Murata Robot cheerleading squad showcases sensor technology - video

A team of cheerleading robots made their dancing debut in Tokyo on Thursday as creator Murata Manufacturing demonstrated its cutting-edge sensor technology.

With curtains pulled back and Japanese pop music pulsing in the background, 10 doll-like robot girls with illuminated pom-poms rolled out onto a stage to perform their choreographed routine.

The cheerleaders stand just 36 centimetres (10 inches) tall with matching bob hairstyles that hide the complicated machinery inside their heads.

The team's advanced gyro sensors, which are usually found in cars and digital cameras, keep them from falling off the balls that they wobble on during their routine, Murata said.

The cute creations have LED eyes that shine in different colours as they manoeuvre into various formations including a heart shape, diagonal lines and a moving figure of eight.

"Of course they cannot jump like true cheerleaders," said Koichi Yoshikawa, a Murata engineer involved developing the technology.

"But the idea is that they are doing their best to stay stable on their little ball, as if they were telling the team, 'hang on, do your best'!"

Group-control technology, developed in collaboration with Kyoto University, makes sure that the robots move in a synchronised way and don't crash into each other.

That promise got off to a shaky start, however, as several dolls collided and fell over during the first take in front of assembled media, prompting assistants to remove clumsy members of the squad.

Despite the hiccup, Murata, a major electronics manufacturer, said the technology has big potential, such as helping cars stabilise on slippery or damaged roads.

The company currently makes sensors that are used to monitor tyre pressure and in engine control units.

Its next-generation technology could also be used as an anti-collision device in self-driving cars being developed by companies such as Google and Tesla.

NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to Capture 'Striking' Lightning Data

Flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair.

When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.

Researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe.

Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts.

It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.

The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare -- and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well.

The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016.

Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload.

STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoD's STP.

NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratory’s high inclination.

This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to "look" farther towards Earth's poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite.

Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks.

LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.

"Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning -- what we call total lightning -- during both day and night," said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall.

"As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics.”

LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency -- and it does this without land-ocean bias.

Returning ISS Astronauts 'flew blind' after Soyuz sensors failed

The three crew of the International Space Station (ISS) who returned to Earth this week endured a hair-raising descent after their height sensors failed, a Russian cosmonaut revealed on Friday.

Pavel Vinogradov said that he and the two other crew of the Soyuz capsule which touched down in Kazakhstan Wednesday had groped their way through the landing after they lost all data about their height from the ground.

"There were problems. For some reason after the undocking all our parameters disappeared. Essentially, after the undocking, we flew blind," he said at the Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, quoted by Russian news agencies.

He said that the only data the crew could receive about their approach to the earth -- crucial for knowing when to fire the engines to soften the landing -- came from the salvage team on the ground.

He said the rescue teams were able to radio to the crew that they were 300 metres (1,000 feet) and then 100 metres (330 feet) from the ground in the Soyuz capsule, which lands vertically with the help of a parachute after reentering the atmosphere.

"I managed to count eight seconds and we touched down very softly," he said, adding that aside from the usual G-forces and jolting "everyone felt normal".

Vinogradov, fellow Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy touched down on the Kazakh steppe on Wednesday morning, in a landing that at the time seemed hitch-free.

Russia is currently the only nation capable of transporting humans to the ISS in its Soyuz rocket and capsule system after the withdrawal of the US shuttle.

UPDATE
However, the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency denied the cosmonaut's claim Friday, RIA Novosti reported.

"It wasn't a blind landing," Vladimir Popovkin said, explaining mission control simply switched off an information display in the landing module of the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft.

The cosmonauts still had enough readings to complete the landing procedure without problems, he said.

"Two dates simply overlapped in a program, and we had to turn off the [information] display so that [the readings] would not be patchy on the screen," Popovkin said.

Cancer Home Detection Kit

Small Liquid Sensor May Detect Cancer Instantly, Could Lead To Home Detection Kit - What if it were possible to go to the store and buy a kit to quickly and accurately diagnose cancer, similar to a pregnancy test?

A University of Missouri researcher is developing a tiny sensor, known as an acoustic resonant sensor, that is smaller than a human hair and could test bodily fluids for a variety of diseases, including breast and prostate cancers.

"Many disease-related substances in liquids are not easily tracked," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. "In a liquid environment, most sensors experience a significant loss of signal quality, but by using highly sensitive, low-signal-loss acoustic resonant sensors in a liquid, these substances can be effectively and quickly detected - a brand-new concept that will result in a noninvasive approach for breast cancer detection."

Kwon's real-time, special acoustic resonant sensor uses micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS), which are tiny devices smaller than the diameter of a human hair, to directly detect diseases in body fluids. The sensor doesn't require bulky data reading or analyzing equipment and can be integrated with equally small circuits, creating the potential for small stand-alone disease-screening systems.

Kwon's sensor also produces rapid, almost immediate results that could reduce patient anxiety often felt after waiting for other detection methods, such as biopsies, which can take several days or weeks before results are known.

"Our ultimate goal is to produce a device that will simply and quickly diagnose multiple specific diseases, and eventually be used to create 'point of care' systems, which are services provided to patients at their bedsides," Kwon said.

"The sensor has strong commercial potential to be manifested as simple home kits for easy, rapid and accurate diagnosis of various diseases, such as breast cancer and prostate cancer."