Sky Survey Map of Massive Galaxies, Distant Black Holes, Clues to Dark Matter and Energy

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III(SDSS-III) has released the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, helping astronomers better explain the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up 96 percent of the universe. 

According to SDSS-III scientific spokesperson and University of Pittsburgh assistant professor of physics and astronomy Michael Wood-Vasey, scientists using the map, titled Data Release 9 (DR9), can retrace the Universe’s history over the last seven billion years. 

Wood-Vasey co-wrote the DR9 summary paper featured on the arXiv database.

“This is science at its collaborative best,” said Wood-Vasey. “SDSS-III scientists work together to address big questions extending from our own galaxy to distant reaches of the Universe, and then they share that data with the world to allow anyone to make the next big discovery.”

The new DR9 map of the Universe includes images of 200 million galaxies and spectra measurements of how much light galaxies gives off at different wavelengths— of 1.35 million galaxies, including new spectra of 540,000 galaxies dating from when the universe was half its present age.

Researchers at SDSS-III say that studying spectra is important because it allows scientists to figure out how much the Universe has expanded since the light left each galaxy.

Additionally, having this new data to analyze not only helps researchers understand the distant Universe, and the Earth’s own Milky Way Galaxy.

DR9 includes better estimates regarding the temperatures and chemical compositions of more than a half million stars in the Milky Way.

DR9 represents the latest in a series of data releases stretching back to 2001. This release includes new data from the ongoing SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which will eventually measure the positions of 1.5 million massive galaxies over the past seven billion years of cosmic time, as well as 160,000 quasars—giant black holes feeding on stars and gas—from as long ago as 12 billion years.

While all of these new images and spectra contain the promise of new discoveries about the universe, SDSS-III is only in the middle of its six-year survey and will release three times as much data by the time it has completed its work, in 2014.

All the newly released data is now available on the DR9 Web site, at http://www.sdss3.org/dr9.

Additionally, the SkyServer Web site includes lesson plans for teachers who use DR9 data to teach astronomy and other topics in science, technology, and mathematics.

Stephen Hawking trials Mind-Reading device

Technology has helped Stephen Hawking in many ways, and now it might allow him to communicate using thought alone. 

The cosmologist is trialling a device that monitors brain activity with the ultimate aim of transforming it into speech.

Hawking has motor neurone disease - nerve decay that has left him almost completely paralysed. He currently communicates using a series of cheek twitches to select words from a screen. 

"It is a very, very slow process," says Philip Low at Stanford University in California, who is founder of healthcare company NeuroVigil.

As Hawking loses control of his cheek, Low hopes he might instead communicate using his company's portable device.

The iBrain records brain activity from a single point on the scalp. An algorithm then extracts useful information from this activity.

In a preliminary trial, Low's team asked Hawking to imagine moving his hands and feet while wearing the device. 

They were able to identify what movement he was imagining through changes in his brain activity.

They now hope to develop the technology to enable Hawking and others to use the imagined movements to instruct a computer to write or speak words.

Low presented the work at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge, UK, on 8 July.

Human Gets Immersed In Remote Robot's Actions

A group of Japanese roboticists envisions a world where we all use robots to visit friends and family, and represent us in distant work sites.

They are developing a telepresence robot they think will give humans more physical immersion in remote locations.

“Vision is not enough,” said Dzmitry Tsetserukou, an assistant professor at Toyohashi University of Technology’s Advanced Interdisciplinary Electric Research Center.

“We have to provide tactile feedback to make him or her more involved, and also motion feedback so we can feel more like we are human on the robot side.”

Tsetserukou, along with computer science and engineering professor Jun Miura and PhD candidate Sugiyama Junichi, developed a robot called NAVIgoid that enables a human controller to guide it remotely using torso movements, and receive physical feedback from the robot.

The robot was recently demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques in Asia.

Human Gets Immersed In Remote Robot's Actions

MIT Camera Snaps at the speed of light

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects. Video: Melanie Gonick.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report they have developed a camera that can capture the speed of light in fractions of seconds.

The researchers from MIT's Media Labs suggest the new technology and imaging techniques could prove to be highly beneficial, maybe 10 years down the line, in hospitals and testing centers, as a hand-held medical scanner.

The imaging system can acquire visual data and capture images at a rate of 1 trillion frames per second and also produce a slow-motion video of light travelling through an object.

"Watching this it looks like light in slow motion. It is so slow you can see the light itself move across the distance," said Ramesh Raskar, an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the Media Lab.

NASA Selects Seven Firms To Provide Near-Space Flight Services

NASA has selected seven companies to integrate and fly technology payloads on commercial suborbital reusable platforms that carry payloads near the boundary of space.

As part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, each successful vendor will receive an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. 

These two-year contracts, worth a combined total of $10 million, will allow NASA to draw from a pool of commercial space companies to deliver payload integration and flight services. 

The flights will carry a variety of payloads to help meet the agency’s research and technology needs.

“Through this catalogue approach, NASA is moving toward the goal of making frequent, low-cost access to near-space available to a wide range of engineers, scientists and technologists,” said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“The government’s ability to open the suborbital research frontier to a broad community of innovators will enable maturation of the new technologies and capabilities needed for NASA’s future missions in space.”

The selected companies are:
– Armadillo Aerospace, Heath, Texas
– Near Space Corp., Tillamook, Ore.
– Masten Space Systems, Mojave, Calif.
– Up Aerospace Inc., Highlands Ranch, Colo.
– Virgin Galactic, Mojave, Calif.
– Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, Camarillo, Calif.
– XCOR, Mojave, Calif.

NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist is charged with maturing crosscutting technologies to flight readiness status for future space missions. Through these indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, NASA intends to provide frequent flight opportunities for payloads on suborbital platforms.

The Flight Opportunities Program is managed at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. For more information on the program, visit: http://flightopportunities.nasa.gov

For more information about NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct

‪Rockwell Collins Pro Line Fusion Touch Screen‬‏ - YouTube

For the first 50 years of computing, the input and output of a computer have been to different places. Mobile computing and the touch screen are quickly changing things though and the changes extend to the aircraft industry.

At the 59th Annual Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Airventure in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Rockwell Collins has unveiled the first touch-control primary flight displays (PFD) for business jets and turboprop aircraft, which will be available on future applications of the company's Pro Line Fusion avionics system.

The icon-based, touch-controlled interface is designed to make the cockpit more user friendly and keep the pilot's eyes focused up and forward instead of down at the center console.

A tap of the display brings up a context-sensitive menu that lets pilots change things such as the speed, altitude and heading of the aircraft with just a couple of taps.

Through the icon-based graphical user interface, the pilot can also manage aircraft systems, complete checklists, and review the flightplan on a scrollable map, all without taking their eyes off the PFD.

Through gesture controls, pilots can also redirect the aircraft to a graphically displayed waypoint or destination with a swipe of a finger instead of entering information on a console-mounted keypad.

Other gestures control panning and zoom features, while a physical keyboard is retained for alphanumeric input rather than an onscreen virtual keyboard that was decided would cover up too much important information.

With a couple of taps, the screen layout can also be split into two, three or four windows and the elements of the individual windows customized by dragging and dropping icons to provide a wealth of relevant flight information at a glance.

Rockwell Collins says the user-friendly, icon-based graphical user interface also cuts the learning curve for pilots transitioning to a new aircraft type.

"These displays demonstrate our focus on empowering pilots with natural head-up, eyes-forward interfaces," said Colin Mahoney, vice president of Sales and Marketing for Rockwell Collins.

"Touch-controlled, icon-based controls on the main displays help keep pilots' attention focused up and forward for safer and more efficient flying."

Rockwell Collins expects to receive certification for the touchscreen interface in 2013, after which it is slated to appear in cockpits featuring its Pro Line Fusion avionics suite.

A Minimalist-record-player

Take a peek at this record player. It’s the kind that plays vinyl records, the 12″ kind, and it does it well with only the bare minimum.

It’s called “Turnstyle” and it’s made up of the motor, the needle, the speakers, and the controls. What more do you need? It’s a skeleton of its former self.

This project is designed by RD Silver, a designer who has the guts to take away everything but the guts.

The requirements for function set upon this project were the following: spin record, on/off, volume, speaker, and needle.

As far as design requirements: no corners, no hard edges, no 90 degree angles.

NASA TRL: Technology Readiness Levels De-mystified

Click on the picture to see the Flash version.

In the research and development world, ideas are like schoolchildren.

All new technologies must pass through a number of grades before they are declared ready for graduation.
At NASA, as in the rest of the research community, these grades are called technology readiness levels, or TRLs.

Each TRL represents the evolution of an idea from a thought, perhaps written on a cocktail napkin or the back of an envelope, to the full deployment of a product in the marketplace.

"NASA acknowledges the system as a useful, commonly understood method for explaining to collaborators and stakeholders just how mature a particular technology is," said Tony Strazisar, senior technologist for NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate in Washington.

In fact, NASA invented the system and many of it's space partners follow, with similar systems.

A NASA researcher, Stan Sadin, conceived the first scale in 1974. It had seven levels which were not formally defined until 1989. In the 1990s NASA adopted a scale with nine levels which gained widespread acceptance across industry and remains in use today.

Using bowling balls as tracker Balls - CERN Bulletin

The bowling balls - CERN Bulletin

This will be of interest to youngsters as a history lesson and it will be the recollection of a distant memory for us old grey hairs. It's a great example as to how some of the technology developed, back in the 60's, in the days when a mouse was simply a) an irritating rodent that ate your lunch, b) something for biologists and chemists to experiment on, or c) a boon companion for lonely geeks who spent too many long winter nights in the science lab.

40 years ago, the web, Wikipedia and Google did not exist. Communications were minimal and this meant that the sharing of information was very slow, unreliable and based on published papers. It was much more difficult to know what everyone was working on and whether other people in other parts of the world, or even in the same laboratory, were facing the same problems or developing the same tools or solutions as you.

At that time, Bent Stumpe was an electronics engineer, newly recruited to work on developments for the SPS Central Control room. One of the things his supervisor asked him to build as soon as possible was a device to control a pointer on a screen, also called a tracker ball.

The heart of the device was the 'ball' that the user would move his hand over, while the cursor followed the corresponding movements on the screen. “We needed very round, well balanced and smoothly moving balls and after much thought and discussion, we thought that bowling balls best met these requirements”, recollects Bent Stumpe.

Read the full article by following the link here

The Future of Human Interface

Curtain falling on 'Digital Decade'

While it got off to a rocky start with the overhyped Y2K bug and dotcom bubble, the era dubbed the "Digital Decade" by Microsoft's Bill Gates has turned out to be a dizzying period of innovation.

"It's been an amazingly vibrant decade for the Internet and for digital things in general," said John Abell, New York bureau chief of Wired magazine, which has chronicled the technological leaps and bounds of the past 10 years.

"People simply don't exist in a non-digital world at all," Abell told AFP. "Even grandmothers and Luddites all have tools and devices -- even if they don't realize they're using them -- which connect them to a digital world."

David Pogue, personal technology columnist for The New York Times, points to Apple's iPod, introduced in 2001, as among the most influential devices of the decade.

"It really revolutionized the way music is distributed and marketed," said Pogue, who also casts a vote for the Flip pocket camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies.

"In two years it has taken over one-third of the camcorder market and has killed the sales of tape camcorders," Pogue told AFP.

Pogue also gives a nod to the GPS navigational unit "which changes the way we drive and also has environmental considerations because millions of people spend less time driving around lost."

Touchscreen smartphones such as Apple's iPhone featuring thousands of applications are also high on Pogue's list.

"It's become a tiny pocket computer in a size and shape that no computer's ever been before -- and mobile and connected to the Internet all the time," said Pogue. "That's a revolutionary set of circumstances."

What's more, he added, "It's only two years old. The iPhone came out two years ago.

"Imagine what the iPhone and the Android phones and the Palm phones are going to look like in five years? They're going to be smaller, thinner, much better battery life, many more features, much faster."

"Right now we're looking at the Stone Age of these phones," Pogue said. "We think they're modern but they're not."

Another groundbreaking device high on the lists of technology analysts is Amazon's Kindle electronic reader, which made its appearance in 2007 and has spawned a host of rivals jostling for a share of the digital book market.

The past decade has, of course, also seen seismic shifts in the Web with the explosive growth of social networking sites, wireless connectivity and the rise of Internet-based cloud computing.

Web search and advertising giant Google has become "central to our lives," said Wired's Abell, branching out into "everything you can think of, from mail to documents to the telephone."

In the late 1990s, Pogue said, "creating a webpage took skill, talent, special software -- it was still only for the geeks."

The Internet has become accessible to all in the years since, giving birth to sites such as Wikipedia in 2001, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.

"The beauty of Web 2.0 websites is that it makes it very easy," said Pogue. "Anybody can immediately just type, just type to present their point of view without having any special talent except having an opinion.

"What it does that's really amazing is it connects people who have similar interests, even very narrow interests, who would never meet each other," he said. "They would never be able to connect any other way."

Much of what has come to pass over the past 10 years was presaged by Gates when he gazed into a crystal ball in an October 2001 essay titled "Moving Into the Digital Decade."

"Wherever you are, you'll have the power to control who can contact you or access your information to live your life as openly or as privately as you wish," Gates wrote.

As for what the next decade holds, Pogue is not going there. "Anyone who tries to predict the future of technology usually looks like an idiot," he said.

Unless you're Bill Gates.

EADS TV Video - Spectacular

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Magic Ink: Now available for full colour Printing

Borrowing an idea from nature could lead to technology capable of producing full-colour A4 prints in a fraction of a second, according to South Korean engineers.

Many insects and birds owe their bright colours to the interaction of light with finely-patterned surface textures, rather than relying on pigments. The iridescent colours of a peacock's tail are largely a result of the interaction of light with just one biological material – melanin rods.

Engineers have long experimented with replicating these so-called structural colours in synthetic materials, and now Sunghoon Kwon's team at Seoul National University in South Korea has managed it.

Their M-Ink can be used to produce any colour in the visible spectrum and could lead to a new method of cheap and fast full-colour printing, Kwon says.

Just add nanoparticles

M-Ink contains three ingredients: magnetic nanoparticles 100 to 200 nanometres across, a solvation liquid, and a resin.

The nanoparticles disperse throughout the resin, giving the ink a brown appearance. But when an external magnetic field is applied, the nanoparticles immediately snap to the magnetic field lines, forming chain-like structures.

The regularly-spaced nanoparticle chains interfere with incoming light, so that the light reflected from the surface is of a particular colour. Adjusting the magnetic field strength shifts the spacing of the field lines and changes the colour, says Kwon.

China Internet Users already Exceed Population of the USA - Only 1 in 4 currently have internet access

China's Internet users have surpassed the U.S. population in number, and more Chinese than ever are using e-commerce and accessing the Web through mobile phones, according to official statistics.

China's broadband users and the number of .cn Web sites coming on-line, are also first in the world, China reports.

Slideshow: 10 ways the Chinese Internet is different from yours

China had 338 million Internet users at the end of last month, the most in any country, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said late Thursday.

Message Boards Chat

Chatting on message boards, cruising around social networking sites and pursuing other entertainment were among the most popular activities for Web users, the center said in a report posted on its Web site. The number of Internet users who watched videos online rose 10 percent from six months ago. More than one-fourth now shop online.

China also led the world in the number of registered Web sites, nearly 13 million, using its .cn top-level domain, the report said

All Figures on the Rise

Almost all of the reported figures rose substantially this year. Nearly all of the Internet users had broadband, which China is working to link to more remote areas

Mobile Broadband

The report gave some mixed signals on the prospects for mobile broadband, which China is also pushing. The number of Chinese who used mobile phones to access some online services rose to 155 million, but just one in four of those people said they would use 3G to surf the Web in the future, the report said.

High prices and limited coverage so far have kept down 3G take-up despite aggressive marketing by China's three mobile carriers.

Malware and Security Issues

The report also showed the severity of malware and other security problems in China. Over 100 million Chinese had passwords or account numbers stolen in the first half of this year, and almost twice as many experienced virus or trojan attacks, it said.

Despite the huge numbers already connected, only one in four Chinese is already an Internet user, the report said. So, brace yourself for the sudden upsurge in Chinese internet activity in the coming year.

Scanning Crowds for Demographics

Eye balling

With electronic billboards checking your credentials, processing power escalating, hi-res cameras and other sensors becoming ever cheaper, it's become possible for manufacturers to develop products that allow web-like targeting of consumers in the "real world."

Par example, a system developed by a Singapore research agency, lets advertising screens detect the genders of passers-by: it will soon be able to tell how old they are, too. IBM has been working on systems that can scan a crowd and estimate numbers and demographic types. They want to now where pedestrians and shoppers are looking and what interests them most.

The Hi-res camera vision of computers is now sophisticated and cheap enough to make it possible to spot the logos on your drinks cup or shopping bags, and serve up responsive ads, that reinforce your choices or promotes a competitor.

Now that facial recognition has become a consumer technology it is not difficult to install a series of ad screens that tracks individuals as they move through a subway system or mall, greeting them at each turn with a particular message or character. Coming to a high street near you, allegedly.