Tech & Science Archives - Page 45 of 114

Study Reveals That Wasps Display Amazing Navigational Skills

February 14, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

Once again making use of high speed cameras earns great results for researchers as a study reveals that wasps display amazing navigational skills. But it’s not all because the insects have a natural knack of figuring out where they are, but because of the way they scan surroundings and what they can see in order to map the ‘way back home’.

It has been known for a very long time that wasps have a tendency to display strange flight patterns, especially when they leave their nests. Scientists have been puzzled by the zig zagging motions a wasp slowly makes, in an expanding arc sort of fashion, especially immediately after leaving their nest. However, it had not yet been discovered why the wasps display this behavior or what they were looking at as they were doing it.

After 10 years of the unexplainable mystery, researchers were finally able to figure out the meaning of the widening arc flight patterns by employing high speed cameras and studying the body posture and head movements of the wasps as they commence their test trip.

Along with the high speed stereo cameras, researchers also used a panoramic imager to map a 3D model of the environment the wasps were flying in, in order to pinpoint every single point of interest the wasp may have been flying towards. Using those means, the scientists recreated a wasp’s eye view of the world, which in turn ended up elucidating the mystery.

It turns out that wasps fly in such a manner because that is the method they employ to map the environment where the next is located, by literally looking it from numerous angles. They change views during their test flights – literal surveys they make of the location of their nest, with no other purpose than that – and use the differences they experience in order to decide when they have to change direction and begin a new arc in their flight.

They have been also noticed to rely to ground features such as rocks, leaves or other larger formations in order to understand and remember their location and how to return to the nest.

This is an important discovery in the topic as it may help develop tools for ecological neuroscience. There are still plenty of steps of this study left to be taken: bees and ants also display peculiar navigational behavior that may help scientists understand how insects function as well as when and how these competences develop.

Ultimately, understanding how insects navigate may help mankind if they find methods of applying what they learn in future developments of flying robotics.

Image Source: 1

NASA Envisions Futuristic Interplanetary Vacation Posters

February 14, 2016 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

A fairly unexpected but duly appreciated jewel hit the official website news feed recently, showing us the way NASA envisions futuristic interplanetary vacation posters. At least for when that will be a thing of the day. Once again, this is the work of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory situated in Pasadena, California. The same group of people has been responsible for a huge amount of recent marketing and other means of delicately trying to grasp people’s attention towards the importance of space travel.

Only recently they released a video of a regular day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including a tour of it. They also showed how future astronauts train and prepare for potential space missions. They seem to be on a spree, possibly part of NASA’s attempt to open the eyes of the public in the direction of space discovery.

It is known that NASA recently made a statement, saying that the funds necessary for both manned missions they want to undertake – another landing on the Moon as well as a trip to Mars – are incredibly high and unfortunately unrealistic to achieve. Because of that, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to only settle for one or the other to be performed in the next 20 years. Considering one mission of this scale would cost roughly half a trillion dollars, NASA is turning to the public and also attempting to obtain financial help from federal funds.

The posters that made their way to the internet as part of the Visions of the Future series in an attempt to spark interest of the public towards the world that we would live in if space travelling and vacations would become a reality. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory visual strategist Dan Goods talked about the style that was chosen for the posters as being inspired from what science fiction artists and writers saw the future to be like in mid 20^thcentury.

And as a matter of fact, most of them do look like excellent book cover ideas for Robert A. Heinlein book revisions. The 14 posters depict different destinations, and to each their very respective traits and most known features.

That way, you are invited to experience the charm of gravity assist on an aligned series of gas giants as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, something that happens only every 175 years, invited to visit the already historic (by then) sites of Mars, the last celestial body to be known to have water on it – Ceres, the icy Europa or the colorful auroras of Jupiter. Otherworldly destinations make their appearance too, listing Kepler-15B, the planet that orbits around two suns, the ‘red Earth’ from another solar system or places such as the rogue planet PSO J318.5-22 – the one that doesn’t orbit a sun.

You can find all the posters available for download here.

Image Source: 1

The App That Predicts Incoming Earthquakes

February 14, 2016 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

Coming from the Seismological Laboratory at Berkeley, MyShake is the app that predicts incoming earthquakes and it was released just last Friday. Along with it, there was also a video posted via YouTube that features Richard Allen, the director of the laboratory that developed the app, explaining how the app works and individuals can make best use of it.

The application is merely in its incipient phase, and at the current time only works as a study tool for the researchers at the Seismological Laboratory at Berkeley, by attempting to use as many signals from smartphones that have downloaded it. Thanks to the fact that most, if not all newer smartphones these days have an accelerometer sensor built into them, scientists thought of using this fact to the advantage of the people living in particular areas that are prone to seismic activity.

The app has very low storage and battery life requirements and merely keeps track of any motion registered when the phone is left in standby, preferably on a flat surface. While it will continue to function when it senses you in motion, which may result in a false earthquake alarm, this is a grand scale app that will detect false positives according to the zone they are being registered in. The app was designed with the idea that it shouldn’t use more power than your phone would if it were hibernating in mind.

The MyShake app was developed as a citizens’ science experiment with the sole motive of building a global seismic network. Considering that most of the occurrences of earthquakes are too slow to be detected, and it’s mostly done via unreliable channels such as social media, MyShake aims to – hopefully in the near future – become a useful tool in detecting and preventing or at least limiting the casualties following an earthquake.

Scientists working on this project hope to be able to start implementing this the sooner it’s possible, but they do require as many users to pick up the app in the first place. Once a fair number of individuals have it running in the background, people could be notified of incoming earthquakes as soon as 40 seconds before it actually kicks in.

The project hopes to one day be able to help regions with a high risk level of earthquakes such as Nepal. Because there are over 6 million smartphones in the country, if the app ran on at least a portion of them disasters in places such as Kathmandu could be averted.

The app is currently only available on the Google Play Store, as well as the Berkeley website.

Image Source: 1

Nearly 1,500 Windows 3.1 Applications Have Been Revived

February 14, 2016 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

Because we all get nostalgic about the times when being on a computer felt awfully different, archive.org has made it possible that nearly 1,500 Windows 3.1 applications have been revived. That includes over 1,000 games and about 300 productivity tools or other applications that you may not even remember having but once you set gaze on them will immediately bring back memories.

The hundreds of emulated programs exist thanks to the same people who previously brought us 2,400 MS-DOS games to our browsers and now decided to expand their reach into the Windows 3.1 era. And to make it even better, they’re all free too; although you may get a notification after playing or using some of them to let you know who created them and offer you a donation link.

And it’s not even like all you can find on archive.org is just the mainstream stuff. Sure, you are very likely to find most of the classics here and enjoy them to your heart’s content, but there’s also a great number of games or apps that you may not have had the chance to see back in the day. Browsing may lead you to find fairly interesting things.

And if there’s really no utility you can see in playing these things or witnessing the beginning of 90s software, then think of it as a trip into the past and witnessing a piece of history. But surely, anyone who has used a computer back then will be swift to recognize the familiarity and nostalgic at getting to revisit it once more.

Regardless of how you look at it, there is an unmistakably huge amount of work that has been put into emulating all of these, and not just that as they have all been reduced to small browser window size. Each piece runs a JavaScript version of DosBox, which actually boots up Windows 3.1 then attempts to load the program you selected onto this platform.

So to list some of the things you’ll find should be games such as SkiFree, Wheel of Fortune: Deluxe Edition, RattleRace, Sim Earth, Brickbuster and Hoyle Solitaire and even a preview of the upcoming Windows 95 that interacts with you and teaches you how to use the new Windows and what is so great about it. There is also a Windows 95 stock version that you can launch and play around with to reminisce what those 40 MB operating systems were all about back then.

Image Source: 1

The Longest War of the Animal Reign Is Ongoing for 100 Million Years

February 13, 2016 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

The intriguing layers of the ant society have led to an intricate ‘political’ system, one that shows us that the longest war of the animal reign is ongoing for 100 million years. From this perspective, some insect species still manage to amaze scientists as they display a very detailed and well thought out layered society, similarly to the human kind.

While obviously not as evolved as mankind (yet, although some pieces of science fiction insist that meddling with the natural timeline will somehow lead to planet Earth being ruled by giant ants), they are also species that thrive upon well set rules and layers of society. And similarly to humans, they also ‘farm’ other creatures, fight over food and territory.

A recent discovery of several examples of different ants from the same colony preserved in 100 million year old amber found in Myanmar gives scientists even more insight into what the sociality level is in ants. And surprisingly, it hasn’t changed all that much since prehistoric times.

While ants are not the only species of animals that display eusociality – a term used for advanced sociality – they are the most common and well known example of it, along with honey bees and termites, while out of the vertebrates class only two species of African mole rats display the same interest in society layers.

The amber that originated in Myanmar captured two ants of different colonies mid-fight, as they were attempting to knock each other out. This is the proof that scientists needed to realize that this particular trait of ants has been ongoing for a much longer amount of time than previously thought.

Originally, it was believed that eusociality was between 17 to 20 million years old, but recent discovery moves this date back to the Cretaceous period – this was when dinosaurs were not yet extinct. Naturally, given the huge amount of time that it has been since, it is widely obvious that the Cretaceous ant was wildly different than the modern ant.

Researchers also found one of the largest soldier termites ever seen throughout the amber remnants in Myanmar – named the Gigantotermes Rex termite, it is nearly an inch long with a head that makes up nearly half of that length.

It too, was found immortalized in amber in the midst of combat with a different species of insect, only one more proof of the fact that this type of behavior existed and has survived this long throughout history.

Image Source: 1

We Say Goodbye to the Comet Lander Philae

February 13, 2016 By Karen Jackson Leave a Comment

It is time that we say goodbye to the comet lander Philae, the European Space Agency probe that was sent out on the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet nearly a year ago as part of the Rosetta mission. The mission had started nearly 10 years prior to that and now seems to be the time when this particular part of the mission has come to an end.

The Philae spacecraft is a name worth knowing as it has performed the first soft landing on a comet nucleus on November 12^th of 2014, while being remotely operated from the German Aerospace Center (also known as DLR) in Cologne, Germany. While the achievements of the spacecraft were undeniable, the shuttle started having issues in late 2014, when its batteries ran out due to reduced sunlight. This led to the craft needing to enter hibernation in hopes that the solar panels would be able to capture enough energy by August 2015 in order to reboot the comet lander.

Sadly, this did not happen due to unexpected conditions the shuttle encountered. After very sporadic communication being established between the spacecraft and the Earth base between June 13^th and July 9^th, and a temporary re-entering of the online mode, all communications were lost. Scientists have not been able to re-establish a connection with the probe since leading to the conclusion that no further communications with it were likely in January 2016.

The comet 67P that Philae is currently rooted on has entered a phase where conditions on it are increasingly hostile; because it has moved very far away from the sun – approximately 350 million kilometers, temperatures are unbearably low: minus 180 degrees Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, scientists say that Philae’s system cannot function.

Before the German Aerospace Center deemed Philae ‘dead’, they sent one last signal to the probe in hopes of re-establishing contact with it – an attempt that was unsuccessful. However, due to the increasing difficulty of communicating with the probe before then, it is very unlikely that a response is due to come. If anything, the scientists have left the channel dedicated to the Philae probe open in case it ever comes back to life.

Considering that the final conclusion scientists drew suggests that the total of 8 pings sent from Philae to the Rosetta mothership on the span of a month were actually false positives and merely the failure of transmitters and receivers, the tale of the probe may have ended even earlier than we thought.

Image Source: 1

NASA Is Hiring Astronauts for the Mars Mission

February 13, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

Applications are now open for anyone ambitious but qualified as NASA is hiring astronauts for the Mars mission – whenever that will happen. While original plans involved the year 2020 for the first manned mission to the surface of the red planet, it may not happen until several years later, depending on how well funding the mission from the public and federal resources goes.

Regardless, NASA has decided that a manned mission to the planet of promise is the next biggest step in human evolution and achievement. And because the organization came to the conclusion that it cannot afford to focus on both a potential Mars mission as well as another landing on the Moon, it seems to have, after all, chosen that Mars should be the next destination for mankind.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is therefore placing all their efforts in raising funds for the Mars mission and training its future team of astronauts to be. For the first time in four years, NASA is hiring the next generation of astronauts; however, only one of them could eventually actually go to the Red Planet.

The team of astronauts would be training at Johnson Space Center in Houston; and that’s no easy feat. Anyone hoping to leave in a space shuttle for another planet one day needs to have excellent physical condition to begin with, but also a hefty amount of specialized training. That includes things such as spending a long time underwater and performing tasks in what is very similar to a zero gravity scenario, understand and train in the harsh conditions of outer space as well as prepare for a real life, real scale shuttle launch.

But being an astronaut is not only about being physically and mentally fit for the trip. NASA is currently looking for individuals who have a bachelor’s degree in math, science or engineering, with experience or with a military background as the minimum requirements.

NASA also places a lot of emphasis on communication skills. A 2 years long mission on a space craft requires a high degree of communication skills and teamwork, especially if you take into account that the individuals who will be joining need to be able to work together comfortably in the tight confines of a space ship.

Even though the next class of astronauts is only looking for 8 to 14 people, more than 6,100 applicants have already shown their interest in the mission.

Image Source: 1

AT&T Begins 5G Field Testing This Year

February 13, 2016 By Cristopher Hall Leave a Comment

Fabled to be capable of being 10 to 100 times faster than 4G, the new type of network seems to have caught the eyes of phone carriers as AT&T begins 5G field testing this year. This doesn’t mean that 5G will actually become a reality this year too, as technology needs to pick up on the new type of data connection too.

However, it could mean that this is the beginning to carriers starting to work on their 5G network coverages and see how the new generation of super-fast wireless technology fares.

However, to no surprise, AT&T seems to be just ahead of the curve the tiniest bit as it proudly released a 5G roadmap recently, displaying a lot of information regarding the patented technologies such as network function virtualization, millimeter waves and software-defined networking that the 5G network would be reliant on. It is the second carrier to officially announce its 5G-related plans, right next to Verizon.

The speeds that the 5G network aim for may sound unfathomable to some; especially since you wouldn’t start by measuring them in megabits per second, but in gigabits per second. Which is quite something given that not everyone is getting that on their optic fiber internet connections at home yet.

This means that at such speeds you would download an HD movie in mere seconds and the time a video starts streaming after you hit the play button to be somewhere as low as 5 milliseconds. This is a very much welcomed innovation for mobile devices as statistics show that over 60% of the network traffic recorded in 2015 was achieved via videos.

And now as we move into the age of virtual reality and devices more performant than ever before, the network technology needs to follow suit as specialists expect a large increase in network traffic once again. And the mere way that 5G is built makes it a lot more efficient because it supports multiple radio interfaces.

While AT&T wishes to partner with Ericsson and Intel and try to push 5G solutions as early as the second quarter of 2016, this is not a feasible ambition for regular users and may just be put in place for internal use only. A more realistic plan is the one that Verizon describes: along with the combined efforts of Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung, the company plans for the technology to be available to consumers no sooner than 2020.

No matter how much wishful thinking is at work here, an entire new type of network will mostly likely take a long time to implement all over the United States.

Image Source: 1

Google Picasa Is Leaving to Make Room for Google Photos

February 13, 2016 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

Apparently the popular photo editor Google Picasa is leaving to make room for Google Photos, the other application made by the same company and released about a year ago. The reason? Google Photos Chief Anil Sabharwal believes that it’s counterproductive for the company to focus on two similar products at the same time, and each for different platforms.

Therefore, Google will give up Picasa and simply focus on developing and improving Google Photos to work better on both desktop and mobile.

While the public was given the date of March 15^th 2016 as the day when support for Picasa will be discontinued, Sabharwal did mention that anyone who has been using Picasa on their phone should not feel worried about losing their stored photos or videos in the Picasa online albums. They will be automatically imported from the app and into Google Photos accounts automatically.

The switch from Picasa to Google Photos will most likely not be the best received news that Android users will have to take and accept. The reason behind that is the fact that while Picasa as a standalone app may be easily exchanged with something else, there is a number of other third party apps that link to it and function based on it.

Surely, in due time, the apps in question should be updated to reflect the change in order to not render them unusable for an undetermined amount of time. However, depending on how popular and which developer is behind the apps in question, it may take between days and weeks, if not months for all of the apps to be updated to use Google Pictures instead.

Just like with any other piece of software that is past its time, it won’t simply just vanish off of our devices. The app will continue to exist indefinitely, but it will no longer receive any kind of update or further development. While that may not seem like a problem to some, it may end up exposing users to malware and other similarly malicious types of software as it is easier for attackers to go through older security signatures of software.

Not to mention that users will no longer be able to add pictures to the online album on Picasa anymore. Regardless, the changes and shift to Google Photos will be rolled out gradually and users will be notified to download all their photos from Picasa onto the other service beforehand.

Image Source: 1

Excitement Amongst Scientists as Gravitational Waves May Be Proven to Exist

February 9, 2016 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

If you’ve been checking various researchers’ Twitter pages, you may have already noticed that there’s a lot of excitement amongst scientists as gravitational waves may be proven to exist – finally. They were originally envisioned and predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1916, on basis of the theory of general relativity.

In essence, gravitational waves are believed to be ripples made by bodies in the curvature of spacetime. Because of the effect of gravity, energy can therefore be transported along these ripples and become known as gravitational radiation. They are believed to be more often occurring in binary star systems, neutron stars or black holes.

There has been an ongoing experiment known as LIGO – Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory – that hopes to reproduce and detect gravitational waves in a man-designed environment. While it is not yet confirmed that the experiment resulted in the expected conclusion, several big names in the scene have been at it and getting particularly excited about the prospect as the experiment is nearing its end.

LIGO will announce its findings on Thursday at 3.30 PM GMT in a paper published in Nature, along with an official press release. If gravitational waves are proved to exist, it would therefore confirm Einstein’s beliefs exactly 100 years later than they were made. The method that the researchers employed for confirming or infirming the theory that gravitational waves exist is by measuring incredibly tiny changes in the length of a tunnel all the way at the LIGO Hanford Observatory.

Gravitational waves are believed to be one of the most elusive, intriguing and yet mysterious phenomena in our universe; this is partly because they are caused by rather rare events that take place very far away from what the human eyes can reach. Mankind is only capable of theorizing what a merger of black holes would mean and how gravitational waves would be created as a result.

That is exactly what the scientists are trying to mimic – but naturally at a much smaller scale – in their laboratories at the LIGO Hanford Observatory. And judging by the reactions that they’re barely controlling themselves from having via social media, it would appear that they only have good news for humanity.

If Einstein’s theory is confirmed, this could lead to much more ambitious scientific goals for the human race – and may eventually lead to discovering some method of time travelling; although that would certainly take a lot longer than we’d think.

Image Source: 1

Categories