Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

[Hamartia Antidote]

SpaceX rocket hitting the barge at 1:00 mark

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

new "Force Awakens" trailer (that's the new Star Wars movie)

one from last year

ANA jumps into the fun

 

[KAL-EL]

new "Force Awakens" trailer (that's the new Star Wars movie)

one from last year

You beat me to it.. so between the music score, seeing the Falcon in action, Han and Chewie, I was geeking out to high heaven.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

yet another trailer

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice


But the TV series can be better...

I always liked this one

Of course when they help each other it can be funny

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Chevrolet FNR

The Big Picture: Chevy's self-driving concept car is straight out of sci-fi

"Thought that Mercedes' F 015 self-driving car was futuristic? It looks old hat next to GM's autonomous electric concept, the Chevrolet-FNR. The pod-like design appears ripped straight from a sci-fi flick, complete with crystal laser lights, "dragonfly" swinging doors and sensors (including radar) that aren't as conspicuous as they are on other robotic vehicles. And that's just the outside -- inside, it's touting magnetic hubless wheel electric motors, wireless charging, swiveling front seats and eye recognition to verify the owner. As with most out-there concepts, the chances of driving what you see here are slim to none. However, it won't be at all shocking if the technology in the FNR eventually trickles down to more practical (if far less adventurous) cars."

 

[friendly_troll96]

 

[Gibbs]

The Viking Buddhas | ThorNews

This 6th century Buddha statuette from North India was found in an old Viking trading town on Helgö Island in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. During the excavation of the Oseberg ship one so-called “Buddha bucket” was found. The findings illustrate that the Vikings traded over vast distances and had to deal with many different cultures and religions.

The statuette on Helgö Island was found along with an Irish crosier and an Egyptian Coptic christening ladle. The first archaeological excavation in 1954 uncovered the remains of the early settlement dating back as far as 200 AD. The small statuette and the christening ladle were both dating from the 6th century.

The so-called “Buddha bucket” found in the Oseberg ship got its name from a brass and enamel ornament of a bucket handle in the shape of a figure sitting with crossed legs. The bucket is made from yew wood, held together with brass strips, and the handle is attached to two anthropomorphic figures compared to depictions of the Buddha in the lotus posture.

Explored the World

In the period 8th to 11th century the Vikings traveled throughout the known and unknown world where they trough trade and warfare met new cultures and religions: From Greenland and Vinland (North America) in the west, Miklagard (Constantinople) and India in the East, to Blåland (English: “Blue Land”, meaning Africa) in the south.

With the battle axe in one hand, they had to deal with people who had a different culture, language, and color and that believed in other gods than themselves: Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and tribes that followed natural religions.


The Oseberg ship “Buddha bucket”. (Photo: Saamiblog/ Wikimedia Commons)

There are made many exciting archaeological discoveries dating back to the Viking Age in Scandinavia, and the Buddhas are only two examples: Persian silk with beautiful patterns, strips of hammered gold of Chinese origin, peacocks and optical lenses most likely produced in Byzantium are others.


Knowledge From the Slaves

It is well documented that the Vikings ran extensive slave trade and it is very likely that some of these “exotic commodities” were brought back home and sold in Scandinavia. The youngest of the women found in the Oseberg ship is, according To Per Holck of Oslo University, mitochondrial haplogroup U7: Her ancestors came from the Black Sea area, possibly Iran.

Did the Vikings get knowledge from the slaves about other cultures and languages that were helpful to them? Did they bring slaves as interpreters on their travels? And – how did these slaves affect the Vikings’ view of religion?

A paradox is that Norway and Sweden were the last countries in Europe to introduce Christianity as the official religion. Could one reason be that the Vikings had seen and learned about other cultures and religions that they considered unfamiliar, including Christianity, and thus stayed loyal to the Norse religion that had provided security, structure and success?

Most Scandinavian Viking graves are not yet excavated and are preserved for posterity. Hopefully, many of the answers lie hidden along with the remains of the most adventurous people in history.

 

[Transhumanist]

IBM Just Cracked One of the Biggest Problems Facing Quantum Computing

Quantum computing could make complex calculations trivial—but it’s currently fraught with problems. Now, though, IBM has solved one of the biggest, allowing it to detect the internal errors that could otherwise render quantum calculation useless.

One of the many problems exhibited by the breed of future computers is that they exist in the delicate and fuzzy quantum world, using not bits but qubits—quantum bits. Each of these qubits can represent a 0, a 1, or—crucially—both, providing the ability to dramatically bump up computation speeds. When both exist at the same time on the quibit, they are related by what physicists call a phase relationship.

But in real quantum computers, errors can occur when a qubit holds both states: they can flip to being just a regular 0 or 1 (known as a bit flip), or the phase relationship can change sign (known as a phase flip). While there are already techniques in existence that can detect both errors, so far it’s been impossible to detect them both at the same time. That’s not much use, because you needed to be able to detect all errors for a quantum computer to work reliably. But researchers at IBM have cracked the problem. PhysOrg explains how:

The IBM Research team used a variety of techniques to measure the states of two independent syndrome (measurement) qubits. Each reveals one aspect of the quantum information stored on two other qubits (called code, or data qubits). Specifically, one syndrome qubit revealed whether a bit-flip error occurred to either of the code qubits, while the other syndrome qubit revealed whether a phase-flip error occurred. Determining the joint quantum information in the code qubits is an essential step for quantum error correction because directly measuring the code qubits destroys the information contained within them.

It’s a seemingly simple solution to what’s been a huge problem in the quantum community. IBM reckons it should be enough to introduce this kind error detection in the larger arrays of qubits that researchers hope to create in the future. We sure hope so.




We Should Be Able To Detect Spaceships Moving Near The Speed Of Light

A pair of engineers say it's possible to detect the signatures of spacecraft traveling at relativistic speeds, and we can do so using current technologies. The trouble is, their new analysis also suggests that moving through space at ludicrous speed is more hazardous than previously thought.

A new paper by Raytheon engineers Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson suggests that spaceships traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light must interact with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and subsequently produce detectable and distinguishable light signatures. At the same time, however, the ensuing drag from the collisions imposes an upper constraint on the speeds at which spaceships can travel.

What a Drag

The CMB is the "afterglow" of the Big Bang — a lingering remnant that cosmologists use to peer back into the Universe's primordial age. The CMB has stretched across the entire cosmos, but its energy can still be detected in the microwave region. So even if a spaceship could travel through matter-clear space, it would still have to contend with collisions with cosmic microwave photons, which would appear as highly energetic gamma rays at relativistic speeds.

According to Yurtsever and Wilkinson's new analysis, each cubic centimeter of space contains over 400 microwave photons. A ship traveling through space, say, with a hull made from ordinary baryonic matter, would collide with thousands of billions of these photons every second — collisions that should create electron-positron pairs. This would produce considerable drag on a spaceship. MIT's Technology Review explains:

[This] process will dissipate huge amounts of energy. The creation of each electron-positron pair dissipates 1.6 x 10^(-13) Joules. "Assuming an effective cross-sectional area of say 100 square meters, the dissipative effect is about 2 million Joules per second," say Yurtsever and Wilkinson.

In the spacecraft's rest frame, the dissipation is even higher because of time dilation. Seconds effectively last longer when travelling at high speed so the energy dissipation is significantly higher, of the order of 10^14 Joules per second.

That's a significant drag for the spacecraft's engines to overcome, just to keep it at a constant velocity, say Yurtsever and Wilkinson. They argue that this is a good reason to keep the spacecraft's velocity below the threshold for electron-positron pair creation and thereby reduce the drag to a negligible level of just a few joules per second. This threshold occurs when the spacecraft reaches a velocity that is 1 – 3.3 x10^-(17) of the speed of light.

"In general one can imagine the same interactions that occur in a particle accelerator to occur between relativistic spacecraft and interstellar matter," write the authors in their study.

In addition to this drag, the effect of an an object hitting the baryon matter hull at high speeds would be calamitous. For a ship traveling near the speed of light, the collision with a single cosmic dust grain with a mass of 10^-(14) grams would release about 10,000 megajoules worth of energy. That's the same amount of energy released by 2,400 kilograms of exploding TNT. And that's just a single grain of dust.

"Our assumption that matter-matter interactions can be dealt with when civilization can build relativistic spacecraft may prove false and may be a barrier that will prevent space travel [at relativistic speeds]," write the engineers.

That's a rather unfortunate conclusion.

Signatures of Speed

Okay, that's the bad news. The good news is that this same effect should allow us to detect alien ships moving near the speed of light.

Yes, scientists have speculated about detecting alien ships before — like detecting radiation from spacecraft engines or light from nearby stars reflecting off spacecraft. But Yurtsever and Wilkinson's approach is a bit different.

When traveling this fast, a ship would scatter the CMB to produce a unique signature in the form of a frequency shift. This shift would be detectable in the terahertz to infrared regions of the spectrum as an object moves relative to the background. Remarkably, the researchers say the scattering would "cause a frequency shift that could be detectable on Earth with current technology."

But given the problems of drag and the energy produced by collisions, alien ships may not be able to move this fast, thus diminishing our hopes of ever detecting such tantalizing signatures.

 

[Transhumanist]

RIP Messenger: What the Spacecraft Taught Us About Mercury

Messenger’s fate was sealed from the beginning: When it ran out of fuel, the space probe would crash into Mercury, the planet it was sent to observe. What we didn’t expect is Messenger to last four years instead of one. After an unexpectedly long and fruitful mission, Messenger met its inevitable end today.

It’s a sad day for those of us who gets irrationally attached to inanimate spacecraft, but it’s also good day to reflect on what this little probe has meant for space exploration. Messenger—short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging—was the first probe to ever orbit the closest planet to the sun. It was a difficult journey, but it brought back some pretty important discoveries.

So let’s take a moment to remember Messenger, shall we?

Messenger’s long spiraling route

Messenger launched from Earth in 2004, but it spent its first seven years just getting to Mercury. The route, which added up to 4.9 billion miles, was a purposely circuitous one. Why not a straight shot? To slow down enough to slide into Mercury’s orbit and counteract the sun’s strong gravitational pull would have taken an enormous amount of fuel. Instead, NASA engineers came up with a spiraling path that used the Earth, Venus, and Mercury’s gravity to get Messenger into position. In more detail, it went past Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury four times before sliding into orbit. Here’s what it looked like:

It’s hard being so close to the sun

To create a probe that could survive the sun, which shines 11 times brighter on Mercury than on Earth, engineers had to come up with novel solutions. For example, Messenger had a parasolmade of ceramic cloth. Temperatures could reach 700 F on one side of the cloth, and it would be only room temperature on the other. But it also meant Messenger couldn’t fly too close to Mercury, or heat radiating up from the planet would damage the probe’s underbelly.

There’s ice!

Ice on Mercury had been long suspected but never confirmed until Messenger came along. The probe took photos of the dark craters at the poles, which are so deep that parts of their interiors never see the light of day. It’s cold enough for solid ice. The discovery also confirmed that water is not as rare in the solar system as we once believed.

An odd magnetic field
Like Earth and unlike many other planets, Mercury has a magnetic field, but it’s seriously askew. It is a lot stronger in the north than in the south. For now, we still don’t know why.

Mercury shrank
Mercury is unusual in that its iron core makes up a full 60 percent of its mass. As its core has cooled and shrunk, the whole planet has shriveled with it. Messenger found wrinkles—huge cliffs, really— that dominate the surface of the planet, evidence of the planet’s changing size.

More generally, Messenger gave us the most complete view of Mercury’s surface. We now have its whole globe mapped, but we also have close-ups of the surface that show lava flows and craters in detail. In its final days and hours, as it flew closer to the planet than ever, Messenger was sending back remarkable new images. In total, the probe has sent back 255,000 images to Earth over its lifetime.

Now that Messenger has crashed, it has left yet another crater, relatively small, on the pockmarked surface of Mercury—the only sign that we were ever there.

 

[Transhumanist]

NASA'S SHAPESHIFTING AIRPLANE WINGS PASS FLIGHT TESTS

It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s close. NASA, working together with the Air Force Research Laboratory, announced yesterday that they’ve successfully flown a plane with a new, flexible wing--the kind that could change how all future fixed-wing aircraft fly.

Added to the rear edge of a Gulfstream III jet's wings, the technology could cut airplane fuel consumption by up to 12 percent. “Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge” is its name, and it's made out of a bendy material whose identity has not been revealed by its maker, FlexSys.

The shape-changing wings are an alternative to flaps, whose hard edges generate drag and noise. That drag is, at times, sort of the point. Looking out a wing seat on a jetliner as it lands, it’s possible to see the flaps angling down to increase the size of the wing and slow the speed of the plane as it lands. The flexible edge still allows this, bending and contorting in drag-increasing ways when needed, but it does it all under a smooth, continuous surface. Servos and actuators inside the flexible shell of the aircraft pull strings that then contort the wings’ surface, bending and warping to produce an effect similar to mechanical flaps. The smooth wings promise to be more aerodynamic in flight, which helps to save on fuel.

For the tests, NASA flew the plane 22 times, with flaps fixed in position for each flight. Those angels ranged from 1 degree downward to 30 degrees upward. In future tests, which NASA has at least seven more planned, the wings will likely change angles during the flight.



Watch Jeff Bezos' New Rocket Take to the Skies For the First Time

Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle ventured out on its first developmental test flight. The Jeff Bezos-founded organization reports that the launch was a success—though it didn’t manage to recover the propulsion module as it hoped.

The vehicle’s 110,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine apparently “worked flawlessly” during the test according to Bezos, with guidance, navigation, control and separation all working as planned. “Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return,” he adds.

Sadly, one of the main goals of Blue Origin is re-use, so the failure on that front is a shame. Maybe next time?

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

NASA'S SHAPESHIFTING AIRPLANE WINGS PASS FLIGHT TESTS

Well I guess we know what will be in a 6th gen fighter jet now.

 

[Transhumanist]

The Massive Proving Ground Where Extraordinary New Trains Are Tested

General Electric’s development team just completed a year of field-testing for the new Evolution Series Tier 4 locomotive. Some of the tests took place at the Federal Railroad Administration’s high-altitude testing circuit near Pueblo, Colorado at an elevation of 5000 feet above sea level. These photographs capture the train’s gruelling journey.

This harsh desert testing ground is considered the most difficult North American operating environments, and now you can have a bird eye glimpse of it because GE provided us a bunch of amazing aerial photos taken by the award winning photographer Vincent Laforet. Beware: pure railway **** ahead!

According to GE reports their new engine is the first freight locomotive that meets the U.S. government’s strict Tier 4 emission standards, which means that the particulate matter (PM) emissions are cut by 70 per cent while nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by 76 per cent, compared to GE’s current Tier 3 machines. GE engineers have been torturing this engine on dedicated railway tracks over 20 miles long, including a loop suitable for speeds up to 70 miles-per-hour.

The tests include high-speed, long distance, heavy haul and other conditions, while NOx, particulate matter, hydrocarbons emissions, carbon monoxide, horsepower, traction and other performance benchmarks are being measured. Since the locomotive can be connected to the Industrial Internet, they also test its software. And now the stunning photos you are longing for:

 

[Transhumanist]

New Test Suggests NASA's "Impossible" EM Drive Will Work In Space

Last year, NASA’s advanced propulsion research wing made headlines by announcing the successful test of a physics-defying electromagnetic drive, or EM drive. Now, this futuristic engine, which could in theory propel objects to near-relativistic speeds, has been shown to work inside a space-like vacuum.

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism. But as stated by NASA Eagleworks scientist Harold White:

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

The trouble with this theory, however, is that it might not work in a closed vacuum. After last year’s tests of the engine, which weren’t performed in a vacuum, skeptics argued that the measured thrust was attributable to environmental conditions external to the drive, such as natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating.

The recent experiment, however, addressed this concern head-on, while also demonstrating the engine’s potential to work in space.

The NASASpaceflight group has given consideration to whether the experimental measurements of thrust force were the result of an artifact. Despite considerable effort within the NASASpaceflight forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artifact, the EM Drive results have yet to be falsified.

After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive experiments in the US, UK, and China – at thrust levels several thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum conditions – the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves serious inquiry.

Serious inquiry, indeed. It’s crucial now that these tests be analyzed, replicated, and confirmed elsewhere. A peer-review and formal paper would also seem to be in order lest we get too carried away with these results. But wow. Just wow.

EM drives could also be used on multi-generation spaceships for interstellar travel. A journey to Alpha Centauri, which is “just” 4.3 light-years away, suddenly wouldn’t be so daunting. An EM drive working under a constant one milli-g acceleration would propel a ship to about 9.4% the speed of light, resulting in a total travel time of 92 years. But that’s without the need for deceleration; should we wish to make a stop at Alpha Centauri, we’d have to add another 38 years to the trip. Not a big deal by any extent of the imagination.

 

[Transhumanist]

NASA's Ten Engine Electric Drone Goes From Chopper to Airplane and Back

Space missions get all the hype, but NASA Aeronautics is doing some pretty rad stuff, too. Their ten engine, unmanned electric plane, for instance, has just successfully transitioned from hover mode to wing-borne flight and back again.

Dubbed the Greased Lightning (GL-10), the current prototype for this UAV has a ten-foot wingspan, with eight electric motors along its wings and two on its tail. For take-off and landing, this clever plane points its wings up and hovers like a helicopter. Once airborne, the wings tilt forward and the drone switches to airplane mode. At least, that’s what NASA has been hoping would happen. Transitioning from vertical to forward flight without falling out of the sky is no small challenge, as the engineers behind the V-22 Osprey have been made painfully aware.

But so far, so good! If the GL-10 continues to perform well, NASA hopes the small craft could eventually be used for a range of applications, including package delivery, long-endurance agricultural surveillance and mapping.



We've Just Developed a Portable Cloaking Device

If you’re a non-magical being, you might think your chances of becoming invisible are slim to nil. But don’t jump to conclusions just yet: Researchers are now claiming to have developed a portable system that can make small objects, like your keys or pet lizard, disappear from sight.

The key to real life invisibility lies in clever optical tricks that bend light around an object, shielding it from detection. In principle, such technology has only been demonstrated for very tiny objects, but now, a group of researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say they’ve developed a scaled-up system that can be ported around and used for classroom demonstrations.

The problem researchers typically run into when they try to bend light around an object lies in compensating for the extra distance the light must travel. Since they can’t very well increase the speed of light in air, the KIT team has developed a silicon-based organic polymer (PDMS), that, doped with titanium dioxide nanoparticles, scatters light waves to slow them down. Once slowed, the light can be sped up again to make up for the longer path around the veiled object.

When the KIT researchers want to cloak an object, they place it inside a hollow metal cylinder coated with acrylic paint, which diffusely reflects light. That metal tube is then embedded inside a light-scattering PDMS block. If the time it takes light to travel through the block is just the right proportion of the time it takes light to travel through the cloak, the cloak becomes invisible. Or so the researchers say—the first actual demonstration of this technology will take place on May 13th, according to a press release.

While it’s a far cry from a cloak you can actually don—unless you fancy walking around inside a giant metal tube inside a giant block of silicon—this proof-of-concept could, one day, lead to more sophisticated materials that are wearable. In the meanwhile, a simple device that can make cellphone-sized objects disappear from sight sound like the start of any number of excellent pranks.




A Cloaking Device For Sound Will Make You Invisible To Sonar

A cloaking device that makes you appear completely invisible is still trapped in the realm of science fiction. But researchers at Duke University have successfully created a cloaking devicethat works with sound instead, making an object completely invisible to SONAR and other acoustic imaging techniques.

So how does a bunch of perforated plastic sheets stacked in a pyramid stop an object from interfering with sound waves so that it's seemingly not there? It doesn't. What the cloaking device does do, however, is make the sound waves seem as if they were reflected off an empty flat surface by altering their trajectory and slowing them down ever so slightly to compensate for the plastic pyramid.

The science behind how it works and how the researchers designed this structure is very complicated. But in essence it can fool a SONAR system by making it think its microphones are detecting a perfect reflection of the sound wave it just blasted out. If Red October had been wrapped in one of these, Ramius could have cruised all the way to the U.S. undetected.

The downside to this creation is that hardly anyone relies on sound to detect anything on land. If you were thinking of robbing a bank by creeping through the entrance at night wearing one of these pyramids, you'll be even more noticeable by security cameras. But given light can also act like a wave, the techniques and insights learned here might eventually lead to breakthroughs with the ultimate cloaking device.

 

[Transhumanist]

Video: Inside the fiery inferno of a rocket launch

Here’s an awesome view of the fiery power that is a rocket. A GoPro camera is strapped inside this rocket test so that rocket scientists can get a view of what’s going on inside. It’s pretty amazing, the fire burns so hot that you can almost feel it through the screen.

Rocket scientists incorporate a number of different testing techniques before committing a rocket to flight. One of those tests is called a “static test.” In this setup a rocket engine is fired while being anchored to a test bench. Fitted with instrumentation, the scientist can safely measure thrust, pressure, cooling, and other rocket data. Watch and witness from inside the inferno when something goes wrong.