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Social Media Replaces Police Missing Persons Searches In France

Kelsey D. Atherton — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

French police have abandoned in-progress searches for missing adults and will no longer accept new search requests. Instead, families should turn to social media, the government announced.

An almost century-old program in France is coming to an end. "Searches in the interest of the family" became a function of French police after World War I to reunite families disrupted by the conflict. Now, in a letter to police chiefs nationwide, the French Ministry of the Interior is telling police departments to end in-progress searches and refuse new requests to search for missing adults, unless there are signs the person may be in danger. Instead, police should direct people towards social networks.

In a way, this is a logical result of technology performing a task better than government can. In the early 20th century, police had one of the better networks for information, especially when they were organized on the national level, like in France. Combined with a governmental proclivity to collect information on citizens, be it for taxes or land registry or through other legal documents, the best place to find information on someone was in government records. It made sense, then, that a bureaucracy already tasked with finding and recording information on persons of interest would be a natural fit for reuniting families.

These days, social media networks allow private citizens to easily dig up information on just about anyone. A single individual with a internet access today may be more equipped to find a missing person than an entire police department was a century ago.

French police aren't abandoning all missing person searches—those in danger, like crime victims, missing children, or suicidal people, fall under a different procedure, one still very much in line with police operations. Instead, police are handing off the less urgent requests, like finding a deadbeat behind on child support payments, to citizens themselves.

It's a brilliant labor-saving move by the French police, but it has an uncomfortable footnote. What does it mean when social media companies possess far more information about us than governments a century ago had about our great-grandparents?

Hold on a second, let me tweet that.

New Water-Repellant Fabric Is Like A Second Skin

Colin Lecher — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:30:00 GMT

A tiny channel of canals directs water away from where it shouldn't be.

We've seem some neat ideas for water-repellant materials that suggest sweat stains will one day be as dead as dial-up. Here's one more: Researchers at the University of California, Davis, are developing a fabric that acts like human skin, channeling and releasing excess moisture.

Beads of sweat form and fall when there's excess water on the body, and the idea behind this project is similar: hydrophilic threads are stitched into a fabric made from a hydrophobic material. Put water in touch with the fabric, and the water will be pushed toward the hydrophilic material, then drawn through gaps and expelled on the other side. (Sweat itself actually doesn't smell; that smell's released by bacteria on skin breaking down proteins in the sweat. So hopefully a sweater made out of this stuff wouldn't be gross for everyone nearby.) All the other parts, meanwhile, stay "completely dry and breathable."

Going to the gym in the future is going to be the best.

U.S. Army Creates Shoebox-Size Universal Battery Charger

Kelsey D. Atherton — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

It charges eight batteries and two USB devices at once.

Battery chargers are finally getting a military upgrade. This is big! Not in a literal sense—that honor goes to the previous battery charger used by the U.S. Army, which was the size of a suitcase and either vehicle-mounted or left to rest on a table. It was hardly something a soldier could carry into the battlefield or on patrol.

Now, the military has downsized to a charger smaller than a shoebox. Dubbed, creatively, the Universal Battery Charger, the new charger weighs only six pounds. It can charge eight batteries and two USB devices at once, which is useful for the GPS systems, radios, and smartphones soldiers keep with them. The charger itself can draw power from available electrical sources. According to Marc Geitter, an engineer on the project, this includes generators, fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines, and vehicle cigarette lighters.

Soldiers aren't always near available power sources, so the Universal Battery Charger will come with a foldable solar panel. Additionally, the new charger is designed specifically to work with another (very awesome) army development in portable energy, the Re-using Existing Natural Energy Wind and Solar System, or RENEWS. Transported in two 70 pound cases, RENEWS is a portable wind turbine with solar panels that can power two or three laptops continuously. Combining it with the Universal Battery Charger adds versatility to the system, and gives soldiers access to power even when far beyond the grid.

Who Wouldn't Want To Stay In This Totally Insane Space Hotel!?

Colin Lecher — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

It's got a wind tunnel! Also: a zero-gravity spa!

Last week, the U.S.-based consortium Mobilona unveiled plans for this crazy building: a futuristic "space" hotel filled with stuff you associate with ideas about the future from, like, the 1930s. The 984-foot, 1.5 billion euro ($1.9 billion) building would include a vertical wind tunnel, a 24-hour shopping mall, a marina for parking yachts, and a zero-gravity spa (not even totally clear how that works). It would all be stationed on an artificial island.

So who wouldn't want this? Oh, maybe a major city in a country devastated by the economic downturn.

When Mobilona submitted plans for the project to planning officials in Barcelona, they got some icy responses. "We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project (for the city) will follow a different path," the city's mayor said in a TV interview.

Bummer! With prices like 300 to 1,500 euros per room (about $390 to $1,900), it could make for an affordable place to take the kids on a zero gravity spa/wind tunnel trip. Or you could splurge and get the six-story mansion penthouse full-time for 70 million euros, or about $90 million.

Oh, well. Maybe they'll have better luck in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, where they're also planning similar behemoths.

[Telegraph]

Big Pic: Eruption Of Alaska's Pavlof Volcano, As Seen From The International Space Station

Clay Dillow — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

The crew aboard the International Space Station managed to snap these three striking images of Alaska’s Pavlof Volcano a few days ago, which capture (via their oblique angles) just how far these plumes can stretch and how huge they can be (we usually see these images from directly above, so it’s hard to tell just how big they really are).

Pavlof is in the Aleutian Island arc, some 625 miles southwest of Anchorage. It began erupting last week, spewing an ash plume 20,000 feet into the air. For orientation purposes: The plume is extending southeastward, back toward the mainland United States.

[NASA Earth Observatory]

Obama Set To Reboot Drone Strike Policy And Retool The War On Terror

Clay Dillow — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:30:02 GMT

In a major counterterrorism address today, President Obama is expected to announce a significant shift in the drone policy that has been the cornerstone of his war on terror.

At 2 p.m. ET today, President Obama will address a crowd at National Defense University in D.C. to spell out some of the biggest vagaries of his administration--policies that are central to America’s security and foreign policy that, nonetheless, have been shrouded in official secrecy, opaque statements of accountability, and open-ended legal jargon that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

In today’s speech, Obama is expected to discuss the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay (which, despite 2008 campaign promises, remains open) and the future of America’s war on terror now that Osama bin Laden has been, how shall we say, rendered irrelevant. But policy wonks and national security nerds are mostly interested in Obama’s spelling out of the legal rationale that will govern lethal drone strikes going forward.

These three topics are deeply intertwined, of course. With the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and a reduced American presence in the regions regarded as power bases for the likes of al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and the Taliban, American security and intelligence forces have only two real options. Strike at suspected terrorists with drones, or somehow capture those suspects and detain them (at some place like Guantanamo).

It would seem that if the war on terror is going to continue (and it is--for another 10 or 20 years according to one recently-quoted Pentagon official) then it seems that either detention or the use of lethal strikes must increase. But that’s not really the case, and in today’s speech Obama is expected to outline why the administration thinks so.

In his first major counterterrorism address of his second term, the President is expected to announce new restrictions on the unmanned aerial strikes that have been the cornerstone of his national security agenda for the last five years. For all the talk about drone strikes--and they did peak under Obama--such actions have been declining since 2010. And it seems the administration finally wants to come clean (somewhat) about what it has been doing with its drone program, acknowledging for the first time that it has killed four American citizens in its shadow drone wars outside the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, something the public has known for a while now but the government has refused to publicly admit.

The Obama administration will also voluntarily rein in its drone strike program in several ways. A new classified policy signed by Obama will more sharply define how drones can be used, the New York Times reports, essentially extending to foreign nationals the same standards currently applied to American citizens abroad. That is, lethal force will only be used against targets posing a “continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and who cannot be feasibly captured or thwarted in any other way. This indicates that the administration’s controversial use of “signature strikes”--the killing of unknown individuals or groups based on patterns of behavior rather than hard intelligence--will no longer be part of the game plan. That’s a positive signal, considering that signature strikes are thought to have resulted in more than a few civilian casualties.

Reportedly there’s another important change in drone policy in the offing that President Obama may or may not mention in today’s speech: the shifting of the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere (likely Yemen and Somalia as well) from the CIA to the military over the course of six months. This is good for all parties involved. The CIA’s new director, John Brennan, has publicly said he would like to transition the country’s premier intelligence gathering agency back to actual intelligence gathering and away from paramilitary operations--a role that it has played since 2001 but that isn’t exactly in its charter.

Putting the drone strike program in the Pentagon also places it in a different category of public scrutiny. The DoD can still do things under the veil of secrecy of course, but not quite like the CIA can (the military is subject to more oversight and transparency than the clandestine services in several respects, and putting drones in the hands of the military also changes the governing rules of engagement).

So what does this all mean for the war on terror? If Obama plans to create a roadmap for closing Guantanamo Bay and draw down its drone strike program, it suggests that the administration thinks we are winning--as much as one can win this kind of asymmetric war. It appears the war on terror is shifting toward one in which better intelligence will lead to more arrests and espionage operations to thwart terrorists rather hellfire missile strikes from unseen robots in the sky.

The drones aren’t going anywhere--they’ll be a key technology piece deployed in those intelligence gathering operations. But much to the relief of drone-strike opponents, it appears America’s policy of using lethal drone strikes to regularly eliminate her enemies--and whoever happens to be standing in proximity--will be put on a much tighter leash. Counterterrorism will go back to being more of a law enforcement exercise than a military “seek and destroy” mission. Lethal drone strikes will still occur, but their more judicious application is a welcome shift in policy for many Americans--and certainly for people in the parts of the world where they have been most prevalent.

The World’s Largest Lego Model Is A Life-Size X-Wing [Video]

Corinne Iozzio — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

How’d they do it?

Click here to enter the gallery

This morning, Lego opened up a gigantic box in Times Square. Inside: a full-scale replica of an X-wing fighter made entirely of Lego bricks. It’s the single-largest Lego sculpture in history, claiming more than 5.3 million bricks and weighing nearly 46,000 pounds. Last week, far away from the mayhem of midtown Manhattan, we had the chance to preview the sculpture, learn about the engineering that goes into a project of its scale, and (most importantly) sit in the cockpit and high-five Lego Luke Skywalker.

We met with Erik Varszegi, a Lego Master Builder based at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Connecticut, in a hanger at Ronkonkoma airport on Long Island. Varszegi is one of 32 builders who spent a combined 17,336 hours constructing the model (that’s about four months, if you do the math). Here’s how they do it:

Every Lego model starts as a computer model. Designers use a proprietary software called Lego Brick Builder. The software first draws a grid over any 3-D object (a tank, a plane, the Death Star), and then it reinterprets that grid as Lego bricks. Corners are corners, while contours and curves become slowly sloping staircases of bricks.

brightcove.createExperiences();

The X-wing fighter, which stands 11 feet tall with a wingspan of 43 feet, is a precise 42-times scale model of the same kit you can buy at Toys ‘R’ Us. That means for every one-by-one Lego peg on the kit, there’s a 42-by-42 square on the sculpture. (And yes, there is a raised “LEGO” logo on each of those gigantic pegs.)

This model has an added complication: after its time in NYC, the X-wing will travel cross-country to Legoland in California, a state with a set of stringent seismic standards. The computer models help designers plan an intricate steel infrastructure that will ensure the X-wing won’t shatter in a quake. It’s also strong enough for you to sit in the cockpit or perch atop one of the engines.

After the steel substructure is complete, builders go about constructing the model one layer at a time. A temp-to-perm solvent binds the bricks together—after they’ve been clicked together. Builders put a dollop of glue inside each of the holes on the underside of a brick; the glue cures overnight, reacting with the plastic to fuse the two together permanently. Mistakes do happen, Varszegi admits, so if they catch a mistake the next morning, they can pry apart bricks with a little elbow grease and perhaps a flathead screwdriver.

The team also added some (literal) bells and whistles to the final sculpture. The engines have lights and speakers, and so they light up and cycle through a pre-programmed series of launch and battle sounds. Not to be outdone, R2D2 also chimes in.

For projects of this scale, Lego maintains a facility in Kladno, Czech Republic. Once it’s completed, the fighter breaks down into 14 separate pieces that are packed in custom shipping containers and delivered by boat. For the move to Times Square, it was separated into four segments and was loaded onto trucks.

The X-wing unseats the Herobot 9000 robot at the Mall of America as the largest Lego sculpture in the world. Though ‘bot stands about 34 feet tall, it has slightly less than 3 million bricks and is grossly outweighed by the X-wing’s tonnage. “It’s almost too big,” said Varszegi “from far enough away, you can’t really tell it’s Lego.” Sorry Erik, to us that’s the best part.

Why Don't We Have More Drones Monitoring Wildfires?

Kelsey D. Atherton — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Infrared eyes and remote pilots have a lot to offer forest firefighters.

Remote-controlled drones are much better at flying through smoke than human pilots: their infrared eyes can track the edge of a fire even through the thickest air. When the Forest Service asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to use unmanned aerial systems to monitor wildfires, the FAA said no, but offered an exemption: the Forest Service could fly the drone, so long as an operator on board another aircraft could see it at all times.

That undermines the whole reason for using a drone, of course, but such is the curious state of drone regulation today. In 2015 the FAA will pass new rules opening airspace to far more unmanned vehicles, and should have guidelines in place for how firefighters and law enforcement officials use drones.

Until then, organizations have to get authorization from the FAA to fly drones domestically. There's a growing list (and accompanying map) of groups that have FAA permission to fly drones. Groups not on that list have to request permission from the FAA to operate drones on a case by case basis, a process that can take days and has limited applicability in emergency situations. And even if an organization like the Forest Service gets timely permission, that permission often comes with the stipulation that drones be followed with a manned chase plane. Flying through smoke is a great task for a drone, but requiring another plane to follow along behind it defeats the whole point of using an unmanned plane in the first place.

Flying tracking the edges of forest fires should be one of the least controversial uses of drones ever. Congress has to approve of the FAA rules before they can take effect in 2015. It remains to be seen whether Congress will respect the difference between drones that save lives and drones that violate privacy.

[New York Times]

Navy Completes First Flight Of Game-Changing MQ-4C Triton Spy Drone [Video]

Clay Dillow — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:15:00 GMT

The long-range maritime drone will give the U.S. unprecedented surveillance of the world's oceans.

For the U.S. Navy and Northrop Grumman, it's shaping up to be a banner year in unmanned flight. While the carrier-based autonomous X-47B continues to hit milestones aboard the USS George H.W. Bush somewhere off the East Coast, out west in Palmdale, Calif., today the Navy flew its MQ-4C Triton maritime drone for the first time, marking the beginning of a sea change (pardon the pun) in the way the U.S. military patrols the oceans. The drone flew for 80 minutes and reached an altitude of 20,000 feet.

The Triton isn’t a completely new platform. If it looks familiar, that’s because everyone from the U.S. Air Force to NASA has been using its cousin--Northrop Grumman’s reliable Global Hawk--for years now, for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, and meteorological data gathering, among other things. Triton is essentially an upgrade of the Global Hawk, optimized for maritime environments, with a strengthened airframe and de-icing features that allow it to rapidly ascend to and descend from high altitudes.

Those upgrades allow Triton to fly at altitudes nearly ten miles above sea level (its ceiling is listed as 60,000 feet, though it will likely stick to the 53,000-55,000 for most missions) for 24 hours at a time. That high vantage point allows its advanced sensors to take in a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction. Carrying the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) sensor package (Popular Science awarded BAMS a Best of What’s New award last year) along with a classified advanced radar system, Triton will be able to both detect and identify ships on the water.

That is, rather than registering as a simple blip on the radar screen, BAMS will be able to generate a picture of the shape of the ship and use that to identify it by profile. In that way, it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine--from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton's strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.

That’s if everything works as advertised, and both Triton and BAMS are still in the early stages of development. The first flight by Triton is a big step forward. Though it’s built on the back of the tested Global Hawk platform, the tweaks that have been made to the design are significant. In fact, a Global Hawk lent to the Navy by the Air Force for testing crashed at Naval Air Station Pax River last year--an event that was seen at the time as a potential setback for Triton and BAMS. So today’s first flight is significant, as it marks the first airborne tests of a Triton and the beginning of the shift toward a brand new maritime capability.

That new capability is also quite significant. The Navy wants 68 Tritons based at five locations around the globe. Flying in rotations, they will be able to keep unprecedented tabs on the world’s critical sea lanes and important littorals, working alongside and supporting the manned P-8A Poseidon mission (the Poseidon is replacing the P-3 Orion anti-sub warfare aircraft; basically the Triton, which is unarmed, will conduct the ISR and the Poseidon will handle any kinetic strikes or electronic warfare, should it be necessary). And because the Triton is unmanned and autonomous, it will require less intensive human labor to fly as well as less risk to human pilots.

"When operational, the MQ-4C will complement our manned P-8 because it can fly for long periods, transmit its information in real-time to units in the air and on ground, as well as use less resources than previous surveillance aircraft," said Rear Adm. Sean Buck, Patrol and Reconnaissance Group commander, in a statement. "Triton will bring an unprecedented ISR capability to the warfighter."

That’s still a few years away, but today marks a critical step for the maritime capability, and a second huge leap forward for autonomous flight in just more than a week.

Should Photojournalists Be Permitted To Manipulate Photos?

Dan Nosowitz — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:00:49 GMT

In the wake of the scandal around the winner of the World Press Photo award, which was found to have been manipulated significantly with Photoshop, it seems like the right time to discuss this sort of editing. Our sister publication, American Photo, has an excellent interview with Fred Ritchin, a professor at NYU, author, photojournalist, and activist against unannounced digital manipulation of images. Check out the full interview here.

This Newer, Stronger 3-D Printed Gun Costs Just $25

Clay Dillow — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:15:00 GMT

A Wisconsin engineer has produced a cheaper, more durable version of Defense Distributed's 3-D printed pistol on an inexpensive, consumer-grade printer.

Defense Distributed’s plastic, 3-D printed “Liberator” single-shot handgun was here for a moment and then it was gone in more than one sense. For one, the news cycle turned over. Moreover, the State Department came down on Defense Distributed asking it to pull the CAD file for the Liberator off its servers until the lawyers could figure out if putting a free, downloadable CAD file up on the Web violated any arms export regulations. But the Liberator is back and--presumably to Defense Distributed co-founder Cody Wilson’s glee--it is evolving.

By the time the State Department asked Defense Distributed to pull down the CAD file for the Liberator, it was already replicating across the Web. And one of the people who appears to have gotten his hands on it is a Wisconsin engineer who identified himself to Forbes only as “Joe.” Joe has printed what he adorably calls the “Lulz Liberator” on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3-D printer--a printer that is far less expensive than the industrial-grade one used by Wilson and company to create the original Liberator, which essentially was a disposable pistol--one shot and the barrel breaks, requiring the user to print another.

Joe’s Lulz Liberator--cost: $25--successfully fires eight rounds through a single barrel (and a ninth round through a replacement barrel) in the video below, proving that plastic guns have already leapt beyond the one-shot-per-print limitation. The Lulz Liberator is still a single-shot weapon--that is, it only holds a single round at a time--but it can be reloaded and fired multiple times using a single barrel.

Joe made his Lulz Liberator from PA-747 ABS plastic, a standard kind of ABS that is the working material for most consumer-grade 3-D printers. Yet he claims that it’s stronger than the more expensive stuff Wilson prints with in his larger, more costly Stratasys printer. Joe also augmented his version with a few components not found on the original Liberator, which is all plastic except for the firing pin made from a standard nail. The Lulz Liberator uses a metal nail for a firing pin, but also employs metal screws--available for pennies at your local hardware store--to hold the body of the firearm together rather than relying on plastic pins as Wilson's does. And like Wilson’s, it contains a non-functioning piece of steel designed to bring it into alignment with the Undetectable Firearms Act.

The Lulz Liberator reportedly misfired several times during tests, and some of the screws and firing pins had to be replaced throughout the testing. Reloading is also no simple matter; each spent .380 cartridge expanded enough that they had to be pounded free of the chamber with a hammer. So it’s not like the Lulz Liberator is a rapid-fire, or even a semi-rapid fire plastic firearm.

What it is: A confirmation that Wilson’s Liberator design indeed functions the way he says it does, as well as proof that now that this thing is out there in the maker ecosystem it’s going to evolve independent of Wilson and Defense Distributed.

One key difference between Wilson’s Liberator and Joe’s Lulz Liberator: the Lulz Liberator design file is not available for download online and it’s unclear if or when Joe might release it into the wild. But it doesn’t really matter. Defense Distributed’s file is still circulating out there, and it’s unlikely Joe is the only maker out there tinkering with new ways to make better firearms from cheap plastic.

[Forbes]

Headset Zaps Video Gamers' Brains For Better Reflexes

Colin Lecher — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:45:31 GMT

For when you just HAVE to beat everyone at Call of Duty.

Foc.us is a company that makes headsets for gamers. Those headsets, starting to ship in July, send electricity through your brain. This is their pitch:

Overclock your brain using transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to increase the plasticity of your brain. Make your synapses fire faster.

Faster Processor, Faster Graphics, Faster Brain!

If that sounds a little sketchy to you, that's because it probably should.

The excellent NeuroBollocks blog explains how transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) is an interesting idea: sending targeted, low-level electric currents through the brain with TDCS excites certain regions, which could have implications in treating depression and stroke victims. Plug in a patient for 20 minutes, and you could get the effects for up to days at a time. So foc.us is marketing $249 headsets ("Maximum 2 headsets per order.") that claim to "[e]xcite your prefrontal cortex," thus improving your gaming ability. To the company's credit, at least one study suggests hooking up a 9-volt to your skull could improve gaming ability, although that was all done in the lab, under professional supervision.

That's definitely not the only field TDCS is exploring. Brain-zapping for medical (or extra-medical) purposes has been around for years: Giovanni Aldini was using electricity to treat treat patients with personality disorders in the early 19th century. But with the rise of brain scans able to show the results of electricity pumped into the brain, TDCS and related processes like transcranial random noise stimulation are undergoing a boom. TDCS, although still controversial, could be used to improve math skills (or get you high).

Still, NeuroBollocks outlines some of the issues with foc.us's claims:

So – does it work? Possibly… But it almost certainly doesn’t do what the company says it does. For a start, if you want to “get the edge in online gaming” wouldn’t you want to stimulate your motor cortex (at the top of the head) and/or the visual cortex (at the back)? It’s unclear how stimulating the prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead) would give you an advantage in games. In fact, (as this article explains) placement of the electrodes over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is most often used for treatment of depression and chronic pain, so potentially these devices might have more of an effect on mood or emotions than any useful gaming-related functions.

Sure, the process could result in skin lesions, and there's still some debate over what's a safe amount of electricity to juice yourself with, but do you want to beat your friends at video games or not? (Engadget tried out a prototype and noted "a strange, almost burning, sensation.")

And no: according to the foc.us website, the headset isn't FDA-approved: "The focus gamer headset offers no medical benefits, is not a medical device, and is not regulated by the FDA."

Can't we go back to the good old days, like three weeks ago, when people were just shocking themselves to improve video games for fun?

[NeuroBollocks]

How Toys Are Preparing Kids For A Future With Robotic Friends

Corinne Iozzio — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:37:36 GMT

Introducing Generation Robot

For Christmas in 1993, my father gave me a My Magic Diary, a children’s version of Casio’s digital organizer. From that point on, I always had some iteration of that device—whether a PalmPilot or the iPhone 5 I carry today. Like most others my age, I was raised around mobile devices, so now as an adult, I’m generally unfazed by a new phone or tablet or piece of software. The next generation, Generation Z, will be raised with something entirely different. That thing will be robots.

Just as I had my little digital organizer, children today are growing up in a world where people touch and talk to their gadgets. Whether it’s on their mother’s iPad or a kid-friendly LeapPad tablet (a touchscreen device that plays interactive educational games), children are learning to interact with devices in new ways. “With touchscreens, there’s an intuitive interaction with what they’re craving,” says Jody Sherman LeVos, a child-development expert at LeapFrog. And that interaction is not limited to touch. Speech- and facial-recognition software lets kids talk to gadgets—and lets the gadgets talk back.

Kids’ perception of technology is different. Devices can be friends or teachers, not just tools.Because children are accustomed to this social relationship, their perception of technology and its purpose differs from those of their parents. Devices can be friends or teachers, not just tools or entertainment. Last year, a team at Boston-based research firm Latitude asked children to imagine how robots could fit into their lives. Sixty-four percent imagined a social humanoid, and the bots were more likely to act as tutors, playmates, or companions than exclusively as maids or assistants.

Members of Generation Z will also be the first to have advanced robot companions at home. Last fall, Hasbro released a new generation of Furby that gathers data from sensors—including an accelerometer that measures how gentle or rough a child is with the toy—and changes its personality based on how it’s treated.Several more robots launching this year, including Romo and WowWee RoboMe, use a smartphone as a computing brain, so they’re able to utilize the camera and facial recognition to react to people. (The toy market has been a proving ground for innovative technologies before; the Speak & Spell, for one, was the first device with a single-chip voice synthesizer when Texas Instruments launched it in 1978.)

A generation of children raised with robots could power a new wave of innovation. Just like software development, which moved from labs to start-ups to anyone with even a passing interest in code, robotics development will become democratized. Current robotic platforms, such as the Robot Operating System developed at Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California, are open. Like a smartphone SDK, the OS turns robots into a canvas for a developer to create applications. In the same way kids as young as 12 are creating mobile apps today, they will create robot apps tomorrow. Need a trainer? A Spanish tutor? A friendly ear? Just download an app, and it’s literally there.

3 Robots That Want To Save Your Life

Kelsey D. Atherton — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Meet the machines that might rescue you after a future disaster.

Thanks to their mechanical strength and ability to operate in conditions too dangerous for humans, robots are poised to become the rescuers of the future. Here are three promising designs that could soon work alongside first responders to save lives after a disaster.

1. CHIMP: Carnegie Mellon scientists are designing a robot monkey tank, above, to climb ladders, roll over rubble, and most importantly, open doors. Designed to work in human-sized spaces, CHIMP will be partially autonomous, which means it should be able to navigate through a disaster area with little human input. CHIMP is just one of several designs competing in a DARPA challenge to build robotic first responders.

2. The Robotic Safety Crawler: From Japan, this robot is basically a remote-controlled, super-strong stretcher. The crawler, which can transport a person of up to 250 pounds, was created for the police department of Yokohama, Japan, to help carry victims to safety after an earthquake. It features an infrared camera (so the driver can navigate from afar) and interior sensors that can monitor a patient's blood flow and other vital signs.

3. Snake Robot: This slighty scary 'bot is designed to slither through narrow gaps and under debris, making it ideal for navigating collapsed buildings. With a camera, lights, and audio sensors, the snake robot could find trapped people even before emergency workers begin to clear rubble. They can even be paired with rescue dogs, which should make them a bit less terrifying.

Read about an awesome rescue drone here.

IBM's Watson Is Bringing "Cognitive Computing" to Customer Service

Clay Dillow — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:58:49 GMT

It will be powering smartphone apps by the end of the year too.

IBM’s Watson computing platform made a name for itself on Jeopardy, but its incremental roll-out into the real world has been no less impressive. It has worked in finance at Citi helping to assess risk and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center sifting through medical cases and data to help oncologists make the right diagnoses. Now the supercomputer is rolling out to the masses as a computerized customer service agent designed specifically to help customers connect with the information they want at a variety of firms in a variety of businesses, including Australian finance house ANZ, at media ratings maker Nielsen, and at Royal Bank of Canada.

This new offering of Watson, known as IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, will give customer service transactions a layer of cognitive computing help, leveraging Watson’s unique skills to make those transaction go more smoothly. Those unique skills include Watson’s ability to understand context and to learn as it goes, giving it far deeper insight and the ability to return far more meaningful answers than a simple Web search can.

The reason Watson can do this is because it is more or less designed like a human brain. That is, where a Web search is great for finding certain blocks of text out there on the Internet or sifting through structured data sets, Watson works well with unstructured data, or data that hasn’t been organized into a database. Web search can find you a snippet of text within a sea of words as directed by the terms of your search. Watson can understand both the nuance of your question and the context of the text surrounding your potential answer, wherever it lives out there on the Web. As such, Watson’s answers tend to be more meaningful.

On top of that, Watson can learn as it goes. So imagine Watson working alongside your financial planner. Your planner asks you questions, you answer, Watson remembers your answers. Watson is also sifting through an Internet’s worth of financial data as well as your specific financial data, looking at your transactions and the economy in your city and state and the global economy and several anecdotal, unstructured stories and opinion on the municipal bond market, in which you have invested a meaningful portion of your savings. You can ask your advisor a specific question about your portfolio and its prospects for the near term, and he or she might have to get back to you with the answer. Watson can put a good answer in front of the both of you instantly.

And it doesn’t stop there. Beyond being a client-relations assistant, IBM is also bringing Watson directly to the masses via an “Ask Watson” feature that offers help to customers via various channels, including email, text, and chat. Considering nearly half of the 270 billion customer-service-related calls go unresolved every year, Watson’s cognitive ability could go a long way toward alleviating load stress on call centers and in resolving customer service issues (imagine calling the help desk only to find you can’t get a live person on the phone and you still get to walk away satisfied).

IBM Watson Engagement Advisor will roll out with a handful of companies (including those listed above over the next few months, during which it will be evaluated for a variety of tasks (ANZ will use it to evaluate insurance portfolios to help customers determine where they are over-insured and where they are exposed, while Nielsen will roll it into the software tools that help its clients in media planning figure out where to buy their ad space) before being released into the larger ecosystem.

Keep an eye on it, as it will likely grow into something larger, and quickly (IBM says the first Watson-powered consumer apps will emerge later this year). Imagine a voice-activated Watson assistant that understands your linguistic nuance and learns from your past queries what to expect in the future. In other words, imagine a Siri that really works.

[IBM]

Russia Is Building Robots To 'Neutralize' Terrorists

Clay Dillow — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:02:09 GMT

Though it hasn't explained exactly how, the Russian government says it is building robots that will minimize casualties during terrorist attacks and engage terrorists directly.

It’s hard to tell sometimes what’s real and what’s bluster in the world of arms development, but it’s notable nonetheless that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has publicly revealed that Russian experts are developing robots designed specifically to minimize casualties in terrorist attacks. Oh, and also to neutralize those terrorists. What could possibly go horribly, horribly, terribly wrong?

The Russian defense industry (which Rogozin oversees) has not yet revealed exactly what these robots will be capable of or when they will be deployed, only that it is building them and that they would be able to evacuate injured soldiers and police or civilians from the scenes or terrorist attacks. They will also be able to engage terrorists at a distance without harming any hostages they might have.

Again, they haven’t said exactly how they are going to engage terrorists at a distance without harming hostages, but what’s most important here is that they’re going to. The robots are being developed alongside other anti-terror technologies, including those that can see terrorists through obstacles.

Ostensibly these robots will also be able to disperse crowds of terrorists, round up terrorists for imprisonment or questioning, or even “neutralize” terrorists that haven’t yet done anything wrong but that the Russian state finds to be potential threats. Fortunately these robots will only be used against terrorists, because if you replace “terrorist” with just about any other group of people this paragraph becomes fairly unsettling.

[RIA Novosti]

NASA Invests In 3-D Food Printer For Mars Missions

Colin Lecher — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:01:28 GMT

Making pizza out of insect meal, instantly

It would take a lot of food to get astronauts to Mars, but what if they could get whatever they wanted at the push of a button?

NASA is funding an ambitious 3-D printing food project that wants to make that happen, Quartz reports. The space agency's handing over to mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to spend building a prototype universal food synthesizer. And it could make pizza.

Contractor's food synthesizer would print layers of food from cartridges of powders and oils, creating a perfectly nutritious meal. (It can actually print from any "organic" material with the right ingredients inside, so insect-based pizza may be the proteinaceous meal of choice.) Contractor has already made a chocolate printer as a proof of concept, and now is moving on to a pizza printer.

A pie's a good candidate for this because its made from discrete sections. Each print head would only have the job of printing : either the dough, which would be cooked by a hot plate while being printed; the sauce, which would be a mixture of tomato powder, oil, and water; or the ambiguous, gross-sounding "protein layer," which could be made from milk, animals, or plants.

The cartridges would all have a 30-year shelf-life, enough time for, say, a trip to Mars. The astronauts can switch to real cooking once they get there.

[Quartz via Verge]

Oklahoma Students Design Drones That Can Fly Into Tornadoes

Kelsey D. Atherton — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

The remotely piloted vehicles could one day replace storm chasers, who risk their lives to capture valuable data about tornadoes.

The best way for researchers to get information about a tornado is to send sensors high up into the storm—a maneuver that is too dangerous for a manned aircraft and, up until now, has been too complex for most remote-controlled craft.

Engineering students at Oklahoma State University have designed three concept drones that may solve this problem. Three teams of students came up with plans for Storm Penetrating Air Vehicles (SPAVs). The goal is for these remotely piloted machines to ultimately replace storm chasers, who risk life and limb driving after tornadoes to capture data.

Here's what the drones needed to be able to do:

Take off from a typical road
Be transportable by a standard flat-bed trailer
Lift off and land in 22 mph winds, with gusts of up to 28 mph
Fly for at least four hours at 5,000 feet without refueling
Carry at least one, preferably multiple, dropsondes into the weather system

Dropsondes? Dropsondes are cylinders full of sensors that can be dropped or carried (by aircraft or balloons) into storms, where they rapidly collect and transmit data about humidity, temperature, windspeed, and wind direction. The National Center for Atmospheric Research uses dropsondes to study hurricanes.

The SPAVs could serve as more powerful, reusable dropsondes, with onboard sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, altitude, GPS, and dew point depression, as well as an optical and infrared camera.

While these are only concepts for now, Jamey Jacob, the Oklahoma State University professor in charge of the project, is in talks with the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, and the University of Oklahoma to develop these systems for use by first responders.

Currently, there's no direct way for the Federal Aviation Administration to authorize such flights into storms, though Jacob told Popular Science that a professor at UC Boulder has received special exemptions in the past. It seems likely that these kind of unmanned vehicles will be covered by new FAA rules, which are set to allow drones into commercial airspace starting in 2015.

Russia's 'Space Ark' Returns All Of Its Lizards And Half Its Mice Safely To Earth

Clay Dillow — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:56:20 GMT

The longest orbital experiment dedicated purely to biology has returned to Earth.

Less than half of the rodents, lizards, fish, and other small animals that were lofted skyward last month made it back alive, but nonetheless Russian researchers are calling their so-called “Space Ark” mission--the longest-duration space mission ever dedicated purely to biological study--a success. After spending a month in space, the Russian Bion-M landed slightly off-target but safely in a Russian field yesterday.

The mission, which launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 19, marks the first time animals have flown in space for this long on their own. The study was designed to study the effects of long-term space flight on cell structure.

The animals are now on their way to Moscow for further study during which researchers from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences) will try to define and understand the effects of long-duration spaceflight on animal cells. That in turn should help pave the way for future human flights into space beyond Earth orbit.

[NBC]

Google Maps Helps People Find Families They Lost Decades Ago

Francie Diep — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:03:58 GMT

Among those of us who grew up with the Internet, some have found unexpected, outsize benefits.

If you moved away from a place soon after starting kindergarten and never went back—how much would you remember about the town? Just a corner of a distinctive building, perhaps, or a stand of trees under which you liked to play.

Luo Gang, who grew up in the Fujian Province in China, remembered only that his hometown had two bridges. He was abducted one day on his way to kindergarten and taken to a family nearly 1,000 miles away. His new family treated him as their own, but he still reviewed his old memories every night before going to bed, he told the South China Morning Post.

When he became an adult, he joined a Chinese website dedicated to locating missing children and submitted a rough sketch of what he remembered about home. Information from the volunteers, plus satellite images from Google Maps, helped him find his actual hometown, Guangan in the Sichuan Province, the South China Morning Post reported from Nhaidu, a Fujian news website.

The Internet is now awash in warm fuzzies from his story. Luo eventually reunited with his biological parents, who had worried about terrible things like whether he was well clothed and fed.

Luo's story echoes that of Saroo Munshi Khan, who fell asleep on a train when he was five and was borne away from his hometown, whose name he didn't know. A nonprofit group eventually found him and put up a notice for him as a missing child. When no one responded, the group, the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, adopted him to an Australian couple.

Khan grew up in Australia. But after college, he began looking for his hometown on Google Maps, searching for landmarks a five-year-old kid would know. Like Luo, he eventually found and met his birth family.

[South China Morning Post]

Norwegian Geologists Begin Drone-Guided Quest For Oil

Clay Dillow — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:30:00 GMT

Using data collected by drones, a research team is building 3-D maps of Norway's geology to help companies track down hidden mineral wealth.

We’ve heard a lot from the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) community about the potential for drones to assist in oil and gas exploration, yet we’ve seen relatively little by way of example as companies across the world wait for aviation law to catch up with the technological reality. Not so in Norway, where a team from the Center for Integrated Petroleum Research (a joint project between the University of Bergen and Bergen-based Uni Research) is using UAS to look for oil reserves on land at at sea.

Members of the center's Virtual Outcrop Geology group are employing an octo-copter loaded with all kinds of sensors—high-definition cameras, infrared sensors, LIDAR scanners, etc.—to map the geography and geology of the Norwegian landscape from above. The group used to do this by sending teams out into the wilderness with ground-based laser scanners and other equipment to create digital maps of the terrain from the ground. But given Norway’s diverse geography, such ground mapping was often impossible, which forced the team to lease helicopters to capture what they couldn’t get themselves, often at very high cost.

The new drones can perform the same aerial mapping tasks as helicopters, quickly reaching high elevations and other inaccessible areas to generate 3-D terrain maps that can be integrated with data from geological and seismological studies to produce three-dimensional pictures of the Earth’s crust. These in turn can tell geologists a lot about where oil is likely to be hiding both on land and underneath the surrounding seabed.

And of course the drones can do all of this at a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional methods—which is one of the most promising aspects of UAS technology regardless of application. By putting the means to conduct aerial survey in the hands of individual users at a relatively reasonable cost, everything from wildlife management to geological survey to infrastructure maintenance has the potential to become more precise, more effective, and ultimately less expensive. Virtual Outcrop Geology's work is a case in point—even if cheaper oil and gas exploration methods aren’t going to translate into savings at the gas pump any time soon.

[University of Bergen]

Another Big Milestone For The X-47B: Its First Touch And Go Landing

Clay Dillow — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

The Navy's unmanned, autonomous combat jet demonstrator continues to successfully pass milestones for unmanned aviation

The Navy’s unmanned and autonomous X-47B continues to hit new milestones. Less than a week after completing its first catapult launch from a carrier deck last Tuesday the Unmanned Combat Aerials System (UCAS) executed its first touch and go landings--that's when an aircraft touches down like it's landing but then accelerates and takes off again--aboard the USS George H.W. Bush on Friday, bringing this technology demonstrator ever closer to being fully carrier-capable.

The X-47B is the Navy’s first modern unmanned fixed-wing aircraft to operate from a carrier deck and is currently proving out a suite of technologies that will enable a future program (known as Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system, or UCLASS) to produce an actual unmanned, autonomous combat jet for Navy service. Critical to UCLASS are the precision GPS and relative navigation technologies aboard both aircraft and carrier that link the two together into a seamless system, and that’s what we’re seeing at work in the video below.

In the video, the X-47B makes two passes over the carrier deck before executing a couple of touch and go maneuvers, which are essentially aborted landings wherein an aircraft touches down on the carrier deck and takes off again. They are a typical training maneuver, used when a pilot is practicing landing approaches. In carrier ops touch and go maneuvers are quite a bit more significant, as pilots must quickly take off again if they miss the arresting cable on the carrier deck when landing (although technically this is called a “bolter” rather than a “touch and go).

The two initial flyovers aren’t just for show, however, and that’s perhaps the most interesting part of the this video. During the two approaches wherein the X-47B doesn’t touch down it is basically practicing its landing approach plus a “wave off” in which either the Landing Signal Officer on the flight deck or the aircraft itself decides the landing is unsafe. This could be because something on the flight deck becomes unsafe (a person or vehicle wanders into the landing area, for instance) or because the X-47B’s flight computers detect something amiss with the aircraft’s glide path or angle of approach.

In other words, those first two flyovers are testing the ability of the carrier and aircraft to talk to each other over the super-fast datalink that they share--which is really the linchpin of this system. And the touch and go moments show the system working spectacularly, putting the X-47B on the deck and then sending it skyward again off the other end. The Navy is still certifying the X-47Bs tail hook and landing capability on a terrestrial carrier simulator at nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay (the USS George H.W. Bush is tooling around at some undisclosed set of coordinates off the Virginia/Maryland coast so the aircraft can fly between the two), but by the looks of things it shouldn’t have any problem completing carrier landings--and its mission--once it is cleared to do so.

[U.S. Navy]

South Pole Lab Detects Elusive Deep-Space Neutrinos For The First Time

Kelsey D. Atherton — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

After two years of searching, the icy observatory has finally found evidence of the high-energy particles, which may have come from a distant black hole or supernova.

It looks like the IceCube Observatory neutrino detector at the South Pole has found what it was looking for just two years after opening.

Neutrinos are strange subatomic particles that travel through the galaxy in straight lines, harmlessly passing through regular matter, and with their neutral charge they are free of the influence of magnetic fields. As such, neutrinos convey a lot more information than their diminutive stature suggests, leading astronomers back to their origins in high-energy cosmic events, like gamma-ray bursts, supernovas, black holes, or star formation. (There are other, less-interesting neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions, within the sun, or sometimes in manmade accelerators, but those carry less energy and are easy to distinguish from the high-energy, deep-space neutrinos.)

The IceCube Observatory is all about finding these extraterrestrial neutrinos. To do that, it takes advantage of one of the few things neutrinos collide with: ice. Antarctica has that in abundance; the next trick is catching those collisions. The observatory consists of over 5,000 optical sensors arrayed in strings throughout holes drilled into the ice, sometimes as far as a kilometer deep. These sensors can catch and record the flashes of light produced when a neutrino collides with ice. With the sensors in place, scientists sat back and waited for results in trickle in.

At an astrophysics symposium on Wednesday, University of Wisconsin–Madison postdoctoral fellow Nathan Whitehorn described 28 high-energy neutrino events observed by the Antarctic laboratory. Two of these events revealed neutrinos traveling faster than any ever observed in a manmade accelerator. A forthcoming publication is set to describe the events in more detail. For now, we just know the observatory is functioning, and scientists are ready to work with the data it generates.

[Phys.org]

Yahoo! Officially Acquires Tumblr For $1.1 Billion

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:17:18 GMT

Yahoo, a service people used to use, spends lots and lots of money on Tumblr, a service people use now. And by "people" we mean "teens." Hence the purchase.

Marissa Mayer, the new-ish CEO of Yahoo, announced this morning (though the purchase had been approved by Yahoo's board a few days earlier) that Yahoo will purchase Tumblr, the image-centric blogging and social network beloved by, mostly, teens. Her post was illustrated with a GIF, and posted on Tumblr. David Karp, the very young CEO of Tumblr, announced the acquisition on the staff Tumblr, ending with the salutation "Fuck yeah," because he is very young.

Yahoo has had a bad decade; the service was dominant in the early years of the internet with their "front page," a list of news and weather and updates that would routinely be set as a user's homepage. That led to other successes in search and email, but as Google became dominant in both those categories and the "front page" began to fall out of favor, Yahoo became a company with an aging and apathetic userbase. So they began acquiring other companies.

These have all turned out poorly. For an in-depth account, check out Mat Honan's piece for Gizmodo about the acquisition and destruction of Flickr, but that's just one of many. Geocities, del.icio.us, and so many more have also been nabbed by Yahoo.

Mayer, though, is a founding member of the early Google team, and was brought on to revitalize the brand. This is her first major acquisition, and man, is it a major one.

Tumblr is a blogging platform, but a closed system, unlike, say, Wordpress. Blogs are customizable, but only to a point, and the format encourages images and videos (and, especially, GIFs) rather than long wordy posts. More importantly, it's a massive social network, with 300 million unique visitors a month, commenting and sharing posts and joining and contributing to lots of little communities within Tumblr.

It's largely used by the youngs, with its largest demographic in the 18-24-year-old range. And it's a haven for the weirdest elements of internet culture, teen and otherwise--there's porn, there's objectionable content, and there's an awful lot of copyright infringement, all of which are things Yahoo has typically not tolerated. (Here is one extraordinarily NSFW example. DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK.)

The concern is that Yahoo will, as they've done before, stomp out the personality of Tumblr, inject advertising, alienate the users, and kill the community. (Tumblr, it's worth noting, has neither made nor seemed interested in ever making a profit.) Mayer seems determined not to follow this route, at least from her post, but Tumblr users are upset anyway. Wordpress noted that tens of thousands of Tumblr users had exported their Tumblrs to Wordpress after the announcement.

Navy Dolphins Searching For Mines Uncover Sunken 19th Century Torpedo

Colin Lecher — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:24 GMT

It's only the second torpedo of its kind ever found.

Dolphins have been used for 50 years to help the U.S. Navy echolocate mines. That project is going away in 2017 (to be replaced by robots) but in the meantime, a team of Navy dolphins have picked up something a little more vintage.

Off the coast of California, the dolphins, getting Navy training, uncovered what you see here: a Howell torpedo. From 1870 to 1889, a Rhode Island company produced a mere 50 of them, and it's only the second that's known to still exist (the other example is in a Keyport, Washington museum).

It might not look like much now, but back in the day, this was a top-shelf torpedo: the 11-foot, brass Howell could shoot 400 yards at 25 knots and was the first torpedo that could follow a track without leaving a wake, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Next step: get these dolphins to search for sunken pirate gold.

[Los Angeles Times]