For nearly as long as there has been radio, there have been antennas trained on the sky, looking at the universe in a different light than traditional astronomy. Radio astronomers have used their sensitive equipment to study the Sun, the planets, distant galaxies, and strange objects from the very edge of the universe, like pulsars and quasars. Even the earliest moments of the universe have been explored, a portrait in microwave radiation of the remnants of the Big Bang.
And yet with all these observations, there’s a substantial slice of the radio spectrum that remains largely a mystery to radio astronomers. Thanks to our planet’s ionosphere, most of the signals below 30 MHz aren’t observable by ground-based radio telescopes. But now, thanks to an opportunity afforded by China’s ambitious lunar exploration program, humanity is now listening to more of what the universe is saying, and it’s doing so from a new vantage point: the far side of the moon.
If you want to explore underwater, you have a few options. You can hold your breath. You can try to recycle your air. You can carry your breathing air with you as in SCUBA. You can stick a tube up like a snorkel, or you can have air sent down to you from the surface. EXOlung falls into this last category, but unlike many other surface solutions, it has a twist: it never runs out of power before you do. Watch the video below and you’ll see how it works.
A buoy puts a snorkel up out of the water, and a tube lets you dive up to 5 meters away. There’s a small tank on your chest, and your body’s motion serves to fill the tank from the outside air supply. As your legs extend and retract, you fill the tank and then put the tank’s air at ambient pressure so you can breathe. As a bonus, by varying how you inhale and exhale, you can control your buoyancy and, therefore, your depth.
The system does require you to strap your legs up to the apparatus. However, other similar systems have compressors or batteries which can fail or run down, meaning there can be a limit on how long you can stay under. EXOlung claims there is no limit to how long you can stay under.
The cost looks to be around 300 Euro, although for a bit more you can get one that uses different materials to withstand higher pressures. That one has a 7-meter hose.
For a while now a series of stories have been circulating about Amazon’s Ring doorbell, an Internet-connected camera and entry system that lets users monitor and even interact with visitors and delivery people at their doors. The adverts feature improbable encounters with would-be crooks foiled by the IoT-equipped homeowner, but the stories reveal a much darker side. From reports of unhindered access by law enforcement to privately-held devices through mass releases of compromised Ring account details to attackers gaining access to children via compromised cameras, it’s fair to say that there’s much to be concerned about.
One cause for concern has been the location data exposed by the associated Amazon Neighbors crowd-sourced local crime paranoia app, and for those of us who don’t live and breathe information security there is an easy-to-understand Twitter breakdown of its vulnerabilities from [Elliot Alderson] that starts with the app itself and proceeds from there into compromising Ring accounts by finding their passwords. We find that supposedly anonymized information in the app sits atop an API response with full details, that there’s no defense against brute-forcing a Ring password, and that a tasty list of API and staging URLs is there for all to see embedded within the app. Given all that information, there’s little wonder that the system has proven to be so vulnerable.
As traditional appliance makers have struggled with bringing Internet connectivity into their products there have been a few stories of woeful security baked into millions of homes. A defense could be made that a company with roots outside the Internet can be forgiven for such a gaffe, but in the case of Amazon whose history has followed that of mass Web adoption and whose infrastructure lies behind so much of the services we trust, this level of lax security is unforgivable. Hackaday readers will be aware of the security issues behind so-called “smart” devices, but to the vast majority of customers they are simply technological wonders that are finally delivering a Jetsons-style future. If some good comes of these Ring stories it might be that those consumers finally begin to wake up to IoT security, and use their new-found knowledge to demand better.
After a decade in development, the Boeing CST-100 “Starliner” lifted off from pad SLC-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station a little before dawn this morning on its first ever flight. Officially referred to as the Boeing Orbital Flight Test (Boe-OFT), this uncrewed mission was intended to verify the spacecraft’s ability to navigate in orbit and safely return to Earth. It was also planned to be a rehearsal of the autonomous rendezvous and docking procedures that will ultimately be used to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station; a capability NASA has lacked since the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.
Liftoff at 6:36 AM Eastern
Unfortunately, some of those goals are now unobtainable. Due to a failure that occurred just 30 minutes into the flight, the CST-100 is now unable to reach the ISS. While the craft remains fully functional and in a stable orbit, Boeing and NASA have agreed that under the circumstances the planned eight day mission should be cut short. While there’s still some hope that the CST-100 will have the opportunity to demonstrate its orbital maneuverability during the now truncated flight, the primary focus has switched to the deorbit and landing procedures which have tentatively been moved up to the morning of December 22nd.
While official statements from all involved parties have remained predictably positive, the situation is a crushing blow to both Boeing and NASA. Just days after announcing that production of their troubled 737 MAX airliner would be suspended, the last thing that Boeing needed right now was another high-profile failure. For NASA, it’s yet another in a long line of setbacks that have made some question if private industry is really up to the task of ferrying humans to space. This isn’t the first time a CST-100 has faltered during a test, and back in August, a SpaceX Crew Dragon was obliterated while its advanced launch escape system was being evaluated.
We likely won’t have all the answers until the Starliner touches down at the White Sands Missile Range and Boeing engineers can get aboard, but ground controllers have already started piecing together an idea of what happened during those first critical moments of the flight. The big question now is, will NASA require Boeing to perform a second Orbital Flight Test before certifying the CST-100 to carry a human crew?
Let’s take a look at what happened during this morning’s launch.
If you read the scientific literature, you see the familiar subatomic particles you learned about in school: protons, neutrons, and electrons. If you are young enough, you see others you probably heard about, too, like quarks and gluons. But recently there has been a lot of buzz about excitons and even some transistor circuits demonstrated that use them. But what is an exciton?
It actually sounds like a subatomic particle, but it is a little more complicated than that. An exciton is a bound state of an electron and an electron hole and is technically a boson. You are probably familiar with the idea of an electron hole from semiconductor physics. Technically, it is a quasiparticle. The reason scientists are interested in the beast is that it can transport energy without transporting net electric charge. That is, the state itself is neutral, but also contains energy. Continue reading “What’s An Exciton?”→
Can you imagine a near future where your family doctor can effectively prick your finger and test you for a dozen or so types of cancer? Currently, cancer detection is a time-consuming and expensive process. Existing methods of screening for cancer usually involve taking a whole lot of blood and running tests that cost thousands of dollars. But Toshiba has created a cancer-detecting machine that sounds like something straight out of science fiction.
The machine is about the size of a small office copier, and it looks like one, too. But this small machine can do some powerful tricks. Toshiba claims that the machine can detect 13 types of cancer from a single drop of blood with 99% accuracy. What’s more impressive is that it can do this under two hours, as opposed to days or weeks depending on laboratory backlog. Most importantly, they are aiming to do this entire battery of tests for about $180. Ideally, this machine will do everything that current blood cancer detection equipment does, just better, faster, and with fewer resources.
Some of the cancers the machine can test for have been previously difficult to detect, like ovarian, pancreatic, and esophageal cancer. But this machine can screen for all three of these — great news for early detection of these ravaging cancers — as well as breast, prostate, gastric, colon, liver, biliary tract, bladder, lung, brain, and sarcoma. The only catch is that the machine can’t pinpoint which cancer exactly, it only knows if microRNA one or more of the 13 came up.
So, how does it work? Cancer cells secrete certain types of microRNA into the bloodstream that healthy cells don’t. The machine works by assessing the different types of microRNA that show up in the sample drop, and studying their concentrations. Their work builds on that of Toray Industries, who announced earlier this year that they had made a cancer-detection chip based on microRNA accumulation that is 95% accurate. Development of this chip follows on the heels of research that finds testing for microRNA in bloodwork has the potential to detect cancers in earlier stages, and in some cases like for bowel cancer, with a much less invasive testing procedure.
Toshiba, in partnership with the National Cancer Center Research Institute and Tokyo Medical University will conduct a trial of the machine next year. If the trial is successful, they hope to commercialize it soon after.
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that wherever you are now, a quick glance around will probably reveal at least one LED. They’re everywhere – we can spot a quick half dozen from our desk, mostly acting as pilot lights and room lighting. In those contexts, LEDs are pretty mundane. But what if a little more flash could be added to the LEDs of the world – literally?
That’s the idea behind LightAnchors, which bills itself as a “spatially-anchored augmented reality interface.” LightAnchors comes from work at [Chris Harrison]’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University which seeks new ways to interface with computers, and leverages the ubiquity of LED point sources and the high-speed cameras on today’s smartphones. LightAnchors are basically beacons of digitally encoded data that a smartphone can sense and decode. The target LED is modulated using amplitude-shift keying and each packet contains a data payload and parity bits along with a pre- and post-amble sequence. Software on the phone uses the camera to isolate the point source, track it, and pull the data out of it, which is used to create an overlay on the scene. The video below shows a number of applications, ranging from displaying guest login credentials through the pilot lights on a router to modulating the headlights of a rideshare vehicle so the next fare can find the right car.
An academic paper (PDF link) goes into greater depth on the protocol, and demo Arduino code for creating LightAnchors is thoughtfully provided. It strikes us that the two main hurdles to adoption of LightAnchors would be convincing device manufacturers to support them, and advertising the fact that what looks like a pilot light might actually be something more, but the idea sure beats fixed markers for AR tracking.
