Technology

In the nine years since the Humane Genome Project wrapped up, gene sequencing has gotten faster and cheaper at a pace rivaling the computer industry. Now a technology company in the UK has another breakthrough, taking a cue from the computer industry itself: A cluster of fast individual compute nodes, so easily scalable that the company made a USB-powered disposable version.

The goal is to democratize sequencing and eliminate the still-heady costs associated with genetic analysis, making DNA and protein sequencing as commonplace as an exam with a tongue depressor.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. uses a proprietary nanopore detection system to seek out and study molecules. Nanopores are organic molecules with a hole in them, embedded in a polymer membrane. The membrane’s electrical field allows individual strands of DNA to pass through the nanopores, and the disruption in current through the nanopore can be analyzed and matched to base pairs.

The company uses this setup in two configurations: the GridION system, which consists of nodes filled with disposable test cartridges containing multiple nanopores, and the MinION, designed for portable analysis of single molecules.

Each GridION node and cartridge is initially designed to deliver tens of gigabytes of data every 24 hours. Initially, the company intends to make 2,000-nanopore cartridges, but has plans for a 20-node installation using an 8,000-nanopore configuration. The latter would be expected to deliver a complete human genome in 15 minutes, the company says.

MinION is much smaller and can sequence up to 150 million base pairs in six hours. It uses blood, plasma and serum for sample analysis, like other lab tests, and it doesn’t need polymerase chain reaction amplification techniques to work. It will be on sale for $900 later this year, according to the company.

With technology like this, fast, sub-$1,000 genome sequencing could become commonplace.

[via ZMEScience]

Augmented-reality eyewear is the next step toward a future in which we never again have an unmediated view of the world

Google announced yesterday that before the end of 2012, you will be able to buy augmented-reality smart eyeglasses from the search giant. The Android-powered glasses will have an onboard camera that monitors in real time what you see as you walk (or, heavens preserve us, drive) down the street. The lenses will then overlay information about people, locations, and whatnot directly into your field of view.

We knew this day was coming, but I certainly didn't suspect it'd be so soon. Never again will you have to wonder Where is the closest Pizza Hut? or What make of car is that? or Don't I know her from somewhere? Ubiquitous smartphones have already given us the ability to swiftly look up information with only a moderate disruption. Smartglasses completely remove the mediating step of pausing to wonder and ponder and research: data is simply there, an inseparable part of your visible world.

Overlay Google Maps onto the real world, and navigation becomes effortless. Overlay reviews and menus onto restaurant storefronts as you pass them; overlay nutritional data onto your plate as you eat; overlay purchasing info if you particularly admire your co-worker's new shoes; overlay translations of foreign signage, breaking news, hilarious kittens romping at your feet.

As smartglasses become popular, the world will start to seem naked and inaccessible without a glossy data layer on everything.As smartglasses become popular, the world will start to seem naked and inaccessible without a glossy data layer on everything. Everyday activities, maneuvering through the physical world, socializing, working, learning, will all be increasingly eased by the use of glasses; increasingly, until these activities start to feel almost impossible without the glasses. Who's going to have patience to laboriously explain facts to a non-data-overlaid person? Give you my business card? Point you in the direction of Fifth Avenue? I don't even remember how to spell my name! Where are your Googles?

Will businesses see the need for physical signs and billboards? Will municipalities bother to maintain physical street signs and traffic signals? Will smartglasses make the university lecturer's blackboard and salesman's PowerPoint obsolete as well?

What comes after that? With everyone wearing glasses (or, at this point in the future, contact lenses or implants), individual appearance becomes as malleable on the street as it is now on the Internet. You can overlay your real body with a digitally altered one, saving money on subtle nose surgery or just completely living life as a furry avatar.

What, though, will it take to get us to that tipping point, when head-up augmented reality suddenly shifts from a novelty to a ubiquity? Wearing cumbersome goggles on your face as you proceed through your day is a bit more of an intrusion than I for one am ready for. Sony's 3DTV goggles are impressive and designed only to be worn in the comfort of your couch, and still I have yet to meet someone who owns a pair. The gear will have to be small and easy to integrate with your basic life processes. Perhaps AR windshields in our cars will become common first, before we put them on our faces.

But, however it comes -- the fully mediated future has begun.

A team from Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials has created a new thermoelectric fabric they call Power Felt. It's constructed of "tiny carbon nanotubes locked up in flexible plastic fibers," though the final product looks and feels like fabric, and creates and electrical charge from changes in temperature--like, say, touching it with your hot finger, or sitting on it with your hot butt (hot in this case referring to temperature and thus wholly inoffensive science).

Thermoelectrics isn't a new field, but it's mostly been hampered by expensive materials that can cost up to $1,000 per kilogram. But Corey Hewitt, a graduate student at Wake Forest and member of the Power Felt team, says the new design could drastically bring down the price. For something small, like a cellphone case, the addition of Power Felt could cost as little as a dollar extra. And there are all kinds of possible applications, from apparel to car seats.

Space elevators have been our shared dream for years, but like other promising technologies of the future, they’re just concepts on a distant horizon. Now a Japanese construction firm that specializes in the very tall could make them a reality. By 2050, so still pretty far on that horizon, but hey, it’s a start.

Obayashi Corp., which is almost done building the giant structure above, the Tokyo Sky Tree, wants to build a space elevator that would reach 22,370 miles (36,000 km) above the Earth — that’s above the altitude where geosynchronous satellites orbit. It would take a week to ride up the elevator, traveling on some type of vessel tethered to carbon nanotube cables.

In Obayashi’s plan, a carbon nanotube cable would stretch one-quarter of the way from the Earth to the moon, about 60,000 miles (96,000 km) and attach to some type of spaceborne counterweight. The other end of the tether would be anchored at an Earth-based spaceport, as reported by the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.

The elevator car could carry up to 30 people and would travel at 125 MPH for a week. Tourists could stay at the waystation at 22,370 miles up, and scientists and researchers could go all the way to the end of the tether. There are unfortunately no leads on cost, where to build it or who would finance the project, however.

AFP reports that the company was inspired by its work on the Sky Tree, a 2,080-foot tower that will contain telecommunications antennas and a visitor’s deck offering panoramic views of the capital. “Our experts on construction, climate, wind patterns, design, they say it's possible,” spokeswoman Satomi Katsuyama told AFP. In 40 years, maybe so.

[Yomiuri Shimbun via Slashdot]

In October, manufacturing 100-watt incandescent lightbulbs will become illegal under the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act. As part of the same legislation, 60- and 40-watt ones will be banned by 2014. Compact fluorescents (CFLs) are the simplest-to-make replacement but contain the neurotoxin mercury, have a bluish hue, and don’t illuminate instantly. The regulations are prompting lighting companies to develop new, environmentally friendly ways to produce light that have none of CFLs’ downsides.

NOW
The Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) bulb, pictured top, produces the soft light of an incandescent but is far more efficient. The bulb shoots a beam of electrons through a vacuum toward the glass’s phosphorescent coating, similar to how old cathode-tube-based TVs work. The first ESL bulb, an R30-shape for recessed ceiling fixtures, uses just 19 watts to produce the same amount of light as a 65-watt incandescent. Bulbs appropriate for household lamps will come out later this year. Vul R30 ESL $15

SOON
LED bulbs are 75 percent more efficient than incandescents but can short out if they get too hot. Fried circuits are common if the bulb is installed threads-up, because rising heat overwhelms its heat sink. The company Switch uses a food-grade liquid to cool its LED bulbs, allowing them to work in any orientation. In the bulb, the liquid pulls heat away from the LEDs and causes it to dissipate through the glass. The resulting bulb cools 40 percent better than other LEDs. The placement of the LEDs gives an incandescent-like, omnidirectional glow. Switch Switch75 $25

LATER
The greenest lighting would use no electricity at all. The Bio-Light concept from Philips Design could generate a negative carbon footprint by turning waste into light. Glass containers of bioluminescent bacteria suspended in liquid would be connected with tubes to an anaerobic digester that processes household waste. As the organisms ate the sludge or methane gas from the digester, they would softly glow. The bacteria could be genetically engineered to shine in various hues and to start producing light when they sensed that it was dark out.

Since the days of $4 gas began, the single-cylinder motorcycles and scooters that dominate international megacities have become increasingly common on American streets. Engineers at Yamaha created the Y125 Moegi concept to capitalize on that trend. They based it on the company’s first motorcycle, the 1955 125-cc YA-1, but they also included some modern touches, in particular an ultralight frame and a new cylinder design that could help make the Moegi one of the lightest and most fuel-efficient motorcycles ever.

The Y125 Moegi, which is 90 percent aluminum, weighs just 176 pounds (50 pounds less than an entry-level Vespa). Engineers molded the aluminum frame using Yamaha’s proprietary “controlled-filling” die-casting process. Controlled filling reduces air bubbles in the finished parts by 20 percent, making it possible to build strong, thin components that are 30 percent lighter.

Like the original YA-1, the Moegi runs on an air-cooled, 125-cc engine, which connects to the bike’s 20-inch rear wheel with a simple belt drive. But engineers replaced the YA-1’s lawnmower-like two-stroke with a low-friction four-stroke. They also incorporated another Yamaha invention: the DiASil cylinder, the world’s first mass-produced all-aluminum, die-cast motorcycle cylinder. The DiASil’s abrasion-resistant aluminum alloy dissipates heat at three times the rate of steel. When the engine isn’t being adequately cooled by the wind (for example, when riding uphill or stuck in traffic), there’s less power loss resulting from increased engine heat.

Yamaha hasn’t announced a horse-power rating for the Moegi engine, but 10 to 15 horsepower would be enough to propel a bike this light to 50 mph. Yamaha engineers have said, however, that the Moegi could achieve 188 mpg, which would make it nearly four times as efficient as a typical motorcycle.

Mileage: Up to 188 mpg
Weight: 176 pounds

The smallest transistor ever built — probably the smallest that can ever be built — uses a single phosphorus atom, in a breakthrough that could be one more step on the path toward functional quantum computers. Single atoms have served as transistors in other studies, but this is the first time researchers were able to engineer its location and apply a voltage in a controlled fashion.

This is possible because of a scanning tunneling microscope, which can be used to manipulate single atoms. The atomic structure of silicon has made it difficult to engineer atomic-scale circuits using STMs, however. Researchers at Purdue University, the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne used a combination of STM and etching to make a transistor with a precise location on a silicon surface.

Michelle Simmons and colleagues at the University of New South Wales were able to replace one silicon atom out of a six-atom group with one phosphorus atom. The atom sits between source and drain electrodes, which are less than 20 nanometers apart. The gate electrodes are a tad more than 100 nanometers apart, according to the paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology. Simmons and colleagues applied a voltage across both sets of electrodes and measured the changes in electron states in the phosphorus atom. They found that this change — the electrical current — depended on the voltage applied, just like a field-effect transistor should behave.

“These results demonstrate that single-atom devices can in principle be built and controlled with atomically thin wires, where the active component represents the ultimate physical limit of Moore’s law,” the authors say. Moore’s law holds that the number of transistors on a processor will double every year and a half. When you can make atom-sized transistors — which would mean situating them one nanometer apart — that’s about as tightly packed as things can get.

The only problem is that it must work in ultracold temperatures, about as cold as liquid helium (- 391 degrees F). So for now it’s not practical as a transistor structure for smaller and more powerful processors. But it could be relevant for quantum computation, because it allows for precise control of individual electrons, the authors say.

[via Science Daily]

With Mars500 now behind us, NASA is dialing up its own Mars mission simulation in conjunction with Cornell and the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Unlike Mars500, the NASA-sponsored sim won’t run the full 520 days estimated as necessary to complete a real Mars mission. But the four-month simulation will focus very heavily on one critical aspect of any future manned voyage to deep space: food.

NASA wants to know the cheapest and easiest ways to round out an interplanetary pantry so that astronauts will get the nutrition they need while being able to change up their diets enough to keep things interesting. That’s why Cornell and U. of Hawaii-Manoa are looking to sequester six people in a simulated Mars base on a lava flow in Hawaii--to study menu fatigue and menu engineering to develop best practices for outfitting future missions.

The volunteers will take on the roles of astronauts, wearing hazmat suits to simulate the experience of wearing radiation shielding clothing and living in close quarters. They’ll be outfitted with a mix of pre-prepared astronaut foods like those NASA uses today and some preservable unprepared foods like freeze-dried meats and baking ingredients for making their own meals. From that, NASA hopes to get some reasonably good data on how the simulated astronauts adapt to their limited menu options and what items are found to be most versatile.

If you wish to volunteer your time and intestinal fortitude to the cause of interplanetary space science, auditions are on now. To apply, click over to U. of Hawaii-Manoa before Feb. 29.

[USA Today]

Really, really hot water

The James Webb Space Telescope may someday put Hubble out of business, but until then NASA’s old standby is still making new discoveries. Today, that comes to us in the form of the first exoplanet “waterworld”--a water-covered planet shrouded by a dense, steamy atmosphere, the first confirmed planet of its kind.

The planet, known as GJ1214b, was discovered in 2009 by ground-based observations. But at that time it was difficult to glean much from the data other than the fact that the planet was indeed out there orbiting a red dwarf and is roughly 2.7 times Earth’s diameter. But its nearness to its star--just 1.3 miles away--meant that scientists could be reasonably sure it is hot there, likely around 450 degrees.

When astronomers from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics more recently turned Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 toward GJ1214b while it was transiting its host star, they were able to analyze the light passing through the atmosphere for the first time. That analysis suggests that GJ1214b is swathed in a fairly consistent and dense atmosphere of water vapor. Further analysis of size and mass (and thus density) further suggest that GJ1214b contains more water than Earth, and less rock.

That’s not to say GJ1214b is the kind of watery paradise in which you’d want to go sailing, or even face down a cartel of hapless but well-armed future-thugs. Even if GJ1214b is exactly what the Hubble data suggests it is, it’s very hot there and the high pressures and temperatures would make for some conditions vastly different than those on Earth. Superfluid water and other exotic phenomena likely occur there regularly--things that would be cool to see from a distance but highly incompatible with life as we know it on this planet.

The CfA astronomers responsible for the Hubble research speculate that GJ1214b probably formed further away from its star where water ice is more plentiful. It then resettled into a closer orbit, becoming the steamy sphere Hubble sees today. That means at some point this waterworld would have had to pass through the star’s habitable zone, though there’s no telling how long it hung around there. More at CfA.

[Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics]

An animal rights group stopped a planned pigeon shoot over the weekend, leaving the would-be marksmen to shoot down another target: The animal group’s aerial drone.

A group called SHARK, SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness, went to Broxton Bridge Plantation near Ehrhardt, S.C., on Sunday to video a live pigeon shoot, according to the Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, S.C. The group lofted a small Mikrokopter drone and planned to tape the shoot. Law enforcement officers and an attorney tried to stop the drone from flying, according to the T&D. The group persisted, and apparently the shooters got back in their cars to leave, said Steve Hindi, president of SHARK.

The drone took off anyway, and then several shots rang out. One eventually struck the drone and it spiraled to the ground, to the dismay of the SHARK representatives who were filming it from the ground. The T&D has video of it here.

Civilian use of drones is becoming more widespread, with sometimes strange and interesting results. Microdrones, the maker of the drone used in this case, previously unleashed a drone to chase African wildlife to get some new animal footage. Last month an amateur drone pilot spotted a river of blood streaming from a pig slaughter facility in Texas, prompting the Texas Environmental Crimes Task Force to launch an investigation. And paparazzi drones could soon be stalking celebrities.

With new rules governing drones in U.S. airspace taking effect this fall, stories like this could become more common.

[Times & Democrat via Slashdot]

Here, a two-stage suborbital rocket rips across the auroras over Alaska. The small rocket was launched by scientists Saturday as part of a NASA-backed study into how auroras can affect signals coming to and from satellites and spacecraft. Scientists hope to better understand the way space weather impacts our electrical systems on Earth and in orbit in order to possibly mitigate those effects as the sun builds toward its solar maximum in 2013.

The team used a 46-foot sounding rocket (known as a Terrier-Black Brant) to gather data across a 6-mile-thick layer of the Earth’s upper atmosphere where incoming charged particles from the sun interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. On an average day that incoming solar interference doesn’t cause us any problems, but in the case of solar storms and coronal mass ejections, incoming bursts of particles like the ones that cause the northern and southern lights can damage satellites, spacecraft, conventional aircraft, and even electrical grids on the ground.

Christened the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfven resonator (MICA) mission, the launch should help scientists to better understand the auroras and the so-called Alfven waves that cause them. As long as they keep snapping photos like these, we’re fans of the research.

[SPACE]

The Missile Defense Agency’s Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB) is dead after a long battle with Pentagon budgetary priorities and Congress. ALTB is best remembered for being a far-out directed-energy beam missile defense interceptor that dodged cancellation by the SecDef himself in 2010 by successfully zapping a test missile from the sky, earning it $40 million more and a new lease on life. But even ALTB couldn’t survive last week’s federal budget slashing. ALTB was sixteen years and several billion dollars old. It will be laid to rest at the the Air Force’s Maintenance and Regeneration Group, known as “The Boneyard.” It is survived by the Navy’s Free Electron Laser.

[Danger Room]

At Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique Company in northern China, people turn other people into plastic. Plastination is a four-step process during which polymers replace water and fat molecules in biological specimens.

Plastinated bodies don’t decompose, and museums and medical schools can display them with exposed muscles, veins and brains in exhibits around the world. One such exhibit, called “Bodies,” has visited dozens of cities worldwide since it opened in 2005. Hong-Jin Sui founded the Dalian facility in 2002 after he studied plastination under the man who invented it, Gunther von Hagens. Sui says the human bodies processed at Dalian Hoffen come from medical universities and the animals from zoos and aquariums. It can take more than two years to plastinate large animals, such as whales, but humans take only eight to 12 months.

Future pharmacies will be inside our bodies

In the future, implantable computerized dispensaries will replace trips to the pharmacy or doctor’s office, automatically leaching drugs into the blood from medical devices embedded in our bodies. These small wireless chips promise to reduce pain and inconvenience, and they’ll ensure that patients get exactly the amount of drugs they need, all at the push of a button.

In a new study involving women with osteoporosis, a wirelessly controlled implantable microchip successfully delivered a daily drug regimen, working just as well, if not better, than a daily injection. It could be an elegant solution for countless people on long-term prescription medicines, researchers say. Patients won’t have to remember to take their medicine, and doctors will be able to adjust doses with a simple phone call or computer command.

Pharmacies-on-a-chip could someday dispense a whole suite of drugs, at pre-programmed doses and at specific times, said Robert Langer, the Institute Professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who is a co-author on the study.

“It really depends on how potent the drugs are,” he said. “There are a number of drugs for things like multiple sclerosis, cancer, and some vaccines that would be potent enough.”

Langer and fellow MIT professor Michael Cima developed an early version of an implantable drug-delivery chip in the late 1990s. They co-founded a company called MicroCHIPS Inc., which administered the study being published today in Science Translational Medicine. The team decided to work with osteoporosis patients because the disease, and the drug used to treat it, presented a series of special opportunities, Langer said. A widely used drug called teriparatide can reverse bone loss in people with severe osteoporosis, but it requires a daily injection to work properly. This means up to 75 percent of patients give up on the therapy, Langer said. It’s also a very potent drug that requires microgram doses, making it an ideal candidate for a long-term dispensary implant.

Getting the chips to work well required some tinkering on the part of the company, including the addition of a hermetic seal and drug-release system that can work in living tissue. The chip contains a cluster of tiny wells, about the size of a pinprick, which store the drug. Each well is sealed with an ultrathin layer of platinum and titanium, Langer said. At programmed times or at the patient’s command, an external radio-frequency device sends a signal to the chip, which applies a voltage to the metal film, melting it and releasing the drug. The wells melt one at a time.

“It’s like blowing a fuse, the way we’ve got it set,” Langer said. He said the amount of metal is near nanoscale levels and is not toxic.

The team also had to ensure the chips were secure and could not be hacked. The chips communicate via a special frequency called the Medical Implant Communications Service band, approved by both the FCC and the FDA. A bidirectional communications link between the chip and a receiver enables the upload of implant status information, including confirmation of dose delivery and battery life. A patient or doctor would then enter a special code to administer or change the dose, Langer said.

The research team recruited seven women in Denmark who had severe osteoporosis and surgically implanted the chips into their abdomens in January 2011. The chips stored 20 doses of the drug. The patients had the implants for a year, and they proved extremely popular, Langer said. “They didn’t think about the fact that they had it, since they didn’t have to have injections,” he said.

Ultimately, the device delivered dosages comparable to daily injections, and there were no negative side effects. There was no skipping the shot if a patient didn’t feel like visiting the doctor — complying with a prescription is of key importance, said Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering at MIT. “This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future where you have fully automated drug regimens,” he said.

The study points out one interesting phenomenon that will inform future research and development on these types of implants. When you implant a device into a person’s body, the body forms a fibrous, collagen-based membrane that surrounds the foreign device. This can affect how well drugs can move from the device and into the body, which in turn affects dosage requirements and pharmaceutical potency. One of the aims of this study was to examine the effects of that collagen membrane, and the researchers found it did not have any deleterious effects on the drug.

Now that these chips have been proven to work, Langer and the others want to test them with other drugs and for longer dosage periods, he said. Because the well caps melt one at a time, the chips could be used to deliver different types of drugs, even those that would normally interact with each other if taken in shot or pill form, he said. The team wants to build a version with 365 doses to see how well it works.

It could even be used as a long-term sensing device, he said, an interesting possibility of its own. Medical sensing implants can degrade once they’re in the body, so implants that could check for things like blood sugar or cancer antibodies can lose their effectiveness. But a chip with multiple sensors can work a lot longer — once a sensor is befouled, simply melt another well and expose a fresh one, Langer said.

The ultimate goal is to create a chip that could combine sensing and drug delivery — an implantable diagnostic machine that can deliver its own therapy.

“Someday it would be great to combine everything, but that will obviously take longer,” Langer said.

First, build a telescope the size of planet Earth

For something that might not even exist, black holes do a whole lot of work for modern physics. These regions of compact mass--so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational fields--are a major underpinning of general relativity, and inform much of what we think we understand about how galaxies work. It’s a lot to ask of a phenomenon that we've never actually seen.

Then again seeing a black hole is, by definition, a difficult idea to execute. The absence of reflected light makes black holes invisible, and the fact that the really interesting supermassive ones hide obscured at the center of galaxies compounds the problem. You would need to build a telescope the size of planet Earth to capture an image of a black hole. And that’s exactly what Sheperd Doeleman, assistant director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, and his colleagues at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are trying to do.

A virtual telescope with a data-gathering surface the size of the planet.The EHT is an international project aimed at taking the first picture of a black hole, specifically of Sagittarius A*, the site of the black hole that is believed to be lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says it is there, and other observations of nearby galactic structures strongly hint at its existence as well. Einstein even told us what it should look like. But actually seeing it for the first time will tell us all kinds of things about the very nature of spacetime itself, and it will also tell us if relativity is breaking down at the core of our universe. Essentially, capturing an image of a black hole is a test of general relativity itself--a test of modern physics as we know it.

“Black holes are still theoretical constructs, they’re kind of like the unicorns of the cosmological world,” Doeleman says. “There’s very good evidence they exist, and our best test case is at the center of our galaxy where it’s fairly certain there’s a 4-million-solar-mass black hole lurking. But we haven’t seen it yet. To ask whether Einstein is right, you have to go to the most extreme environment in the universe, which is the boundary of the black hole.”

Getting there will require a blend of new technology, old tricks, and the anointing of a brand-new radio telescope array that will come online over the next few years. But Doeleman and the various collaborators building the EHT are now confident that what wasn’t even thinkable just a few years ago is now within reach, as technology has turned a time-tested astronomical technique into a tool that should give us our first glimpse of Einstein’s vision of gravity’s most violent manifestation.

That technique is very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and it’s what allows the EHT team to build a telescope the size of Earth without actually building anything at all. By feeding data from radio telescopes around the world into a supercomputer, they can create a telescope with an imaging area the size of the entire planet, allowing them to capture images in radio wavelengths at resolutions that should let them see straight to the heart of the Milky Way.

Think of VLBI like this: You’re standing at the center of the galaxy, looking at Earth, which is way out at the Milky Way’s fringe. Now, imagine Earth as a mirror, but only the places where there are radio telescope arrays on its surface are polished--the rest of this planet-sized mirror is blacked out. These polished spots are the only places on the mirror that can collect data. This sparse mirror wouldn’t provide a very complete picture to someone peering through the other end.

But now imagine the Earth rotating. The polished portions of the lens--the parts collecting data--begin to slowly move across the blacked-out areas of the mirror, collecting data from different points on its surface as rotation and the seasonal tilt of the planet continue. Eventually, the telescopes--and there are many scattered all over the globe--have collected data from positions all over this lens, just not all at the same time. Over months and years, this data is sufficient to stitch together a rather thorough view roughly equivalent to that captured by an Earth-sized telescope mirror.

That’s VLBI. By linking the data from many telescopes together, the EHT can generate a virtual telescope, with a data-gathering surface the size of the planet. Their data is time-stamped by a hydrogen maser atomic clock, ensuring that given enough computing power, all the radio data can be neatly stitched together into a single picture. And given enough time, and as more radio telescopes come online, that picture grows clearer and clearer.

Up to a point, at least. VLBI has been employed by astronomers for decades, but an undertaking like the EHT wasn’t possible previously. The technology simply wasn’t there yet. It’s really not even there now, but it’s so close that Doeleman and his EHT colleagues can begin gathering data.

“We have the opportunity to make measurements that weren’t possible five years ago,” Doeleman says. “In the last five years, we’ve developed instrumentation to carry out VLBI at the highest frequencies where you get very good resolution. We can also now swallow large swaths of bandwidth. Instead of a couple of hundred megahertz, we can now swallow many gigahertz. You can think of that as being more energy, more photons from the black hole itself. That means our sensitivity goes way up. So it’s a combination of higher sensitivity and more telescopes around the Earth that’s letting us do what we couldn’t five years ago. The technology is at a point now that it’s a matter of implementation rather than building new systems.”

A big piece of this technological advance is the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) coming online in northern Chile over the next few years. ALMA’s 66 precision antennas will be tied together into one huge radio telescope--a sort of microcosm of VLBI--that will be the most sensitive submillimeter facility on the planet.

“That, in one stroke, is going to increase the sensitivity of the Event Horizon Telescope by a factor of ten,” Doeleman says. “And it’s going to increase our ability to see very small detail by a factor of two.”

But when observing a black hole, which allows no light to escape, what will the EHT be observing? How can it image something that seemingly cannot be imaged? Einstein has an answer for this too.

“The black hole’s gravitational field is so intense that it draws all this dust and gas and matter to it,” Doeleman says. “But it’s trying to force all that matter into such a small space that it gets very, very hot and begins to radiate--in X-rays, in the optical, and in the radio. It’s a very bright source of emission across the spectrum.”

In other words, Doeleman says, we’ll see the black hole because it is a messy eater--it will be ringed in radiating matter, a “luminous soup” that hasn’t yet fallen into the black hole but is glowing at the event horizon. But exactly what this will look like is uncertain, and this will be the exciting check on relativity because relativity tells us exactly what it should look like. At a black hole, the gravitational force should be so intense that it lenses light around it, Einstein theorized. So while some of the light we see from that luminous soup will come to us naturally from the front side of the black hole, it will also bend light around itself, exposing us to light from the backside that, under normal circumstances, would be going the opposite direction.

If relativity is correct, the image produced should show a perfectly circular ring of light--a halo of lensed light bending around the black hole--wrapped around a dim space in the middle. Einstein called this dark spot in the center the “shadow.” At a recent meeting of EHT partners in Tucson, all the physicists and theorists present concurred that finding that shadow--and verifying or disproving Einstein’s prediction--should be a top scientific priority, Doeleman says. After all, with one image we could not only finally prove the existence of black holes, but could confirm or completely upend everything we theoretically know about what takes place at the heart of our galaxy and galaxies elsewhere in the universe.

“We’re after an image that will show these strong gravity effects, we’re after this shadow,” Doeleman says. “When we finally do take a picture, if we see this shadow, it will be an amazing, mind-altering result.”

It makes my day when new technology promises to make life’s most tedious tasks more interesting. Take laundry, for example. I would loathe it so much less if I had a friendly robot to help me fold my socks. Or perhaps if I had this waterless washing machine, which would levitate my clothes and scrub them clean with dry ice in a matter of minutes.

The Orbit uses a battery-filled ring to levitate a supercooled superconductive metal laundry basket. The basket is coated in two layers of shatterproof glass and chilled using liquid nitrogen. The batteries inside the ring produce a magnetic field, and the basket levitates inside this field as its electrical resistivity drops.

The laundry orb, which is opened and controlled using a ceramic-based touchscreen interface, blasts sublimated dry ice at supersonic speeds toward your clothes. The carbon dioxide interacts with the organic materials in your laundry and breaks them down. Then the dirt and grime is filtered out through a tube that you can rinse, and the CO2 is removed and re-frozen (though it’s not clear how, because this would require lots of energy). Voila, clean and dry clothes.

At this point it’s just a concept by designer Elie Ahovi, but it’s not hard to imagine these types of cleanerballs in apartments of the future. Anything that will cut down on time spent doing laundry.

[via Treehugger]

A technique inspired by pop-up books could enable quicker production of tiny robots and other electrical devices, according to Harvard engineers. Usually, building a micro aerial vehicle — or any other robot — requires a painstaking assembly process, with each little wing or sensor folded and machined just so. Now it can come together in a single fold.

It works by combining all the robots’ component layers, sandwiching each piece of metal or carbon fiber into a single sheet. First each layer is laser-etched into the proper design, and the sheets are laminated together. The end result is a hexagonal sheet with a small assembly scaffold, with the whole thing the size of a U.S. quarter.

The entire assembly has 137 folding joints. The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on — in this case, it's the Harvard Monolithic Bee, or Mobee.

“This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production,” said doctoral candidate Pratheev Sreetharan, who co-developed the technique. Before this, students were dipping tiny wires into superglue and using microscopes to ensure they aligned the parts correctly.

If this sounds like an obvious solution, it’s because it’s very similar to the process used to make printed circuit boards, in which electronic pathways are etched from successive layers of conductive material. So it would theoretically be pretty easy to convert this process for high-speed robot manufacturing, and even to automate it — you could have robots manufacturing other robots.

Why would you want lots of tiny robots? The Mobee project’s goal is to have a fleet of bio-inspired robots that can behave autonomously as a colony, for various research goals. This process dramatically speeds the production cycle, Sreetharan said.

The team is publishing a paper about this manufacturing style in the March issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

[via Science Daily]

Our good friends over at Sound + Vision just posted a great little explainer on crossovers, "the part of a loudspeaker that people least understand." (They're kind of like filters that send different parts of the input audio to different parts of the speaker.) It's a great way to actually figure out what's going on inside your boom-cubes (the preferred audiophile term for speakers, we assume). Read more over at S+V.

Along with annoyingly adhering to your TV screen and tabletops, dust can be a deadly material, exploding with enormously destructive force in places like coal mines, sugar refineries and grain silos. The explosive properties of normal dust are pretty well known, but what about non-traditional dust? Not all dusts are created equal — and dust derived from the materials of the future could present a very different type of danger.

Led by S. Morgan Worsfold of Dalhousie University in Halifax, a team of researchers from Canada and Norway set out to determine these properties. They surveyed the fairly small body of published research on blowing up nanoparticles, flocculent materials — fluffy synthetic stuff — and hybrid dust mixtures, which they define as any dust with an added liquid or gas.

Dust is defined as a teeny solid less than 420 microns in diameter, but that does not cover the nanoscale world. Nanodust, and its potential explosive properties, is relatively under-studied. A general rule of thumb in the world of dust research holds that the smaller the particle size and the greater its surface area, the more explosive it is. Nanoparticles are tiny, but have a large relative surface area because of the way atoms are arranged in them. They also tend to want to clump together, and this is one of the properties that makes items like carbon nanotubes and graphene so interesting to study. But these large agglomerations of nanoparticles, called nanpowders, are also pretty explosive, igniting with just 1 millijoule of energy. They could ignite with a spark, a collision or mere friction, according to Worsfold and colleagues. And because they’re so small, nanoparticles can remain suspended in the air for days or weeks and you would never know it.

Then there’s flocculent dust, which is made of fibers and has a non-spherical shape, and is derived from all the synthetic materials in our homes, like polyesters, acrylics and nylons. These materials don’t fall under the normal definition of dust, but they are dangerous all the same, the researchers say — flocculent materials are often manufactured using electrostatics, so they could ignite if something goes wrong. Hybrid mixtures could be any type of dust particle with a liquid or gas, so those are more variable.

The researchers say much more study is needed to understand the explosivity of these different dusts, especially nanodust, as nanotechnology grows ever more prevalent. Their paper appears in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

First responders will be cleared to operate small drones in U.S. airspace in just three months

Just a week after Congress finally passed an FAA spending bill requiring the aviation regulator to expedite the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the national airspace, President Obama has already signed it into law. What does that mean? The bill requires full integration of UAS into the national regulatory framework by Sept. 30, 2015, but you’ll start seeing drones in the sky sooner than that. Small UAS (under 55 pounds) must be cleared to fly by mid-2014. And emergency first responders will be able to pilot very small UAS (4.4 pounds or less) within just 90 days.