Microsoft’s Latest Innovation “OmniTouch”, Turns Any Flat Surface into a Multi-Touch Screen

At a user interface symposium this week in Santa Barbara, Calif Microsoft Research presented their new technology that will transform any surface into a touch screen. This new technology is dubbed as OmniTouch and it is a wearable system that enables multi-touch input on “arbitrary, daily surfaces.

Hrvoje Benko of the Natural Interaction Research group at Microsoft added that “We wanted to take advantage of the terrific surface area the real world provides”

This technology unites a depth-sensing camera and laser-based pico projector, the latter not like Microsoft’s Kinect camera for the Xbox 360. But it has been re-designed to function at short range.

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Tablet app puts Braille keyboard at your fingertips

The lack of tactile feedback makes typing on a touchscreen difficult at the best of times, but the problem is even worse for blind and visually impaired users. That's set to change thanks to Adam Duran, a student on a summer course at Stanford University who has come up with aBraille keyboard for tablets.

The standard QWERTY keyboard on most tablets requires you to find small keys on a smooth, glass screen without any touchable clues to guide you. Instead, Duran's app offers a standard eight-key Braille keyboard that appears wherever you place your fingers on the screen.

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Three-way race to reach lost Antarctic lakes

Antarctic researchers are set to make first contact with long-lost lakes deep beneath the continent's ice – closely followed by second and third contact. Three expeditions will attempt to enter the hidden lakes over the next two years, in search of unknown kinds of life that have evolved in isolation. The projects could also determine if or when the west Antarctic ice sheet will collapse – one of the worst-case scenarios in future climate change.

Over the next few months a team from the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK, and other institutions will set up drilling equipment on the ice above Lake Ellsworth. They will return late next year to drill into the lake.

Ellsworth is buried under 3 kilometres of ice, in what was once a fjord. The team will break in by firing a jet of hot water into the ice. "We can get through those 3000 metres of ice in about three days," says lead scientist Martin Siegert of the University of Edinburgh, UK. The hot-water drill should also minimise contamination of the lake, as the melted pristine ice from the bottom of the borehole is cleaned and then used in the jet.

The hole will stay open for only 24 hours. During that time the team will lower in a probe to retrieve samples of water and sediment. A second probe will drill into the sediment on the lake floor and retrieve a core. Afterwards the hole will naturally close up. "It will be as if we were never there," Siegert says.

"We're confident we'll find life in the sediments," says Martyn Tranter of the University of Bristol, UK, but life in the nutrient-poor water is less likely. Tranter says any living things will be bacteria, perhaps feeding on sulphides from ground-up rock in the sediments.

Three kilometres above Lake Ellsworth (Image: British Antarctic Survey)

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NASA Awards the Largest Prize in Aviation History to an All-Electric, Super-Efficient Aircraft

Pipistrel's Taurus G4 NASA HQ Photo

NASA has awarded the single largest prize handed down in aviation history to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for designing and demonstrating its Taurus G4 electric aircraft. Per the rules of the NASA- and Google-sponsored CAFE Green Flight Challenge, Pipistrel’s Taurus G4 covered 200 miles in less than 2 hours and did so on the electricity equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per passenger, scoring $1.35 million for the effort.

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China Opens the World's Longest Bridge Over Water, Toppling American Record-Holder

Jiaozhou Bay Bridge Xinhua News Agency

Along with its massive high-speed rail network, China has officially surpassed the United States in yet another piece of transportation infrastructure: the world’s longest sea bridge.

The new bridge spans Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of China’s Shandong Peninsula in northeastern China. At 26.4 miles long, it beats Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — the previous world-record holder — by at least 2 miles, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

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Saudis Set to Build Kingdom Tower, Soon to be The World's Tallest Building

Kingdom Tower Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture

Saudi Arabia knows how to keep up with the Joneses. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai has officially been the world’s tallest building since its opening early last year, but by 2016-ish Saudi Arabia plans to let the UAE know exactly who the big brother is on the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis have inked a deal between the Kingdom’s holdings company and a certain Bin Laden Group to build the world’s tallest building, an elegant yet extreme tower that will rise 3,281 feet above the streets of Jeddah.

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Second big satellite set to resist re-entry burn-up

Even if NASA's 6-tonne UARS satellite does not cause any injury or damagewhen it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere today, there is more space junk headed our way next month. A defunct German space telescope calledROSAT is set to hit the planet at the end of October – and it even is more likely than UARS to cause injury or damage in populated areas.

No one yet knows where UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) will fall to earth. Although most of the craft's mass will be reduced to an incandescent plasma, some 532 kilograms of it in 26 pieces are forecast to survive – including a 150-kilogram instrument mounting.

NASA calculates a 1-in-3200 chance of UARS causing injury or damage. But at the end of October or beginning of November, ROSAT – a 2.4-tonne X-ray telescope built by the German aerospace lab DLR and launched by NASA in 1990 – will re-enter the atmosphere, presenting a 1 in 2000 chance of injury.

The higher risk stems from the requirements of imaging X-rays in space, says DLR spokesperson Andreas Schütz. The spacecraft's mirrors had to be heavily shielded from heat that could have wrecked its X-ray sensing operations during its eight-year working life. But this means those mirrors will be far more likely to survive a fiery re-entry.

Incoming! (Image: Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics)

Broken mirror, bad luck

On its ROSAT website, DLR estimates that "up to 30 individual debris items with a total mass of up to 1.6 tonnes might reach the surface of the Earth. The X-ray optical system, with its mirrors and a mechanical support structure made of carbon-fibre reinforced composite – or at least a part of it – could be the heaviest single component to reach the ground."

At the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, the head of thespace debris office, Heiner Klinkrad, agrees that ROSAT's design means more of it will hit the surface. "This is indeed because ROSAT has a large mirror structure that survives high re-entry temperatures," he says.

ROSAT was deactivated in 1999 and its orbit has been decaying since then. "ROSAT does not have a propulsion system on board which can be used to manoeuvre the satellite to allow a controlled re-entry," says space industry lawyer Joanne Wheeler of London-based legal practice CMS Cameron McKenna. "And the time and position of ROSAT's re-entry cannot be predicted with any precision due to fluctuations in solar activity, which affect atmospheric drag."

Solar swelling

US Strategic Command tracks all space objects and the US-government-run Aerospace Corporation lists both upcoming and recent re-entries on itswebsite. But ROSAT is not yet on the upcoming list because its re-entry time is far from certain.

The moment a craft will re-enter is difficult to predict because it is determined by two main factors. First, the geometry of the tumbling satellite as it enters the upper atmosphere, which acts as a brake. Second, the behaviour of the upper atmosphere itself, which grows and shrinks with the amount of solar activity, says Hugh Lewis, a space debris specialist at the University of Southampton, UK.

"Solar activity causes the atmosphere to expand upwards, causing more braking on space objects. The reason UARS is coming back sooner than expected is a sudden increase in solar activity. Indeed, we expect to see a higher rate of re-entries as we approach the solar maximum in 2013," he says.

But don't expect it to be raining spaceships – what's coming down is partly a legacy of 1990s space-flight activity. "Some of the re-entries we see today [with UARS and ROSAT] are a heritage of years with high launch rates, which were a factor of two higher than they are today," says Klinkrad.

"The trend is towards smaller satellites, with more dedicated payloads," he says, rather than "all-in-one" satellite missions on giant craft like UARS. That means debris from future missions should be smaller.

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Hardy 6-tonne satellite falls to Earth

Update: NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell back to Earth early on Saturday morning. NASA says it has not yet determined the exact point of re-entry, but the vast majority of the satellite's trajectory at the time was over water. However, it also passed over parts of west Africa and northern Canada. There have been no reports of damage or injury.

Original article, posted 20 September 2011:

Hit the deck! A 6-tonne, abandoned NASA satellite with some particularly hardy parts is zooming towards Earth.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) was launched in 1991 to study chemical changes in the Earth's upper atmosphere and decommissioned in 2005. NASA says it will probably re-enter Earth's atmosphere on 23 September, give or take a day.

"This is the largest NASA satellite to come back uncontrolled for quite a while," says Nick Johnson, chief scientist for NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will come home with a bang (Image: NASA)

Most of the satellite's mass should burn up but the agency has identified 26 parts likely to survive, including a 150-kilogram instrument mount and three 50-kilogram batteries. In total, more than half a tonne of debris should crash on Earth in a debris footprint some 700 kilometres long.

Cow flat

Based on the number of pieces the satellite is expected to break into, the total area it could potentially hit and the number of people in those areas, NASA estimates that it has a risk of approximately 1 in 3200 of injuring somebody (pdf).

That's well above the risk of 1 in 10,000 that NASA now requires before it launches a satellite, but UARS was designed and launched before NASA drew up those rules.

Johnson points out that no one has ever been seriously injured by space debris, although there are anecdotal reports that a cow was killed by debris from the Skylab space station, which re-entered over Australia in 1979.

Hugh Lewis, an expert in space-debris modelling at the University of Southampton, UK, agrees that the risk is low. "You have to remember that over 20,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres wide have re-entered the atmosphere since the beginning of the space age - and there have been no reported injuries from these events," he says. "At 1 in 3200, the probability of the surviving pieces of UARS causing injury are remote"

Legal unknown

If people or property were to be hit by the UARS debris they would chart new legal territory, says Joanne Wheeler, a specialist in space law at CMS Cameron McKenna in London, since neither the UN Outer Space Treaty nor the UN Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects have ever been tested in court.

NASA has not yet said where UARS will hit, other than somewhere between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south. That area spans northern Canada through to the southern tip of South America and most of Europe and Asia and so encompasses most of the world's 7 billion population, along with a huge swathe of ocean.

Any wannabe space-junk collectors, be warned. On its website, NASA says: "If you find something you think may be a piece of UARS, do not touch it. Contact a local law enforcement official for assistance."

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Engineers can build a low-carbon world if we let them

The engineering solutions to combat climate change already exist. Politicians must be brave enough to use them before it's too late

One word sums up the attitude of engineers towards climate change: frustration. Political inertia following the high-profile failure of 2009'sCopenhagen climate conference has coupled with a chorus of criticism from a vocal minority of climate-change sceptics. Add the current economic challenges and the picture looks bleak. Our planet is warming and we are doing woefully little to prevent it getting worse.

Engineers know there is so much more that we could do. While the world's politicians have been locked in predominantly fruitless talks, engineers have been developing the technologies we need to bring down emissions and help create a more stable future.

Wind, wave and solar power, zero-emissions transport, low-carbon buildings and energy-efficiency technologies have all been shown feasible. To be rolled out on a global scale, they are just waiting for the political will. Various models, such as the European Climate Foundation's Roadmap 2050, show that implementing these existing technologies would bring about an 85 per cent drop in carbon emissions by 2050. The idea that we need silver-bullet technologies to be developed before the green technology revolution can happen is a myth. The revolution is waiting to begin.

Climate call

The barriers preventing the creation of a low-carbon society are not technological but political and financial. That's why at a landmark London conference convened by the UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 11 national engineering institutions representing 1.2 million engineers from across the globe, under the banner of the Future Climate project, made a joint call for action at December's COP17 climate change conference in Durban, South Africa.

The statement calls on governments to move from warm words to solid actions. They need to introduce legislation and financial support to get these technologies out of the workshop and into our homes and businesses and onto our roads. Targeted regulation and taxation will also drive innovation. This will require bold politics, and spending at a time when money is scarce. It is far from unaffordable, however. The UK's Committee on Climate Change, which advises the British government, continues to support the view of theStern report – an assessment of the climate change challenge in the UK – that the move to a low-carbon society will cost no more than 1 per cent of GDP by 2050.

Resistance to wind turbines and the power lines they feed, nuclear power and electric cars, as well as the economic costs, all make public opinion a powerful brake on change. However the alternative seems certain to be worse. It is not only the challenges of a deteriorating climate: with inaction comes a great risk to our economy in the long term. The green technology revolution, just like the industrial revolution before it, will give jobs to those countries which have created the right conditions for it to flourish.

China in front

Which countries these will be is still an open question. India, Germany, Australia and the UK were among the nations signed up to the Future Climate statement, whereas the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters – China and the US – were not. When it comes to investment in clean technology, however, that's not the whole story.

Although China is continuing to build coal-fired electricity plants at an alarming rate to power its rapid economic growth, the UN Environment Programme confirmed last month that it is now by far the world's biggest investor in renewable energy. Last year, China's wind, solar and biomass power industries received $49 billion of new investment, a third of the global total, and it now has the largest installed wind capacity in the world. When predicting who the front runner in this next great technological revolution will be, it is difficult to see past the emerging superpower to the east.

The US is going in the opposite direction. A natural gas rush driven by the development of controversial "fracking" techniques over the past decade has echoes of the oil rush that transformed Texas a century ago. The Financial Times reports that just one company, BHP Billiton, is investing as much as $79 billion in US shale gas fields – over three times the amount invested in all US renewables in a year. This will secure cheap energy in the short term, but it is a finite resource and ultimately a dead end. In due course we could face the interesting prospect of the US turning to China to acquire its wind turbine technology.

Nuclear elephant

Investment in renewable energy is vital for a prosperous, low-carbon society. However, decision-makers cannot ignore the elephant in the room – nuclear power. The enormous cost of implementing 100 per cent renewable power is not realistic for most nations, so nuclear offers our best chance of making a low-carbon society achievable and affordable. Yet the incident at Fukushimaearlier this year has reinforced some long-standing concerns.

Unlike road use or smoking, nuclear power stirs anxieties in many of us that are out of proportion with its true risks. This is not to be complacent about the potential danger of a nuclear plant, but it is striking that nuclear power has killed fewer than 5000 people in its entire history. Compare that with coal mining, which in just one year and in one country – China in 2006 – killed 4700.

Germany's decision to phase out all nuclear power as a result of Fukushima will most likely have unintended consequences. The Association of German Engineers has estimated that it will cost €53 billion every year in Germany to close down its nuclear generation and switch to 100 per cent renewable energy. It will be interesting to see how public opinion, now so clearly against nuclear power, responds as the economic costs become apparent.

Any technological revolution requires two crucial ingredients – engineers to design, develop and manufacture the technology, and politicians to help create the legislative, behavioural and societal environment that allows change to happen. Today's engineers have fulfilled their side of the bargain. It is time for our politicians to show their mettle.

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New NASA Photos Show Footprints on the Moon

Footprints on the Moon NASA/LRO

In new photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can see the landing sites of some lunar craft, as well as the tracks left by those who flew in them. What creatures left these prints? A semi-dormant species known as the Earth astronaut; to be precise, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad, the crew of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

The windless moon preserves tracks in dust pretty nicely. In addition to this Apollo 12 shot (click to see it with labels), NASA has released images of the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 landing sites.

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NASA’s Leap Into Deep Space: Newly Announced Rocket Really Packs A Punch!

NASA’s new generation rocket will be the biggest and baddest rocket ever built. It is the next generation rocket meant for carrying very heavy loads of cargo into space, thanks to a giant booster. It will eventually carry astronauts into space, but that is still a long way away. It is a first step towards NASA’s endeavor for Deep Space Missions.

This announcement by NASA was made yesterday (14^th September, 2011).

The Space Launch System, as conceived of by an artist (Courtesy: NASA)

The Space Launch System

The new rocket is called the Space Launch System (SLS) and it will use liquid hydrogen in liquid oxygen as fuel to get the thrust that it intends to achieve.

The entire SLS program is worth at $18 billion, with the rocket alone costing $10 billion. This works out to $3 billion per year for NASA. The rocket will take some time coming, though. The first test flights are expected in faraway 2017.

SLS will use the still use the solid rocket boosters on either side of the SLS core main rocket. The carrying capacity is slated to be 70 metric tons initially, which will eventually touch 130 metric tons with upgrades. As for the amount of thrust, the SLS will deliver about 20 percent more thrust than the Saturn V rockets, which powered the Apollo missions. It will also be taller, at 403 feet, a clear 40 feet taller than the Saturn rockets.

Future bright, present controversial

This is the first concrete announcement of the future plan of progress for NASA after its 30 year Space Shuttle Program ended a couple of months back. In this time, NASA will be using private built rockets to journey to and from the International Space Station and, maybe, even have manned flights.

As with any big project, the SLS was recently embroiled in controversy after the Wall Street Journal published the news that NASA’s estimates for the SLS was nearly $63 billion! The source of this news was found to be a leaked memo and based on hypotheses, rather than facts. The actual costs are of the tune of $20 billion.

The rockets get bigger and bigger, trying to keep up with human ambitions in space.

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