regular 1 a.m. EST wakeup time as he conducted the Reaction Self Test.

This 5-minute test helps crew members objectively identify any impacts to their performance caused by sleep loss, fatigue and disruptions to circadian rhythms.

Following the crew’s daily planning conference with flight control centers around the world, Burbank spent his morning setting up equipment for the Integrated Cardiovascular experiment and participating as its test subject.

Investigators use the data from these tests to measure the atrophy of the heart muscle that appears to develop during long-duration spaceflight and to develop countermeasures to mitigate those effects.

Experiments like this one are crucial to understanding and maintaining crew health as NASA moves towards space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, Shkaplerov participated in a Russian cardiovascular study known as Pneumocard and later performed routine maintenance on the life-support system in the Russian segment of the orbiting complex.

His fellow cosmonaut, Ivanishin, conducted preventative maintenance on the ventilation system of the Zvezda service module.

After a break for lunch, all three Expedition 30 crew members teamed up for an emergency egress drill to remain familiar with the location of emergency equipment and hatches as well as the evacuation route.

In cooperation with the mission control centers around the world, the crew worked through the response procedures as if there were an actual emergency requiring a rapid departure and tagged up with flight controllers afterward to review the results.

Aerodrag Exercise: Surfing An Alien Atmosphere

Venus Express has completed an 'aerodrag' campaign that used its solar wings as sails to catch faint wisps of the planet's atmosphere. The test used the orbiter as an exquisitely accurate sensor to measure atmospheric density barely 180 km above the hot planet.


During five aerodrag measurements last week, Venus Express' solar arrays and control systems were operated as one big flying sensor, with the solar arrays rotated at various angles to the direction of flight.

The special configuration exposed the wings to the vanishingly faint wisps of atmosphere that reach to the boundary of space around Venus, generating a tiny but measurable aerodynamic torque, or rotation, on the satellite.

This torque can be measured very accurately based on the amount of correction that must be applied by reaction wheels, which counter-rotate inside the spacecraft to maintain its orientation in space.

Scuba Diving is Great Exercise for Asthma, Diabtes, Cardiac problems

An increasing number of patients with controlled diabetes, asthma and other diseases are getting the green light for an activity that was once off limits: scuba diving.

An increasing number of patients with controlled diabetes, asthma and other diseases are getting the green light for an activity that was once off limits: scuba diving.

(/ABC News Photo Illustration)

There is little evidence to suggest that having asthma or diabetes should preclude a patient from venturing underwater, according to researchers at the Dive Medicine Symposium at Rutgers University.

"There's not a lot of strong data to suggest that diabetics are at increased risk" of potentially serious adverse events, said Dr. Michael Madsen, a fellow in undersea and hyperbaric medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Likewise for other depth-related illnesses such as arterial-gas embolism in the lungs or decompression sickness, also known as "the bends," he said.

The same thinking applies to most asthmatics, said Dr. David S. Lambert, who specializes in hyperbaric therapy at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Madsen said the major issue for diabetic divers is the potential for an underwater hypoglycemic episode that causes unconsciousness. These episodes are usually triggered by increased metabolic demands, since patients are "using more energy than usual when they're diving," he said.

They're particularly problematic for insulin-dependent diabetics, because their regular does of the hormone may be too high for someone undergoing increased activity.

There are also concerns about myocardial infarction (a heart attack) among diabetic divers from unrecognized vascular disease, Madsen said, although these threats are more frequently detected today and divers know about such risk in advance.