Researchers from the University of Michigan working with NASA have developed a material that might add an extra layer of protection from space debris
The current design relies on a series of impact shields known as Whipple bumpers or Whipple shields.
The work by U of M scientists might offer an added layer of protection. This new material is composed of a type of liquid resin called thiol-ene-trialkylborane.
It sandwiched between two polymer panels to form an airtight seal. The resin remains liquid as long as that seal remains unbroken.
but as wee all learned from TV and movies, the air inside a spacecraft will be sucked out quickly.
New iphones, ipads, and Apple TVS September 9th September is upon us, and that means a major Apple event is right around the corner.
In recent years, the September and October timeframe has come to signify new iphones, ipads, and new operating systems.
But given the fact that the Apple TV has received so much attention in the rumor mill this year,
we might just see a major announcement for the living room as well. On September 9th, Apple will be hosting an event in San francisco to unveil its latest products.
Cupertino infamous secrecy has been hard to maintain with so many links in the production chain, so enough information leaks ahead of time that we normally know the broad strokes of what Apple has planned.
By and large, the next versions of the iphone are being referred to as the sand s Plus. Given Apple previous use of the ick-tockmodel, that certainly makes sense.
This revision will probably serve as a minor update to the existing hardware without a drastic change in design. 7000 series aluminum seems to be the alloy of choice here potentially the exact same material used in the Apple Watch Sport.
we might be in for a slightly thicker and heavier chassis. After some poking around with the latest Apple software developer Hamza Sood discovered some evidence that force touch is coming to ios devices.
so it a no brainer on the iphone. Unsurprisingly, the cameras will likely be upgraded as well. 9to5mac is reporting that the rear-facing cameras on the next iphones are being upgraded to 12 megapixels,
and they will be capable of recording 4k UHD video. But considering that the low-end model might still only ship with 16gb of flash storage
However, the front-facing camera will also be getting an upgraded sensor and a flashbulb of its very own.
Wee bound to see an Apple A9 system-on-a-chip with a faster CPU and GPU.
Apple has been continually adding more sensors to their devices, so having a newer chip dedicated to handling the increasing amount of data makes sense.
While an Apple patent for wireless earbuds with bone conduction popped up recently on the USPTO website
I wouldn expect those to ship with the new iphone. If Apple does ever sell wireless earbuds like this,
I anticipate them being sold separately at a premium price. After all, you can already buy $200 Beats wireless headphones from the Apple Store. ipad rumors are flying fast,
but we don know if wel see an ipad refresh during the September event. Last year, Apple held a separate event for the ipad Air 2 and ipad Mini 3,
so we may see the same events playout this year. By far, the biggest rumor here has revolved around the introduction of a 12.9-inch ipad Pro.
Not only is this giant ipad slated to sport a 2048×2732 resolution but it will also have a pressure sensitive stylus to boot.
If the rumors are true, this premium device will clearly be targeting the professional market.
Supposedly, production will be starting soon. Estimates range anywhere from one to five million ipad Pros shipping in this calendar year.
However, the Pro might not even begin shipping until the release of ios 9. 1 sometime later this fall.
The rumor mill seems positive that wel see a new Apple TV SET-top box this go around.
Specifically, some outlets seem sure that the new Apple TV will cost $200 or less
support Wii-like motion gaming, and offer a TV service similar to Sony Playstation Vue.
Of course, we heard similar rumors ahead of this year WWDC, but all we got was a price drop on the existing hardware.
It been about two and a half years since the Apple TV has been refreshed, so itl be no surprise
if Apple does finally deliver new hardware. However, it possible that theyl ride out the current model until the 4k market penetration goes up.
As for an actual Apple-branded television, don bet on it. It always a possibility but only for high-end consumers.
I have a hard time believing Apple will ever get into the budget end of the market.
so the odds of seeing new hardware are slim. We may see some new bands or colors,
Earlier this year at WWDC, Apple showed off the new versions of both of its major operating systems.
Most notably, rumor has it that ios 9 will offer animated wallpapers similar to the Apple Watch motion faces.
and Privacybadger making their way to the iphone someday. As always, wel be covering this Apple event as it happens,
The behavior of this plasma, and the process by which it cooled to form matter as we know it,
blasting apart matter so violently that even hadrons can form takes a lot of input energy. In general, it been assumed that any particle collider looking to create a sample of quark-gluon plasma would have to smash together very heavy atomic nuclei.
The pockets of plasma born of these collisions are much smaller than those created by heavier atoms,
not because the plasma itself will ever be long-lived enough to be useful, but because the data gathered as it winks in
and out of existence can offer a window into the very earliest events in the history of the universe.
So, as interesting as it is that smaller collisions can create smaller, more localized droplets of quark-gluon plasma
Now Boeing has announced the first all-electric ion propulsion satellite is fully operational. The satellite in question doesn have a snappy name it a communications satellite called ABS-3a 702sp.
It was launched last March aboard a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket. It has just recently been handed over to its owner
Bermuda-based telecommunications company ABS. Because ABS-3a is a communications satellite, it needs to remain in a geosynchronous orbit.
In this case, Boeing claims the Xenon Ion Propulsion system (XIPS) designs used for ABS-3a is ten times more efficient than liquid fueled rockets.
ABS-3a needs only 11 pounds (5kg) of xenon gas per year to maintain station-keeping,
ABS expects the satellite to remain active for about 15 years. Ion thrusters are also considerably lighter than chemical engines
Upon delivery to orbit, ABS-3a used its ion thrusters to reach a geosynchronous orbit at 3 degrees west longitude.
After being tested by Boeing, the satellite was turned over to ABS on August 31st. Now that the design has proven itself viable,
Boeing is forging ahead with a second satellite for ABS using the same XIPS engines.
This one will be blasted into space sometime next year x
#uper-antennacould let Mars rover talk directly with Earth Right now, Mars rovers like Curiosity get roughly 15 minutes to talk to scientists back On earth, twice per day.
it has to all fit into these 15-minute windows. For scientists on the ground, the necessity of bouncing signals through multiple orbiting satellites means that rover missions progress as a series of quick snapshots, with tense waits in between.
Now, they have a prototype for a new and improved type of rover antenna one that could turn those minutes into hours,
The idea comes from a group working on advanced antenna technology at UCLA, in combination with NASA Jet propulsion laboratory.
The idea is basically to use an array of 256 antenna elements (a 16 x 16 square) all working together to make a uper-antennacapable of directly communicating with Earth.
The reason it works is not just that the array of mini-antennas creates a more powerful signal
and Mars. The additive characteristics of its compound antenna actually work in both directions; not only will it be able to create more powerful signals to transmit back to Earth,
and so the antenna is planned to be mounted on a gimbal arm that can lift the antenna and orient it in any direction.
This unrestrained antenna mount combined with the circular polarization of the signal itself, should also allow the rover to transmit
meaning that those hours of phone time don need to be wasted. Right now, the UCLA team has made only a four-element-by-four-element prototype.
if their 16-by-16 version was going to work. A full-scale prototype is in the works e
#Sensing bionic limbs are here and they work New research from Johns hopkins university and DARPA shows how far sensing bionic limbs have come,
as work with real amputees shows how natural bionics sensing can really be. The researchers recount an episode in which they decided to trick the participant by stimulating two fingers,
it likely that the electrodes are stimulating the sections of motor cortex already associated with finger sensation.
Wee developing the hardware necessary to restore the relationship between the brain and the outside world and in the process developing the hardware necessary to completely change that relationship forever.
If your brain is wired up and youe thousands of miles away on business, why not let your partner run your spare hand over their face,
And you don have to be an amputee to get electrodes put on your brain, which opens up the area of extra mechanical limbs.
but there also plenty of emergent military and industrial value to be had, in any project of this type.
when data is both money and power, and this genuinely altruistic medical research is thought slowly turning into data i
#New quantum dot could make quantum communications possible A new form of quantum dot has been developed by an international team of researchers that can produce identical photons at will,
paving the way for multiple revolutionary new uses for light. Many upcoming quantum technologies will require a source of multiple lone photons with identical properties,
With these quantum dots at their disposal, engineers might be able to start thinking about new, large-scale quantum communications networks.
From a mathematics perspective it trivially easy to encrypt any message so that nobody can read it,
In particular, the wavelength of photons changes as they move down an optical fiber not good since creating photon with precise attributes is the whole source of quantum security.
So, unless youe less than one quantum dot range away from the person you want to talk to,
quantum security wouldn work; a theoretical quantum repeater would insert too much uncertainty about the wavelength of any light it ferried Along with this technology,
across or even between continents in the networked way of regular digital internet traffic. These quantum dots basically achieve perfect single-photon emission by super-cooling the quantum dots so the emitting atoms do not fluctuate.
These fluctuations results in very slightly different emission wavelengths, so by slowing them with cryogenic temperatures,
they reduce the signal noise. This should allow the re-emission of quantum key information in a reliable-enough form to preserve the quantum security setup.
You can still listen in on either the sender or receiver directly, or perhaps even find a way to surveil these quantum dots themselves,
reading each photon as it absorbed and reemitted. Potential attackers could install optical splitters so they get
#Making life more resistant to stress A recent paper in Current Biology suggests that plants can be engineered against climate change, even drought.
Researchers propose to do this by making the plants better at handling stress. Now I know what you might be thinking tress limate changeit sounds like it time to call the plant acupuncturist.
or herbicides, just photosynthesizing can be deadly. Even in the absence of any of these assaults
when the plant detects stress. Beneath this superficially crude mechanism lie untold layers of regulatory nuance.
they only attach at certain putative sites. On the other hand, ubiquitins have a subtle trick up their sleeves they can tag other tags.
When you consider that the human genome codes for over 600 different forms of just the E3 ligases alone,
modifying them for climate change is not something we should claim (at least at this early point in the game) to be able to do any better than the plant itself might do h
#Terahertz breakthrough allows for ultrafast wireless communications A collaboration between US and Japanese researchers, have developed a key component
in order to enable wireless communications which operate up to 100x faster than current generation routers. Current wireless communications operate at microwave frequencies,
however as the demand for faster speeds and larger bandwidths increases, scientists are looking for ways to alleviate the communication bottleneck.
Between the microwave and infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum lies an appealing candidate: Terahertz (THZ) radiation.
Oscillating at around 1 trillion times per second, THZ waves were utilized previously for the wireless data transmission world record,
whereby a team of researchers showed local data transmission could be up to 100gbit/s. However, for any real world system,
electronic components are required which perform common functions akin to our regular communication technology; such as transmission, multiplexing, demultiplexing,
detection, processing etc. The THZ Challenge Any high-bandwidth communications technology requires the ability to multiplex (combine multiple signals together
and transmit over one medium) and demultiplex signals (separate out the multiple independent data streams for further processing).
This technique permits the transfer of the masses of data around the internet, TV, etc. whereby a vast number of data channels are carried over a single optical fiber, wirelessly or copper cable.
However, multiplexing and demultiplexing of the much faster THZ signals remains an unaddressed challenge; despite the importance of such capabilities for broadband networks.
The device created here is a modification of a common type of antenna designed to operate at THZ wavelengths.
Termed a eaky wave antenna the device is made from two parallel metal plates, forming a waveguide.
One of the plates has a small slit in it and as the THZ waves travel down the waveguide,
some of the radiation leaks out. The angle the radiation leaks out is dependent on its frequency,
hence 10 different frequencies will radiate at 10 different angles (demultiplexing) and by reversing the process the device can multiplex.
A device operating to multiplex/demultiplex between directional free-space beams and a single-mode waveguide is extremely appealing for real-world communication applications Furthermore, one of the advantages to the approach,
the researchers say, is that by adjusting the distance between the plates, it possible to adjust the spectrum bandwidth that can be allocated to each channel
and thus offers a unique method for controlling the spectrum allocation, by variation of the waveguide plate separation.
The team hope that his early prototype device will kickstart greater research into next generation THZ based communication networks.
whether the interaction of THZ radiation with biological organisms is safe. A theoretical study published by MIT in 2009 suggested that THZ waves may interfere with DNA via nonlinear instabilities,
Until sufficient experimental biological data is gathered, one cannot be entirely certain as to the mechanisms involved,
Wee learning how to make them, and how to direct their action once made they ought to be absolutely owning the headlines right now.
and nourish stem cells bound for injection and differentiation into heart muscle cells. It used rats with damaged hearts
e-muscularizingthe area and fixing the characteristic damage of a heart attack. The hydrogel worked like a charm;
compared with just 12%survival while suspended in a normal injection fluid. Prior studies using stem cell injection have had to resort to specialized version of cells or cell components,
or just injecting incredible numbers of the cells, but both of these approaches are costly, time consuming,
This is currently the strategy with gene therapy as well, to flood an area with many nonspecific actors to wash out the importance of their individual incompetence,
compared with just 8%for regularly stem cell therapies. The team did not invent a treatment for this heart disease,
but a booster pack that lets a preexisting treatment really kick into high gear. It can support both adult and embryonic stem cells
and if it not put inside a living being, the hydrogel can actually maintain 100%of the stem cells it contains.
This comes soon after a separate team from Harvard university announced their porous hydrogel could also achieve huge increases in the effectiveness of stem cell therapies.
improve the effectiveness by increasing the number of stem cells that survive to enact their programming.
Hydrogels are useful in biology because theye much like us made mostly of hydro. Theye intrinsically safe for use with biology,
and biomedical engineers are even looking into using them as a bio-safe internal optical network.
In fact, this study found that injecting just the hydrogel, with no stem cells at all, had a mild benefit on its own by seeming to promote blood vessel growth.
which enabled researchers to find telltale signs of hydrated minerals on streaked-looking slopes. These dark, narrow,
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) ur quest on Mars has been to ollow the water, in our search for life in the universe,
and now we have convincing science that validates what wee long suspected, said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington,
NASA scientists noted they mined data going as far back as the Viking 1 an 2 landings in the mid-1970s,
But the primary data source was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2006 and contains four other primary science instruments
The data from that study, using the ESO Very Large telescope in Chilie, seemed to indicate that water persisted on the surface of the Red planet for at least a billion years.
#Microfluidic cooling yields huge performance benefits in FPGA processors As microprocessors have grown in size and complexity,
it become increasingly difficult to increase performance without skyrocketing power consumption and heat. Intel CPU clock speeds have remained mostly flat for years,
while AMD FX-9590 and its R9 Nano GPU both illustrate dramatic power consumption differences as clock speeds change.
One of the principle barriers to increasing CPU clocks is that it extremely difficult to move heat out of the chip.
New research into microfluidic cooling could help solve this problem, at least in some cases. Microfluidic cooling has existed for years;
we covered IBM Aquasar cooling system back in 2012, which uses microfluidic channels tiny microchannels etched into a metal block to cool the Supermuc supercomputer.
Now, a new research paper on the topic has described a method of cooling modern FPGAS by etching cooling channels directly into the silicon itself.
Previous systems, like Aquasar, still relied on a metal transfer plate between the coolant flow and the CPU itself.
Modern microprocessors generate tremendous amounts of heat, but they don generate it evenly across the entire die.
and CPUS aren very good at spreading that heat out across the entire surface area of the chip.
This is why Intel specifies lower turbo clocks if youe performing AVX2-heavy calculations. By etching channels directly on top of a 28nm Altera FPGA, the research team was able to bring cooling much closer to the CPU cores
and eliminate the intervening gap that makes water-cooling less effective then it would otherwise be.
the group etched 100 micron silicon cylinders into the die, creating cooling passages. The entire system was sealed then using silicon
and connected to water tubes. e believe we have eliminated one of the major barriers to building high-performance systems that are more compact
an associate professor and ON Semiconductor Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer engineering. e have eliminated the heat sink atop the silicon die by moving liquid cooling just a few hundred microns
away from the transistors. We believe that reliably integrating microfluidic cooling directly on the silicon will be a disruptive technology for a new generation of electronics.
Could such a system work for PCS? The team claims that using these microfluidic channels with water at 20c cut the on-die temperature of their FPGA to just 24c,
compared with 60c for an air-cooled design. That a significant achievement, particularly given the flow rate (147 milliliters per minute.
Clearly this approach can yield huge dividends but whether or not it could ever scale to consumer hardware is a very different question.
As the feature image shows, the connect points for the hardware look decidedly fragile and easily dislodged or broken.
The amount of effort required to etch a design like this into an Intel or AMD CPU would be non-trivial,
and the companies would have to completely change their approach to CPU heat shields and cooling technology.
Still, technologies like this could find application in HPC clusters or any market where computing power is at an absolute premium.
Removing that much additional heat from a CPU die would allow for substantially higher clocks even with modern power consumption scaling n
#A possible broad spectrum cancer cure is in the offing, but human trials could be up to 4 years away For almost
as long as humans have been tooling around on planet earth, cancer has been nipping at our heelsnd brains, stomachs, kidneys, and so on.
The fossil record indicates humanity embittered relationship with the disease extends even to prehistoric times.
Over the centuries, cancer has proven a most intractable foe. One reason for this is that cancer is a big family, with numerous subtypes and categories,
a veritable medusa head which immensely complicates finding a universal cure. A remedy for one cancer is no guarantee that it will work against another type of cancer.
Worse the treatments that work against multiple types of cancer like chemotherapy and radiation are often so harsh and hazardous that doctors hesitate to prescribe them.
Badly needed is a broad spectrum cancer cure that doesn ruin the human body in the process.
Thanks to a research group studying malaria, such a cure now looks to be in the offing.
The story of this accidental discovery is important as much for what it says about the scientific process as the treatments it promises.
The researchers, a group of Danish scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the University of British columbia
were studying a malaria vaccine for pregnant women when they stumbled across what appears to be broad spectrum cancer cure in the form of a modified malaria strain.
The story is not without a heavy dose of irony, one of mankind oldest foes,
the Malaria virus, may contain the mechanism for curing an even worse nemesis cancer. Ali Salanti, a researcher behind the possible cancer cureor decades, scientists have been searching for similarities between the growth of a placenta
and a tumor, says Ali Salanti, who headed up one of the teams responsible for the discovery. he placenta is an organ,
which within a few months grows from only a few cells into an organ weighing approximately two pounds,
and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively foreign environment. In a manner of speaking, tumors do much the same;
they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environment. hile studying the placenta, Ali Salanti noticed that a carbohydrate the malaria parasite attaches itself to in the placenta of pregnant women is identical to a carbohydrate found in many cancers.
It was but a small step from there to modifying a malaria strain, so that when it comes in contact with a cancer cell,
it injects a toxin that destroys the cell. In this manner, the scientists believe they have created effectively a method for identifying a wide range of cancerous cells in the body
and eliminating them. So far several rounds of animal tests have borne out their hypothesis, and a company called VAR2 Pharmaceuticals has been spun out of this research to bring the therapy to market.
Despite what looks like rapid progress, it could take roughly four years before human trials begin.
Aside from the obvious tremendous benefit that would come from a broad spectrum cancer cure, these developments highlight another nemesis to human health:
the quantity of red tape institutions like the FDA foist upon anyone seeking to develop a new drug.
A report published by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) pegs the cost of developing a prescription drug that gains market approval at $2. 6 billion.
No small amount of this results from unnecessary red tape, according to a 2012 report from the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
Evidencing just how problematic issue has become, a study from the US Department of health and human services examining barriers to drug development cited mprovements in FDA review process efficiencyas one of the main ways to bring down the soaring cost of drug development.
With 7. 6 million people dying of cancer a year, in the four years it will likely take to bring this cancer treatment to market,
an estimated 30.4 million people will die who might have been saved. If ever there was a case for reforming the regulatory model governing drug development,
this discovery of potential broad spectrum cancer cure would seem to make it r
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011