Monthly Archives: January 2014

NASA’s Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

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NASA's robot butler for astronauts, Robonaut 2, may still be waiting for its legs to be delivered to the International Space Station, but you can see how the humanoid automaton may dance in weightlessness with an eerie elegance in this new video.

The video waltz of NASA's Robonaut 2, set to the "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss, was created by SPACE.com by stitches together a series of NASA recordings of the droid's prehensile leg tests.

The $2.5 million Robonaut 2, also called R2, is designed to eventually work with the astronauts and even take over some of their duties both inside and outside the space station. An R2 unit launched to the orbiting outpost as just a torso with arms and camera-equipped head during the last flight of the space shuttle Discovery in 2011. [See more photos of NASA's Robonaut 2 humanoid robot]

Since then, the R2 unit has been performing tests and experiments in a stationary position inside the space station, but it's expected to be able to move around alongside the astronauts after it gets its legs sometime this year.

Though humanoid in form, Robonaut 2's legs move in some unnervingly inhuman ways. Instead of one knee, r2 has seven joints that bend in all different directions, and watching its legs move is almost like watching a horrible football injury in slow motion.

When fully extended, the automaton's legs will span 9 feet (2.7 meters), according to NASA. And R2 doesn't have feet. Instead, it has special tools called "end effectors" that will allow it to use sockets and handrails to climb around inside and outside the station. NASA officials, however, have said that R2's upper body still needs some upgrades before it will be ready to venture into the vacuum of space.

Last month, NASA unveiled its latest humanoid robot Valkyrie, or R5. The 6-foot, 2-inch tall (1.9 meters) robot, which has an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel superhero Iron Man, was built to compete in the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge for disaster-response robots in December.

Follow Megan Gannon onTwitterandGoogle+. Follow us @SPACEdotcom, FacebookorGoogle+. Originally published onSPACE.com.

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NASA's Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

Mexican University Designs Catalysts With Nanotechnology To Reduce Vehicular Pollution

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Currently, they have developed two types of nanocatalysts according to the requirements of Pemex in its process of sulfur removal, from the area of refinement, with which reducing gasoline and diesel to having only 10 parts per million of sulfur has been achieved, as according to international regulation.

This is pointed out by Sergio Fuentes Moyado, head of project and director of CNyN at UNA, located in the northwest state of Baja California. He adds that after three years of research at an experimental level at the Center and pilot tests at the National Institute of Oil, the nanotechnological catalyst counts with a national patent and is ready for tests at a refinery.

CNyN's technology uses molybdenum disulfide and is part of the fifth generation of catalytic converters, although is the first to be conceived since its origin from nanotechnology.

"We look to obtain much more efficient, resistant and cheap catalysts than what we currently can find in the market. That is why, since it design and planning are conceived under the nano concept, which improves some properties of this kind of technologies", Fuentes Moyado highlights.

He explains the process of sulfur removal. "The catalyst eliminates sulfur from the gasoline and diesel molecules, as these are deposited over small arrangements of four to five nanometers and that is where the reaction in presence of hydrogen takes place. So, at the end of the process clean molecules are obtain, that can be used for fuels".

Is important to highlight that the synthesis of the catalyst happened in the Hydrocarbon Processing Laboratory, which was created for this project in the facilities of the CNyN in Baja California.

"Currently we are testing the compound to know if it can be scalated to an industrial level to produce tons instead of kilograms and install the process at a refinery. We have presented a preview of the progress to Pemex and they are very interested in carrying out the test at a refinery. If so, the nanocatalyst would be manufactured in USA, because we don't have a company that can produce them in our country.

"A big infrastructure is required. The design we have made came from the most basic, which is understanding how the molecules bond to the catalyst and how we can force the active sites of the molecules to have more contact with the fluid, being either gasoline or diesel. There is a design involved with the application of knowledge", said the director of CNyN.

The project was funded by the Energy Secretariat (Sener) and the National Counsil of Science and Technology (CONACyT) with more than 66 million of Mexican pesos.

For the creation of the nanocatalyst the Physics and Material Research Institute, the Center of Applied Sciences and Technological Development at UNAM also contributed.

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Mexican University Designs Catalysts With Nanotechnology To Reduce Vehicular Pollution

Mass is critical at nano-scale; matters in calculations and measurements

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A UT Arlington engineering professor has proven that the effect of mass is important, can be measured and has a significant impact on any calculations and measurements at the sub-micrometer scale.

The findings help to better understand movement of nano-sized objects in fluid environments that can be characterized by a low Reynolds number, which often occurs in biological systems. The unconventional results are consistent with Newton's Second Law of Motion, a well-established law of physics, and imply that mass should be included in the dynamic model of these nano-systems. The most widely accepted models omit mass at that scale.

Alan Bowling, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, collaborated with Samarendra Mohanty, an assistant physics professor, and doctoral students Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Bryan Black and Sarvenaz Ghaffari, as well as graduate student James Drake to make the discovery.

A key advantage of the new model is that it can be used to build computer simulations of nano-sized objects that have drastically reduced run times as compared to a conventional model based on Newton's second law. These conventional models have run times of days, weeks, months and years while the new model requires only seconds or minutes to run.

In the past, researchers attempted to address the long run time by omitting the mass terms in the model. This resulted in faster run times but, paradoxically, violated Newton's second law upon which the conventional model was based. The remedy for this paradox was to argue that mass was unimportant at the nano-scale.

However, the new model retains mass, and predicts unexpected motion of nano-sized objects in a fluid that has been experimentally observed. The new model also runs much faster than both the conventional and massless models.

It is expected that this new model will significantly accelerate research involving small-scale phenomena.

Research areas that Bowling and collaborators at UT Arlington are currently investigating include cell migration, protein function, bionic medical devices and nanoparticle suspensions for storing thermal energy. However, the applications for the computer simulation in medicine, biology, and other fields are endless.

The research is detailed in the paper "Dynamics of Microscopic Objects in Optical Tweezers: Experimental Determination of Underdamped Regime and Numerical Simulation using Multiscale Analysis" and published online by the Journal of Non-Linear Dynamics. The paper is scheduled for publication in the journal's print version later this year.

Khosrow Behbehani, dean of the College of Engineering, said the team's findings may alter ways of thinking throughout the engineering and scientific worlds.

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Mass is critical at nano-scale; matters in calculations and measurements

I Break Horses – Medicine Brush (Live @ Village Underground, London, 23/01/14) – Video

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I Break Horses - Medicine Brush (Live @ Village Underground, London, 23/01/14)
I Break Horses performing "Medicine Brush" live at Village Underground, London on January 23rd, 2014. All rights reserved to the artist. No copyright infring...

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I Break Horses - Medicine Brush (Live @ Village Underground, London, 23/01/14) - Video

American Medicine Today: Productivity Tracked like A Long Island Jeep Dealership

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The brilliant Ira Glass managed the impossible in the penultimate This American Life episode of 2013 humanizing car salespeople to the point where you begin to empathize with them, even if you continue to dread (perhaps even more so) your next visit to a showroom.

Glass takes us through a month in the life of the Town and Country Jeep dealership in Levittown, Long Island, introducing us to an eclectic group of men and one woman who are trying to hit their target of 129 cars, and earn a handsome bonus from Chrysler. There are individual bonuses available as well. Glass explains how the system works:

So there actually is a place at Town & Country where they keep score of who has sold what. Its in Freddies office, the general managers office. Its a white board with each persons sales for the month to date on it.

Every car or truck that theyve sold is represented by a little magnetic rectangle thats roughly the size of a nine volt battery. Everybody calls these chips. And the different colors of the chips stand for different models of cars and trucks.

And throughout the day, salesmen come and they hover around whiteboard, seeing where everybody stands. And generally, everybody is shooting for at least 15 sales a month. At 15 sales, your commission for the next month jumps from 20% to 30%.

The easy availability of data has armed and empowered customers, meaning that dealerships now anticipate making less money on each transaction, and hope to make up the difference in volume, further ratcheting up the pressure.

You listen to the experiences of the salespeople the divorces, the missed opportunities to watch a sons football game, the weight gain, the rituals and are overwhelmed by the intense pressures of the job, and by the extent to which it evokes the poignant desperation of Death of Salesman, and the violent urgency of Glengarry Glen Ross. The manager actually reminds his staff to, Always Be Closing, and the modern equivalent of the magical Glengarry leads seem to be customers drawn from the internet. By any measure, it seems like a brutal way to make a living.

In the month or so since the episode aired, Ive been struck by the unflattering parallels between the experience of Glasss car salespeople and the reports Ive heard from physicians in a range of practice settings.

Ive heard from physicians employed by for-profit companies that their productivity in terms of patient encounters is monitored using a nearly identical communal chart to the one the Long Island dealership uses to track Jeep sales. Providers are explicitly urged to increase their productivity, receiving bonuses if they hit a pre-specified number of patient encounters, and warnings about their future career prospects if they fall short.

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American Medicine Today: Productivity Tracked like A Long Island Jeep Dealership