Wednesday, April 19, 2017
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Saturday, April 15, 2017
Repost - Saving up to $10 billion per year by using near earth asteroids
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An exciting program of human exploration beyond LEO might include an outpost at the top of the Earth-Moon gravity well or on the surface of the Moon; human exploration of Near Earth Objects in their natural orbits; and/or a series of human missions to the Mars system. Water, oxygen, propellant, and shielding can be made in space from resources known to be plentifully available in asteroids and probably in the Martian moon Deimos. Optical Mining technology is a breakthrough approach to harvesting these materials from asteroids, boulders, and regolith in microgravity. In Optical Mining, excavating and processing asteroid materials is accomplished by highly concentrated sunlight which they have shown can be used to drill holes, excavate, disrupt, and shape an asteroid while the asteroid is enclosed in a containment bag.
Optical Mining of Asteroids, Moons, and Planets to Enable Sustainable Human Exploration and Space Industrialization Credits: Joel Sercel
Phase 1 work demonstrated Optical Mining in the laboratory and performed mission and systems analysis of the application of Optical Mining to human exploration missions. Their mission analysis showed that the most accessible Near Earth Objects (NEOs) can be used to provide NASA with mission consumables for human exploration in deep space with the potential of saving up to $10 billion per year or $150 billion over the 15 year operational life cycle of a human exploration program. This savings alone would be enough to transform NASA’s vision of human exploration from being unaffordable to being affordable within budgets that Congress can approve. Phase 1 technical work included a full scale (8 kW) Optical Mining demonstration using a high fidelity CI-type asteroid simulant in vacuum using sunlight from a 10 meter diameter solar concentrator without mechanical contact or downforce. This work confirmed our physics based mathematical model of the excavation and volatile extraction process and scalability of results from 36 prior, small scale (≈ 1 cm diameter) demonstrations and tests.
Phase 2 work will complete mission and system analysis of the application of Optical Mining to an exciting program of human exploration and we will mature the technology of Optical Mining to the point at which NASA can baseline this approach for an affordable program of human exploration. Our mission studies will address the production via Optical Mining missions to extract and retrieve resources, consumable processing, storage, and application of consumables to human exploration mission in cislunar, NEO and Martian space. The mission studies will be tightly coupled with our laboratory work. Laboratory work will include the development and integration of a 30 kW Optical Mining test apparatus in our laboratory and integration with our high quality vacuum chamber for a test program involving Optical Mining.
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Repost - Ship concept by Katsuhiro Otomo
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Happy Birthday Katsuhiro Otomo!
Keywords: kaneda kei akira ship concept art design illustration by japanese manga anime artist katsuhiro otomo born on April 14th 1954
Friday, April 14, 2017
Thursday, April 13, 2017
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Google Glass is becoming successful in the workplace
“It’s a big market today, and it will be an even bigger one in the future,” said Brian Ballard, founder and chief executive officer at Upskill, a Google Glass partner that makes augmented reality apps for workers in the field. Its customers — and as of recently, its investors — include industrial giants like Boeing and GE.
Google has several corporate partners for Google Glass at work.
Upskill works with other smart glasses makers as well, like Intel, Microsoft and Vuzix. Ballard declined to comment on how many units it has deployed, but he did say it is targeting companies that will need “thousands of these devices in the field to do one job.”
Augmedix, a San Francisco-based start-up with nearly 1,000 employees, built its business off smart glasses. Unlike Upskill, the vast majority of its customers — doctors at large hospitals — are using Google Glass. CEO Ian Shakil said the company expects to deploy 1,000 Google Glass devices by the end of the year.
Augmedix sells its application to 12 hospitals, including Dignity Health, Sutter Health and TriHealth, to help doctors transcribe notes from patient interactions. Doctors wear the glasses during consultations and transmit video to medical scribes, who take notes. That way, the doctors are freed up to focus on the patients.
Remote scribes saves each doctor 3 hours a day.
Interapt develops solutions that enrich customer and employee engagement, solve operational challenges, and secure new opportunities across a wide variety of industries. Interapt creates and delivers complete packaged solutions including proprietary apps, analytics, and platforms.
– Google Glass enhanced Training (faster and cheaper training)
– Google Glass enhanced collaboration
Pristine created EyeSight, a secure video communication platform for Glass used by healthcare providers, medical device companies, and large enterprises to support front-line staff with the expert help they need–instantly, on demand, and hands-free.
Wearable Intelligence creates Glassware for energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and more. Our workflow, communications, training, and data access products are in the field at some of the world’s best known companies.
Ubimax is a full-service provider focused on creating Glass solutions for order picking, manufacturing, quality assurance, healthcare and more. Ubimax offers custom development services as well as standardized applications.
Repost - lounge+ concrete coc
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lounge+ concrete cocktail table | Jung und Grau - Betonmöbel und Wohnaccessoires aus Beton
Repost - Vacuum airship would work in thin atmosphere of Mars
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Researchers propose to overcome some of the limitations of current technologies for Mars exploration and even extend current operational capabilities by introducing the concept of a vacuum airship. This concept is similar to a standard balloon, whereas a balloon uses helium or hydrogen to displace air and provide lift, a vacuum airship uses a rigid structure to maintain a vacuum to displace air and provide lift.
A vacuum airship made of a homogenous material cannot withstand the atmospheric pressure on Earth for any material humans have yet discovered, which can be proven using the critical buckling load of a sphere. However, from an initial analysis of the vacuum airship structure and relationship to atmospheric conditions, Mars appears to have an atmosphere in which the operation of a vacuum airship would not only be possible, but beneficial over a conventional balloon or dirigible. In addition, a multi-layer approach, in conjunction with a lattice, would circumvent the buckling problems of a single homogenous shell. The lattice used to support the two layers of the vacuum airship shell can be made, using modulation of the lengths of the members, to fit the curvature of the vacuum airship precisely by following an atlas approach to the modulation. The Martian atmosphere has a pressure to density ratio that is very beneficial to the operation of a vacuum airship; this is a result of the high average molecular weight of the atmosphere (relative to other planets in the solar system) and the temperature of the atmosphere, the trend for which can be observed from the ideal gas law. Through a more in-depth analysis of the vacuum airship model, it can be shown that the vacuum airship may theoretically carry more than twice as much payload as a modeled dirigible of the same size, a 40-meter radius, in the Martian atmosphere.
A vacuum airship would be a valuable design for a vehicular probe for Mars. There are far fewer obstacles for an aerial vehicle as compared to a land vehicle such as existing Mars rovers, e.g. one need not worry about the vacuum airship getting stuck in a trench or being unable to traverse terrain. The vacuum airship could be used as a communication relay for other vehicular probes on Mars thereby overcoming line of sight constraints. If the vacuum airship is damaged, it can land, be repaired, and re-evacuated to resume operation, whereas a balloon would need to have gas pumped back into the vessel. Since the vacuum airship does not use a lifting gas, it can perform a near infinite number of compensation maneuvers to adjust or stabilize its altitude in a temperature variant environment. The vacuum airship could use its structure to protect the instruments from solar radiation and high energy particles. The vacuum airship probe would be able to traverse a much greater area of the planet in a smaller amount of time because there is no need to worry about getting stuck, and the vacuum airship can also observe a greater swath of land by rising in elevation. Even though the vacuum airship would be aerially base, the vehicle would still be able to touch down and perform tasks on the ground; it is even possible the vacuum airship could be used to transport ground probes to different locations. As far as energy is concerned, the large surface area of the vacuum airship would provide plenty of area for solar cells which would allow the vehicle to gather a large amount of solar energy without any additional structure, and once the airship is evacuated, the only energy it requires is for propulsion which can be accomplished by electric motors, unlike helicopters and airplanes which require energy to be devoted to lift.
Repost - a drawing for work-Jake
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drawings and comics by jake wyatt, who draws and writes for a living.
Repost - See Garrus Vakarian’s Head Come Together
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April 12, 2017 AT 9:00 am
See Garrus Vakarian’s Head Come Together
Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian has the kind of face you don’t forget. The design of the alien, a turian, is distinct. Cosplayer and propmaker Crafts of Two made the character’s costume and built the head/mask from the ground up. It’s hard to believe, but the picture above started as a Pepakura base. The intricate paper design is pictured below. Crafts of Two folded the flat file into the shape of Garrus’ face and carefully added putty and clay over the top of it until it started to look like Garrus. He added paint, weathering, and a scope with blue LEDs to complete the build.
The scope coming together. It’s crafted from foam.
Track the progress of the whole build in this album on Facebook.
Maker Business — The productivity paradox
Wearables — Transparency save
Electronics — Copper keepout!
Biohacking — Biohacker Book: Head Strong by Dave Asprey
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Repost - Interview with the creators of DuoSkin #WearableWednesday
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April 12, 2017 AT 2:00 am
Interview with the creators of DuoSkin #WearableWednesday
The News Lens has a interview with the creators of Duoskin, a temporary tattoo-like wearable device.
We all went through the temporary tattoo phase at some point as a child; whether it was hearts, dinosaurs, cars or a random prize out of the cereal box. Just when we thought we were past the age, metallic temporary tattoos took the market by storm with their polished glamor. Beyoncé even teamed up with a temporary tattoo brand in 2015 to launch her own line of metallic body art.
But did you ever imagine controlling your mobile device or storing information with an inexpensive self-customized temporary tat? This is what DuoSkin offers.
DuoSkin allows users to create three types of user interfaces via the temporary wearable tattoos: input on skin through capacitive touch sensing; output on skin through thermochromic resistive heating circuitry; and, wireless communication via near-field communication (NFC). That means you could adjust the volume on your smartphone, just by touching one of these temporary tattoos.
“If you look at wearables today, they are usually black plastic wristbands designed by people in Silicon Valley,” says Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao (高新綠), developer and researcher at DuoSkin. “They don’t speak to me, which is why, though I’m a wearable technology researcher, I never wear wearables. It just does not go with my personal aesthetics or my identity.”
The new body art technology was created by MIT Media Lab, where Kao is a fourth-year doctorate student, in partnership with Microsoft Research. It was awarded the 2017 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards in March, the same award Twitter and Airbnb won respectively in 2007 and 2011.
Maker Business — The productivity paradox
Wearables — Add some flash in a dash
Electronics — DRC Confusion
Biohacking — The Seletora – Build Your Own Harry Potter Themed Centrifuge
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Repost - Brain circuit needed for memory formation has been found
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Researchers have labelled memory cells in mice during a fear-conditioning event — that is, a mild electric shock delivered when the mouse is in a particular chamber. Then, they could use light to artificially reactivate these memory cells at different times and see if that reactivation provoked a behavioral response from the mice (freezing in place). The researchers could also determine which memory cells were active when the mice were placed in the chamber where the fear conditioning occurred, prompting them to naturally recall the memory.
The researchers labeled memory cells in three parts of the brain:
the hippocampus,
the prefrontal cortex, and
the basolateral amygdala, which stores memories’ emotional associations.
Just one day after the fear-conditioning event, the researchers found that memories of the event were being stored in engram cells in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. However, the engram cells in the prefrontal cortex were “silent” — they could stimulate freezing behavior when artificially activated by light, but they did not fire during natural memory recall.
“Already the prefrontal cortex contained the specific memory information,” Kitamura says. “This is contrary to the standard theory of memory consolidation, which says that you gradually transfer the memories. The memory is already there.”
Over the next two weeks, the silent memory cells in the prefrontal cortex gradually matured, as reflected by changes in their anatomy and physiological activity, until the cells became necessary for the animals to naturally recall the event. By the end of the same period, the hippocampal engram cells became silent and were no longer needed for natural recall. However, traces of the memory remained: Reactivating those cells with light still prompted the animals to freeze.
In the basolateral amygdala, once memories were formed, the engram cells remained unchanged throughout the course of the experiment. Those cells, which are necessary to evoke the emotions linked with particular memories, communicate with engram cells in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
“This paper shows clearly that from the get-go, engrams are formed in the prefrontal cortex,” says Paul Frankland, a principal investigator in the Neurobiology Laboratory at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who was not involved in the study. “It challenges the notion that there’s a movement of the memory trace from the hippocampus to the cortex, and makes the point that these circuits are engaged together at the same time. As the memories age, there’s a shift in the balance of which circuit is engaged as a memory is recalled.”
Further studies are needed to determine whether memories fade completely from hippocampal cells or if some traces remain. Right now, the researchers can only monitor engram cells for about two weeks, but they are working on adapting their technology to work for a longer period.
Repost - unboxingearth: Terwilliger Hot Springs, Oregon | by Forrest...
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Terwilliger Hot Springs, Oregon | by Forrest Smith
