Nanosatellite Will Look for Alien Worlds

Draper Laboratory and MIT have developed a satellite the size of a loaf of bread that will undertake one of the biggest tasks in astronomy: finding Earthlike planets beyond our solar system?or exoplanets?that could support life. It is scheduled to launch in 2012.

The "nanosatellite," called ExoPlanetSat, packs powerful, high-performance optics and new control and stabilization technology in a small package.

While there have been many small satellites, these are typically used to perform simple communication or observation missions. "We are doing something that has not been done before," says Séamus Tuohy, director of space systems at Draper.

ExoPlanetSat will search for planets by measuring the dimming of a star as an orbiting planet passes in front of it, a technique called transit observation. The satellite's light detector has two focal plane arrays?one for star tracking and for the transit observations. Measuring a star's dip in brightness precisely also allows the planet's size to be calculated. And by measuring the amount of time it takes the planet to complete its orbit, researchers can determine the planet's distance from its star.

This technique is well-established, but has only be used by much larger orbiting spacecrafts, including the French-operated satellite CoRot, which made a significant planet discovery last year, and NASA's Kepler satellite, which launched in 2009.  ExoPlanetSat is not meant to replace larger spacecraft, but to be complementary, says Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at MIT, meaning the nanosatellite will focus on individual stars that larger spacecraft have identified as being scientifically interesting. Whereas a spacecraft like Kepler looks at approximately 150,000 stars, a nanosatellite like ExoPlanetSat is designed to track a single star.

To accurately measure a star's brightness, engineers must keep the spacecraft stable?incoming photons must hit the same fraction of a pixel at all times, says Seager, who is also a participating scientist for the Kepler satellite. "Any disturbances that shake the spacecraft will blur the image and make the measurements unusable," she says. "And smaller spacecrafts are easier to push around."

To precisely control and stabilize ExoPlanetSat, Draper and MIT researchers built custom avionics and off-the-shelf reaction wheels, a type of mechanical device used for attitude control, at the base of the spacecraft to maneuver it into position. Battery-powered piezoelectric drives control the motion of the imaging detector, which is uniquely decoupled from the spacecraft, so it operates separately. (The battery will be charged by solar panels.) "The drives move the detector counter to the spacecraft so precisely the human eye cannot see the motion," says Seager. "This is an order of magnitude better than any nanosatellite has demoed before," she says.

The nanosatellite has a volume of three liters; it's 10 centimeters tall, 10 centimeters wide, and 30 centimeters long. "It was an engineering feat getting all the hardware, including the necessary processing power and data storage, into such a small package," says Tuohy.

Each nanosatellite will cost as little as $600,000 once in production?ExoPlanetSat cost approximately $5 million?and their estimated orbital lifetime is one to two years. Eventually, Seager says, the researchers hope to launch a whole fleet of nanosatellites surveying the nearest and brightest stars.

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Samsung designs AMOLED display that can be folded 100,000 times

Samsung researchers in South Korea have designed and built a prototype of a seamless foldable Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display. The display's mechanical and optical robustness were tested by performing 100,000 folding-unfolding cycles. The relative brightness at the junction decreased by just 6 percent, which is hardly recognizable by the human eye and so the deterioration can be considered negligible. The findings have been published in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters.

The display consists of two AMOLED panels, silicone rubber (a hyperelastic material), a module case, and a protective glass cover (which not only prevents scratches but can also serve as a touch screen). The display has a very small folding radius of just 1 mm, so that one panel lies almost completely on top of the other when the display is folded at a 180° angle. "All the materials in a foldable window unit (glasses and silicone rubber) must have almost the same optical properties and attach to each other strongly without any optical property change," coauthor HongShik Shim of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology told PhysOrg.

In their study, the researchers explain that most flexible displays, which are becoming increasingly more viable and interesting to mobile companies, are bendable or rollable to avoid the creases that occur from folding a material completely in half. The researchers have overcome this problem by creating an AMOLED display with no visible crease: the key to pulling this off is to control the optical properties of the materials.

Some believe that foldable displays could be the future of mobile devices as they solve the problem of minimizing the size of the device while simultaneously maximizing the size of the display. A display that can fold completely in half is the best way to achieve this goal, but so far it has been a challenge to eliminate the visible crease between panels. Now that obstacle has been surmounted, at least in the prototype phase.

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Online viewership of Indian Premier League surges to 20 million viewers

With IPL fever gripping millions of cricket fanatics in India, the online viewership of the ongoing IPL season has surged to a new record breaking 20 million viewers, surpassing last year?s record of 11 million viewers.

According to the report, this surge is mainly due to the various advantages the online medium offers.

Unlike television where you are bound to a single place, you could watch the live stream as long as you have a computer/mobile phone with a fast internet connection. And since the matches are streamed globally, IPL fans abroad solely depend on the online medium for viewing matches.

That aside, Indiatimes.com the official online partner for IPL streaming also offers you to watch the previous highlights or entire matches without much ad interruptions on their website and their YouTube channel, which can be very helpful in case you miss any match in the whole season.

It also offers you to view scorecards, match schedule, interviews and post match analysis pertaining to the IPL matches, giving the online medium a definitive edge over the television.

Not to be left behind in this whole IPL blitzkreig, online advertisers are also making sure they make use of this golden opportunity by reaching out to a large net savvy audience through their product advertisements.

Mayank Pareek, the executive officer of Marketing & Sales at Maruti Udyog, who were one of the advertisers at Indiatimes.com said:

India has a large population that is young and net savvy which led us to advertise on the Indiatimes on IPL. We are very happy with the response we have got.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/in/2011/05/16/online-viewership-of-indian-premier-league-surges-to-20-million-viewers/

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Sensing Brain Pressure without Surgery

One of the most important things to monitor in patients who've sustained a severe blow to the head or a serious hemorrhage is pressure in the brain. This can reveal an increase in the brain's volume, thanks to bleeding, swelling, or other factors, which can compress and damage brain tissue and starve the organ of blood. Increases in pressure have also been implicated in other, less critical neurological problems, such as migraines and repeated concussions. But current methods for monitoring intracranial pressure are highly invasive?a neurosurgeon drills a hole in the skull and inserts a catheter, which carries a risk of infection.

Thomas Heldt, a research scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and collaborators hope to change that with a new, noninvasive method for monitoring intracranial pressure. While the technology is still in its early stages of development, initial studies on data from comatose patients show that it is about as accurate as intracranial monitoring with a catheter and more accurate than other, less invasive options, which involve inserting a catheter into the tissue layers between the inner skull and the brain. Heldt presented the research at the Next-Generation Medical Electronic Systems workshop at MIT earlier this month.

"If we had a way of determining pressure in the field, even a simple heuristic, like whether pressure is greater than 20 mmHg (millimeters of mercury?the standard measure at which physicians intervene), it would be hugely helpful," says Rajiv Gupta, director of the Ultra-High-Resolution Volume CT Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. "Triage is based on that." Gupta was not involved in the research.

To assess pressure noninvasively, Heldt started by creating a simple circuit model of pressure in the brain using knowledge of brain anatomy and how blood and cerebrospinal fluid flow through the organ. He then developed an algorithm to calculate intracranial pressure for a given level of arterial blood pressure and cerebral blood flow. Arterial blood flow can be measured either with a catheter inserted into the wrist, or indirectly with a finger cuff, a device similar to an arm blood-pressure cuff but which provides continuous readings of blood pressure. A noninvasive ultrasound technique known as transcranial Doppler can detect velocity of cranial blood flow, which is directly related to the flow itself.

Researchers validated the approach using previously collected data from 45 comatose patients. The estimate matched the gold standard measure with a deviation of about eight to nine mmHg. Other methods for measuring pressure, such as catheters inserted into the space between the skull and brain tissue, vary by 10 mmHg from reading to reading in the same brain.

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Weekend tech reading: Sony brings PSN back online

Sony brings PSN back online, new security measures in place Sony Online Entertainment brought its PlayStation Network back online in parts of Europe and the U.S. Saturday following a three-week outage resulting from the hacking of the network by unknown individuals, the company said on the PlayStation blog. The restoration of PSN service requires a firmware update on PS3 consoles and requires users to change their passwords. PCMag

Amazon server said to be used in Sony atttack Amazon's Web Services cloud- computing unit was used by hackers in last month?s attack against Sony Corp. (6758)?s online entertainment systems, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Hackers using an alias signed up to rent a server through Amazon?s EC2 service and launched the attack from there, said the person, who requested anonymity because the information is confidential. Bloomberg

Netflix: Metered broadband a pure cash grab Netflix initially tried to downplay metered billing as a threat to their business, though in recent months the company has gotten increasingly vocal about the issue -- especially after launching streaming video service in Canada and running face first into that country's low caps and high per byte overages. DSLReports

Mozilla halts updates for Firefox 3.5 Mozilla is currently preparing to phase out Firefox 3.5 and said that it will not release further major updates for the browser version. There was no exact date for the end-of-life given, but Mozilla said that it wants to phase out 3.5 as quickly as possible and move its 12 million users to versions 3.6 or 4.0. ConceivablyTech

RIM recalls at least 900 faulty BlackBerry PlayBooks, here are the serial numbers We found the BlackBerry PlayBook to be a pretty solid piece of hardware, but it seems there was a problem batch -- an inside source tells us that nearly 1,000 faulty tablets were shipped to Staples, and now they're being recalled. Engadget

Why I (and probably 600,000 others) stopped playing World of Warcraft Blizzard?s flagship online game, World of Warcraft, shed around 600,000 players in the last quarter even though it released one of its most successful expansion packs yet. Blizzard chief executive Mike Morhaime said players blitzed through the content faster than the developers expected. GamesBeat

Seven tech trade-offs worth making Buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options. Do you go for the navigation package or the rear-seat entertainment system? The faster processor or more memory? NY Times

Confessions of a computer repairman When your PC breaks down ? assuming you can?t fix it yourself ? the first port of call is often a professional repairer who might just be able to rescue that vital data, restore the operating system without losing your photos, or get that graphics card working again. PCPro

Slaying the cable monster: Why HDMI brands don't matter You've probably experienced this when shopping for a new HDTV: A store clerk sidles up and offers to help. He then points you toward the necessary HDMI cables to go with your new television. And they're expensive. PCMag

Perl 5.14 A new version of Perl, 5.14, was officially released on 14th May following the successful test period, including the testing of release candidates. This is the first release of Perl 5 using the new annual schedule. The Perl Foundation

Gabe Newell on Valve The PC games pioneer bares all on Valve's unique dev culture, and shares his grand plan for the future. Develop

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Gaming 26 - The Showman's Bag

Gaming 26 - The Showman's Bag

Posted on 13th May 2011 at 12:17 by Podcast with 16 comments

This week Paul and Joe were joined by plughead.net founder and former PC Zone writer David Brown. First up on the agenda was the continuing PSN outage, and how the continuing lack of service is starting to affect games developers.

We also attempted to talk about the Witcher 2, but somehow we ended up on the topic of DLC and, unsurprisingly, Mass Effect 2. Joe also got a chance to talk about his experiences with Star Wars: The Old Republic, and why he thought the game deserved the savaging that he gave it.

Finally, we also got a chance to put a few of your questions to David who discussed everything from the future of print publishing to the pressure that games publishers and developers put on members of the games press.


As always, we've also set up our weekly competition too, the lucky winner of which will walk away with a Roccat Vire Gaming Headset. The headset weighs only 15g and comes complete with a carry bag and rubberised ergonomic earplugs.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Nanosatellite Will Look for Alien Worlds

Draper Laboratory and MIT have developed a satellite the size of a loaf of bread that will undertake one of the biggest tasks in astronomy: finding Earthlike planets beyond our solar system?or exoplanets?that could support life. It is scheduled to launch in 2012.

The "nanosatellite," called ExoPlanetSat, packs powerful, high-performance optics and new control and stabilization technology in a small package.

While there have been many small satellites, these are typically used to perform simple communication or observation missions. "We are doing something that has not been done before," says Séamus Tuohy, director of space systems at Draper.

ExoPlanetSat will search for planets by measuring the dimming of a star as an orbiting planet passes in front of it, a technique called transit observation. The satellite's light detector has two focal plane arrays?one for star tracking and for the transit observations. Measuring a star's dip in brightness precisely also allows the planet's size to be calculated. And by measuring the amount of time it takes the planet to complete its orbit, researchers can determine the planet's distance from its star.

This technique is well-established, but has only be used by much larger orbiting spacecrafts, including the French-operated satellite CoRot, which made a significant planet discovery last year, and NASA's Kepler satellite, which launched in 2009.  ExoPlanetSat is not meant to replace larger spacecraft, but to be complementary, says Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at MIT, meaning the nanosatellite will focus on individual stars that larger spacecraft have identified as being scientifically interesting. Whereas a spacecraft like Kepler looks at approximately 150,000 stars, a nanosatellite like ExoPlanetSat is designed to track a single star.

To accurately measure a star's brightness, engineers must keep the spacecraft stable?incoming photons must hit the same fraction of a pixel at all times, says Seager, who is also a participating scientist for the Kepler satellite. "Any disturbances that shake the spacecraft will blur the image and make the measurements unusable," she says. "And smaller spacecrafts are easier to push around."

To precisely control and stabilize ExoPlanetSat, Draper and MIT researchers built custom avionics and off-the-shelf reaction wheels, a type of mechanical device used for attitude control, at the base of the spacecraft to maneuver it into position. Battery-powered piezoelectric drives control the motion of the imaging detector, which is uniquely decoupled from the spacecraft, so it operates separately. (The battery will be charged by solar panels.) "The drives move the detector counter to the spacecraft so precisely the human eye cannot see the motion," says Seager. "This is an order of magnitude better than any nanosatellite has demoed before," she says.

The nanosatellite has a volume of three liters; it's 10 centimeters tall, 10 centimeters wide, and 30 centimeters long. "It was an engineering feat getting all the hardware, including the necessary processing power and data storage, into such a small package," says Tuohy.

Each nanosatellite will cost as little as $600,000 once in production?ExoPlanetSat cost approximately $5 million?and their estimated orbital lifetime is one to two years. Eventually, Seager says, the researchers hope to launch a whole fleet of nanosatellites surveying the nearest and brightest stars.

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Thoughts on Jumping

It may seem an odd subject to focus on, as jumping doesn't seem to be very important on the face of it ? cut it out of a game, though, and it can make a huge difference. Games in which players can?t jump, or at the very least dodge or roll, can seem painfully slow, dull and static. Games in which players can jump around and use that movement to interact with the environment can seem immeasurably more fun because of it.

Take Half-Life 2, for example. It?s a game which nearly everyone would agree is well-made, decently written, fun and fast to play through. Now cast your mind back to the first scene in Kliener?s lab, where Gordon is first properly introduced to his allies, where the plot is given its first proper push and where you?re gifted with the HEV suit again. It?s a busy sequence; lots to do, lots to take in. You?d expect most players to pay close attention, at least the first time around.

Instead, every single player I know spends most of the time jumping around. Sometimes they try to jump on the scenery or knock over objects, other times they just leapfrog around the room when a simple stroll would suffice.


The same behaviour holds true in most other games too, I?ve found. When I played Beyond Good and Evil for the first time I hardly walked anywhere across the surface of Hillys; I rolled. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, any hallway that involved walking for more than two seconds would be punctuated by periodic bounding. It seems like aberrant behaviour at first, yet it seems as though everyone does it. Why?

The reason, I think, is actually more to do with player speed than actually jumping. It?s not that people always like to move fast through games or that they enjoy spending time off the ground. Instead, it comes back to the original point ? games that don?t feature jumping can feel static and slow, so we use these features if they're present to help negate this effect. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a pretty fast-paced game, but running down a long corridor can still feel dull and empty; jumping as you run lets you vary the speed of the game. It creates tiny events of player agency and interaction, which stave off that staid feeling.

At the same time, adventure games that don?t feature anything so much as a sprint button? Don?t they seem increasingly slow and dated these days?


This isn?t the only reason why jumping is important, though. It helps you practice for later. It can be used to ward off boredom. It helps you to further explore the game space away from the key features. There's an abundance of smaller reasons; not least of which is possibly the fact that some people just have twitchy thumbs.

For the best games, though ? and this ties into a more overarching theory of mine about character speed ? the act of jumping can be a joy in itself. Master Chief?s jump, for example, is pleasantly floaty, while Dante?s can last for as long as you can hammer the attack buttons. Faith?s standing jump in Mirror?s Edge, however, is realistically awkward; she?s much better with running leaps.

Getting these nuances of player speed correct is one of the most subtle and important aspects of making a good game, especially for first person shooters. Trust me, I play a lot of really rubbish games and I can tell you that, if you throw all the cleverness away and boil it down to basic functionality, Half-Life 2 would still stand above Conspiracy Island 2 based solely on player speed. And the quality of the jumping.

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Sensing Brain Pressure without Surgery

One of the most important things to monitor in patients who've sustained a severe blow to the head or a serious hemorrhage is pressure in the brain. This can reveal an increase in the brain's volume, thanks to bleeding, swelling, or other factors, which can compress and damage brain tissue and starve the organ of blood. Increases in pressure have also been implicated in other, less critical neurological problems, such as migraines and repeated concussions. But current methods for monitoring intracranial pressure are highly invasive?a neurosurgeon drills a hole in the skull and inserts a catheter, which carries a risk of infection.

Thomas Heldt, a research scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and collaborators hope to change that with a new, noninvasive method for monitoring intracranial pressure. While the technology is still in its early stages of development, initial studies on data from comatose patients show that it is about as accurate as intracranial monitoring with a catheter and more accurate than other, less invasive options, which involve inserting a catheter into the tissue layers between the inner skull and the brain. Heldt presented the research at the Next-Generation Medical Electronic Systems workshop at MIT earlier this month.

"If we had a way of determining pressure in the field, even a simple heuristic, like whether pressure is greater than 20 mmHg (millimeters of mercury?the standard measure at which physicians intervene), it would be hugely helpful," says Rajiv Gupta, director of the Ultra-High-Resolution Volume CT Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. "Triage is based on that." Gupta was not involved in the research.

To assess pressure noninvasively, Heldt started by creating a simple circuit model of pressure in the brain using knowledge of brain anatomy and how blood and cerebrospinal fluid flow through the organ. He then developed an algorithm to calculate intracranial pressure for a given level of arterial blood pressure and cerebral blood flow. Arterial blood flow can be measured either with a catheter inserted into the wrist, or indirectly with a finger cuff, a device similar to an arm blood-pressure cuff but which provides continuous readings of blood pressure. A noninvasive ultrasound technique known as transcranial Doppler can detect velocity of cranial blood flow, which is directly related to the flow itself.

Researchers validated the approach using previously collected data from 45 comatose patients. The estimate matched the gold standard measure with a deviation of about eight to nine mmHg. Other methods for measuring pressure, such as catheters inserted into the space between the skull and brain tissue, vary by 10 mmHg from reading to reading in the same brain.

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McDonald?s to shake up food ordering system with touchscreen terminals and swipe cards

McDonald?s is about to revolutionize the way customers order meals in its restaurants by introducing touchscreen terminals and swipe cards, replacing cashiers and the use of banknotes at its 7,000 fast-food restaurants in Europe reports the FT.

Fast food ordering has been pretty much the same for the past 30 to 40 years. McDonald?s first major effort to shake things up aims to attract time conscious and cash-strapped customers by making its restaurants more convenient and user-friendly.

Serving more than 2 million customers a day all over the country, Steve Easterbrook, president of McDonald?s Europe, said that the changes would make life easier for consumers as well as improve efficiency, with average transactions three to four seconds shorter for each customer. Additionally, the new technology would allow McDonald?s to gather more information about customers? ordering habits.

There are, however, people who are less than enthusiastic about the initiative. A 21-year-old was quoted saying: ?I?m looking for work and if there?s more machines doing jobs I?ll find it harder. Plus you won?t get service with a smile.?

The fast-food giant also has plans on refurbishing stores, and introducing longer opening hours and new menus.

I know if the machines in supermarkets are anything to go by, I for one am going to miss the human touch. (Update: That said, at least one person who has tried one rates it highly)

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2011/05/16/mcdonald%E2%80%99s-to-shake-up-food-ordering-system-with-touchscreen-terminals-and-swipe-cards/

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