Wearable 4MM jetpack tested on speed, agility for runners - Video

"Everybody has always wanted to fly. When people hear the word 'jetpack,' that's what they really think about," said Jason Kerestes at Arizona State University.

He is one of the busy explorers at ASU trying to bridge gaps between man and machine. Kerestes has done something different with the jetpack concept.

He and team have reduced the amount of force; their device does not enable a person to fly, "but we have instantaneous thrust and we can pretty much trigger it to allow for faster movement and agile motion."

His jetpack, simply put, does not help you to fly but to run faster, and for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), his project's progress means a lot.

Kerestes has built his prototype, which is now undergoing tests and refinements.

The project is called 4MM, for 4-minute mile. The overall goal is to get any soldier or any test subject to be able to run a 4-minute mile who was not already capable of doing so.

Kerestes started doing his research "kind of by accident," he said.

As the owner of a welding business and going to ASU, students came to him; the team at the time was just at the infancy of this project.

"We were developing robots that could assist amputees," said Professor Thomas Sugar of the Human Machine Integration Lab.

"And DARPA came back to us and asked if we could develop robots that could assist able-bodied people, and make them able to run faster or do things they couldn't do."

Dr. Sugar works on mobile robot navigation and wearable robotics for the rehabilitation of stroke survivors.

Kerestes, already interested in the robotic process, welcomed the opportunity to get involved.

He said the fact that he could work at designing something and then weld up a prototype the next day substantially reduced their overall time on moving from concept to prototype.

Dr. Sugar said he and Kerestes had their doubts they could come up with something but then decided it was possible. They have seen encouraging results so far.

In trials over a 200-meter distance, with the jetpack, they saw a decrease in time and decrease in metabolic cost, the amount of energy required for a person to run at high speeds.

In a test, a subject with the jetpack on a sprint ran three seconds faster, and that was with carrying an extra 11.2 pounds of weight, the jetpack.

As for military support, Kerestes noted that in a warfare arena, a device such as this could spell the difference between life and death, "if you think of a Navy SEAL or a soldier that must get in somewhere quickly, and get out just as quickly," said Kerestes.

New Method: Measuring Super-Massive Black Holes

Understanding the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies is one of the most active research areas in astrophysics.

In a letter to Nature, an international team of astronomers, including Marc Sarzi from the University of Hertfordshire, report the exciting discovery of a new way to measure the mass of super-massive black holes in galaxies.

By measuring the speed with which carbon monoxide molecules orbit around such black holes, this new research opens the possibility of making these measurements in many more galaxies than ever before.

Supermassive black holes and galaxies
A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.

Supermassive black holes can be as much as a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun, and it is believed that most, if not all galaxies including the Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes at their centres - suggesting that the evolution of black holes and galaxies is very tightly linked.

Understanding the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies is one of the most active research areas in astrophysics.

Intriguing link
Marc Sarzi, from the University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Astrophysics Research, said: "There is an intriguing link between the mass of supermassive black holes and the mass of their host galaxies, but this is based only on quite a small number of estimates.

Until now only three methods were used to measure the mass of supermassive black holes and these only work on relatively nearby galaxies.

With this new technique, we have been able to show that we can measure black hole masses much further out in the universe, which will help understanding the role that supermassive black holes played during the formation of galaxies."

Super-sharp telescope images
Tim Davis, lead author of the paper, from ESA's European Southern Observatory (ESO), commented:

"We observed carbon monoxide molecules in the galaxy we were monitoring using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescope.

With its super-sharp images we were able to zoom right into the centre of the galaxy and observe the gas whizzing around the black hole. This gas moves at a speed which is determined by the black-hole's mass, and the distance from it. By measuring the velocity of the gas at each position, we can measure the mass of the black hole."

The CARMA observations were rather challenging, but the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope currently being built in Chile will allow this new technique to be applied more routinely to hundreds of galaxies in the nearby Universe.

Jet-Propelled Bloodhound faces land speed rocket test

The most powerful rocket produced in the UK for some 20 years is due to be ignited in Cornwall later.

It is being tested by the British Bloodhound team, which intends to use the booster in a car capable of running at more than 1,000mph (1,610km/h).

This feat would also smash the current world land speed record of 763mph.

Richard Noble

The rocket will be bolted to the ground in Newquay so that it cannot move, but the firing should make a spectacular noise along the north Cornwall coast.

It is being conducted at the Aerohub, Newquay Cornwall Airport, inside a shelter previously used to house Tornado fighter bombers.

As always, the UK Health and Safety Executive will be on hand to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Invited guests will watch the 10-second burn from inside another shelter via a video link.

Bloodhound is essentially the same team that claimed the existing land speed record for Britain in 1997.

Andy Green

It includes;

• the driver, RAF Pilot Andy Green, 
• project director Richard Noble and 
• chief aero engineer Ron Ayres.

But whereas their previous vehicle, known as Thrust SSC, used two jet engines to break the sound barrier, the new car, to be called Bloodhound SSC, will incorporate a jet engine and a rocket.

The jet is the well-established EJ200 power unit used in the Eurofighter-Typhoon, but the rocket is bespoke and must be put through a test programme to prove its performance and to certify it is safe for use in a manned machine.

Cheetah Robot runs at 28.3 mph - YouTube

The cheetah bot is now able to run at 28.3 mph (45.5 kph), which is 0.5 mph faster than Usain Bolt's fastest 20 meter split, noted Boston Dyanmics, the company developing the robot in conjunction with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Getting the mechanical cheetah up to this speed required researchers to improve the computer instructions that control its legs and back, whose flexible design are key to its speed, IEEE Spectrum reported.

A few important limitations keep this version of the Cheetah stuck in lab, for now. It uses an outside power source that it does not carry.

It relies on a tether to keep it upright. Early next year, however, Boston Dynamics plans to perform outdoor tests of an untethered version, called WildCat.

"Cheetah" the robot breaks land speed record

A robot named Cheetah has broken the speed record for four-legged robots by hitting almost 30 km/h. The previous record of 22 km/h was set in 1989.

Cheetah is being developed by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, with funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of its Maximum Mobility and Manipulation program, which aims to improve the design and mobility of robots.

You might remember Boston Dynamics' previous robots, which include the BigDog, designed as a military pack mule, and the humanoid PETMAN, capable of running on two legs and performing press ups to test the durability of military clothing.

This new robot mimics the movements of fast-moving animals in nature. It uses a short hopping gait at low speeds but increasing its stride and pace by flexing and unflexing its back with each step, much like an actual cheetah.

The current version of the robot has only been tested on a laboratory treadmill, where it is held in place to ensure it remains centred, and is powered by a remote hydraulic pump.

Boston Dynamics says that it plans to start testing a free-running prototype later this year.

NASA Working to Boost Speed of Space Communications

View of the Canberra Complex showing the 70m (230 ft.) antenna and the 34m (110 ft.) antennas. The Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, located outside Canberra, Australia, is one of the three complexes which comprise NASA's Deep Space Network. The other complexes are located in Goldstone, California, and Madrid, Spain

Rovers and deep space probes can forget about quickly posting cool high-definition videos to YouTube, given the painfully slow data transfer rates for most of today's space missions.

But NASA wants to change that by fusing together three aged space communication networks into a much faster, more efficient data network worthy of 21st century missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. And it hopes to do it all without costing taxpayers an extra cent.

NASA's overhaul aims to boost space communication by as much as 50 times faster than today's data transfer rates, so that a Mars mission squeaking by on a few megabits per second might someday get as much as 600 megabits per second, if not more. That could enable far more scientific payoff per mission in the long run.

"Imagine what you can accomplish with a single mission instead of several spacecraft flying over several years to collect the data," said Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation.

An upgraded network might support the very quick upload or download of huge video files the size of an HD YouTube video, as opposed to current capabilities that would struggle to transfer mp3 music files.

Younes worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for a decade before leaving to join the U.S. Department of Defense. But the U.S. space agency hired him back in August 2007 for the purpose of revolutionizing its space communication networks.

Dr John Stapp - 632 mph

Can she take much more Scottie? Is it an early Smart car design or an IKEA sofa on a test rig?

No, its Dr. John Paul Stapp strapped to his bedstead. He was not only the "fastest human on earth;" in the '50s, he was the quickest to stop. In 1954, America's original Rocketman attained a then-world record land speed of 632 mph, going from a standstill to a speed faster than a .45 bullet in five seconds on an specially-designed rocket sled. Possibly the worst part of the record attempt was coming to a screeching dead stop in 1.4 seconds, sustaining more than 40g's of thrust, all in the interest of safety. Not sure who's safety was involved here.