DARPA Robotics Challenge: Japan's SCHAFT team ahead on points

For those wondering who of 16 competing teams would walk away as top performers in the two-day DARPA Robotics Challenge in Florida over the weekend, the suspense is over.

SCHAFT, a Japanese military robotics company newly acquired by Google, won the most points, 27 out of a possible 32. SCHAFT outscored some formidable big-name contenders such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and NASA. IHMC Robotics placed second.

Third place went to Tartan Rescue, from Carnegie Mellon University, and fourth place was awarded to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The fifth-place went to RoboSimian, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

All in all, there were eight top scorers. Team TRACLabs, WRECS (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and Team TROOPER (Lockheed Martin) were the next three.

The eight teams now have the opportunity to continue their work with the help of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding and are to compete in the finals event where one team will net the $2 million prize at the end of 2014.

The Finals will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks with degraded communications between the robots and their operators.

DARPA said that the 16 teams at this year's challenge in Miami represented a mix of government, academic and commercial backgrounds. They were not only from the United States, but also from South Korea and Japan.

SCHAFT's high scores were impressive as the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), established to advance state of the art in humanoid robot competition, is considered as a baseline on the current state of robotics.

The event is a marker for assessing the evolution of robots in hazardous first-responder environments, a demonstration of what is so far possible in pushing technologies closer to the point where robots will help out in a range of rescue tasks quickly, efficiently and with minimal human interaction.

Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for ideas

In this visualisation, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows.

Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green).

Credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

NASA Fermi Space Telescope Points to our Earth

A NASA space telescope hunting for the most powerful explosions in the universe is turning its eye on Earth to hunt for tiny flashes of radiation to determine if they pose a potential hazard to passengers aboard high-flying airliners.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has joined the search for mysterious gamma-ray flashes above thunderstorms, which are ultrabrief but could be a concern for air travelers, researchers said.

Just one millisecond blast of the so-called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) could expose passengers and crew aboard a nearby jetliner to the same level of radiation as 400 chest X-rays, according to a recent study.

Fermi, which NASA launched to seek out gamma-ray bursts — immensely powerful explosions in deep space, usually from a dying star — joined in the hunt several months ago to possibly uncover more about when and how TGFs occur around thunderstorms and lightning.

To do that, scientists are using one of the telescope’s monitoring sensors.

“Fermi-GBM [Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor] has the broadest energy coverage and highest sensitivity of any instruments that have observed, or will observe TGFs,” said Jerry Fishman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Scientists first discovered the existence of TGFs by accident, when the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory detected a flash in 1991. But they still do not know if it is lightning that triggers the phenomenon or whether TGFs provide the quick burst of electrons that may spark a lightning strike.

Research findings by Fishman and his team are expected to be published in the coming weeks by the American Geophysical Union.