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Thursday, May 2, 2013
AT&T makes its Optimus G Pro official, $199 on contract starting May 10
AT&T this morning officially announced the LG Optimus G Pro. It'll be available starting March 10 for $199 on contract. Preorders kick off May 3 online.
We're no stranger to the Optimus G Pro, having enjoyed the Korean version for a couple months now. It's surprisingly svelte for a 5.5-inch device, and the 1080p IPS display is downright gorgeous. It's plenty snappy, too, with a Snapdragon 600 processor cranking along at 1.7 GHz.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/tKToKQnHW04/story01.htm
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20 Smart City Technologies for 2013 and Beyond - Freshome
Santiago Chile announced they?re going to become a ?smart city? in 2013. Santiago is just one example of a growing number of areas around the globe preparing and modernizing for the future, in fact demographers have long predicted the mass urbanization of metropolitan areas across the world. According to the United Nations, by the year 2050, 80% of the world will be living in urban areas. The equivalent of seven Manhattan size cities will be built each year until 2050. For these cities to thrive they must use smart technology to its fullest. Let?s take a look at what?s available now and what?s coming down the pipe.
1. Fuel cell technology
Fuel cells of the future will use less energy, produce much less CO2 emissions, and may even be able to generate electricity autonomously. Amsterdam, a city on the forefront of smartness, is already implementing some of these fuel-cell technologic advances as we speak.
2. Space saving folding vehicles
Vehicle transport in futuristic smart cities will probably entail folding self driving cars. Groups in Europe have already begun implementing these folding micro transport vehicles in replacement of clunky public transport. And hey, they can drive you directly to your destination?take THAT, bus!
3. Solar energy
The future of solar technology is bright, pun intended. More and more gadgets, gizmos, and larger systems will be powered by the sun in the coming years. Solar energy will be highly diversified and simplified making it accessible and economical.
4. Thermostat
Thermostats are getting a lot of buzz with the latest and greatest temperature control gadget on the market, Nest. The smart thermostat of the future will be completely autonomous and able to make temperature corrections based on weather and living habits.
5. Wireless Charging
The days of fighting over power outlets in coffee shops or airports to charge our devices will probably end with us paying a small access fee for wireless charging. The electric vehicles of the future will also have similar wireless charging mechanisms, so you might just get to kiss goodbye to plugs and cords.
6. Water recycle and conservation
Water, like electricity, will be part of the ?smart grid?, and the use/waste will be highly regulated. Companies are using NASA?s space age water recycling technology to make consumer level mechanisms that we will probably be seeing in the near future which will recycle water.
7. NFC
There is more than just mobile payment solutions when we talk about NFC technology. This technology has uses in advertising, security, GPS navigation, retail, and whatever else innovative companies will dream up. Get used to NFC because it?s not going anywhere soon.
8. LED lighting
Finding ways to cut down costs on utilities is at the forefront of building smart cities. There are currently many cities implementing LED technology to slash energy bills, and make no mistake, this technology cuts kilowatt hours like nobody?s business.
9. Vertical farming
Food will be grown in vertical farms within city limits. This food will grow every day of the year 24 hours a day. Think stackable greenhouses and you will start getting the idea of what this looks like.
10. Parking analysis
Vehicles and mobile devices will provide real-time parking maps. This technology will probably be integrated with sophisticated city grid systems that seamlessly talk to your self driving electric car to find optimal parking.
11. Charging infrastructure for vehicles
Get ready for a gradual but massive overhaul of public electric vehicle charging availability. Infrastructure must be built because electronic vehicles will soon become the norm.
12. Facial recognition security surveillance
The future smart city might not be the utopia we all hope for so cities will have to create a safer environment through ultimate surveillance systems with facial recognition technology and a plethora of security cameras.
13. Transportation sensors
A highly complex system of sensors integrated in roadways will allow traffic to be managed much more efficiently reducing congestion and fuel waste.
14. Home automation
Smart homes are those which are intimately aware of how much power they consume as well as having all appliances connected through a common interface. Smart home automation systems will be talking to each other and moderated with sophisticated software making everything more efficient.
15. Peak usage levels and smart meters
The smart grid will be tracking how much energy you use and when you use it. Plan on being given a sliding scale connected to a smart meter with the amount of money you pay for electricity increasing during peak times.
16. Healthcare technology
I reckon that within the decade, thanks to the Affordable Care Act in the U.S., your employer and the government will be tracking your healthcare decisions. If you decide to make bad choices and do something like not take your medication or smoke a cigarette you might just get a penalty in the form of an increased premium.
17. Language barrier breakdown
Current apps are able to essentially break down language barriers in many ways, for example, there are currently sophisticated applications you can use to take pictures of text in other languages and have a translation on demand. That?ll be nice in big multicultural cities.
18. High-tech bike sharing
Companies are popping up which allow members to pay access for bike use with technology installed to make the process of bike rental painless. Things like solar powered rental stations and RFID chips to tell you where available bikes are located will make bike rental very feasible.
19. Urban wind turbines
Urban wind turbines are going to be popping up more and more this year and in the coming years and as technology improves we will be more able to harness the power of the wind, even in confined urban areas.
20. Tintable smart glass
Windows will be tinted on demand so that on hot days they can be darkened to keep rooms cool, and conversely on cold days they can be clear to embrace whatever warmth the sun has, this may be a subtle way to improve the use of renewables, but it?s still awesome.
Source: http://freshome.com/2013/05/01/20-smart-city-technologies-for-2013-and-beyond/
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Wednesday, May 1, 2013
The day NASA's Fermi dodged a 1.5-ton bullet
May 1, 2013 ? NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, checked her email on March 29, 2012, she found herself facing this precise situation.
While Fermi is in fine shape today, continuing its mission to map the highest-energy light in the universe, the story of how it sidestepped a potential disaster offers a glimpse at an underappreciated aspect of managing a space mission: orbital traffic control.
As McEnery worked through her inbox, an automatically generated report arrived from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. On scanning the document, she discovered that Fermi was just one week away from an unusually close encounter with Cosmos 1805, a defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War.
The two objects, speeding around Earth at thousands of miles an hour in nearly perpendicular orbits, were expected to miss each other by a mere 700 feet.
"My immediate reaction was, 'Whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!'" McEnery recalled.
Although the forecast indicated a close call, satellite operators have learned the hard way that they can't be too careful. The uncertainties in predicting spacecraft positions a week into the future can be much larger than the distances forecast for their closest approach.
This was most dramatically demonstrated on Feb. 10, 2009, when a study revealed that Cosmos 2251, a dead Russian communications satellite, would pass about 1,900 feet from the functioning Iridium 33 communications satellite later in the day. At the predicted time of closest approach, all contact with Iridium 33 was lost. Radar revealed clouds of debris traveling along the orbits of both spacecraft, confirming the first known satellite-to-satellite collision.
That crash generated thousands of fragments large enough to be tracked and many smaller pieces that evade detection. Much of the wreckage remains a hazard to operating spacecraft because only about 20 percent of the trackable pieces have reentered the atmosphere.
With a speed relative to Fermi of 27,000 mph, a direct hit by the 3,100-pound Cosmos 1805 would release as much energy as two and a half tons of high explosives, destroying both spacecraft.
Despite the apparent crowding in Earth orbit, there's usually a vast amount of space between individual objects. Close approaches -- also known as conjunctions -- with fragments, rocket bodies and active payloads remain infrequent events. Moreover, few of the potential conjunctions identified a week into the future will actually materialize.
"It's similar to forecasting rain at a specific time and place a week in advance," said Goddard's Eric Stoneking, the attitude control lead engineer for Fermi. "As the date approaches, uncertainties in the prediction decrease and the initial picture may change dramatically."
Twice before, the Fermi team had been alerted to potential conjunctions, and on both occasions the threats evaporated. It was possible the Cosmos 1805 encounter would vanish as well, and the spacecraft's observations could continue without interruption.
But the update on Friday, March 30, indicated otherwise. The satellites would occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other.
"It was clear we had to be ready to move Fermi out of the way, and that's when I alerted our Flight Dynamics Team that we were planning a maneuver," McEnery said.
The only way to accomplish this was by firing thrusters designed to ensure that Fermi would never pose a threat to another satellite. Intended for use at the end of Fermi's operating life, the thrusters were designed to take it out of orbit and allow it burn up in the atmosphere.
Because a failure of this system, such as a propellant leak or an explosion, could have ended Fermi's mission prematurely, the thrusters had never been tested, adding a new source of anxiety for McEnery.
"You can't help but be nervous thinking about highly flammable fluids heading down pipes they'd never flowed down before," she said. "But having done this, we now know the system works as designed, and it gives us confidence should we need to maneuver again in the future."
The Goddard CARA team determined how big a push Fermi would need to mitigate the threat. Working with the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, CARA scientists also checked that the projected new orbit wouldn't put Fermi on course for a conjunction with another object. The Flight Operations Team selected possible times for the primary maneuver and, just in case, up to three additional ones.
Over the weekend, the radar and optical sensors of the U.S. Space Surveillance Network continued keeping tabs on Cosmos 1805 and every other artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites.
Once each day, JSpOC analyzes the updated orbits, looks for possible conjunctions a week or more into the future, and notifies the Goddard CARA team of any events involving NASA's robotic missions. Another group at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston performs the same function for all spacecraft carrying astronauts, including the International Space Station.
By Tuesday, April 3, the threat still had not receded and all plans were in place for firing Fermi's thrusters.
Shortly after noon EDT, the spacecraft stopped scanning the sky and oriented itself along its direction of travel. It then parked its solar panels and tucked away its high-gain antenna to protect them from the thruster exhaust.
"The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second," Stoneking explained. "There was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well."
By 1 p.m., Fermi was back to doing science. A few hours later, the various teams met to evaluate the results of the maneuver and determine if another would be required. When the two spacecraft reached their long-awaited conjunction the following day, they would miss by a comfortable margin of 6 miles, with no further actions needed.
"A huge weight was lifted," McEnery said. "I felt like I'd lost 20 pounds."
Last year, the Goddard CARA team participated in collision-avoidance maneuvers for seven other missions. A month before the Fermi conjunction came to light, Landsat 7 dodged pieces of Fengyun-1C, a Chinese weather satellite deliberately destroyed in 2007 as part of a military test. And in May and October, respectively, NASA's Aura and CALIPSO Earth-observing satellites took steps to avoid fragments from Cosmos 2251.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/nasa/~3/L1HHTDRzBLk/130501101256.htm
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Seahorse's armor gives engineers insight into robotics designs
May 1, 2013 ? The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail's exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other. Researchers are hoping to use a similar structure to create a flexible robotic arm equipped with muscles made out of polymer, which could be used in medical devices, underwater exploration and unmanned bomb detection and detonation. UC San Diego engineers, led by materials science professors Joanna McKittrick and Marc Meyers, detailed their findings in the March 2013 issue of the journal Acta Biomaterialia.
"The study of natural materials can lead to the creation of new and unique materials and structures inspired by nature that are stronger, tougher, lighter and more flexible," said McKittrick, a professor of materials science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
McKittrick and Meyers had sought bioinsipiration by examining the armor of many other animals, including armadillo, alligators and the scales of various fish. This time, they were specifically looking for an animal that was flexible enough to develop a design for a robotic arm.
"The tail is the seahorse's lifeline," because it allows the animal to anchor itself to corals or seaweed and hide from predators, said Michael Porter, a Ph.D. student in materials science at the Jacobs School of Engineering. "But no one has looked at the seahorse's tail and bones as a source of armor."
Most of the seahorse's predators, including sea turtles, crabs and birds, capture the animals by crushing them. Engineers wanted to see if the plates in the tail act as an armor. Researchers took segments from seahorses' tails and compressed them from different angles. They found that the tail could be compressed by nearly 50 percent of its original width before permanent damage occurred. That's because the connective tissue between the tail's bony plates and the tail muscles bore most of the load from the displacement. Even when the tail was compressed by as much as 60 percent, the seahorse's spinal column was protected from permanent damage.
McKittrick and Meyers' research group uses a unique technique that applies a series of chemicals to materials to strip them of either their protein components or their mineral components. That allows them to better study materials' structures and properties. After treating the bony plates in the seahorse's tail with the chemicals, they discovered that the percentage of minerals in the plates was relatively low -- 40 percent, compared to 65 percent in cow bone. The plates also contained 27 percent organic compounds -- mostly proteins -- and 33 percent water. The hardness of the plates varied. The ridges were hardest, likely for impact protection -- about 40 percent harder than the plate's grooves, which are porous and absorb energy from impacts.
The seahorse's tail is typically made up of 36 square-like segments, each composed of four L-shaped corner plates that progressively decrease in size along the length of the tail. Plates are free to glide or pivot. Gliding joints allow the bony plates to glide past one another. Pivoting joints are similar to a ball-and-socket joint, with three degrees of rotational freedom. The plates are connected to the vertebrae by thick collagen layers of connective tissue. The joints between plates and vertebrae are extremely flexible with nearly six degrees of freedom.
"Everything in biology comes down to structures," Porter said.
The next step is to use 3D printing to create artificial bony plates, which would then be equipped with polymers that would act as muscles. The final goal is to build a robotic arm that would be a unique hybrid between hard and soft robotic devices. A flexible, yet robust robotic gripper could be used for medical devices, underwater exploration and unmanned bomb detection and detonation. The protected, flexible arm would be able to grasp a variety of objects of different shapes and sizes.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Michael M. Porter, Ekaterina Novitskaya, Ana Bertha Castro-Cese?a, Marc A. Meyers, Joanna McKittrick. Highly deformable bones: Unusual deformation mechanisms of seahorse armor. Acta Biomaterialia, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.actbio.2013.02.045
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/h6G_iJCIvog/130501132123.htm
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Physicists, biologists unite to expose how cancer spreads
Monday, April 29, 2013
Cancer cells that can break out of a tumor and invade other organs are more aggressive and nimble than nonmalignant cells, according to a new multi-institutional nationwide study. These cells exert greater force on their environment and can more easily maneuver small spaces.
The researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports that a systematic comparison of metastatic breast-cancer cells to healthy breast cells revealed dramatic differences between the two cell lines in their mechanics, migration, oxygen response, protein production and ability to stick to surfaces. The researchers discovered new insights into how cells make the transition from nonmalignant to metastatic, a process that is not well understood.
The resulting catalogue of differences could someday help researchers detect cancerous cells earlier and someday prevent or treat metastatic cancer, which is responsible for 90 percent of all cancer deaths, according to the study. It was conducted by a network of 12 federally funded Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers (PS-OC) sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. PS-OC is a collaboration of researchers in the physical and biological sciences seeking a better understanding of the physical and chemical forces that shape the emergence and behavior of cancer.
"By bringing together different types of experimental expertise to systematically compare metastatic and nonmetastatic cells, we have advanced our knowledge of how metastasis occurs," said Robert Austin, professor of physics and leader of the Princeton PS-OC, along with senior co-investigator Thea Tlsty of the University of California-San Francisco.
Researchers with the Princeton PS-OC, for instance, determined that metastatic cells, in spite of moving more slowly than nonmalignant cells, move farther and in a straighter line, Austin said. The investigators studied the cells' behavior in tiny cell-sized chambers and channels etched out of silicon and designed to mimic the natural environment of the body's interior.
"The mobility of these metastatic cells is an essential feature of their ability to break through the tough membrane [the extracellular matrix] that the body uses to wall off the tumor from the rest of the body," Austin said. "These cells are essentially jail-breakers."
The tiny silicon chambers were built using Princeton's expertise in microfabrication technology ? typically used to create small technologies such as integrated circuits and solar cells ? and are an example of the type of expertise that physicists and engineers can bring to cancer research, Austin said. For the current study, the Princeton team included physics graduate students David Liao and Guillaume Lambert, and postdoctoral researchers Liyu Liu and Saurabh Vyawahare. They worked closely with a research group led by James Sturm, Princeton's William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM) where the microfabrication was done.
The Princeton PS-OC also includes collaborators at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The nationwide PS-OC program aims to crack the difficulty of understanding and treating cancer by bringing in researchers from physics, engineering, computer science and chemistry, said Nastaran Zahir Kuhn, program manager for the PS-OC at the National Cancer Institute.
Other notable findings from the paper include that metastatic cells recover more rapidly from the stress of a low-oxygen environment than nonmetastatic cells, which is consistent with previous studies. Although the low-oxygen environment did kill many of the metastatic cells, the survivors rebounded vigorously, underscoring the likely role of individual cells in the spread of cancer. The study also looked at total protein production and detected proteins in the metastatic cells that are consistent with the physical properties such as mobility that malignant cells need to invade the extracellular matrix.
"The PS-OC program aims to bring physical sciences tools and perspectives into cancer research," Kuhn said. "The results of this study demonstrate the utility of such an approach, particularly when studies are conducted in a standardized manner from the beginning."
For the nationwide project, nearly 100 investigators from 20 institutions and laboratories conducted their experiments using the same two cell lines, reagents and protocols to assure that results could be compared. The experimental methods ranged from physical measurements of how the cells push on surrounding cells to measurements of gene and protein expression.
"Roughly 20 techniques were used to study the cell lines, enabling identification of a number of unique relationships between observations," Kuhn said.
For example, a technique known as atomic force microscopy indicated that metastatic cells are softer than nonmalignant cells whereas a different technique, traction force microscopy, suggested that metastatic cells exert more force on their surroundings, Kuhn said. Together these two findings may indicate that metastatic cells can exert force to stick to, migrate on and remodel the tough extracellular matrix that surrounds the tumor, while remaining flexible enough to squeeze through small spaces in that membrane.
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Princeton University: http://www.princeton.edu
Thanks to Princeton University for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127975/Physicists__biologists_unite_to_expose_how_cancer_spreads
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