As the processing power of the world’s fastest high-performance computers gets faster and faster, we eventually need to think about an era after the processing speed arms race, argued John Gustafson at the Supercomputing Frontiers 2015 conference in Singapore on Tuesday.

Gustafson said that the big challenge for the future of HPC is not necessarily faster processors, but more accurate processors. Using the metaphor of HPC doesn’t need a faster horse, but rather start thinking about a world “post-horse” era, Gustafson proposed moving beyond floating point rounding numbers — which he described as having become sloppy — to something called the universal number or “Unum”.

Unum, as Gustafson first proposed in his book The End of Error, is a new way to represent numbers that’s more accurate than the floating point estimate found in the IEEE 754 standard which Gustafson hopes it would ultimately replace. The IEEE 754 standard is based on the 101×10^2 floating point (which adds up to 64-bits) first introduced by L. Torres y Quevedo in Madrid in 1914.

Unums, which are 29-bits, contain metadata that allows for a longer and more in-depth answer rather than the rounding that floating point integers contain — including the overflow and underflow that goes along with it. Unums also obey algebraic laws and are safe to parallelize. With the mathematically complex problems that comes with the parallelism and sheer power found in modern HPC clusters, complex physics equations are reduced to mere “guesswork”.

The use of rounding can lead to disastrous results. Gustafson gave the example of how during the first Gulf War the 24-bit integer clock used in the Patriot missile batteries miscalculated the approach of a Scud missile by 0.34 seconds — killing 28 and injuring 100. The reason why the missile launched late is because of integer crowding. This came from the inaccuracy of the computer’s system clock due to it multiplying the time from milliseconds to seconds by multiplying 1/10. The 1/10 value was chopped after 24 decimal points. As the system had been on for 100 hours, the continued decimal chopping made the system continually less accurate. When dealing with missiles that travel hundreds of meters per second, this inaccuracy is unacceptable.

The other advantage of Unums is that due to their shorter float size, they take less external memory bandwidth to process. For a data center the largest single line item is its power bill. If power can be saved for the lowest level, for things like RAM calls, this would add up substantially in a massive data center. The US Department of Energy wants vendors to be able to produce an exascale system by 2019-2020 that uses less than 20 MW and to do this power savings has to happen everywhere.

Gustafson said that the next steps to get Unums to go “mainstream” is to convert the Mathematica C library into Unums. After that a strictly Unum compatible FPGA will need to be created. These are the first steps to the long road to a fully Unum compatible CPU.

For more on Unums, Gustafson’s book The End of Errors is worth a read.

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The well-known tire company Goodyear Tire (NASDAQ: GT) unveiled a very interesting prototype at the Geneva Motor Show.

The concept behind this prototype — which is far from going into production — could radically change the way we view car tires and car travel in the future. This concept, named “BHO3” – offers the possibility of charging the batteries of electric cars by transforming the heat generated by the rolling tire into electrical energy. This means, that under certain conditions, the car’s tires could actually charge the batteries of the vehicle. While the whole technology is rather new, the concept sounds profoundly promising all together.

The role of the car tires has always been to provide the safety and performance by adding better traction. Tires also allow for a smoother ride and take the hard hits of variable driving conditions the cars may encounter. In a nutshell they are the contact surface that the car has with the road. On the other hand, the technology of the tires remained stagnant in a lot of ways. Now, with Goodyear releasing its concept tires, dedicated to charging electric vehicles, we might see a big shift of focus for this often neglected part of the automotive culture entirely.

“These concept tires re-imagine the role that tires may play in the future,” said Joe Zekoski, Goodyear’s senior vice president and Chief Technical Officer, in a statement. “We envision a future in which our products become more integrated with the vehicle and the consumer, more environmentally friendly and more versatile.”

These tires would generate electricity through the action of materials in the tires themselves, reacting to the driving surfaces it encounters. The energy is created by heat when it flexes as it rolls during normal driving conditions, creating energy that can be transformed from one state to another, providing electricity. The materials used would optimize the tire’s electricity generation capabilities as well as its rolling resistance.

While Goodyear hasn’t released that much information about this potential groundbreaking technology, it is easy to see how such a solution would benefit would be range anxious drivers and help their electric vehicles achieve better range as well. Take a look at the video we’ve added below to find out more about this revolutionary tire concept. We’re sure some high-profile car manufacturers will take a rather compelling interest in this technology as well.

Now the question is, can Goodyear make this 3D rendering a reality? Only time will tell.

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Google Maps has taken its Street View to the skies.

Google’s cameras went to Lake Pitkäjärvi in Finland where the Aurora Borealis shines. These Northern Lights will be explored also by unmanned space probes sent by NASA to study their effect on satellite communications. The display occurs when highly charged electrons from the solar wind interact with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

Aurora Borealis with moon and stars over the frozen lake. Green denotes oxygen atoms, blue-violet is nitrogen.

The average individual rarely has a chance to glimpse this awesome display unless they are dressed for mighty cold temperatures. The conditions that make the glow visible only occur at certain latitudes and times of the year. The lake site is about 550 miles above sea level at a latitude of 63°9’0.01″ and longitude of 25°19’0.01″. This week’s weather hovers around 9°F and 98 percent humidity with a light dusting of snow.

Clouds replace the aurora borealis over Lake Pitkäjärvi.

Charles Swenson, a Utah State University professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the principal investigator for one of the NASA probes, known as the Auroral Spatial Structures Probe (ASSP). The missions are concerned with how the aurora affects Earth’s weather and how they impact Earth’s atmosphere. The ASSP probe will primarily study how heat from the aurora can impact satellites orbiting the Earth. Heat in and around the aurora is an expanded thermosphere. The expanded gas can increase the drag on satellites shifting their orbits significantly.” The probe also will look at how auroras and geomagnetic storms affect power grid infrastructure around the world.

There are five NASA suborbital sounding rockets. The rockets will launch from Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska. The ASSP probe is disposable according to Swenson. After approximately 10 minutes of collecting data it will splash down in the Arctic Ocean.

Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiment (MTeX) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Image Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

The Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiment (MTeX) will be flying on NASA Terrier-Improved Malemute. A second test, the Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) will study atmospheric turbulence and how atmospheric properties are mixed vertically by deploying trimethyl aluminum (TMA) vapor trails seen as whitish clouds that can be photographed for study according to Miguel Larsen, MIST principal investigator from Clemson University, South Carolina. These tracers will be released between 50 and 87 miles up and according to the scientists do not pose a risk to health or the environment.

The phenomena of the Aurora Borealis is named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for the north wind, Boreas. The aurora inspired myths among many Native American tribes. Once such story as quoted by Ernest W. Hawkes says: “There is a hole in it through which the spirits [of the dead] pass to the true heavens. The spirits who live there light torches to guide the feet of new arrivals.”

The colors of these torches are caused by the element and the altitude at which it encounters the sun’s messenger. Oxygen flames green up to 150 miles in altitude or red higher. Nitrogen displays as blue up to 60 miles in altitude and purple/violet higher.

If you want to see the spirits dance, the displays are visible close to the planets’ magnetic poles (not to be confused with the geographic poles). In the US, the Upper Michigan Peninsula should provide a good view, as should the northern coast of Russia or Fairbanks, Alaska. For a current forecast across Alaska and Canada refer to the website of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Northern Lights counterpart, aurora australis can be seen from Earth’s southern locations in Antarctica, South America, New Zealand and Australia. Additionally, auroras have been observed on most planets in our solar system from Venus to Neptune.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has launched its latest Tesla CUDA compute card, the Tesla K80 today at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans.

This follows Nvidia’s announcement last week that it had been awarded a $325 million Department of Energy grant with IBM to help build two 100 Petaflops+ machines for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Those supercomputers are expected to be built in 2017 and will use Nvidia’s yet-t0-be-built Volta GPU which comes after Pascal which comes after Maxwell, which is what Nvidia is currently using in their consumer graphics cards, but hasn’t quite started to use in professional just yet. So, until then, people looking for the fastest compute cards are going to want to look at Nvidia’s new Tesla K80.

Nvidia’s new Tesla K80 dual GPU compute card is an interesting product because it once again brings back Nvidia’s dual GPU Tesla products and increases the amount of compute you can squeeze onto a single card. Logically, you would think that the K80 would naturally be two K40’s smacked together into a single card, but that’s not accurate. In order to build the K80, Nvidia actually went with GPUs with similar shader core counts as the Tesla K20, but what’s most important is that they actually did double the onboard memory of the K80 from the K40 to 24 GB of GDDR5. Whenever we talk to anyone looking to do large simulations or scenes, their number one complaint is that they can never have too much VRAM and Nvidia appears to be listening to them by packing a whopping 24 GB of GDDR5 per card or 12GB of GDDR5 per GPU.

According to Nvidia’s specifications for the Tesla K80, it has 4992 shader cores (double that of the K20) which turns out to slightly less than double that of the K40, this is because Nvidia is using two GK-210 GPUs rather than the K40’s GK-110B. However, if you look at Nvidia’s performance claims, they state that the Tesla K80 is capable of 8.74 teraflops single-precision and 2.91 teraflops double-precision. This is more than double that of the K40 GPU which it seeks to replace and almost double that of the K10, Nvidia’s first dual GPU Tesla card. That’s the fantastic thing about Nvidia’s own Tesla cards, the K80 is a Kepler based dual GPU card while the K10 is also a Kepler based dual GPU card and the performance difference is nearly double simply by going from the GK-104 GPU design to the GK-110 (full-blown) Kepler GPU design. The Tesla’s K80 two GK210 GPUs each have 13 SMs that are clocked at 562 Mhz base, 875 Mhz boost thanks to Nvidia’s new GPU boosting features for this Tesla card, a Tesla first and something that came over from the consumer cards. Either way, its a great achievement and this is Nvidia’s next step before introducing a Maxwell-based Tesla compute card.

Nvidia’s Tesla K80 Compute Card – Note, no display out since this is a compute card

Also, if you look at the double-precision performance, it is more than 30 times faster than the original dual Kepler GPU card, the K10 and more than twice as fast as the K40 which means that Nvidia makes up for the lack of shader cores somewhere else. One of those places is in the card’s memory bandwidth which is pumped up to a whopping 480 GB/s which pretty much removes memory bandwidth as a bottleneck in most applications. Unfortunately, even though this card does have double the GPUs and double the memory of the K40, it doesn’t quite have double the memory bandwidth, which once again points to a likelihood of lower memory clock speeds than the K40. If one were to simply double the K40’s memory bandwidth, you would be looking at 566 GB/s, not the current 480 GB/s on the K80, but even so, this pretty much dwarfs anything on the market by over 150 GB/s anyways.

That card would be AMD’s own FirePro W9100, which has been very competitive with Nvidia’s K40 and offers 2,816 stream processors, 16GB GDDR5 memory and 320 GB/s memory bandwidth. This comes out to a peak performance of 5.24 teraflops peak single-precision floating-point performance and 2.62 teraflops peak dual-precision floating-point performance, meaning that now the ball is back in AMD’s court with today’s announcement.

In fact, Nvidia’s Tesla compute cards are also enabling some of the most recent scientific breakthroughs like the ongoing Rosetta mission that the ESA has embarked upon, which most recently landed a probe on a comet. “The Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators are up to 10 times faster than CPUs when enabling scientific breakthroughs in some of our key applications, and provide a low energy footprint,” said Wolfgang Nagel, director of the Center for Information Services and HPC at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. “Our researchers use the available GPU resources on the Taurus supercomputer extensively to enable a more refined cancer therapy, understand cells by watching them live, and study asteroids as part of ESA’s Rosetta mission.”

There is currently no pricing information available for the K80 based on the information we were given by Nvidia, however you can probably ballpark that it will cost upwards of $5000 since the K40 originally sold for that price but has since been discounted down to $3,000 very likely in anticipation of today’s announcement. In terms of availability, Nvidia Tesla K80 dual-GPU compute cards will be available from a variety of server manufacturers, including ASUS, Bull, Cirrascale, Cray, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Inspur, Penguin, Quanta, Sugon, Supermicro and Tyan, as well as from NVIDIA reseller partners.

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Today, the Department of Energy has announced that is has granted $425 million to build two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of a broader CORAL initiative which is a collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. $325 million of that will be spent on the actual supercomputer building while an additional $100 million will be used for the FastForward2 program, which is designed to encourage and enable hardware vendors to increase performance and efficiency for the next generation.

The first supercomputer, to be known as Summit, will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will replace the currently existing ‘Titan’ supercomputer which is capable of a peak performance of 27 petaflops. Summit will be capable of delivering between 150 and 300 peak petaflops and will be used for ‘open science’. The Sierra supercomputer, designed to replace the existing Sequoia will be used for nuclear security simulations and will be capable of speeds in excess of 100 petaflops as well. Both systems will be faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer right now, Tianhe-2 in China, which currently clocks in at 55 petaflops of peak performance. Argonne’s hardware win is yet to be announced, but will be unveiled at a later date.

In order to achieve this level of performance, the laboratories participating in the CORAL initiative are harnessing the power of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Power 9 architecture CPUs and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) yet-t0-be-announced Volta GPUs. This means that since this machine is expected to come online in 2017, that we can very likely expect to see Volta GPUs in 2017. The project will use Mellanox’s interconnect technologies to connect the systems together, but in order to connect the GPU to the CPU, they will be using Nvidia’s own NVLink GPU interconnect. NVLink is Nvidia’s own proprietary interconnect specifically designed to increase the communication speed between GPUs and Nvidia is working with IBM to get this interconnect embedded directly into the IBM Power CPUs that will be powering these different supercomputer designs. Additionally, the Summit supercomputer will also be using IBM’s own IBM Elastic Storage using GPFS technology and will store 120 petabytes of data.

The system as a whole, Summit, will only use 10% more power than Titan but will deliver approximately 5-10 the performance of Titan, illustrating where supercomputer designs are headed and how the Department of Energy is really trying to drive high performance increases while also promoting energy efficiency. The expected performance for Summit has already been stated to be between 150 and 300 petaflops, however, this is thanks to over 3400 compute nodes, each delivering 40 teraflops of performance alone. Each node will consist of IBM Power 9 CPU(s) and Nvidia Volta GPU(s), unfortunately we do not know if each node will be a dual processor node or how many GPUs will fit into each node, but the expectation would be a dual processor node with at least 2 GPUs per node.

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This hardware win for IBM and Nvidia is a huge one because it illustrates that the Open Power partnership between the two companies is working and that it can enable IBM to ship more CPUs. This is a very big deal for IBM and Nvidia because this is the first supercomputer in the US in a long time that will be built without either Intel or AMD CPUs. It also means that Nvidia will finally make use of NVLink, which they announced will be coming out with the Pascal GPU, the predecessor to Volta. Nvidia has already said we can expect to see Pascal in 2016, which means the transition from Pascal to Volta will be a fairly quick one.

The Department of Energy has stated that the whole purpose of these new supercomputer designs is to enable exascale computing. Both Coral and FastForward2 are supposed to enable hardware manufacturers to help their customers build efficient and powerful suptercomputers capable of over 1 exaflop (or 1000 petaflops). And if they can get the Summit supercomputer to 300 petaflops, that’s going to be a huge step forward to achieving exascale computing and an exaflop supercomputer.

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Segway dancing, thousands of Japanese schoolgirls, and a continuous shot taken by a drone-mounted camera…

… It must be the newest music video by OK Go.

Alternative Pop band OK Go, masters of the viral music video, just released a new flick for their “I Won’t Let You Down” single.

Every time the band seems to have outdone themselves, they push the envelope with something new. Directed by Morihino Harano, the four men glide around the Longwood Station Studios courtyard on Honda Uni-Cub segways, joined by hundreds of synced dancers, for fantastic visuals from all angles.

Like OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” & “The Writing’s On the Wall” one-takers, there is a sense that we are watching raw footage, with only the ends trimmed off. When crew members (actually a cameo of Japanese pop group Perfume) prepare the shot in the beginning, their actions are fast forwarded, which means the action/music were performed at half-speed for safety. This was a crucial production decision for operating a complicated drone shot, while choreographing almost 2500 cast, crew, and extras.

As the drone ascends upward for the finale, the array of dancers turn into an unbelievable LED-like marquee, shaping the band members’ faces, and the occasional “アイ　ウォント　レッチュー　ダウン”, phonetic Japanese for “I Won’t Let You Down”.

Whether or not you like their music, OK Go will continue to wow audiences worldwide with visually impressive music videos.

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The world renowned theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has finally joined the world of social media and posted his first status about joining the social network. Do keep in mind that Dr. Hawking is not on any other social media platform and has not been well known for being social media savvy. His Facebook page already has over 1 million likes and will hopefully be one of the go-to places for space discussions and posts.

Stephen Hawking

Pictured above is Stephen Hawking’s own Facebook profile picture, which was carefully chosen as it appears many of the images on his account were actually uploaded to the account ahead of the announcement yesterday of his presence on Facebook. The important thing is that now Stephen Hawking has a more direct channel to communicate his views to his fans and critics. It is interesting, though, that he chose Facebook over Twitter or Google Plus, especially considering how short each tweet can be for Twitter, only requiring 140 characters per message.

Either way, this will hopefully give science and technology another proponent who can communicate with the broader population about space, space exploration and theoretical physics. While not everyone may agree with Stephen Hawking’s beliefs, the important thing is that there are more and more voices in the scientific and astrophysics communities talking with the public about their theories and trying to educate the public about space, science and physics.

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Angkor Wat and the surrounding area is an ancient 9th century Khmer construct of temples in Cambodia. LiDar is a 20th century invention that is probing secrets hidden deep within the surrounding jungle. LiDar (light detection and ranging), is an optical remote-sensing technique that transmits laser beams toward a target returning extremely accurate geospatial x,y,z measurements.

Arial image of Angkor Wat, but LiDar reveals much more.

Aerial surveys half a century ago used film cameras and slide rules. We’ve come a long way since then. The technology is discovering that there is more to Angkor Wat than meets the eye. The UNESCO site is an archaeologist’s dream in a country that thrived as part of an empire centuries ago and suffered through a civil war in our lifetime. Combined pieces of hardware turned dreams into reality. The major components of a LiDar system include a collection unit – possibly a land-based tripod or in the case at Angkor Wat, a helicopter – with an onboard computer and data storage devices. There is a laser scanner system, global positioning system (GPS), inertial measurement unit (IMU) and inertial navigation system (INS). The INS measures roll, pitch, and heading of the LiDar system. A light beam bounces back from the surface and a sensor records it to measure a range. When laser ranges are combined with position and orientation data generated from the GPS and IMU, scan angles, and calibration data, it results in a detailed, dense group of elevation points, called a point cloud.The shareable mass point cloud datasets can be managed, visualized, and analyzed. The point data becomes highly accurate geo-referenced x,y,z coordinates by analyzing the laser time range, laser scan angle, GPS position, and INS information.

Each point in the point cloud has three-dimensional spatial coordinates – latitude, longitude, and height – that correspond to a particular point on the Earth’s surface from which the laser pulse was reflected.
Topographic LiDar typically uses a near-infrared laser to map the land as at Angkor Wat, while bathymetric LiDar uses water-penetrating green light to also measure seafloor and riverbed elevations.

Images carved into the temple proper and its walls hint of more discoveries waiting to be unearthed.

LiDar provides archaeologists with the ability to create high-resolution digital elevation models of archaeological sites. The helicopter’s vantage point gives researchers access to areas difficult to reach on foot and can find secrets hidden beneath impenetrable forest canopies. The recent discoveries showed eerie outlines under the surrounding forest of temples never before seen by modern man. There are ceremonial boulevards which form a grid, dykes and man-made ponds which indicate large-scale hydraulic engineering typical of the Khmer empire which out of necessity had to concern itself with controlling the effects of frequent monsoons.

French explorer, Henri Mouhot wrote in his journal in 1863 of the visible ruins he saw: “One of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo, might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.” No wonder modern explorers use every means possible to uncover more of the splendor. The BBC has much more on the topic including how they used LiDar.

LiDar or 3D laser scanning originated in 1960 to detect submarines from aircraft. The science and its use have grown since then. Early in this century, Alex Lee, a then PhD Scholar at the School of Resources, Environment & Society in the Australian National University at Canberra was using LiDar in the Injune project for research involving biomass and global change science. It is his illustration you see below. This graphical representation is of the various elements of a small footprint airborne scanning laser system. Lee was looking at 1100 hectare of forest.

Now, airborne LiDar sensors can capture existing conditions in true 3D. It is possible to model and analyze information virtually down to an individual tree in that forest. It can perform rapid surveys over large land areas with accuracy down to 5cm.
LiDar permeates and facilitates measuring techniques utilized by several industries, including computer gaming, flood forecasting, meteorology, architecture, cellular network planning, and smart cars.

Stanley, 2005 DARPA winner with LiDar on board

Adaptive Cruise Control systems for automobiles have implemented this technology. LiDar units were used for short range detection on Stanley, the autonomous car that won the 2005 DARPA competition. Low-level modules fed raw data from LIDAR, the camera, GPS sets and inertial sensors into software programs that controlled the vehicle’s speed, direction and decision making.

LiDar technology can also be put to use as an alternative to radar guns for speed limit tracking. Rather than relying on Doppler shifts to directly measure speed, policing LiDar uses the principle of time-of-flight to calculate speed.
Physical objects can be captured by LiDar and re-created in the computer realm. When an object or scene has been made digital, it can be manipulated, colored, or textured into a detailed, accurate model. For gaming, it can be the basis for a replica of whole cities or the undulations of a race track.

Angkor Wat isn’t the only game in town. Computer gamers benefit from LiDar, alongside archaeologists, architects, car manufacturers, and all varieties of scientists.
The BBC provides a video in their interesting article. The BBC aired Jungle Atlantis already, but it can be seen October 5 in the US on The Smithsonian Channel under the name Angkor Revealed.

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No, we aren’t talking about a Tesla Motors museum. We are talking about a Tesla Museum that Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal comics is building to commemorate Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-Croat inventor that captured the minds of millions of people around the world, including the minds of Matthew Inman and Elon Musk.

Originally, Inman had written a comic about how awesome Nikola Tesla was and continued to write comics about him and the old research facility that Tesla had kept in New York state, including its state of disrepair. Eventually, he decided that the facility needed to be repaired and restored and to make it into a museum. That sparked a Tesla Museum IndieGoGo campaign back in 2012, which raised a whopping $1.3 million. In addition to that money, New York State agreed to match them for that same amount (up to $850,000) — putting the total raised for the Tesla Museum at $2.1 million, even though they only needed to raise $1.7 million.

Inman did state that, “Even if we raise the full amount and end up with $1.7 million, this isn’t enough to build an actual Tesla Museum / science center. But it will effectively put the property into the right hands so it can eventually be renovated into something fitting for one of the greatest inventors of our time.” So, he knew that they were going to need more funding to really build the Tesla Museum.

Tesla Motors

Then, Inman got excited about his new Tesla Motors Model S electric car and asked Elon Musk if he would donate to help build the museum, which he agreed to donate $1 million and a Tesla Motors Supercharging station. This put the total projects funding somewhere around $2.7 million, which apparently wasn’t enough to built the museum and science center in addition to buying the property and such. So, now we’re at this new round of funding with a new Indiegogo campaign, this time giving people the opportunity to have their names etched into a brick on the walls of the museum, to help finish paying for its building.

The goal for this campaign is actually far less than the previous one, with only $250,000 as the target goal and only within day of being online it has already reached $150,000 out of $250,000. However, Inman warns that this is nowhere near the end of this project as the Tesla Musuem will need a lot of work to ultimately reach an acceptable appearance and functionality.

Inman states that ultimately, they need to raise somewhere near $10 million in total to pay for everything to be fixed, replaced, or rebuilt. Right now, their goal is to help pay for fixing the roof to protect Tesla’s lab from the environment of Long Island New York during the winter. The property itself is in a relatively expensive area, which explains why they needed so much money to buy the property and keep it from being torn down.

They are slowly making their way to $10 million, but I suspect that there will be a chance that they could get another $1 million from this campaign alone. Inman stated that he expects to have future campaigns to pay for future phases of the project that will ultimately land them at the $10 million goal and saving the entire facility and making it a functional science center and museum.

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Move over MakerBot. Another company’s 3D printer will be looking down on you from the International Space Station (ISS). A small startup, or up start company if you prefer, that came out of Singularity University Graduate Studies Program got NASA’s attention. The result is a 3D printer whirling around in space ready to meet its final tests aboard the space craft.

Speakers on the CES 2014 panel The Future of 3D printing never predicted this momentous event.

Made In Space Zero-G 3D printer isn’t sexy, but if it works… space exploration will be changed forever.

Made In Space, founded less than five years ago, boosted by more than half a million dollars from a Small Business Innovation Research grant from NASA, has achieved its goal of sending their Zero-G 3D printer to the ISS. It was created and tested on Earth to be functional in space. Last October, Jason Dunn, Chief Technology Officer, speaking at TEDx predicted that this new printer will disrupt the interplanetary supply chain. Items needed by astronauts while in space can be manufactured in space, eliminating the cost and time to make the item on Earth and send it into outer space to the astronauts.

Made In Space CTO spoke at TEDx

Last year, Made In Space received a Phase III Sole Source contract from NASA to build a 3D printer that could work on the ISS. Their plan was to test current 3D technology in zero gravity and adapt the technology to go into space. Several easily controlled on-Earth problems prove more difficult to solve in space. Off-gassing when working with plastics in the closed environment of a space craft had to be dealt with by developing a special filter. Microgravity affects the thermal process used in 3D printing in that fluids don’t separate due to their being heated because there is no convection. Things float without gravity to hold them down, so the designers needed to reduce and eliminate the amount of variation in the system according to Michael Snyder, Director of R&D and Lead Engineer at Made In Space.

Snyder explains the challenges of performing 3D printing in space

Electromagnetic interference came into play as was the need to have full circuit integration in the sealed environment of the glove box where science and technology experiments are conducted. Vibrations during launch had to be considered. With all those issues resolved, or so they hope after rigorous and unusual testing techniques, the printer is finally on the ISS. Additionally, before the printer headed for ISS, it had to meet NASA safety requirements. NASA certified that the hardware met all necessary operational standards. Now, everyone is looking forward to discovering how it all works over time in the unique environment.

The first printer is owned by NASA per contract. It will only print unique geometries to test tensile strength and other material properties according to company Business Development Engineer, Brad Kohlenberg. It must prove the success of the extrusion process by making a few simple items.

Made In Space’s vision of the future

Dunn said: “When we started Made In Space in 2010, we laid out a large, audacious vision for changing space exploration by bringing manufacturing to space. We’re nearing the culmination of the first stage of our larger vision.” A second printer belonging not to NASA but to the creator company, Made In Space, will head for the space station after successful completion of this first test. The company’s plan for their printer is commercial use.

To see Dunn’s explanation of the challenges and testing Made In Space’s printer underwent, watch the YouTube recording.

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Philae is the name given to the Rosetta mission lander of the European Space Agency (ESA). It’s preparing to land on a comet 405 million kilometers from Earth. The tongue-twisting name of that comet is 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Five potential landing sites had been suggested. The press was notified of the final choice in a briefing today in Paris. Site “J,” judged to be the least risky landing location, is on the smaller, 4 km wide lobe, of Comet 67P. This space voyager will have a visitor on November 11 if all goes as planned. The alternative site “C” would place the lander on the larger section of the comet which looks like two irregular pitted balls connected at the hip. The sites were chosen for having maximum daylight hours and a flat landing surface.

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko close-up. Credit ESA/ATG medialab

The 100 kg (220 pound) lander will be taking measurements while resting directly on the comet’s surface as it whizzes through space. Jean-Pierre Bibring, a lead lander scientist and principal investigator of the CIVA instrument (Comet nucleus Infrared and Visible Analyze) at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in Orsay, France said: “We will make the first ever in situ analysis of a comet at this site, giving us an unparalleled insight into the composition, structure and evolution of a comet.” Seven micro cameras will take a 360 degree panorama of the landing site.

On August 6, after more than 10 years journeying in space, the lander arrived at the comet. Then, discussions and analysis of potential landing sites commenced. When Philae, 405 million kilometers from Earth, was able to hover within 30 km – less than 19 miles – above the comet a final decision could be made.

Dordain explains Rosetta’s mission at ESOC conference

“After ten years, five months and four days travelling towards our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometres [over 4 billion miles] we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General.

Just nine months ago, the hibernating spacecraft woke up and commenced reactivating the orbiter’s 11 science instruments and 10 instruments on Philae in preparation for making scientific observations. As a bonus, on its way to rendezvous with 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the space probe was able to come close enough to asteroids Šteins and Lutetia to get never-before-possible views of the space junk and gather science data about them as well. At its destination, Philae will attempt to send and detect radio waves through the comet’s interior to learn more about its internal structure. Scientists hope to glean information about the comet’s make up and activity.

For a year, Rosetta will hang out with the comet on its elliptical 6.5 year obit swinging around the Sun as it heads back out towards the planet Jupiter. They will pass between the orbits of Mars and Earth as they fly by at 55,000 kilometers or 34,175 miles per hour. Hang on to your hat.

Created in 1975, ESA’s mission is to “ensure that investment in space delivers benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.” The ESA is made up of twenty states, most of which are members of the EU. It works with cooperative agreements with non-member states and Canada. NASA also contributed to the Rosetta mission. Here is also an animated version of the landing, via YouTube

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The University of Rochester Medical Center Smartphone-PD study is partnering Android smartphones with Parkinson’s disease research professionals. Your voice recorded via the digital microphone in your phone, run through software developed by the Non-Linearity and Complexity Research Group at Aston University coupled with machine learning can quantify where a person lies between health and disease. This news comes from Dr. Max Little of Aston in Birmingham, England.

The recent revelation that Robin Williams was diagnosed with Parkinson`s has again brought attention to the disease. Research has shown a definite connection between Parkinson’s disease (PD) a degenerative motor system disorder and speech impairment. PD causes tremors, typically starting in one hand, painful and rigid muscles, slowed movements, and impaired balance. The problems affect not only your limbs, but your vocal organs. The voice becomes more quiet and breathy. Neither definitive blood tests, nor biomarkers indicate Parkinson’s, but the subtle changes in vocalization easily picked up from a smartphone and analyzed by specific software can help detect and monitor the disease.

This connection between Parkinson’s and speech impairment is the foundation for the Smartphone-PD study. Sound waves are caused by fluctuations in air pressure when the vocal folds/cords of the larynx/voicebox which lay over the trachea/windpipe vibrate. Dysphonia –disorders of the voice – can point to the early onset of PD through the use of speech signal processing algorithms.

Additionally, accelerometers in the smartphone can be used to pick up on movements characteristic of PD such as freezing of gait when the person walks. Add GPS and other smartphone data, such as indications of socialization, and the software analysis of those behaviors can result in a diagnostic algorithm for Parkinson’s.

The app was also tested at the University of Oxford. Dr. Michele Hu, consultant neurologist at the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre said: “It’s a much better way of assessing overall disease – a better measure of progression and response to treatment,” Researchers continue to look for ways to diagnose PD from subtle changes that take place in the brain up to 15 years before the appearance of overt symptoms. Smartphone technology is among the approaches being tested.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in the brain. When the cells that make dopamine slowly die, the result is a progressive lack of control over your muscles. The symptoms were first identified by James Parkinson in 1817. Parkinson’s disease usually affects people who are over 50. The early detection hoped for by the Smartphone-PD study is important because there is neither cure nor treatment to prevent or reverse the neuronal cell loss that occurs in Parkinson’s. Medications only provide temporary relief from the debilitating symptoms.

A Patient’s Voice Analysis (PVA) team is comprised of Dr. Little and other scientists from PatientsLikeMe and Sage Bionetworks who employs statistical geneticists and computational biologists. These teams will review voice recordings collected and analyzed by the software along with information supplied by patients using a program from PatientsLikeMe. The Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (PDRS) is a tool that uses patients’ answers to questions that measure treatment effectiveness and disease progression.

Paul Wicks, Ph.D., Vice President of Innovation at PatientsLikeMe says: “We invite anyone who has PD to take part and join PatientsLikeMe, so they can stay informed about their condition and generate new insights about this disease”. Dr. Little’s team also wants healthy individuals to sign up for comparative purposes. Social media has become such a boon to research. Little asks that you consider helping this cause at no charge to you.

A fairly extensive consent form that checks to be sure you understand the purpose and scope of the study and your participation in it can be found here.

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A process known as “cracking” is being viewed as a potential for making hydrogen power more realistic for automotive purposes. Hydrogen is thought to be one of the best alternative fuel sources, but managing it has complications. Ammonia cracking is seen as a safer, less costly method of making hydrogen available.

Cracking separates ammonia into one part nitrogen and three parts hydrogen. Hydrogen is typically produced by steam reforming natural gas, a process that wastes some of the energy stored in the gas, but a more significant result is the release of large amounts of CO2, considered to have a negative effect on the environment. Splitting ammonia into its component parts is seen as a more positive approach to obtaining hydrogen.

Expensive precious metals are used as catalysts in the cracking process. Researchers from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK have discovered a new way that overcomes that cost. Two simultaneous chemical processes using cheaper sodium amide replace the use of a catalyst, thus reducing cost significantly.

Professor Bill David along with Dr. Martin Jones led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source in Oxfordshire. David said: “We can produce hydrogen from ammonia on demand effectively and affordably.” The ammonia can be carried on-board vehicles at low pressure in plastic tanks. David continues: “For cars, we don’t even need to go to the complications of a fuel-cell vehicle. A small amount of hydrogen mixed with ammonia is sufficient to provide combustion in a conventional car engine. While our process is not yet optimized, we estimate that an ammonia decomposition reactor no bigger than a 2-litre bottle will provide enough hydrogen to run a mid-range family car.”

Caption: Prof. Bill David (right) and Dr. Martin Jones with the ammonia decomposition reactor. Credit: STFC

The downside, however, must be attended to. Safety issues revolve around storing on-board high pressure tanks and the cost of installing a new high-pressure infrastructure at the fuel delivery stations are tremendous.

Dr. Steven Chu who holds a Nobel Prize in Physics, 10 patents, and was US Secretary of Energy for four years ending in 2013, said “I always was somewhat skeptical of it because, right now, the way we get hydrogen primarily is from reforming gas. That’s not an ideal source of hydrogen.”

Several attempts to obtain hydrogen by a more acceptable method have been made. In 2013, a team led by Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech developed a way to produce large quantities of hydrogen from xylose, a simple sugar that is abundant in plants.

In a 2009 MIT interview, Dr. Chu had iterated several obstacles then to hydrogen fuel-cell technology along with a quotable comment to put a fine point on those problems. Yet, he told reporters at the Washington Car Show when asked about fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV): “This is an important technology and we want to continue to support the research. Fuel cells can be incredibly reliable.”

David and Jones challenge other researchers to resolve the difficulties associated with hydrogen fuel and to focus on the promise of oil independence. You can find their article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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