Toshiba develops lifelike communication android - Video

Following in the footsteps of Hiroshi Ishiguro's eerily lifelike creations, Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has developed a lifelike communication android that can move its arms and hands smoothly and use Japanese sign language.

The android is a prototype that the company will continue to develop towards achieving a service robot able to assist people in the fields of welfare and healthcare.

The android will be showcased at CEATEC JAPAN 2014, which will be held from October 7 to 11.

The android has the appearance of a friendly young woman, an impression accentuated by blinking eyes and a warm smile.

At present, the android can mimic only simple movements, such as exchanging greetings and signing in Japanese, but Toshiba will integrate its wide-ranging technologies in areas including sensing, speech synthesis, speech recognition and robotic control to realize a more sophisticated social robot by 2020.

The goal is to design a companion for the elderly and people with dementia, to offer telecounseling in natural speech, communicate through sign language and allow healthcare workers or family members to keep an eye on elderly people.

Toshiba developed the android in collaboration with aLab Inc., Osaka University, Shibaura Institute of Technology, and Shonan Institute of Technology.

Drawing on technologies and expertise built up through the development of industrial robots, Toshiba created an algorithm to coordinate the movement of 43 actuators in the android's joints.

Shibaura Institute of Technology and Shonan Institute of Technology contributed robot driving and sensor-based motion teaching technologies, and aLab Inc. and Osaka University provided the technologies required to create a body with a human-like resemblance and emulate human expressions.

As a result, the upper part of the body has a human appearance and moves fluidly.

Toshiba aims to put the android into practical use as a receptionist or as an exhibition attendant within next year.

LLCD: Laser demo reveals bright future for space communication

Compared to the days of dial-up, today's web-sites load at lightning speed. 

Just like you need your web-pages load quickly and securely, NASA scientists and engineers want the same quick connectivity with their data-gathering spacecraft. 

To meet these demands NASA is moving away from their form of dial-up (radio frequency-based communication), to their own version of high-speed Internet; using laser communications. 

Credit: NASA

The completion of the 30-day Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) mission has revealed that the possibility of expanding broadband capabilities in space using laser communications is as bright as expected.

Hosted aboard the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), for its ride to lunar orbit, the LLCD was designed to confirm laser communication capabilities from a distance of almost a quarter-of-a-million miles.

In addition to demonstrating record-breaking data download and upload speeds to the moon at 622 megabits per second (Mbps) and 20 Mbps, respectively, LLCD also showed that it could operate as well as any NASA radio system.

"Throughout our testing we did not see anything that would prevent the operational use of this technology in the immediate future," said Don Cornwell, LLCD mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For example, LLCD demonstrated error-free communications during broad daylight, including operating when the moon was to within three degrees of the sun as seen from Earth.

LLCD also demonstrated error-free communications when the moon was low on the horizon, less than 4 degrees, as seen from the ground station, which also demonstrated that wind and atmospheric turbulence did not significantly impact the system. LLCD was even able to communicate through thin clouds, an unexpected bonus.

Operationally, LLCD demonstrated the ability to download data from the LADEE spacecraft itself. "We were able to download LADEE's entire stored science and spacecraft data [1 gigabyte] in less than five minutes, which was only limited to our 40 Mbps connection to that data within LADEE" said Cornwell.

Using LADEE's onboard radio system would take several days to complete a download of the same stored data.

Additionally, LLCD was to prove the integrity of laser technology to send not only error-free data but also uncorrupted commands and telemetry or monitoring messages to and from the spacecraft over the laser link.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden congratulates the LLCD team on their successful demonstration of laser communications in a video that was relayed via laser to and from the moon. 

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

LLCD also demonstrated the ability to "hand-off" the laser connection from one ground station to another, just as a cellphone does a hand-off from one cell tower to another.

An additional achievement was the ability to operate LLCD without using LADEE's radio at all.

"We were able to program LADEE to awaken the LLCD space terminal and have it automatically point and communicate to the ground station at a specific time without radio commands. This demonstrates that this technology could serve as the primary communications system for future NASA missions," said Cornwell.

GPS 3 Prototype Communicates With GPS Constellation

Lockheed Martin's GPS III Non-Flight Satellite Testbed (GNST), a full-sized, functional GPS III satellite prototype, now at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), Fla., recently communicated via cross-links with Air Force flight-like hardware simulators for the GPS IIR, GPS IIR-M, and GPS IIF satellites, which make up the bulk of the current GPS satellite constellation. 

Since July 19, the GNST has been at CCAFS, where it has helped test CCAFS’s facilities and pre-launch processes, established remote connectivity and communicated with the GPS Next Generation Operational Control System (OCX), and performed other exercises to further reducing risk and gaining efficiencies, prior the first GPS III flight satellite’s expected delivery to the U.S. Air Force in 2014 and launch in 2015.

Read the full article here

NASA Spitzer Discovery: Time-Delayed Jets Around Young Star

Astronomers have discovered that two symmetrical jets shooting away from opposite sides of a blossoming star are experiencing a time delay: knots of gas and dust from one jet blast off four-and-a-half years later than identical knots from the other jet.

The finding, which required the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is helping astronomers understand how jets are produced around forming stars, including those resembling our sun when it was young.

"More studies are needed to determine if other jets have time delays," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is a co-author of the new study to be published in the April 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Now we know that in at least one case, there appears to be a delay, which tells us that some sort of communication may be going on between the jets that takes time to occur."

Jets are an active phase in a young star's life. A star begins as a collapsing, roundish cloud of gas and dust. By ejecting supersonic jets of gas, the cloud slows down its spinning. As material falls onto the growing star, it develops a surrounding disk of swirling material and twin jets that shoot off from above and below the disk, like a spinning top.

Once the star ignites and shines with starlight, the jets will die off and the disk will thin out. Ultimately, planets may clump together out of material left in the spinning disk.

The discovery of the time delay, in the jets called Herbig-Haro 34, has also led the astronomers to narrow in on the size of the zone from which the jets originate. The new Spitzer observations limit this zone to a circle around the young star with a radius of 3 astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between our sun and Earth. This is about 10 times smaller than previous estimates.

"Where we stand today on Earth was perhaps once a very violent place where high-velocity gas and dust were ejected from the disk circling around our very young sun," said Alex Raga of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the first author of the paper. "If so, the formation of planets like Earth depends on how and when this phenomenon ended. Essentially, every star like our own sun has gone through a similar cloud-disk-jets formation process."

One of the jets in Herbig-Haro 34 had been studied extensively for years, but the other remained hidden behind a dark cloud. Spitzer's sensitive infrared vision was able to pierce this cloud, revealing the obscured jet in greater detail than ever before. Spitzer images show that the newfound jet is perfectly symmetrical to its twin, with identical knots of ejected material.

This symmetry turned out to be key to the discovery of the jets' time delay. By measuring the exact distances from the knots to the star, the astronomy team was able to figure out that, for every knot of material punched out by one jet, a similar knot is shot out in the opposite direction 4.5 years later.

This calculation also depended on the speed of the jets, which was known from previous studies by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Other symmetrical jets similar to Herbig-Haro 34 have been observed closely before, but it is not clear if they are also experiencing time delays.

NASA Mars: Both orbiters are down for the count

The Red Planet is experiencing a partial radio blackout this week, as both of NASA's Mars orbiters have been felled by technical glitches. Until one of the probes can be brought back online later this week, the outages will delay operation of the twin Mars rovers, which use the orbiters to efficiently relay data back to Earth.

The main blow to rover operations comes from NASA's Mars Odyssey, which reached the Red Planet in 2001 and has been the prime communications relay for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity since they landed in 2004.

Odyssey has been down since 28 November, when its computers registered a memory error and sent the spacecraft into "safe mode", which minimises spacecraft operations.

Odyssey's most natural communications backup, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), has been kept on standby since August, when the spacecraft spontaneously rebooted for the fourth time this year.

Fast connection
The solar-powered Mars rovers can communicate with antennas on Earth directly, but the orbiters can relay information from the rovers to Earth at more than 10 times that speed, using a fraction of the energy.

The outages could delay attempts to free the Spirit rover from a sand pit that has been its home for more than six months (see Mars rover battles for its life). The rover team has been given until February to extricate Spirit.

"The rovers are safe. However, future activities are likely delayed, roughly on a day-for-day basis until Odyssey returns to relay operations," says John Callas, the rover programme manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Memes from 'Infectious' Bloggers & Twitters

The way that certain images, videos or concepts can suddenly spread like wildfire across the web, using email and social websites to propagate, is one of online culture's most unique phenomena.

Now Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to accurately predict how quickly and widely new "memes", as they are called, will spread. The ability to forecast this "viral" behaviour would be of great interest to sociologists and marketeers, among others.

The secret, they say, is to recognise the fact that people vary in how "infectious" they are when it comes to sharing content online. While some people pass on things they receive right away, others do so after some delay, or not at all.

Medical models
The viral spread of information online has conventionally been modelled using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses.

One of the concepts borrowed is that of an infection's R₀, or basic reproductive number, which describes how many other people someone with the virus can be expected to infect. Knowing the R₀ number help predict the likelihood and extent of real life epidemics, such as H1N1 swine flu.

Rememebr that models that apply the idea to online information can only indicate whether an internet meme is likely to be successful or to die out quickly, says Esteban Moro at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain.

Moro, working with José Luis Iribarren at IBM in Madrid, used IBM's company email newsletter to show the importance of variations between people's infectiousness in propagating memes online.

ESA Launches the World's Largest Communications Satellite

Jean-Yves Le Gall, Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Arianespace, seen in April. A European rocket placed on the world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit, launch operator Arianespace said.(AFP/File/Yoshikazu

KOUROU, French Guiana (AFP) – A European rocket placed the world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit, launch operator Arianespace said.

The 6.9-tonne TerreStar-1, operated by US telecoms services firm TerreStar Networks Inc., was launched by Ariane-5 heavy rocket from the European space base in Kourou, French Guiana, after four delays caused by stormy weather.

It is the 189th launch since the European Space Agency (ESA) introduced Ariane in 1979.
Arianespace chief executive Jean-Yves Le Gall also told reporters the company's first launch from Kourou using a Soyuz rocket would probably take place "in the first week" of 2010.

The firm is to use the Soviet-era workhorse under a commercial arrangement with Russia so that it can launch medium-sized payloads.

The version will be a Soyuz 2, able to take three tonnes into geostationary orbit, compared to 1.7 tonnes that can be launched from Baikonur, the main Russian space base.

Arianespace is also bringing in a new rocket, Vega, for light payloads of up to 1.5 tonnes. The first launches by these rockets had been pencilled for the end of the year.

The Soyuz project has been delayed by the addition of a Russian-made mobile gantry, while Vega has been delayed by testing of some of its sub-systems.

Decyphering the Past

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.

The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse.

These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say?

That is the great challenge of decipherment: to reach deep into the past and hear the voices of the dead. When the Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the Roman empire.

Go Badger!

A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Adam Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have ALS, brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.