SPIDER: 'Spacecraft' seeks traces of the early universe over Antartica

Constructed primarily in Princeton's Jadwin Hall, SPIDER is a stratospheric spacecraft that in December will begin a 20-day orbit in Earth's stratosphere at an altitude of roughly 110,000 feet.

During that period, SPIDER's six large cameras will look for the pattern, or polarization, of gravitational waves produced by the fluctuation of energy and density that resulted from the Big Bang.

These waves, explained William Jones a Princeton University assistant professor of physics, are a "statistically unique fingerprint" that can be traced back to the beginning of the universe.

Many astronomical instruments measure various characteristics of this fingerprint, SPIDER is designed to characterize the "shape" of it, said Jones, who is the project's principal investigator.

"The ultimate goal of SPIDER is to see to what extent we can identify a very characteristic feature in that polarization that's expected to come from the earliest stages of the evolutionary growth of our universe," Jones said.

"There's a very particular pattern than can be generated only by something like a gravitational wave propagating through the surface of the cosmic microwave background [which is the glow of the heat left over from the Big Bang]," Jones said.

"That is a very particular pattern commonly referred to as a 'pinwheel' pattern on the sky. It's that particular pinwheel pattern that we're really after."

SPIDER, which used to be an acronym, but now is the project's formal name, is a multi-institutional project funded largely by a grant from NASA, as well as the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

In addition to Princeton, the primary institutions involved are the University of Toronto; Case Western Reserve University; the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA-funded research center managed by Caltech; and the University of British Columbia.

The project was proposed in 2006 while Jones, who joined Princeton's faculty in 2008, was a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

ESO Image: Lupus 4 - Cosmic Spider Swallows Starlight

A dark, spider-shaped cloud of cosmic gas blocks out light from stars in a new image taken by a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

The amazing photo, taken by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, is filled with stars glowing brightly in a variety of colours.

Red, blue, yellow and orange stars frame the gas blob called Lupus 4, which blots out light from other, more distant stars in the center of the image. Fly through the image in a new video of the Lupus 4 space cloud from ESO.

Eventually, Lupus 4, which is located about 400 light-years from Earth, could give birth to its own stars.

A dark cloud of gas called Lupus 4 blocks out more-distant stars. Photo released Sept. 3, 2014.

Credit: ESO

"How many stars might eventually start to shine within Lupus 4? It is hard to say, as mass estimates for Lupus 4 vary," ESO representatives said in a statement today (Sept. 3).

"Two studies agree on a figure of around 250 times the mass of the sun, though another, using a different method, arrives at a figure of around 1,600 solar masses."

"Either way, the cloud contains ample material to give rise to plenty of bright new stars."

"Rather as earthly clouds make way for sunshine, so, too, shall this cosmic dark cloud eventually dissipate and give way to brilliant starlight."

Another gas cloud in the same area, called Lupus 3, already hosts about 40 young stars that formed over the course of the last 3 million years, ESO said.

The spidery cloud is part of a loose star cluster named the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association, which is a young, widely dispersed star grouping, according to ESO.

The stars in the cluster also likely come from the same huge cloud of cosmic material, representatives from the astronomy organization added.

Google Acquisition Trail goes on: UK Spider provides Security

This is the image posted on UK's spider.io after Google's acquisition.

Google said Friday it was buying the British-based startup spider.io for its technology to weed out fraud in online advertising.

"Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today... but this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest," said Neal Mohan at Google's DoubleClick unit which develops targeted ads.

Neal Mohan

With the new acquisition, Mohan said, "our immediate priority is to include their fraud detection technology in our video and display ads products, where they will complement our existing efforts."

He added that "by including spider.io's fraud-fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem."

The move helps Google combat the practice of click fraud, where criminals use automatic programs to boost the number of clicks on an online ad to boost revenues. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Spiderman robot spins draglines to cross open space

Spider-inspired robots carrying payloads descend on their draglines. 

Credit: Wang, et al. ©2014 IOP Publishing Ltd

Inspired by spiders' abilities to produce draglines and use them to move across open space, researchers have designed and built a robot that can do the same.

Similar to Spiderman shooting a dragline from his wrist, the robot produces a sticky plastic thread that it attaches to a surface, such as a wall or tree branch.

Then the robot descends the dragline, while simultaneously continuing to produce as much line as needed.

The mechanism could enable robots to move from any solid surface into open space without the need for flying.

The researchers, Liyu Wang, Utku Culha, and Fumiya Iida, at the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, have published a paper on the spider-inspired robot in a recent issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

"The dragline-forming robot is interesting because it implements a new concept: that a robot may accomplish a task by building structures to assist it," Wang told reporters.

"It is advantageous because the robot can flexibly vary the structure (in this case, the thickness of the dragline) according to environments or tasks that cannot be anticipated."


At first glance, the robot doesn't look much like a spider, since it is about 3 times larger and made of an assortment of metal, wires, and onboard batteries.

The source of its dragline material is a stick of thermoplastic adhesive (TPA), which functions similarly to a glue stick in a hot glue gun.

When the robot is ready to produce a dragline, the solid TPA stick is pushed through a heating cavity and out of a nozzle.

Two wheels located just beyond the nozzle help elongate and guide the dragline in the desired direction. The robot can form draglines with a thickness varying from 1 to 5 mm.

Since the hot TPA dragline is sticky, it can adhere to the solid surface from where the robot starts its journey into open space.

Once the dragline is stuck on the surface, the robot can begin descending down the dragline while producing more of it, mimicking the way that spiders fall down their draglines in a controlled way.

While spiders use a fourth pair of legs to move down their draglines, the robot relies on its two wheels for locomotion down the dragline.

More information: Liyu Wang, et al. "A dragline-forming mobile robot inspired by spiders." Bioinspir. Biomim. 9 (2014) 016006 (10pp). DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/9/1/016006