Pitts Report » Tech

Russia considers laser technology deal with Israel

CMAC — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:07:47 +0000

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday said that Russia and Israel are considering the possibility of equipping Israeli aircraft with Russian laser technology.

According to RIA Novosti, Putin met with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Sochi, Russia. The two officials discussed the current and future cooperation between both nations, including in the military sector.

“We are considering the possibility of equipping Israeli aircraft with our devices – space technology and laser technology,” Putin said.

Russia and Israel are currently negotiating the establishment of a joint venture to produce drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), worth an estimated $300 million.

“We have viable projects in the area of military and transport aviation,” Putin said. “We bought several drones from Israel and launched several satellites in Israel’s interests.”

The Russian Prime Minister also talked about the possible establishment of a Russian laser station in Israel, as part of the Glonass navigation satellite system.

The announcement came as Russia and Israel have systematically increased its cooperation in the fight against terrorism in recent times.

Apple’s Big Reveal

CMAC — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:36:50 +0000

Apple’s Big Reveal

Laser-powered helicopter hovers for hours

CMAC — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:36:07 +0000

12:58 02 September 2010 by Jeff Hecht

Lasers have recently shown they can down an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) – but they can also keep the drones up in the air. LaserMotive, based in Seattle, Washington, has kept a 22-gram model helicopter hovering for hours at a time on a few watts of laser power.

LaserMotive won $900,000 from NASA last year by beaming power to a robot that climbed a 900-metre cable dangling from a full-scale helicopter. The technology could help power space elevators to lift objects thousands of kilometres into orbit. But with space elevators still at the concept stage, LaserMotive is keen to find other ways to turn a profit from its technology, says company founder Jordin Kare.

Flying times of conventional UAVs are limited by the fuel or batteries they can carry. Solar power with battery backup for night flight allows flight times lasting several days – defence firm Qinetiq, based in the UK, has flown its ultralight Zephyr for more than 82 hours. But although Swiss company Solar Impulse has demonstrated that solar power can keep even a piloted craft in the air, the uncrewed vehicles typically flown by military agencies are heavier and more rugged, and so need more power to stay in the air than they can get from the sun.

LaserMotive says that ground-based lasers can deliver the required power. At last week’s AUVSI Unmanned Systems Conference in Denver, Colorado, the firm focused light from an array of semiconductor-diode near-infrared lasers down to a 7-centimetre beam, which automatically tracked a modified radio-controlled helicopter. The aircraft carried photovoltaic cells optimised for the laser wavelength, which converted about half the laser power reaching them to generate a few watts of electricity – enough to power the rotors of the little copter.

The laser-powered helicopter can hover for 6 hours, company president Tom Nugent told New Scientist from the show. He thinks that limit is set only by the quality of the motor driving the rotors. “It’s a little consumer-grade brush motor not meant to run this long,” he says. Under laser power, the copter “flies for several hours until the motor burns out”.

Laser-powered future

“That little helicopter sounds like a nice demonstration,” says Robert Van Burdine, a former engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who demonstrated laser-powered flight of a fixed-wing craft in 2003. His group manually aimed the laser, but the 300-gram radio-controlled plane with 1.5-metre wingspan had enough momentum to glide if the beam drifted off target; the helicopter would fall if the beam missed it. Although many people expressed interest at the time, he knows of no follow-up work.

LaserMotive has bigger plans for extending flight duration of military craft, says Kare. “We expect we can scale to anything anybody is interested in,” including helicopters and UAVs. A craft could hover for long periods over a laser base, or fly missions and return to recharge over the laser, or fly between a series of laser bases. In the longer term, he envisions lasers powering remote ground-based sensors, delivering power to forward military bases, or supplying emergency power during disasters.

Apple revamps iPod lineup, unveils low-priced TV box

CMAC — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:18:31 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) — Apple goes smaller and cheaper on Wednesday from refreshed iPod media players to rent- only TV set-top box system in hope of a brighter upcoming holiday sales season.

Reporters and IT bloggers packed into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco Wednesday morning, waiting for the showcase of new Apple products and services, as well as the presentation of the company’s CEO Steve Jobs.

REFRESHED IPOD

After showing photos of the new Apple retail shop in Shanghai and Paris, Jobs unveiled the new line up iPod media players, saying that “it’s the biggest change in the iPod lineup ever.”

The new iPod shuffle features over 15 hours of music playback on a single battery charge, 50 percent more battery life than the current model and starts at 49 U.S. dollars with a storage of 2 GB.

The iPod shuffle also has a new VoiceOver button on the top, allowing users to hear the name of the currently playing song and to switch between songs and playlists. VoiceOver speaks 25 different languages and can alert users when their battery needs charging.

With battery lasting for up to 24 hours, the revamped iPod nano has a touchscreen instead of a clickwheel. It also features Shake to Shuffle, enabling users to shake their iPod to shuffle to a new song in their music library. “This is the biggest reinvention of the iPod nano since its debut in 2005, and we think users are going to love it,” said Jobs.

The iPod touch, the most popular iPod product, goes thinner and gets the Retina Display, same as iPhone 4. It also gets a front facing camera and FaceTime, a video calling software also features for iPhone 4, as well as a rear-facing camera for high definition video recording.

The battery of the new iPod touch can last for 40 hours and the price starts at 229 dollars with 8GB storage.

The Apple CEO then introduced the iTunes 10 software with Ping, a new music-oriented social network. With Jobs calling it as ” social music discovery,” Ping is like a hybrid of Facebook, Twitter and iTunes, enabling users to follow friends and artists to see what they are saying and downloading. “We think this is going to be very popular, very fast,” Jobs said.

PRICE-CUT TV BOX, SHOW RENTALS

Jobs went on to introduce a smaller and cheaper version of Apple TV set-top box, which has been around since 2007, but “never been a huge hit.”

The new Apple TV is a quarter of the size of the previous version and can be easily held in people’s hand. It supports video streaming from Netflix Inc., a company that offers movies and TV shows rental by mail and online and can also stream content from Internet and computers to high definition (HD) TVs.

Users can rent first run movies for 4.99 dollars the same day they are released on DVD and rent HD TV episodes at the cost of only 99 cents. Jobs confirmed that ABC, ABC Family, Fox, Disney Channel and BBC America have agreed to offer shows for streaming.

He also announced that the price of the Apple TV will come down fr

Honey, I Shrunk The Memory! Scientists Heralding Smaller Gizmos, Again

CMAC — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:06:09 +0000

Rice University scientists are reporting advances in shrinking the technology that makes computer memory work–a huge key to the next revolution in gadget design. Soon your supercomputer may be the size of an iPhone.

Every few years the end of Moore’s law (predicting the ever-shrinking, ever-more-powerful design of silicon chips) is predicted, and then a new breakthrough is achieved that enables more shrinkage of the components of CPUs and other chips. The result is always our latest and greatest clutch of CPUs, memory devices and silicon what-nots that are more powerful than the last ones, while consuming less electricity and generating less heat. Some limits are approaching though that do signify the upper-end of Moore’s applicability, since they run into hard physics limitations–and the way that chips are currently crafted have proved particularly irksome for makers of flash-based memory.

How MIT’s Hybrid Bike Wheel Came to Life

CMAC — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:45:49 +0000

An interview with Christine Outram, who shepherded the Copenhagen Wheel’s development.

Can a student design change the world? Absolutely, and the Copenhagen Wheel — a hybrid-electric wheel you can bolt onto almost any bike — might soon prove how fast that can happen.

Developed by a student team out of MIT’s SENSEable City lab, the wheel recently won the U.S. round the James Dyson Awards. Even Sir James lauded the design’s versatility and elegance, telling us, “It’s a well thought out design in that it addresses a number of problems beyond tired legs.”

Co.Design recently talked with Christine Outram, who, as a graduate student, led the effort to bring the Copenhagen Wheel from a mere drawing to a full-blown working product. Here, she talks about the criteria the team laid out to guide the product’s development, and how the wheel is “more than a piece of transportation,” and could lead to full-blown carbon credit programs.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did the idea came about?

The project started at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, which usually collaborates with cities and telecoms and other places with extra data lying around, with the goal of creating a vision for the city in 15 years. The city of Copenhagen saw something called the Real-Time Room, which turned the iPhone into an ambient environmental monitor. They wanted to buy it, but being a university, the lab couldn’t really sell the project to them. So we agreed to take a look at Copenhagen, to see how technology could improve on the city.

And so, what issues did you look at once the student workshop began?

Initially there were five students involved, including myself. And the most striking thing you notice about Copenhagen is all of the bikes — 36% of people in Copenhagen bike to work. That trend began in the 1970s, with roads being strategically cut off, and cars being taxed 180%. The city mentioned that they wanted to reach 50% by 2015, but they weren’t coming close. That figure had actually plateaued some time ago.

So then we started thinking: Why wouldn’t someone get on a bike? It comes down to distance, topography, safety, and infrastructure. Weather is a factor, but we couldn’t change that [laughs].

Pretty early on, the idea of putting an electric wheel on a bike came about, because it could help put people on bikes that live further out or live below big hills. One of the students in the workshop created a really nice rendering, but we didn’t have any idea at that point about how it would actually work. And that’s when the lab went into the second phase, with a new batch of students — the “urban demo” phase. This was focused on choosing the batteries and the motor, and making the design real.

So how does the wheel work?

Inside of the hub, there’s a 250 watt motor. And when you pedal, there are sensors in the wheel that detect torque. So once the torque sensor detects a certain amount of exertion, it knows to supplement your pedaling. So if you’re going up a hill, you get more an assist. The idea is not that you stop pedaling and the motor takes over — you’re always pedaling, and the feeling is like having a friend pedaling with you.

You brake by pushing back on the pedals, and much like a Toyota Prius, the motor converts the friction created into electricity, which charges the battery. Also, when you’re going downhill, the gears in the hub switch so that they can recover energy there as well.

As far as engineering goes, the main thing is that you don’t want the batteries or the motor to spin with the wheel, creating momentum. So these sit near the axle, in a fixed position. The spinning part of the wheel actually rotates around them.

Finally, you choose how much assist you want through the iPhone interface. You can choose from low to high amounts of assist — so anywhere from 100% boost to a 300% boost.

It seems like the real insight was creating a wheel that can attach to any bike. How did that idea come about?

It actually links back to the City Car lab at MIT, because they designed something called the Robo Scooter, which had all the of the components in the wheel. So it seemed like a natural extension of that idea.

From there, we really treated it like a design project and we we weren’t interested in an incremental improvement on electric bikes, since they’re all pretty clunky with hard-wiring and external batteries. So we started with a design brief, that had four main criteria: 1. All of the components should fit in the hub. 2. It should be easily retrofitable and modular, so that you could plug in different components such as a bigger battery if you live near hills or environmental sensors if you’re a city looking to gather data. 3. It should be your friend, and be able to tell you how well you’re doing. 4. It should have a social component that connects with your friends and encourages you to cycle.

You student team at MIT was pretty multidisciplinary. How did that affect the product that ultimately emerged?

I should say that the guidance came from the leader of the lab, Carlo Ratti, who has a background in civil engineering and architecture, and Assaf Biderman, who was a physicist and works on tangible interfaces. Multidisciplinary backgrounds like theirs are really the key. When you including an electrical engineer and an electrical engineer and an architect, all these people have to speak the same language. It can’t be that you create something that works and put a pretty case over it. For instance, we could have easily hardwired a battery into the thing, but we wanted the battery to removable. The glue among everyone was an end-use focus. And that’s a design way of thinking.

So what did an architect like yourself contribute to the process?

The skill that architects bring is being able to think top down and bottom up at the same time. You have to have vision for an overall building design, but also be able to think about the design of a doorjam to prevent leaks when it rains. That sort of simultaneous thinking helps in these types of projects, and I think it helped that I continued with the project between both the brainstorming and the building.

Anything more you’d like to add about the product?

What I really like is that it’s not just a piece of transport. By including environmental sensors in the hub, you can use this to gather fine-grained data from a fleet of bicycles, just as a byproduct of people taking a normal route everyday. Moreover, you can also gather data about how many cycle miles are being logged over time, so you could watch whether the wheel is having an impact on a city’s carbon emissions. You can even imagine the wheel becoming the basis for carbon credits awarded to cities, or even competitions between cities across the world.

So is there VC backing? How are you guys staying in business? And what’s next?

We’re actually funded right now by the ministry of the environment in Italy, which is paying for the material cost of the 12 prototypes we’ve build. Those will soon go into a serious phase of beta testing, for example, riding up hills in San Francisco to see if they survive. Then, we’re looking to go commercial in 10-12 months. We already know that the final version is going to be far smaller and lighter that what you see now, thanks to custom motors and better battery selection.

And the cost?

It’ll be about $600 retail, which we think is pretty reasonable, once you consider that your average electric bike is $1000, and you don’t have to get rid of what you already have.