::Hundred Year Starship Initiative, Mars by 2030.

For a while now, there has been a conversation going on in certain circles (you know, space circles): namely, if the most prohibitive part of a manned flight to Mars would be the return trip, why bother returning at all? And besides the whole "dying alone on a hostile planet 55-million-plus kilometers from your family, friends, and loved ones" thing, we think it's a pretty solid consideration. This is just one of the topics of discussion at a recent Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco, where NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden discussed the Hundred Year Starship Initiative, a project NASA Ames and DARPA are undertaking to fund a mission to the red planet by 2030. Indeed if the space program "is now really aimed at settling other worlds," as Worden said, what better way to encourage a permanent settlement than the promise that there will be no coming back -- unless, of course, they figure out how to return on their own. Of course, it's not like they're being left to die: the astronauts can expect supplies from home while they figure out how to get things up and running. As Arizona State University's Dr. Paul Davies, author of a recent paper in Journal of Cosmology, writes, "It would really be little different from the first white settlers of the North American continent, who left Europe with little expectation of return." Except with much less gravity. 


Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, KurzweilAI.

::Transparent Armor 2x Stronger than Kevlar.

Scientists in Israel have developed a transparent material with "the hardest organic nanostructure known to man," according toDiscovery News. Based on artificial proteins similar to (and simpler than) the beta-amlyoid proteins that have been linked to Alzheimer's disease, and covered with transparent nanospheres, the new material is very, very strong: in order to cut it, a diamond-tipped probe would have to apply twice the pressure it would take to cut Kevlar. Researchers see it being used for anything from bulletproof armor to reinforced steel -- but don't throw out your old body armor yet! It could be years (if not decades) before this comes to market.


Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, DViCE.

::10 Fold Increase in Cellphone Battery Life, Thanks To Nanotechnology.

Please let the Swiss' research into battery life nanotechnology come true, please oh please. I sound like a kid wishing on a star, but if their Steeper project gets adopted, gadgets will become more efficient and our planet healthier.

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne's Adrian Ionescu spoke of their ambitious plan, which uses nanoscience and nanowires to "close" up leaky transistors, saying that their "vision is to share this research to enable manufacturers to build the holy grail in electronics, a computer that utilizes negligible energy when it's in sleep mode, which we call the zero-watt PC."

Supposedly the US spends $4 billion each year on lost electricity, according to the Department of Energy. Not only that, but there's obvious repercussions on the planet, and our gadgets. Anything that can prolong the battery life of my HTC Desire gets my vote. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, BBC.

::Unbreakable Flexible Displays.

Liquavista has been working on their electrowetting technology for awhile now, doing what they can to improve the technology and implement it in new ideas. Their latest use of the tech is the company’s brand new flexible displays, which the company is very proud of. 

Liquavista says that the new flexible displays are fully capable of displaying colors, and that they feature a very high refresh rate. And, as we’ve come to expect from most flexible displays, it won’t be as power hungry as a regular display. The company also boasts that you’ll be able to read what’s on the display easily enough, no matter the lighting condition you find yourself.

And, as the title suggests, the company believes that their new flexible displays are unbreakable. Of course, that’s a relative term that some may use in a different way than some might expect. After all, you don’t really see the company putting the display through tests to wage how “unbreakable” it is, but we can see that the display is certainly very flexible. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, InavateontheNet.

::German Electric Car Drives a Record Breaking 372 Miles on Single Charge.

The yellow and purple Audi A2 car took around seven hours to complete the 600-kilometre (372-mile) stretch and arrived in the sumptuous courtyard of the economy ministry in Berlin just before 8:00am local time (0600 GMT).

"If any journalists want to charge up their iPhones, we still have some electricity left," quipped driver Mirko Hannemann, 27, as he stepped out of the four-door car to show off the battery.

Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle welcomed the team on arrival and was even tempted into taking a spin around the courtyard, although not behind the wheel.

"They even had the heating on. It really was a luxury journey," Bruederle told a large crowd of journalists and photographers on a chilly Berlin morning.

At a later press conference, Bruederle said: "Welcome to a world record. Before, electric cars could typically only go 60 or 70 kilometres before recharging. This is a technological leap forward."

Car manufacturers hope that electric cars will grow to dominate the automotive industry but consumers see the short range of the vehicles as a major downside.

Japanese researchers have driven an experimental electric car more than 1,000 kilometres around a track, but the two German firms, lekker Energie and DBM Energy, said their vehicle was the furthest travelled by an everyday car.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government aims to have one million electric cars on the road by 2020, but Germany's car giants have been slow off the starting grid and are now scrambling to catch up with their Asian rivals.

World-leading luxury car maker BMW and Europe's biggest manufacturer Volkswagen have both said they intend to launch their first vehicles in 2013.

In contrast, last week, Japan's Nissan said it had started mass producing its Leaf electric car and is poised to put it on sale both at home and in the United States.

Nevertheless, Berlin has offered sweeteners to jump-start its national champions and hopes that by 2050, gas-guzzlers could be a thing of the past.

"Let the message go out to the world. Germany is again a technological leader," said Bruederle.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, AFP.

::Powerloader Light Exo-Suit.

If this exo-suit is the Powerloader Light, I'm guessing this is the Powerloader. It can increase leg power by 40kg, though at a cost of $223,000, none of us will be kicking someone while wearing it anytime soon.

Panasonic is selling the Powerloader Light for half that price to developers ($111,500), with the request that any research must be presented within the first year. The idea behind it is that it can help with rehabilitation, but when it runs on Linux 2.6 and can be modded both at software and hardware levels, I know what I'd be using it for. Kicking down pinatas and sprinting off with my spoils, yes. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, PlasticPals.

::CERN Scientists Eye Parallel Universe Breakthrough.

GENEVA, Switzerland - Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts long dear to science-fiction writers such as hidden worlds and extra dimensions.

And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the "New Physics" on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.

"Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions... These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments."

This was how the "ideas" men and women in the international research center's Theory Group, which mulls over what could be out there beyond the reach of any telescope, put it in CERN's staff-targeted Bulletin this month.

As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the "universe's extra bits" -- if they do exist as predicted -- should be brought into computerized, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.

Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN -- in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland -- has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.

Proton collisions

By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff last weekend, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of 5 million a second -- two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.

By next year, collisions will be occurring -- if all continues to go well -- at a rate producing what physicists call one "inverse femtobarn," best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder.

The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval "Big Bang" 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.

Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet Earth, only 4 per cent of that universe is known -- because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy

Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors -- and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe -- to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.

The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing -- presumably into them -- and then back into the classical four.

Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated -- a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Reuters.

::Commercial Spaceport.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo won't have to taxi down public runways for much longer. Today, founder Richard Branson and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson cut the ribbon at a nearly two-mile long runway for the world's first commercial spaceport. While the rest of the facilities at New Mexico's Spaceport America are still under construction and Branson estimates sub-orbital launches are still nine to eighteen months away, the 42-inch-thick strip of pavement is definitely complete -- see the WhiteKnightTwo mothership come in for a landing right after the break. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Associated Press.

::Berkeley Labs Open Electrical Link to Living Cells.

Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have designed an electrical link to living cells engineered to shuttle electrons across a cell’s membrane to an external acceptor along a well-defined path. This direct channel could yield cells that can read and respond to electronic signals, electronics capable of self-replication and repair, or efficiently transfer sunlight into electricity.

Coaxing electrons across a cellular membrane is not trivial: attempts to pull an electron from a cell may disrupt its function, or kill the entire cell in the process. What’s more, current techniques to transfer cellular electrons to an external source lack a molecular roadmap, which means even if electrons do turn up outside a cell, there is no way to direct their behavior, see where they stopped along the way, or send a signal back to the cell’s interior.

So the researchers first cloned a part of the extracellular electron transfer chain of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, marine and soil bacteria capable of reducing heavy metals in oxygen-free environments. This chain or “genetic cassette” is essentially a stretch of DNA that contains the instructions for making the electron conduit. Additionally, because all life as we know it uses DNA, the genetic cassette can be plugged into any organism. The team showed this natural electron pathway could be popped into a (harmless) strain of E. coli — a versatile model bacteria in biotechnology — to precisely channel electrons inside a living cell to an inorganic mineral: iron oxide, also known as rust.

Bacteria in environments without oxygen, such as Shewanella, use iron oxide from their surroundings to breathe. As a result, these bacteria have evolved mechanisms for direct charge transfer to inorganic minerals found deep in the sea or soil. The Berkeley Labs team showed that their engineered E. coli could efficiently reduce iron and iron oxide nanoparticles — the latter five times faster than E. coli alone.

“This recent breakthrough is part of a larger Department of Energy project on domesticating life at the cellular and molecular level. By directly interfacing synthetic devices with living organisms, we can harness the vast capabilities of life in photo and chemical energy conversion, chemical synthesis, and self-assembly and repair,” said Jay Groves, a faculty scientist at Berkeley Labs and professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley.

“Cells have sophisticated ways of transferring electrons and electrical energy. However, just sticking an electrode into a cell is about as ineffective as sticking your finger into an electrical outlet when you are hungry. Instead, our strategy is based on tapping directly into the molecular electron transport chain used by cells to efficiently capture energy.”

The researchers plan to implement this genetic cassette in photosynthetic bacteria, as cellular electrons from these bacteria can be produced from sunlight — providing cheap, self-replicating solar batteries. These metal-reducing bacteria could also assist in producing pharmaceutical drugs, as the fermentation step in drug manufacturing requires energy-intensive pumping of oxygen. In contrast, these engineered bacteria breathe using rust, rather than oxygen, saving energy.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Berkeley Labs.

::First all-robot Surgery.

A team of surgeons at McGill University, including the da Vinci robo-surgeon and a robot anesthesiologist named, of all things, McSleepy, recently removed some dude's prostate during what is being billed as the world's first all-robotic surgery. The device transmits hi-def 3D images to a nearby workstation, where it is controlled by surgeons "with a precision that cannot be provided by humans alone," according to MUHC urologist-in-chief Dr. A. Aprikian. Of course, the robots are being kept on a tight leash by their human operators, with McGill's Dr. Thomas Hemmerling pointing out that "[r]obots will not replace doctors but help them to perform to the highest standards." Just tell that to all the othermedical robots we've seen in this space, eh, doc? We've heard they have plans. Bad plans.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Daily Mail.

::Fujitsu 3D Car Camera System.

Reversing cameras on cars and trucks aren’t new, but Fujitsu has been working on a full 360-degree system that could give a seamless view around a vehicle from just four cameras.  The wrap-around video system consists of the new Fujitsu MB86R11 2D/3D “Emerald L” Graphics SoC and the companion developers toolset; the end result is a 3D hemispheric view of the vehicle’s surroundings from a dynamically definable perspective or “free eye point.”

“Conventional multi-camera “bird’s eye view” technologies” suggests Fujitsu, “stitch together two-dimensional images, often resulting in distorted image.”  Instead, their system promises a more accurate representation of corners and blind-spots; you can either look out from the front, sides or back of the vehicle, or see an overview of it within its surroundings.  More details.

The MB86R11 SoC, meanwhile, pairs a 400MHz ARM Cortex A9 CPU and a custom OpenGL 2.0-compliant graphics core with a unified shader array and 16 parallel floating point units.  It can support five displays and four independent video inputs simultaneously, capture 720p HD video, and has gigabit ethernet, four USB 2.0 and SATA/PATA storage connections ; more details.  Samples are already available for automotive developers, priced at around $39, and hopefully we’ll be seeing this tech show up in cars sometime soon.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Fujitsu.

::Finding Exoplanets Got Easier.

So that Gliese Goldilocks Zone planet may not exist. Sad. Cheer up though, because Arizona State astronomers have discovered a new technique that could make spotting exoplanets a bit easier. Which is great, because right now it's really frickin' hard.

The biggest hurdle is light. When we look at distant stars and try to see their planetary systems, the glare from the star can be millions of times brighter than the rocky planets that could inhabit the warm Goldilocks Zone. This is the case with our solar system, whose dusty space and glaring Sun potentially obscure all but Neptune from hypothetical alien observers.

What this amazing new research out of ASU does is reduce the glare by stealing some of the star's own light.

Using these "ripples" of light the researchers are able to cancel out some of the star's glare (only on one side, as seen in the picture). But, what a picture the left side is! That white spot's a planet, directly observed, orbiting the well-documented Beta Pictoris, visible and glorious thanks to this new technique.

Astronomers expect to use this technique to confirm the 500 exoplanets discovered so far are the real deal (sometimes they're false positives), and then they'll use it to find even more.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Discover.

::Computer Beats Human at Japanese Chess.

A computer has beaten a human at shogi, otherwise known as Japanese chess, for the first time. No big deal, you might think. After all, computers have been beating humans at western chess for years, and when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, it was greeted in some quarters as if computers were about to overthrow humanity.

That hasn't happened yet, but after all, western chess is a relatively simple game, with only about 10¹²³ possible games existing that can be played out. Shogi is a bit more complex, though, offering about 10²²⁴ possible games.

The Mainichi Daily News reports that top women's shogi player Ichiyo Shimizu took part in a match staged at the University of Tokyo, playing against a computer called Akara 2010. Akara is apparently a Buddhist term meaning 10²²⁴, the newspaper reports, and the system beat Shimizu in six hours, over the course of 86 moves.

Japan's national broadcaster, NHK, reported that Akara "aggressively pursued Shimizu from the beginning". It's the first time a computer has beaten a professional human player.

The Japan Shogi Association, incidentally, seems to have a deep fear of computers beating humans. In 2005, it introduced a ban on professional members playing computers without permission, and Shimizu's defeat was the first since a simpler computer system was beaten by a (male) champion, Akira Watanabe, in 2007.

Perhaps the association doesn't mind so much if a woman is beaten: NHK reports that the JSA will conduct an in-depth analysis of the match before it decides whether to allow the software to challenge a higher-ranking male professional player. Meanwhile, humans will have to face up to more flexible computers, capable of playing more than just one kind of game.

And IBM has now developed Watson, a computer designed to beat humans at the game show Jeopardy. Watson, says IBM, is "designed to rival the human mind's ability to understand the actual meaning behind words, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant content, and ultimately, demonstrate confidence to deliver precise final answers". IBM say they have improved artificial intelligence enough that Watson will be able to challenge Jeopardy champions, and they'll put their boast to the test soon, says The New York Times. 

I'll leave you with these wise and telling words from the defeated Shimizu: "It made no eccentric moves, and from partway through it felt like I was playing against a human," Shimizu told the Mainichi Daily News. "I hope humans and computers will become stronger in the future through friendly competition."

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, New Scientist.

::Swiss has the Longest Tunnel in the World.

Today, after 20 years of digging by some 2,500 workers, 8 of whom lost their lives, Swiss engineers blasted through the last bit of rock to create the world's longest tunnel. The accomplishment even made macho Swiss miners cry.

Stretching 35.4 miles under central Switzerland, the Gotthard Base Tunnel was conceived in 1947 as a more efficient conduit for transporting goods from all corners of Europe, specifically those moving between the port of Genoa in Italy and the Dutch port city of Rotterdam.

The massive drill machine dubbed "Sissi" blasted through the last six feet of rock this morning, amidst cheers, fireworks, and trumpets (really!). Eduard Baer, the foreman for the job, said it was "the most wonderful moment in [his] 36 years of tunnel building."

Peter Fueglistaler, the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Transport, got really real about what the tunnel meant for Switzerland: "We are not a very emotional people but if we have the longest tunnel in the world, this also for us is very, very emotional."

And they have good reason to be: it was a bitch to make. Der Spiegel outlined some of the technical difficulties of building this mega tunnel:

In the drilling of the tunnels, workers relied on eight gigantic, 3,000-ton tunnel drilling machines simultaneously. "An exceptional logistical plan" was necessary, says [tunnel construction expert Markus] Thewes. An 800-meter-long shaft was drilled vertically into the mountain, for example, so that workers could begin working in the middle of the tunnel.

Often, though, the outsized drilling machines provided little help. In zones where the rock was particularly brittle, workers were forced to use more traditional methods, such as explosives. Zones of stone that had been crushed to bits as the Alps formed proved to be particularly problematic.

"Nobody has ever worked in such material at such a depth," says geo-technician Georgios Anagnostou, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

When the tunnel is completed for train transport in 2017, it'll let passengers and cargo zip through the Alps at speeds of up to 155mph. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Der Spiegel.

::Self Driving Taxi.

Who needs safety drivers? Not Germany's Freie University, that's for sure, which has just demonstrated a self-driving taxi to rival Google's efforts without a soul at the wheel. This laser, radar and sensor-equipped VW Passat, dubbed "Made in Germany," has a companion iPad app from Appirion to do all the hard work, too -- you just start the program, punch in coordinates and wait for the car to extract itself from a nearby parking lot and pick you up from school. Ladies and gents, the future is now. 

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Autonomous Labs.

::Underground Skyscraper.

Say hello to architect Matthew Fromboluti. If he lived in a comic book, he would be designing lairs for super-villains. In the real world, he just wants to build this formidable subterranean skyscraper in the desert outside Bisbee, Arizona.

His project, called Above below, is a building that drills 900 feet into the ground, in the now-abandoned 300-acre wide Lavender Pit Mine.

It has it all. Beautiful design, complete autonomy from the outside world, skylights and tubes channeling the natural light, farms, and climate control. Now he only needs a Utopian society with enough money to build it. And John Carpenter to film something really horrific and alien happening to all of them.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Inhabitat.

::Lung on a Chip.

This ersatz lung, no bigger than a multivitamin, could represent a new pharmaceutical testing method.

On it, researchers have created an artificial alveolus, one of the sacs in the lungs where oxygen crosses a membrane to enter the body's blood vessels. A polymer sheet that stands in for the membrane is in the blue strip. On one side of the sheet, blood-vessel cells mimic a capillary wall; on the other, lung-cancer cells mimic lung epithelial cells.

Scientists have tested the chip's immune response, and it behaves just like real tissue would, a first step to having lifelike organ systems on which drugs can act. The chip's primary developer, biomedical engineer Dongeun (Dan) Huh of Harvard University, hopes that within two years, the chip will succeed in mimicking the process by which the lungs swap oxygen for carbon dioxide. Huh would like to create a suite of artificial organs to be used in cosmetics testing and pharmaceutical safety trials.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, TDK.

::TDK Develop 1 TB Optical Disc.

We've heard about 1TB-sized optical discs in the past, but TDK has now revealed a 1TB monster of its own at CEATEC. Unlike existing Blu-rays which use four recording layers at most, TDK's creation features 16 layers on both sides of the disc, each capable of storing up to 32GB apiece. If you're keeping track of the optical storage arms race, that's seven more gigabytes per layer than Pioneer's 400GB and500GB disc achievements made back in 2008. TDK's prototype also has the potential to leverage existing Blu-ray technologies, since it's made from a material already found in BDs and shares the same beam aperture. On the down side, the current version's recording layers measure 260μm -- that's more than twice as thick as its Blu-ray counterpart -- and causes aberrations in today's fat-layer-hating optical lenses. Outside of its Biggest Loser qualifications, though, TDK says "its commercialization depends on disc manufacturers." Considering the company has yet to sell the 10-layer 320GB discs revealed at CEATEC 2009, however, we're doubtful this 1TB improvement will hit stores anytime soon.


Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, TDK.