 |
There are currently, 9 guest(s) and 0 member(s) that are online.
You are Anonymous user. You can register for free by clicking here
|
The lights are on, but nobody's home.
|
We received
1766769
page views since 30th November, 2005
|
| |
This morning I saw an interesting thing about rising sea levels and how they would influence the shape of habitable land in Australia. It shows how the continent changes into a series of islands as the water level rises up to 500m. I think 500m is a bit of an exaggeration, I've only ever heard about 60m as a maximum figure, but maybe it could be more under extreme circumstances. You can view it here (it's a pretty small Flash file).
Further discussion is in the forum topic.
|
|
I was reading yesterday that the launch of the shuttle Discovery is set to go ahead despite NASA's head of safety and the chief engineer both saying they were against the launch due to 'risk of vehicle loss'. I know there are competing interests and a need to keep the shuttle going so that the ISS can get finished before the shuttle is mothballed, but I still thought it's a bit odd that the safety guys can just get overruled like that. Why even have them if you don't listen to them?
|
|
On the electrodynamics of moving bunnies
|
|
Below the fold is an analysis of the Easter Bunny, modelled on Is There A Santa Claus?, which I wrote for our science society newsletter. (By the way, if you don't get that title, allow Wikipedia to enlighten you.)
|
New from the world of American military research come two interesting inventions.
The first is a gun-toting robot helicopter called the AutoCopter Gunship. It can fly at speeds up to 90km/h and carries an automatic shotgun for all your terrorist-dispatching needs. At the moment, it's flown by remote control but they are apparently developing increasing levels of autonomy for it. You can see a video of it in action here. Automatic gunships like this might be quite useful, because they can travel way faster than normal troops and are probably better at fighting enemies sequestered high up in buildings, etc. They're pretty loud, though, and you'd have to imagine they wouldn't be too resilient, but then again neither are humans.
The second invention, which is not necessarily entirely militaristic but could definitely be used as such, involves new ways of controlling animals. Researchers are developing skills in selectively stimulating regions of animals' brains with electrodes, in order to provoke specific responses. For example, by activating a certain sensory area of a shark, you can make it think it smelt something to its right, so it will turn that way; how sharply it turns depends on how strong your signal is. This effectively allows you to steer the shark. The US Navy is setting up equipment to broadcast these signals by sonar to special pods mounted on the sharks. The whole thing sounds a lot like RA2 but apparently sharks do have an appeal as naval tools: they blend into the environment, they are silent and they power themselves (by eating, obviously). This means they might be utilised to track enemy ships or for other surveillance.
Of course more research is needed to determine whether the neural stimulation is inhumane to the animals, and it may ultimately turn out that using sharks for long-range endurance missions doesn't work if they have to continuously take breaks to hunt for fish. But the technology can be applied to other short-term tasks; one team has developed rats which can be steered through debris and are trained to sniff out the explosive RDX, for example.
The full article from New Scientist is available here.
|
| |
|
Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.
|
|
|
