Tag: team

Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars

An international team of astronomers have released two petabytes of data from the Pan-STARRS project that’s also known as the “world’s largest digital sky survey.” Two petabytes of data, according to the team, is equivalent to any of the following: a billion selfies, one hundred Wikipedias or 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with single-spaced text. The scientists spent four years observing three-fourths of the night sky through their 1.8 meter telescope at Haleakala Observatories on Maui, Hawaii, scanning three billion objects in the Milky Way 12 times in five different filters. Those objects included stars, galaxies, asteroids and other celestial bodies. According to Thomas Henning, director of the Planet and Star Formation Department of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: “Based on Pan-Starrs, researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example white dwarfs. This will expand the census of almost all objects in the solar neighbourhood to distances of about 300 light-years. The Pan Starrs data will also allow a much better characterization of low-mass star formation in stellar clusters. Furthermore, we gathered about 4 million stellar light curves to identify Jupiter-like planets in close orbits around cool dwarf stars in order to constrain the fraction of such extrasolar planetary systems.” While the immensity of two petabytes of data is already hard to grasp, that isn’t the extent of the team’s observations. The astronomers are rolling out their research in two steps: this one called the “Static Sky” is the average of each individual scan. See the image above? That’s the result of half a million 45-second exposures taken over four years. They’re releasing even more detailed images and data in 2017 — for now, you can check out what the team released to the public on the official Pan-STARRS website. Via: TechCrunch Source: Queen’s University Belfast , Pan-STARRS , Physorg

Excerpt from:
Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars

Scientists design the next-gen CRISPR for gene editing

CRISPR is already effective enough to be used in experimental therapies for leukemia, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and other conditions. But a team of scientists from Western University have created an even more effective version of CRISPR by adding an engineered enzyme called TevCas9. The current version of CRISPR uses an enzyme known as Cas9 to cut DNA segments, such as the specific parts that cause genetic disorders. Western’s scientists created TevCas9 by combining Cas9 with another enzyme called I-Tevl. According to the team, the next-gen CRISPR is more precise and more efficient. Plus, it has the potential to prevent genes from repairing themselves. Lead scientist David Edgell explains: “The problem with CRISPR is that it will cut DNA, but then DNA-repair will take that cut and stick it back together. That means it is regenerating the site that the CRISPR is trying to target, creating a futile cycle. The novelty of our addition, is that it stops that regeneration from happening.” See, the upgraded CRISPR cuts genes in two places instead of just one to make it tougher for self-repair to kick in. The team still has to confirm that through further testing, but as the team says, that “is the hope and the expectation.” If you want to read the study’s technical details, check out the team’s paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Source: PNAS , Western University

See more here:
Scientists design the next-gen CRISPR for gene editing

New battery tech lasts for days, charges in seconds

Scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF) have created a supercapacitor battery prototype that works like new even after being recharged 30, 000 times. The research could yield high-capacity, ultra-fast-charging batteries that last over 20 times longer than a conventional lithium-ion cell. “You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week, ” says UCF postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary. Supercapacitors can be charged quickly because they store electricity statically on the surface of a material, rather than using chemical reactions like batteries. That requires “two-dimensional” material sheets with large surface areas that can hold lots of electrons. However, much of the research, including that by EV-maker Henrik Fisker and UCLA , uses graphene as the two-dimensional material. Yeonwoong “Eric” Jung from UCF says it’s a challenge to integrate graphene with other materials used in supercapacitors, though. That’s why his team wrapped 2D metal materials (TMDs) just a few atoms thick around highly-conductive 1D nanowires, letting electrons pass quickly from the core to the shell. That yielded a fast charging material with high energy and power density that’s relatively simple to produce. “We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials, ” Jung says. The research is in early days and not ready for commercialization, but it looks promising. “”For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability, ” Choudhary said. Jung calls the research “proof-of-concept, ” and the team is now trying to patent its new process. While it could go nowhere like many other battery developments, it’s worth looking at new supercapacitor research closely. If commercialized, it could allow for longer-range EVs that can be charged in minutes rather than hours, long-lasting (non-explosive) smartphones that can be charged in seconds and grid or home energy storage solutions that drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Source: UCF

Read the original:
New battery tech lasts for days, charges in seconds

Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

A Prisma for videos doesn’t sound so enticing now that Prisma itself has begun supporting the format. The popular app can now apply filters to videos and spit out 15-second snippets that look much more artistic than their source. Even better, it can process files even if you’re offline , which the team made possible by optimizing the algorithm. The bad news? Only the iOS version of the app supports videos for now, but the team is working on bringing the feature (along with offline processing) to Android. If you’ve ever used the app, you know that it can take some time to pass images through its filters, so you may be wondering how much longer videos take. It all depends on your device: it will take iPhone 7 up to 30 seconds, iPhone 6s a full minute and iPhone 6 two minutes to reveal your 15-second masterpiece. At the moment, videos only work with nine filters, but the developers plan to add more until all their filters can be applied to both photos and videos. While the app sounds more useful now, this still isn’t Prisma’s final form: the company promises to add support for GIFs “very soon, ” so you can give those reaction GIFs the artistic touch they deserve. Source: iTunes

Originally posted here:
Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs

Doctors at Oxford University made medical history recently by successfully completing the first robot-assisted intraocular surgery. Robert MacLaren, Professor of Ophthalmology at the university, and his team managed to gently peel off a 1/1000th millimeter membrane from the inside of a patient’s eye. To do so, the team relied on a cutting-edge medical device known as the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2. The R2D2, developed by Dutch medical robotics firm Preceyes BV, is designed to perform keyhole surgery, entering and exiting the eyeball through a single, sub-millimeter hole. What’s more, it’s built to be exceedingly steady, especially given the tight tolerances within which it works. It employs a series of seven, independently computer controlled motors to navigate within the eye and can move as little as 1/1000th of a millimeter at a time. This is done to eliminate any semblance of tremors in the surgeon’s hands — including even the most minute tics like those generated by the doctor’s own heartbeat. “Current technology with laser scanners and microscopes allows us to monitor retinal diseases at the microscopic level, but the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can operate on, ” Dr. MacLauren told the BBC. “With a robotic system, we open up a whole new chapter of eye operations that currently cannot be performed.” In this case, the surgical team was tasked with exorcising a tiny growth of membrane that had contracted around the patient’s retina and distorted his vision to resemble the hall-of-mirrors scene from Enter the Dragon. The existing method calls for doctors to time their movements between heartbeats but with the help of the joystick-controlled R2D2, that procedure can be completed in a fraction of the time. For the record, this is not how it’s supposed to go. The R2D2 is still undergoing clinical trials. In fact, this was the first of 12 such tests, each being more complex than the last. However, should the device gain government approval, it could become, as MacLauren states, “a vision of eye surgery in the future.” Source: Oxford University

Follow this link:
Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs

Dolphin emulator now supports every GameCube game

The open-source Dolphin emulator has been able to run nearly every GameCube title since 2009 , but one title has stumped it — Star Wars: The Clone Wars . It turns out that the 14-year-old game used some pretty clever, tricky-to-implement memory tricks. However, the team says it finally cracked the game with a more accurate memory emulator, which had the added benefit of other GameCube titles more stable. More than any other GameCube title, Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes advantage of the GameCube’s mappable memory to set up its own custom RAM structure. Unfortunately, it can change those on the fly in mid-game, crashing the emulator. To fix the problem, the Dolphin team had to rewrite a large chunk of the code that deals with so-called “block address translations (BATs).” The result is an emulator that can run every single official GameCube title with fewer crashes, but is a tad slower (8-15 percent) with those that use a different type of memory addressing. So, even though you can run the Dolphin software on a Mac, PC, Linux or Android machine, the team recommends as fast a computer as possible for certain titles. The Dolphin emulator was created as a software research experiment to do retro gaming, but because it runs Wii games (which Nintendo still sells) , it has been exploited for piracy. You can still legally run GameCube titles on a Wii console, but the last one, Madden NFL 08 , was released in 2007. Since they’re now moving into a preservation phase, the updated emulator is good news for gaming history geeks, despite the potential for misuse. Source: Dolphin

View the original here:
Dolphin emulator now supports every GameCube game

Cyborg locusts with tattooed wings can sniff out bombs

“Men, bring out the sniffer locusts.” That’s something a bomb squad chief could say in the future, thanks to a team of engineers working to turn the insects into cyborgs that can be sent anywhere to sniff out explosives. It won’t be an easy feat — the researchers, who hail from the Washington University in St. Louis, will have to equip the insects with several pieces of technology. Good thing they have a powerful backer: the Navy. Team leader Baranidharan Raman has received a three-year $750, 000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to make his dreams a reality. Raman has been studying how the bug processes smell for years now. He and his team found that locusts can identify particular scents, such as those they’re trained to detect, even in the presence of other odors. Raman believes the cyborg bugs will be much more effective than robots, because their antennae have a ton of natural sensors. “Why reinvent the wheel? Why not take advantage of the biological solution?” he asked. “That is the philosophy here. Even the state-of-the-art miniaturized chemical sensing devices have a handful of sensors. On the other hand, if you look at the insect antenna, where their chemical sensors are located, there are several hundreds of thousands of sensors and of a variety of types.” To turn ordinary locusts into bomb-sniffing machines, the engineers plan to implant an electrode into their brains to hijack their antennae and read electrical activity. Since operators need to get whatever info the bugs collect, the researchers are also developing a tiny backpack that can transmit data. The receiver’s red LED lights up in the presence of explosives, while the green LED lights up in the absence of any. Finally, the engineers plan to tattoo the bugs’ wings with biocompatible silk that can convert light into heat. A laser, probably installed on the backpack, will allow an operator to control the cyborg bug. Focus the laser on the left wing to make the insect go left, and vice versa. It will function much like a remote-controlled drone. If Raman and his team don’t hit a snag along the way, they could be testing the first prototypes within a year’s time and could be done within two. Via: BBC Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Read the original:
Cyborg locusts with tattooed wings can sniff out bombs

Now we can 3D print ceramics

Despite being able to build just about anything with 3D printing, until now items have been limited to polymer plastics, a handful of metals and glass . However, researchers at HRL Laboratories have announced a significant advancement in additive manufacturing: the ability to print ceramics . The trick, the HRL team figured out, was to not heat ceramic powder. Doing so generates too many microscopic flaws that can lead to cracks and fractures. Instead, the team developed a material they’re calling “preceramic polymers” that convert to ceramic when heated. Essentially, the HRL team prints out the 3D design using these preceramic polymers and then fires the resulting item (like in a kiln) to harden the material into ceramic. This material is compatible with stereolithography , a popular 3D printing method wherein a laser is used to solidify a liquid polymer. What’s more, the team figures it can print out a highly detailed and complex ceramic part 100 to 1000 times faster than conventional stereolithography by using an ultraviolet light and patterned masks. This advancement could prove a boon to the aerospace industry which already relies on ceramic components for everything from wing panels on planes to the internal mechanisms of orbital rockets. DARPA has awarded the team a development contract for an ablative ceramic aeroshell — essentially a heat shield for spacecraft as they enter an atmosphere — as HRL’s ceramics are reportedly 10 times stronger than the ceramic foam currently commercially available. [Image Credit: Getty] Source: MIT Tech Review

Continue Reading:
Now we can 3D print ceramics

Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users

Dropbox for Business is an increasingly important part of the company’s revenue stream — there are more than 130, 000 businesses using the service — but there are many more people out there using the company’s more consumer-focused free service and its $9.99 monthly subscription plan. Millions of those users are in fact using their personal Dropbox accounts to get work done, as well — so now Dropbox is going to offer a set of tools to make it a lot easier for individuals and smaller businesses to use Dropbox with a team of co-workers. In fact, that’s the name of the new service that launches tomorrow: Dropbox Teams. Anyone using Dropbox will now have the opportunity to create a team. When you start the process, Dropbox will even suggest users it thinks you should invite based on what documents you share with what people or whether you’re all using the same email address domain. Once your team is set up, everyone will have access to the same shared folder, which Dropbox expects teams will use to share documents that the whole group will need access to. Fortunately, you can also set up sub-groups (like a marketing team, or the specific people involved with a specific project) — that’ll keep everyone on the team from having files they don’t need taking up space in their Dropbox. Dropbox Teams will also give administrators granular control over what different users will have access to — you can limit what files and folders they can see, and you can also decide whether files can be shared or not. Another sharing option is the ability to determine whether folders and files can be shared with people who aren’t on your team. If files are confidential, you can keep them only within your team, but other files will be able to be freely shared with anyone using Dropbox. (Of course, that won’t stop anyone from downloading the file and sharing it via email, but there’s only so much you can expect from a free offering.) The last major feature here is pulled directly from Dropbox for Business. If you happen to have created Dropbox accounts for separate work and personal accounts, Dropbox will let you link them together so you can see them both while logged in, rather than have to log in and out to jump between them. All in all, it’s a pretty generous set of free features: it lets the many people out there already using the popular Dropbox Basic and Pro services for work have more control over how they do that. And it just might help the company sell more Dropbox for Business subscriptions as those small companies start growing up. Source: Dropbox

Read more here:
Dropbox Teams will offer a host of business features to free users