The World's First Commercial Space Launchpad Is To Be In South Texas

Elon Musk has announced that Space X is to build the world's first commercial space launchpad-and it will be near Brownsville in south Texas, reportedly America's most impoverished region.

The state is pushing over $15 million into the facility, which is hoped to create 300 jobs and inject $85 million in capital investment into the local economy. The cash injection comes from numerous sources, including $2.3 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund and $5 million from the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation.

Governor Rick Perry explained that "Texas has been on the forefront of our nation's space exploration efforts for decades, so it is fitting that SpaceX has chosen our state as they expand the frontiers of commercial space flight." The plan is contingent upon final approval of local agreements and receipt of additional required permits, but, otherwise, an economy in need looks like it's about to get a hi-tech shot in the arm.

Article by Jamie Condliffe.

DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ makes it easier to grab smooth aerial video, photos

DJI's Phantom 2 Vision is pretty much the benchmark for ready-to-fly (RTF) quadcopters for aerial photos and video. Well, it was the benchmark until the new Phantom 2 Vision+ arrived.

The quadcopter itself seems unchanged from the Phantom 2 Vision. You'll find all the same convenience features like color-coded, self-tightening propellers for easy installation and replacement, and a slot-loading battery pack (no connectors to mess with here) that delivers up to 25 minutes of flight time. If you don't stop to charge up its batteries or read the manual, it can go from out of the box to up in the air in about 10 minutes.

The camera on the Vision+, though it looks different, also seems to be the same, at least in specs: an f2.8 lens paired with a 14-megapixel 1/2.3-inch CMOS sensor that can capture Adobe DNG raw or JPEG images and video at up to 1080p at 30fps. You can also control ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance, and choose from 140-, 120-, or 90-degree field of view.

 

 

The biggest change is what is supporting the camera. With the original Vision, the camera was on an antivibration platform stabilized only on the tilt axis and the tilting range during flight (remotely controlled through the mobile Vision app) had a range of 60 degrees. The Vision+, however, has a three-axis gimbal similar to the one available for use with a GoPro camera on the Phantom 2.

The gimbal actively stabilizes the camera in roll, pitch, and yaw directions keeping the video looking smooth even with sudden movements. Plus, the camera can now do a 90-degree tilt letting you shoot straight down.

DJI PHANTOM 2 VISION+

 

 

 

The quadcopter's integrated GPS autopilot system allows it to hover at a specific altitude and hold its position so you can get the exact shot you're after. The GPS also gives you a return-to-home fail-safe that will signal the Phantom to fly back to your takeoff spot and land in case you travel out of range or simply panic.

And if you're after more of a drone experience, the Phantom 2 Vision+ is fully compatible with DJI's Ground Station capabilities, which lets you plot a GPS path for the Phantom to navigate autonomously.

Also new for the Vision+ is increased range for the Wi-Fi extender. Sitting on a bar attached to the radio controller, the extender delivers the first-person view from the Vision+ camera to an Android or iOS device using the DJI Vision app (that can also be clamped on the controller). The Vision was capped at 300 meters, but the Vision+ can travel up to 700 meters (2,296 feet) away.

The app not only lets you pilot from a first-person perspective and control the camera, but it's also what delivers important telemetry and flight information such as altitude, direction, flight distance, and speed.

Lastly, DJI added a safety feature to prevent flights that are too close to large and small airports.

We'll have a full review in the near future, but if you know you want one, the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ is available for pre-order for $1,299.

Article by Joshua Goldman

LED lighting is so 2012: LG bets on an OLED lamp

LG is joining an industry effort to infuse the humdrum lighting market with the excitement -- and profits, and complexity -- of the computing and electronics business.

LG's OLED Table Lamp LG Electronics

Several companies offer smartphone-controlled LED light bulbs these days, but LG Electronics is trying to advance the state of lighting with another approach, too: an OLED table lamp.

The Korean company, which already has a strong home-appliances business, unveiled its OLED Table Lamp on Monday at the Light+Building 2014 trade show in Frankfurt. Instead of using conventional light-emitting diodes (LEDs), its light source is the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology that can be formed into a sheet.

The table lamp, like the company's new LED bulb, the Smart Lamp, has an LG app for iOS and Android that lets you control the bulb over Bluetooth. The app can adjust the lights to set modes for movies or reading, or dim gradually at night and turn on with an alarm.

There's nothing that prevents companies from equipping old-style incandescent or fluorescent lights from wireless control systems, but people generally see those products as commodities to be purchased at the lowest cost available. As the electronics and computing industry tries to expand into the previously humdrum lighting market, though, remote-control apps offer a reason to charge significantly more.

 

LG Electronics' Smart LampLG Electronics 

Wirelessly linked lighting eventually could ease integration with home-control systems that can help people save power and money, communicate with home theater and security systems, and maybe even coordinate with power companies and other homes for smoother operation of the electricity grid.

Newer electronic lighting technologies also offer consumers some novelties such as variable-color lights that can be tuned for different moods. And some believe that with OLED lighting, homeowners eventually can move to sheets of illuminated wallpaper. That'll require a bigger shift in lighting habits away from traditional bulbs, though.

The $60 (£36) multicolor Philips Hue bulb, introduced in 2012 and updated this year with the $40 (£24) Lux white-only bulb and $60 Tap remote control system, has pioneered the market for these higher-end, connected bulbs. But others are also selling products, including involved in the market, including the $30 (£18) Insteon LED Bulb, the $70 (£42) Lumen LED Color Smart Bulb, and the $40 Belkin WeMo Smart LED Bulb.

Even consumers excited about the new lighting prospects will have to tread carefully, though. Some of these systems, such as Philips' and Belkin's, require a separate control hub that costs extra, often bundled in a starter kit.

That may sound like a pain, but don't be surprised if, in a few years, wiring new houses for light switches starts becoming a relic of the pre-wireless era.

Article by Stephen Shankland.

Newly discovered dwarf planet could challenge what we know about our solar system

While Pluto might have been stripped of its full planetary status, thanks to a shift in official definitions, a newly discovered planetoid could actually hint at the existence of a "super-Earth" in the far reaches of our solar system. The ball of rock and ice, known as 2012 VP113, is estimated to be 250 miles wide, and has the most distant known orbit of our sun -- currently around 7.7 billion miles, extending to around 42 billion at its farthest. 2012 VP113 was spotted using the Dark Energy Camera in Chile, after a series of time-lapse photos captured it moving across the night sky.

It's not the first (and probably not the last) object of notable size observed beyond the Kuiper belt -- Sedna was discovered in 2003, but until now had been pretty much a lone case. Exciting as this is, it's also thought that, given certain similarities in the angle of Sedna and 2012 VP113's orbit, that there might be a much larger planet lurking in the shadows pulling on them, yet to reveal itself. This, once more, could change what we know about our very own observable solar system. Time to revise those museum models again?

Article by James Trew

Google turns down military money for robot competition

The bipedal Schaft robot, the top scorer in a DARPA competition last year for disaster-response scenarios, will compete in the finals, but now with funding just from Google.

Schaft, a Japanese company focusing on a humanoid robot, is one of several small robotics firms that Google has acquired.Schaft

 

Google will pay its own way through a robotics competition, deciding against accepting money from the US military for a humanoid robot that topped the charts in a contest for disaster-relief scenarios.

Last year, Google acquired the Japanese robotics firm Schaft that built the bipedal robot that earned the highest score at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) for a machine that can handle disaster zone tasks including climbing ladders, navigating debris, opening a door, and shutting off a valve.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Department of Defense unit that seeks to advance technology, had funded the work before Google's acquisition, but Google told DARPA it's moved the project to the self-funded category.

"Team Schaft...has elected to switch to the self-funded Track D of the program," DARPA said in a statement Friday.

Schaft and another robotics company that Google acquired, Boston Dynamics, both had accepted DARPA funds. Stepping away from the military funding avoids some politically touchy entanglements for a company that's far more interested in bringing automation to consumers' lives than to the battlefield.

DARPA is funding eight teams to move from last year's trials competition to the finals. That stage had been scheduled 2014, but DARPA is now setting the competition for some time between December 2014 and June 2015.

Boston Dynamics had been working on a bipedal humanoid robot project called Petman, a sequel to earlier projects inspired by quadrupedal animals.

Article by Stephen Shankland

LG's first smart light bulb flashes when you get a phone call

LG isn't about to let household heavyweights like Philips corner the connected lighting space -- it just unveiled the Smart Lamp, its first take on the concept. The 10W LED bulb gives Android and iOS users a familiar level of control over their illumination, including a light-based alarm clock and a security mode that pretends you're at home. There are a couple of noteworthy tricks in this initial offering, however. The light connects through both Bluetooth and WiFi, letting it pull the sync-based stunts we've seen in a few other bulbs: it can flash when you get a phone call, or (with Android) pulse to the beat of the music. The Smart Lamp is more expensive than ordinary LEDs at 35,000 won ($32) in LG's native Korea, but it could be a good deal if you don't need the many-colored lighting of Hue and similar systems. Unfortunately, there's no word on whether or not it's coming to the US.

Article by Jon Fingas

Musk, Zuckerberg, Kutcher invest in AI firm Vicarious

The three are joining in on a $40 million round that will help Vicarious toward its ambitious goal: translating the brain's neocortex into code.

Three prominent figures in the technology world have invested serious cash into a company that's trying to make a major move in artificial intelligence.

Tesla chief Elon Musk, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and actor and venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher have invested $40 million into Vicarious, a company that's studying the human brain's neocortex and attempting to translate its function to computer code, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The neocortex is an essential element of being human, providing the functions that allow us to think, see, move, and much more. Speaking to the Journal in an interview, Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix said that his company's goal is to build "a computer that thinks like a person."

Vicarious is part of a broader robotics and artificial-intelligence movement sweeping the tech world. A slew of major companies, including Google and Amazon, are looking to leverage robotics, and Google is especially interested in enhancing artificial intelligence.

Vicarious can't say how long it will take for it to achieve its goal of creating a robot that can think like a human, but the company believes it's only a matter of time before it happens.

Can you say, "Battlestar Galactica"?

Artilce by Don Reisinger

 

 

Humans came long after aliens, scientist suggests

A Harvard astrophysicist says his research indicates that humans may be one of the last life forms to inhabit the universe. Alien microbes came millions of years before us.

How did life really begin?

I've never thought of humanity as being especially advanced.

Somehow, we struggle so much with such basic things as thermostats and civility that I cannot imagine we've been around since either the Big Bang or God's Big Finger Pressing Play.

Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb gets the feeling that we are one of the last to the universe party.

As Space.com reports, Loeb's research suggests that a mere 15 million years after the Big Bang, alien microbes might have happily survived.

He said: "When the universe was 15 million years old, the cosmic microwave background had a temperature of a warm summer day on Earth. If rocky planets existed at that epoch, then the CMB could have kept their surface warm even if they did not reside in the habitable zone around their parent star."

Traditional scientific thinking offered that the first stars formed out of hydrogen and helium. There weren't any so-called heavy elements that would have assisted planet formation.

Loeb asked the simple question: What if there were some heavy elements? There might have been huge stars exploding and emitting them.

Any planets that might have resulted from these explosions would have enjoyed the warmth of cosmic microwave background radiation. Therefore, water may have been present and life forms may have existed.

This puts into question the idea of "Goldilocks Zones," the areas of the universe that are said to be the right distance from stars -- not too warm, not too cold, but just right -- in order for the existence of liquid water to have been possible.

But wait. How on earth can we ever know whether Loeb's theory might have some truth attached to it?

He suggests "searching for planets with atmospheric bio-signatures around low-metallicity stars in the Milky Way galaxy or its dwarf galaxy satellites."

In essence, if researchers find planets in the vicinity of stars that have merely a few heavy elements, then these might once have been analogous to the very earliest of planets.

Understanding what may or may not have happened billions of years ago is not exactly a simple task.

But one sign that Loeb might be onto something is that his fellow scientists aren't pooh-poohing it.

Water might have existed in many more places than first imagined. So who knows who or what might have existed in times gone far by?

And who knows what might still exist and be visiting us regularly, only to leave, shaking their heads and bodies in derision?

Article by Chris Matyszczyk

 

 

Scientists accidentally record ball lightning in nature for first time

Chinese researchers have done the seemingly impossible: observed and recorded an instance of ball lightning completely by accident. And it bodes well for a decade-old theory about the nature of the conundrum.

An instance of ball lightning re-created in the lab last year by a team at the US Air Force Academy.

Ball lightning, a phenomenon in which a glowing orb of light persists for seconds after a lightning strike, is one of the most enduring atmospheric mysteries in science. Reported sightings date as far back as ancient Greece -- an occurrence of ball lightning is rumored to have killed 18th century scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann -- and re-creating it synthetically has been a daunting feat, accomplished by only a few research teams after Nikola Tesla managed to first manifest spherical charges in the lab in 1904.

Since then, little progress has been made toward concrete theories that can explain the strange, near-mystical nature of ball lightning. However, a group of Chinese scientists in 2012 managed, completely by accident, to not only observe and record an instance of it in Qinghai in western China, but to measure the contents of the orb with spectrographs. It marks the first time ever the phenomenon has ever been captured in nature.

While recorded sightings of ball lightning are numerous throughout history and prevalent now on YouTube, the use of spectrographs make this instance a telling achievement, and worthy of publication Friday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

One of the most grounded theories regarding ball lightning, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss of the University of Canterbury in Cristchurch, New Zealand, is that it's caused by lightning striking soil and turning its chemical contents into a vapor. That vapor is said to then condense into a ball of floating aerosol that glows with the heat of the soil's elements mixing with oxygen. Thanks to the spectrograph readings, this theory, first postulated in 2000, now seems all the more plausible.

The scientists -- Jianyong Cen, Ping Yuan, and Simin Xue -- were observing a thunderstorm when the ball lightning, 5 meters wide and lasting roughly 1.6 seconds, appeared before their eyes. They took their gear, which consisted of camera equipment alongside the slitless spectrographs, back to the lab where the team discovered that the orb contained the same elements found predominately in the soil: silicon, iron, and calcium. "The spectral analysis indicates that the radiation from soil elements is present for the entire lifetime of the BL [ball lightning]," the team's report concluded. The accompanying video recording of the occurrence has not been released at this time.

When reached by NewScientist regarding the findings, Abrahamson said, "Here's an observation which has all the hallmarks of our theory. This is gold dust as far as confirmation goes."

The findings are not entirely conclusive regarding the nature of ball lightning and not evidence that Abrahamson's theory is universally applicable. For instance, it does not explain how ball lightning can pass through indoor environments like people's homes or inside the cockpit of a plane, as was the case in an instance of ball lightning that passed through the cockpit of a C-133A cargo plane traveling to Hawaii from California. Nor does it address what causes the bang many say to be typical in the evaporation of the orbs.

Still, the findings do bring validation to the idea that ball lightning's mysterious nature may, in some cases, be nothing more than an explainable and perfectly natural chemical reaction between the power of a lightning strike and the ground we stand on.

Article by Nick Statt

Google Is Making Smart Contact Lenses for Better Health Monitoring

A late-breaking surprise just came out of the Google camp with the revelation that it's going to start making smart contact lenses. As in contact lenses with integrated sensors and circuitry. Yep, it's that time in the future. But it might not be what you're hoping for. It isn't the next generation of Google Glass (one people would willingly wear in public) display, rather, it's for sensing.

Dazzling aurora borealis could reach the lower 48 this week

Thanks to a massive solar flare, sky-watchers may be able to indulge in an array of colorful northern lights forecasted to appear on Thursday and Friday.

A nighttime photo taken from the International Space Station of the aurora borealis over the Midwest US in 2012.

(Credit: NASA)

Here's to hoping for clear skies. A stunning show of colorful aurora borealis, or northern lights, is forecasted for Thursday and Friday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. And, what's more, they could be seen as far south as Washington, Illinois, Michigan, and even down the Rockies to Colorado.

"The CME [coronal mass ejection] is forecast to set off G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm activity through January 9 and 10," NOAA wrote on its prediction center site on Wednesday. "Aurora watchers should be ready."

The glimmering cloud-like lights will be due to an intense solar flare that burst off the sun on Tuesday causing a massive solar phenomenon that sends charged particles hurtling toward Earth. When these particles crash into the planet's protective magnetic field, they light up the atmosphere wherever they hit.

"These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground," NASA said in a statement. "When intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours."

Several solar flares ejected off the sun last year, giving aurora viewers some spectacular sightings. Last January, the largest solar radiation storm since 2005 caused the lights to glow throughout the North and South Poles. And, even in November, onlookers were able to get a peak of some beautiful auroras.

Typically the aurora borealis are green, but sometimes they can be red, blue, and greenish-yellow.

Here is an aurora forecast map from NOAA updated to the time of this writing:

 

Here is a NASA video of the solar flare on Tuesday:

 



Article by Dara Kerr

 

 

Inhabitat's Week in Green: Mission Mars One, MulchFest 2014 and a pickup truck made of ice

Ever wish you could just get away from it all? Mission Mars One is a prime opportunity to secure a one-way ticket away from Earth. The Dutch nonprofit organizing the mission just finished screening its first round of applicants, and it will soon move on to the second round. The Mars mission is still more than a decade away, but here on Earth, we're seeing plenty of life-changing innovations. In June, a paralyzed teen will make the ceremonial first kick of the World Cup using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. Ghana has some of the worst sanitation in the world, but MIT's Susan Murcott is looking to provide clean drinking water to people with an amazing $6 water filter that's made from a big ceramic bowl. Embedding batteries in the human body for medical applications is a tricky task, but a team of scientists just created biological batteries made from cuttlefish inkthat can be consumed in a pill. And on the design front, Spanish architectSantiago Calatrava is facing legal action from his home city of Valencia over the beautiful, but deteriorating €100 million Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia opera house.

Bicycles and cars don't mix, and adding dedicated bike lanes to existing streets can be very difficult. So architect Norman Foster came up with a novel idea: Createa three-story-high bicycle skyway to cover 135 miles in London. (It may be a long time before that vision becomes reality.) A couple of Chinese companies have developed one solution to the country's transportation and emissions problems: A new series of robotic car-sharing stations will dispense small electric vehicles like candy. Meanwhile Ford gave us a sneak peek at its very first solar-powered car, and British adventurer Maria Leijerstam set a world record when she rode a custom recumbent bike from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole in just 10 days. And the Canadian ice sculpture company Iceculture added about 11,000 pounds of sculpted ice to a pickup truck frame, producing a completely roadworthy truck that's made almost entirely from frozen H2O.

The world is still recovering from last week's New Year's celebration, but the planet isn't nursing much of an environmental hangover, thanks to several green initiatives. In New York, the Times Square ball drop featured a 12,000-pound geodesic sphere made of more than 30,000 energy-efficient LED lights. As if that wasn't enough, the LEDs were powered, at least in part, by stationary bikes that were parked in Midtown Manhattan. In other holiday news, New Yorkers looking to get rid of their Christmas trees can recycle them at MulchFest 2014 next week. And looking back at some of the highlights of 2013, the readers of Ecouterre and Inhabitots have spoken, selecting their top eco-fashion and green parenting stories.

by INHABITAT

Testing for electromagnetic interference at Samsung's EMC lab

Samsung's EMC Laboratory is right in the middle of its huge "Digital City" compound in Suwon, Korea. This site goes through roughly 4,000 products a year, with different rooms tasked with testing different sections of Samsung Electronics' admittedly broad range. What you see above is a 75 by 59 feet chamber set up for the electromagnetic interference test, with three antennas pointed at a yet-to-be-released TV (not shown in the photo for obvious reasons). All of this is simply to gauge precisely how much interference the product outputs, to ensure it doesn't exceed certain levels. Do read on if you want more detail -- we've also got a video tour waiting for you.

 

Engineers use either two large antennas to detect noise between 20MHz and 1GHz, or a standalone (and slightly more impressive-looking) antenna to pick up frequencies of up to 26GHz. In recent years, the latter test has become more significant due to the increasingly complicated (read: chip-heavy) state of modern consumer electronics. Whatever's being tested is placed on a rotatable part of the lab floor and is scrutinized from every angle. You may think that the white polystyrene plates on the wall are for absorbing the reflected noise, but it's really the black foam spikes underneath that do the job -- the white tiles are simply for keeping the room bright.

The 70-minute test is mostly an automated process (thus why there's no one in the room to disrupt measurements), during which the antennas receive a constant stream of data. Samsung doesn't expect a product to fail, as everything's designed to fall well below the limits; but if it does, production is stopped until engineers can figure out what went wrong.

(by Mat Smith)

New Stacked Solar Cells Can Withstand the Power of 70,000 Suns

 

The power of 1,000 suns? Pfft. That ain't nuthin'. A recent breakthrough in solar panel connections has allowed scientists to create arrays of solar cells that can stand strong under the blazing glare of 70,000 suns. Not that they'd ever have to, but still.

Stacked solar cells-which are exactly what they sound like-are some of the most efficient solar-sucking power generators on the market today. In general, they can turn just less than half of the sunlight they absorb into pure power. But stacked cell is only as strong as its weakest part; you have to connect the stacked cells in such a way that the energy doesn't get wasted in the connections. That gets especially hard under a lot of light.

Scientists at North Carolina State University recently discovered that a thin film of gallium arsenide in the solar cell junctions can stop virtually all voltage loss, and let the cells work efficiently under the power of 70,000 suns. Yeah, we only have one sun, but thanks to lenses we can beef that up to at least a few thousand in concentrated power.

Dr. Salah Bedair, a senior author of the study, described the accomplishment to PhysOrg this way:

[It] is more than sufficient for practical purposes, since concentrating lenses are unlikely to create more than 4,000 or 5,000 suns worth of energy. ...This should reduce overall costs for the energy industry because, rather than creating large, expensive solar cells, you can use much smaller cells that produce just as much electricity by absorbing intensified solar energy from concentrating lenses.

So a 70,000 sun tolerance is still pretty ridiculous unless colonize Tatooine or something. But it's overkill in the best possible way. [PhysOrg]

Alt-week 09.07.13: 3D printed cars, invisibility cloaks, and LADEE launches

Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.



We're all about the launches this week, at both ends of the spectrum. At the small-scale, we see what happens when a pinewood derby gets the 3D printing treatment. At the other end, NASA's LADEE begins its voyage to the moon. This is alt-week.

 

 

We get the impression that the team behind the IDSA conference are our kinda people. Why? Well, amongst all the serious business of discussing industrial design and creativity, they saw fit to set up a little 3D printed fun. We applaud the ingenuity behind printing replacement bones, prototypes and other such useful stuff, but in the same way the internet is a wealth of knowledge, we still use it for a little YouTube relief now and again. The mission? Design and print a car that will "jump" the farthest when launched from a ramp. Oh, and extra points if it crashes spectacularly. Ten designs were chosen as finalists, and got to have their creations printed, and launched into infamy. Watch the colorful band of entrants in the video above to see who wins.



If you thought the coolest thing we'd see come from a 3D printer this week would be the cars above, then what about this -- a 3D printed invisibility cloak! Not only that, but instructions on how you can make one yourself. Okay, it's not going to let you sneak into the pantry unnoticed, in search of more candy, or whatever nefarious misadventure you might have been cooking up. But if you hang out in the 9.7- to 10.1 GHz frequency range (that which this device renders things invisible to) then you're in luck. That might not sound useful, but it's around the range used by some radar guns, so, well you might find some use for it. Once it scales up, of course. The work comes from engineers at Duke University, initially unveiled earlier this summer.

 

 

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer -- or LADEE for short -- has been successfully launched. The Mission ops team at the Ames Research Center, Moffett Field California, confirmed that the spacecraft took off successfully at 11:27pm EDT on Friday. The Lunar-bound rocket will explore the atmosphere around our moon, while inspecting dust that is sometimes found emanating from its surface. It's also going to make use of the experimental laser communications, which assuming work as planned, offer a six-fold increase in throughput over traditional radio systems. Catch the launch above, or some official photos here.

Quantum Cryptography Could Make Your Phone Uncrackable Someday

As the world of cybersecurity becomes increasingly volatile, more advanced solutions to problems like encryption couldn't come soon enough. This is why everybody's excited about a team of British physicists' testing a method that would put quantum cryptology in everybody's pocket.

Quantum cryptology is a slightly complicated but ultimately gamechanging thing. Put simply, it's practically uncrackable, making it the holy grail of encryption techniques. Whereas traditional methods of cryptology depend on mathematical formulas-which can be solved-to encrypt data, quantum cryptology depends on the laws of physics-which cannot be broken-to do so. Up until now, however, quantum cryptology has required serious hardware that's typically only found in quantum optics labs.



Quantum cryptography uses the laws of physics to guarantee the secrecy of messages sent from one location to another. It is one of the few quantum technologies that is become mature enough to make the leap from the laboratory to the commercial world.

So governments, the military and commercial organisations such as banks are all interested having this kind of perfect secrecy. And indeed a number of companies have cropped up in the last 10 years to sell the service.

One problem is that quantum cryptography is only possible between places that have the kind of gear usually only found in quantum optics laboratories. It generally requires that both the transmitter and receiver have a source of single photons, a way of controlling and modifying individual photons and superconducting photon detectors.

Before getting into the new technique, it would be helpful to review the basics of quantum cryptology. Imagine Alice and Bob want to communicate with each other without a third party, Eve, listening in. Traditionally, they would have public and private keys that are very big prime numbers, creating a math problem that would take Eve millions of years to solve. As computers get better, though, that math problem becomes easier. This is where quantum cryptology comes into play. Instead of a series of numbers, Alice would send the key to Bob as a series of photons. Based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Eve wouldn't be able to observe the photons without changing or destroying them.

Again, the transmission and receiving of these photons has always required some serious gear. But a team of physicists from the University of Bristol have developed a new approach that simplifies the equation. The MIT Technology Review explains:

In the new technique, only one of the parties, Alice say, needs to have the quantum optics gear such as a source of photons and so on. Alice creates the photons and then sends them down an ordinary optical fibre to Bob, the other party.

Bob, merely modifies the photons to encode them with information before sending them back to Alice. This dramatically simplifies the equipment Bob requires, allowing it to fit in a handheld device.

Imagine the near future when internet companies use quantum optics equipment to beam secure messages to our iPhones, and we can respond from the palms of our hands. This is probably less important for something like email and more important for the idea of mobile voting. In fact, one of the first uses of quantum cryptology was for elections in Geneva, Switzerland.

While it's not completely infallible-people are always prone to making mistakes during the encryption process-quantum cryptology is currently the most secure way we have to transmit information. And if you listen to folks like Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, cybersecurity has never been a more pressing priority. So everybody wins with these improved methods of encryption. Everybody except Eve and her hacker friends, of course.

End of Moore's Law: It's not just about physics

A DARPA director argues that the end of the Moore's Law could come about because of insurmountable economic challenges.



An Intel wafer. Chipmakers may find it more difficult to justify the huge costs of developing the next generations of chip technology.

The end of Moore's Law may ultimately be as much about economics as physics, says a DARPA director.

"My thesis here is that it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law, and that it's worth pondering how it will end, not just when," Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Bob Colwell

Colwell gave a presentation at the Hot Chips Conference at Stanford University on Monday titled "The Chip Design Game at the End of Moore's Law."

"The silicon business is incredibly expensive for folks like Intel, who have to pay huge amounts of money to develop the next-generation silicon technology," he said.

Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. For decades, chipmakers have succeeded in shrinking chip geometries, allowing Moore's Law to remain on track.

Below are the comments he provided based on his speech at the Hot Chips conference:

[It takes] huge amounts to build the fab plants, and yet more...to pay for the design teams to design new chips. Intel makes these investments, which are in the [billions of dollars], because they expect to reap way more [billions of dollars] in profits in the following years.

But if there is doubt that those profits will arrive, and possibly if they just doubt they can come up with the necessary silicon improvements, they may not want to make the investment at all. Should a major player like Intel make such a call, that would effectively end Moore's Law all by itself, because then the various companies that make the super expensive tools for chip production will themselves not make the investments needed to keep Moore's Law alive.

Expanding on the comments above, Colwell said companies need to focus on the economics of getting to 7 nanometers and beyond:

I think most technologists will, at least privately, rationally consider the prospects for the end of Moore's Law. But they focus on the physics, which change substantially from one silicon process technology to the next. These technologists know how monumental the challenges are to even get to [7 nanometer] silicon technology, so the natural assumption is that eventually some problem with the next silicon process technology will turn out to be physically insurmountable, and that's what will end Moore's Law.

They are right, there are very serious challenges looming, but then, the silicon industry has beaten back such challenges in the past. This gives a lot of people false confidence that we can do it again. My attitude is, maybe we can, maybe we can't, but physics isn't the only challenge. That was my point in focusing on economics, to remind the field that we have to succeed at the physics AND the economics or we will have failed, and Moore's Law will have ended.

Colwell said that for the Defense Department, he uses the year 2020 and 7 nanometers as the "last process technology node."

But he adds, "In reality, I expect the industry to do whatever heavy lifting is needed to push to 5nm, even if 5nm doesn't offer much advantage over 7, and that moves the earliest end to 2022. I think the end comes right around those nodes."

Intel has already begun discussing commercial 10-nanometer technology, which is expected to ramp up in 2015.

But Intel component scientists have also said that it's not clear what technology will be used beyond 7 nanometers.

Currently, Intel processors, such as its Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors, are made on a 22-nanometer process.

(Via Cnet)

Elon Musk on the Hyperloop: 'It's like getting a ride on Space Mountain'

In a highly anticipated unveiling prefaced by Musk last week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO outlines his vision for high-speed travel.



A mock-up from SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk of his proposed Hyperloop concept.

Elon Musk revealed Monday a more complete outline of the proposed Hyperloop system in a blog post published on the Web site of his company SpaceX. Musk's primary clarifications are on its top speed -- up to 800 mph -- and the physical components and mechanics of such a system that he says will be most effective for cities within 1,000 miles of one another. Related posts SF-LA in a half hour via Hyperloop? Still at least 7 years away Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas? Elon Musks talks Hyperloop (live blog) Elon Musk pulled all-nighter to prep for Hyperloop unveiling Hyperloop hopes? Musk won't build transit system himself Described as shotgun-like tubes spread 50 to 100 yards apart, the Hyperloop would operate by keeping a low-pressure interior that would work in much the same fashion as a vacuum-sealed tube but without as many of the safety complications. Using a linear acceleration method -- much like a railgun -- the system would use electromagnetic energy to accelerate and then reverse the high-speed movement of the pods for a safe slowdown. As for the general feel of riding in the Hyperloop, Musk told Businessweek, "It would have less lateral acceleration -- which is what tends to make people feel motion sick -- than a subway ride, as the pod banks against the tube like an airplane. Unlike an airplane, it is not subject to turbulence, so there are no sudden movements. It would feel supersmooth. "It's like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland." Musk has been transparent about the Hyperloop concept being a way to instigate discussion, and that he has neither the time nor the means to build it himself.