Nasa plans 3D printer space launch

US space agency Nasa is planning to launch a 3D printer into space next year to help astronauts manufacture spare parts and tools in zero gravity.
It will be the first time a 3D printer has been used in space and could help reduce the costs of future missions.
The device will have to withstand lift-off vibrations and operate safely in an enclosed space station environment.
Nasa has chosen technology start-up Made in Space to make the microwave-sized printer.
"Imagine an astronaut needing to make a life-or-death repair on the International Space Station," said Aaron Kemmer, the company's chief executive.
"Rather than hoping that the necessary parts and tools are on the station already, what if the parts could be 3D printed when they needed them?"
In 1970, Apollo 13 astronauts had to cobble together a home-made carbon dioxide filter using a plastic bag, a manual cover and gaffer tape.
A 3D printer might have solved the problem in minutes and helped them reach the Moon.
"If you want to be adaptable, you have to be able to design and manufacture on the fly, and that's where 3D printing in space comes in,'' said Dave Korsmeyer, director of engineering at Nasa's Ames Research Center.
Nasa is also experimenting with 3D printing small satellites that could be launched from the International Space Station and then transmit data to earth.
Additive manufacturing, as 3D printing is also known, builds up objects layer by layer, commonly using polymer materials.
But laser-melted titanium and nickel-chromium powders are now being used to build much stronger components.
In August, Nasa successfully tested a metal 3D printed rocket component as part of its drive to reduce the costs of space exploration.

Scientists want to turn smartphones into earthquake sensors

For years, scientists have struggled to collect accurate real-time data on earthquakes, but a new article published today in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America may have found a better tool for the job, using the same accelerometers found in most modern smartphones. The article finds that the MEMS accelerometers in current smartphones are sensitive enough to detect earthquakes of magnitude five or higher when located near the epicenter. Because the devices are so widely used, scientists speculate future smartphone models could be used to create an "urban seismic network," transmitting real-time geological data to authorities whenever a quake takes place.
The authors pointed to Stanford's Quake-Catcher Network as an inspiration, which connects seismographic equipment to volunteer computers to create a similar network. But using smartphone accelerometers would be cheaper and easier to carry into extreme environments. The sensor will need to become more sensitive before it can be used in the field, but the authors say once technology catches up, a smartphone accelerometer could be the perfect earthquake research tool. As one researcher told, "right from the start, this technology seemed to have all the requirements for monitoring earthquakes — especially in extreme environments, like volcanoes or underwater sites."

Guided by Touch Screens, Blind Turn to Smartphones for Sight

Luis Perez loves taking photographs. He shoots mostly on an iPhone, snapping gorgeous pictures of sunsets, vintage cars, old buildings and cute puppies. But when he arrives at a photo shoot, people are often startled when he pulls out a long white cane.
In addition to being a professional photographer, Mr. Perez is almost blind.
“With the iPhone I am able to use the same technology as everyone else, and having a product that doesn’t have a stigma that other technologies do has been really important to me,” said Mr. Perez, who is also an advocate for blind people and speaks regularly at conferences about the benefits of technology for people who cannot see. “Now, even if you’re blind, you can still take a photo.”
Smartphones and tablets, with their flat glass touch screens and nary a texture anywhere, may not seem like the best technological innovation for people who cannot see. But advocates for the blind say the devices could be the biggest assistive aid to come along since Braille was invented in the 1820s.
Counterintuitive? You bet. People with vision problems can use a smartphone’s voice commands to read or write. They can determine denominations of money using a camera app, figure out where they are using GPS and compass applications, and, like Mr. Perez, take photos.
Google’s latest releases of its Android operating systems have increased its assistive technologies, specifically with updates to TalkBack, a Google-made application that adds spoken, audible and vibration feedback to a smartphone. Windows phones also offer some voice commands, but they are fewer than either Google’s or Apple’s.
Among Apple’s features are ones that help people with vision problems take pictures. In assistive mode, for example, the phone can say how many heads are in a picture and where they are in the frame, so someone who is blind knows if the family photo she is about to take includes everyone.
All this has come as a delightful shock to most people with vision problems.
“We were sort of conditioned to believe that you can’t use a touch screen because you can’t see it,” said Dorrie Rush, the marketing director of accessible technology at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit vision education and rehabilitation center. “The belief was the tools for the visually impaired must have a tactile screen, which, it turns out, is completely untrue.”
Ms. Rush, who has a retinal disorder, said that before the smartphone, people who were visually impaired could use a flip-phone to make calls, but they could not read on the tiny two-inch screens. While the first version of the iPhone allowed people who were losing their vision to enlarge text, it wasn’t until 2009, when the company introduced accessibility features, that the device became a benefit to blind people.
While some companies might have altruistic goals in building products and services for people who have lost their sight, the number of people who need these products is growing.
About 10 million people in the United States are blind or partly blind, according to statistics from the American Foundation for the Blind. And some estimates predict that over the next 30 years, as the vast baby boomer generation ages, the number of adults with vision impairments could double.
Apple’s assistive technologies also include VoiceOver, which the company says is the world’s first “gesture-based screen reader” and lets blind people interact with their devices using multitouch gestures on the screen. For example, if you slide a finger around the phone’s surface, the iPhone will read aloud the name of each application.
In a reading app, like one for a newspaper, swiping two fingers down the screen will prompt the phone to read the text aloud. Taking two fingers and holding them an inch apart, then turning them in a circle like opening a padlock calls a slew of menus, including ones with the ability to change VoiceOver’s rate of speech or language.
The iPhone also supports over 40 different Braille Bluetooth keyboards.
On all the mobile platforms, people with vision loss say, the real magic lies in the hundreds of apps that are designed specifically to help people who are blind.
There are apps that can help people see colors, so pointing their phones at an object will yield a detailed audio description of the color, like “pale yellow green” or “fresh apricot.” People who are blind say these apps open up an entirely new way of seeing the world. Light detection apps can emit a sound that intensifies when someone approaches a light source. This can be used to help people find a room’s exit, locate a window or turn off a light. There are apps that read aloud e-mails, the weather, stock prices as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds.
In the United States, one of the biggest challenges for blind people is figuring out a bill’s denomination. While coins are different sizes, there is no such differentiation between a $1 bill and a $100 bill. In the past, people with impairments had someone who could see help them fold notes differently to know which was which, or they carried an expensive third-party device, but now apps that use the camera can identify the denomination aloud.
“Before a smartphone was accessible we had to carry six different things, and now all of those things are in one of those devices,” Ms. Rush said. “A $150 money reader is now a $1.99 app.”
She added: “These devices are a game-changer. They have created the era of inclusion.”
While some app makers have made great efforts to build products that help people with impairments, other developers overlook the importance of creating assistive components.
Mr. Perez said what he could do now with his smartphone was inconceivable just a few years ago. But even well-known apps like Instagram, which he uses to share some of his photos, do not mark all of their features.
“When some developers design their apps, they don’t label all of their buttons and controls, so the screen reader just says, ‘This is a button,’ but it doesn’t say what the button actually does,” Mr. Perez said. “That’s an area where we need a lot of improvement

Surface Pro 2: hands-on

Microsoft just unveiled the Surface Pro 2 at an event in New York City. Like its predecessor, it's a 10.1-inch tablet with enough specs that can turn it into a laptop or even a PC replacement. This latest refresh doesn't change much visually, but under the VaporMG casing Microsoft has bumped the specifications to the latest Intel Haswell processor, extended the battery life, and generally improved what was already a fast tablet. The battery life on the Surface Pro 2 is said to be 75 percent better than Surface Pro, while graphical performance is up 50 percent and overall performance is 20 percent better. Microsoft is calling it the "most powerful, professional, and productive tablet ever made." We'll be sure to put those claims to the test in our full review.
One big change is a new two-step kickstand. Like the Surface 2, it works by simply pushing the kickstand further out to create a wider 55-degree angle for the device. It appears to offer a new solution for lap use, but only if you're really willing to use the onscreen keyboard as a Touch or Type Cover as the new angle could be difficult to use.

Surface pro 2 on display,which features with far better battery life and colored keyboard pads.

The Surface Pro 2 looks the same visually as last year's model
Picking up and holding the device in tablet mode still feels a little chunky and heavy, and the size and dimensions are unchanged from the original Surface Pro. Microsoft has also swapped the Windows logo at the rear of the Surface Pro 2 for just a Surface wordmark using the Segoe font. The Surface 2 also includes the new wordmark.
Performance in our brief time with the Pro 2 was good, but the Surface Pro never really felt slow or laggy to begin with, so it's hard to say how much better the new model is until we can test it in real-world situations. Same can be said for the battery life, though it is impressive that Microsoft says it's able to increase the stamina by so much while still maintaining the overall size and weight of the original. Microsoft claims that the new display offers 46 percent more color accuracy, though it's hard to get a gauge of that without comparing the two side by side.
The Surface Pro 2 is a welcome improvement over the Surface Pro
The other half of the Surface Pro 2 story is the new power cover keyboard and docking station. The power cover offers a 30 watt hour battery that gives the Pro 2 two and a half times the battery life of the original Surface Pro, according to Microsoft. The new Docking Station accomodates the Surface Pro 2 with the power cover attached, and offers three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, audio in and audio out, a Mini DisplayPort, and an ethernet jack. Microsoft says it can support external resolutions of up to 3840 x 2160 pixels. Microsoft is pushing the Surface Pro 2 as a complete replacement for your main computer, so the Docking Station helps get it there.
Overall, the Surface Pro 2 is a welcome improvement over the Surface Pro — it's faster, lasts longer, and is more flexible than before. Paired with the updates coming in Windows 8.1, the Pro 2 might not only be the Windows tablet to get this holiday season, it is likely the laptop to beat, too.

Bionic leg is controlled by brain power

The act of walking may not seem like a feat of agility, balance, strength and brainpower. But lose a leg, as Zac Vawter did after a motorcycle accident in 2009, and you will appreciate the myriad calculations that go into putting one foot in front of the other.

Taking on the challenge, a team of software and biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, surgeons and prosthetists has designed a prosthetic limb that can reproduce a full repertoire of ambulatory tricks by communicating seamlessly with Vawter's brain.

Bionic leg of Vawter which works on brain stimulus.A remarkable engineering of 21st century

A report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine describes how the team fit Vawter with a prosthetic leg that has learned — with the help of a computer and some electrodes — to read his intentions from a bundle of nerves that end above his missing knee.
For the roughly 1 million Americans who have lost a leg or part of one due to injury or disease, Vawter and his robotic leg offer the hope that future prosthetics might return the feel of a natural gait, kicking a soccer ball or climbing into a car without hoisting an inert artificial limb into the vehicle.
Vawter's prosthetic is a marvel of 21-st century engineering. But it is Vawter's ability to control the prosthetic with his thoughts that makes the latest case remarkable. If he wants his artificial toes to curl toward him, or his artificial ankle to shift so he can walk down a ramp, all he has to do is imagine such movements.
The work was done at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago under an $8 million grant from the Army. The armed forces hope to apply findings from such studies to the care of about 1,200 service personnel who have lost a lower limb in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We want to restore full capabilities" to people who have lost a lower limb, said Levi J. Hargrove, lead author of the new report. "While we're focused and committed to developing this system for our wounded warriors, we're very much thinking of this other, much larger population that could benefit as well."
The report describes advances across a wide range of disciplines: in orthopedic and peripheral nerve surgery, neuroscience, and the application of pattern-recognition software to the field of prosthetics.
Weighing just over 10 pounds, the leg has two independent engines powering movement in the ankle and knee. And it bristles with sensors, including an accelerometer and gyroscope, each capable of detecting and measuring movement in three dimensions.
Most prosthetics in use today require the physical turn of a key to transition from one movement to another. But with the robotic leg, those transitions are effortless, Vawter said.
"With this leg, it just flows," said the 32-year-old software engineer, who spends most of his days using a typical prosthetic but travels to Chicago several times a year from his home in Yelm, Wash. "The control system is very intuitive. There isn't anything special I have to do to make it work right."
Before Vawter could strap on the bionic lower limb, engineers in Chicago had to "teach" the prosthetic how to read his motor intentions from tiny muscle contractions in his right thigh.
At the institute's Center for Bionic Medicine, Vawter spent countless hours with his thigh wired up with electrodes, imagining making certain movements on command with his missing knee, ankle and foot.
Using pattern-recognition software, engineers discerned, distilled and digitized those recorded electrical signals to catalog an entire repertoire of movements. The prosthetic could thus be programmed to recognize the subtlest contraction of a muscle in Vawter's thigh as a specific motor command.
Given surgical practices still in wide use, the prospects for such a connection between a patient's prosthetic and his or her peripheral nerves are generally dim. In most amputations, the nerves in the thigh are left to languish or die.
Dr. Todd Kuiken, a neurosurgeon at the rehabilitation institute, pioneered a practice called "reinervation" of nerves severed by amputation, and Vawter's orthopedic surgeon at the University of Washington Medical Center was trained to conduct the delicate operation. Dr. Douglas Smith rewired the severed nerves to control some of the muscles in Vawter's thigh that would be used less frequently in the absence of his lower leg.
Within a few months of the amputation, those nerves had recovered from the shock of the injury and begun to regenerate and carry electrical impulses. When Vawter thought about flexing his right foot in a particular way, the rerouted nerve endings would consistently cause a distinctive contraction in his hamstring. When he pondered how he would position his foot on a stair step and ready it for the weight of his body, the muscle contraction would be elsewhere — but equally consistent.
Compared with prosthetics that were not able to "read" the intent of their wearers, the robotic leg programmed to follow Vawter's commands reduced the kinds of errors that cause unnatural movements, discomfort and falls by as much as 44 percent, according to the New England Journal of Medicine report.
Vawter said he had "fallen down a whole bunch of times" while wearing his everyday prosthetic, but not once while moving around on his bionic leg.
He said he could move a lot faster too — which would be helpful for keeping up with his 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. But first, Vawter added, he needs to persuade Hargrove's team to let him wear it home.

11 Tips to Keep iOS 7 From Destroying Your Battery Life

Your iPhone's new operating system comes with plenty of advantages, but iOS 7's not without its drawbacks. Battery life just ain't quite what you'd want it to be, but we've got some tips to squeeze the most out of that sucker and stay juiced all day long.

iOS 7 comes with a whole bunch of new features that are handy if you need/want them. If you don't, they're just eating away at that precious battery life behind the scenes, and give you exactly zero help for your trouble. So shut 'em down.

Turn off parallax

Parallax is fun, but it's the definition of "extra." And maybe it even makes you dizzy. Who needs it? Not you. You can turn it off in accessibility settings, by going to Settings>>General>>Accessibility and setting Reduce Motion to on.

Turn off AirDrop/Bluetooth if you're not going to use it

AirDrop is great when you are AirDropping. The rest of the time it's just fidgeting in its seat, looking for another device to play with. Turning it off is easy, just swipe up your Control Center, and hit the toggle.

Stop searching for Wi-Fi

There's no need to have your phone searching for Wi-Fi when there's no trusted network in sight. You'll save yourself some trouble if you get in the habit of turning off Wi-Fi from the Control Center when you leave the house. Alternatively, you can go to Settings>>Wi-Fi and turn Ask to Join Networks to off. This way your phone will hop on Wi-Fi's it knows, but won't look around for more without direct orders.

Disable location services (for apps that don't need it).

Google Maps needs to know where you are, yes. But Facebook? Hop over to Settings>>Privacy>>Location Services to get a full list of the apps that are asking about where you are. You can probably turn off about half, and cut down on a lot of GPS polling.

Turn off background app updates

Immediate app updates are rarely a huge deal, but having enough battery can be. Go to Settings>>iTunes & App Store and then scroll down. You'll see Updates under Automatic Downloads. Turn it off. Just don't forget to stop by the App Store and update manually now and then.

Turn off background app refreshing

The brutal downside of good multitasking is running things in the background (duh). But if you go to Settings>>General>>Background App Refresh, you can disable background-runnin' for the apps that aren't important. Or all of them if you want to go all the way.

Disable auto-brightness

Chances are, auto-brightness keeps you more well-lit than you need to be. You can shut it off and get your mood-lighting on by going to Settings>>Wallpapers & Brightness and flipping the toggle. While you're there, crank that backlight all the way down, or as far down as you can handle. If you step outside, that's what the Control Center is for.

Go on a push notification diet

Not every app needs to push its notifications; that stuff takes power. Go to Settings>>Notification Center and scroll down to the Include section. Then go on a toggling spree.

Don't push; fetch.

If your email isn't that important, or you have a couple accounts, go turn the low-priority ones to fetch instead of push. This one is pretty dependent on how often you get emails and how crucial they are, so you'll have to feel it out, but you can set to fetch in Settings>>Mail, Contacts and Calendar>>Fetch New Data

Turn off Siri's "Raise to Speak" feature

If you want Siri to eat less of your precious battery, turn off his or her Raise to Speak feature in Settings>>General>>Siri>>Raise to Speak. Or, if you're really not fond of the dude/lady turn him/her off to go dream of electric sheep.

Turn off 4G (if times are tough)

Disabling 4G is going to hurt a little but, but desperate times can call for desperate measures and LTE is a battery-burner. You can choke off the data-hose by going to Settings>>Cellular>>Enable LTE/Enable 4G

And treat your battery right in general

But even without all these tweaks, it pays to treat your lithium-ion battery right from the start, especially if you have a new gadget

Curiosity rover discoveries show Mars to be more complex than had been known

A self portrait of rover Curiosity

A series of discoveries from NASA's Curiosity rover are giving scientists a picture of Mars that looks increasingly complex, with small bits of water spread around the surface and an interior that could have been more geologically mature than experts had previously thought.
Curiosity's formidable arsenal of scientific instruments has detected traces of water chemically bound to the Martian dust that seems to be covering the entire planet. The finding, among several in the five studies published online Thursday by the journal Science, may explain mysterious water signals picked up by satellites in orbit around the Red Planet.
The soil that covers Mars' surface in Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed last year, seems to have two major components, according to data from the rover's laser-shooting Chemistry and Camera instrument. One is a coarse soil with millimeter-wide grains that probably came from the rocks around them; the other is very fine, with grains often a few micrometers in size, the ChemCam data show.
The fine-grained soil doesn't really match the rocks around it, said Pierre-Yves Meslin of the University of Toulouse in France, who led one of the studies. But it does seem to match the stuff found at sites where other rovers and landers touched down. That means it's probably distributed over much or all of the planet, kicked up and carried far in the fierce dust storms that can shroud the planet in a reddish haze.
The researchers say they don't know where that soil comes from, whether it's created in many places or has one source that gets picked up and blown all over.
Either way, it's a handy, naturally averaged sample of the Martian surface, said Indiana University mineralogist David Bish, who led a different study.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this fine soil is that ChemCam's readings detected a hydrogen signal, which could explain why satellites orbiting Mars have picked up a mysterious water signal in the past, Meslin said.
"It's actually kind of exciting because it's water yet again on Mars, but it's in a different material than we had recognized," said Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist. "So what Curiosity is doing is just demonstrating that water is present in a number of ways. It just adds to the diversity."
But another study based on data from Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy tool — part of the dirt-digesting lab in the rover's belly — found no sign of water in soil samples taken from Rocknest, a sandy dune of a pit stop on the rover's way to a region dubbed Yellowknife Bay. That's because CheMin uses X-ray diffraction to bounce high-energy light off of a mineral's crystalline structure. If the soil isn't in crystalline form, there's no way for CheMin to see it.
All this means the hydrogen signal seen by ChemCam must have been coming from the amorphous, or non-crystalline, portion, which makes up a significant minority of the soil, said Bish, who led the CheMin study.
Sure enough, Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument cooked up a tiny sample in its little oven and found that roughly 1.5 percent to 3 percent of the soil was made of water. The scientists think this water may have come from the atmosphere, pulled out of the thin air.
Bish said it was interesting that CheMin found no signs of minerals that formed in water, since looking for such clays was "one of the reasons for going to Gale Crater." Inside Gale Crater lies a 3-mile-high mountain called Mt. Sharp, whose layers could be rich in clays that hold answers to whether Mars was hospitable to life.

A view of Gale crater near the Mars Equator

It's possible that this fine-grained soil is simply too young to have ever encountered liquid water, he said. If so, it would mean that many years passed between the formation of the water-rich clays locked inside of certain rocks and the dusty grains that currently cover the Martian surface.
Another of the studies focused on the rock known as Jake M, named after NASA engineer Jake Matijevic, who died shortly after the rover landed in 2012. The researchers didn't intend to study the rock — they analyzed it with Curiosity's alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer in order to help put ChemCam's measurements in context, said Caltech geologist Edward Stolper, lead author of that study.
Jake M is unlike any volcanic rock seen on Mars. It's rich in alkaline magma, which told the researchers that it had been created under high pressure — and perhaps in the presence of water, Stolper said. In fact, it looks something like a relatively uncommon rock on Earth called a mugearite, found on ocean islands and in rift zones.
The rock's composition also told scientists that it was clearly made of the leftovers after other minerals had crystallized out. That led them to believe that the heating and cooling and movement of magma that used to occur beneath Mars' mantle were a lot more complicated than they had thought.
"We see evidence for a more evolved planet," Grotzinger said, "so it looks like it was headed in more of a direction like Earth."

BJP Leads But AAP and Kejriwal Surging in Delhi: Survey

Delhi’s political mood is swinging rapidly, according to a recent survey conducted by Cicero Associates, a Delhi based public opinion and political consultancy firmin the last week of August.

If elections were held at the time of the survey, the Aam Aadmi Party would have 27 per cent vote share, the Congress, 26 per cent vote share and the BJP, 31 per cent vote share.

At the same time the survey shows as many as 47 per cent of Delhiites as willing to give Aam Aadmi Party a chance to form the government, as against only 33 per cent for the BJP, and 27 per cent for the Congress.

Arvind Kejriwal is way ahead of Sheila Dikshit and Vijay Goel in Chief Ministerial popularity ranking and the poll predicts that while the BJP and the Congress have reached their saturation point in converting their support into votes, Aam Aadmi Party has a large head room for further growth.

The survey showed that as many as 14 per cent voters of Delhi did not recognize the name of Aam Aadmi Party. One-third could not identify the party’s recently acquired symbol – the broom. Therefore, it is clear that the Aam Aadmi Party has converted only a little over half of its potential support of 47 per cent into votes so far.

Since the last such survey conducted in February, the Congress has lost 9 percentage points; BJP has lost 4 percentage points; while AAP has registered a significant swing of 13 percentage points in its favor.

When asked if the Aam Aadmi Party should get a chance to form the government, as many as 47 per cent respondents were favorable to the idea versus 31 per cent who were against it. For the current Congress government, only 37 percent were in favor while as many as 62 percent respondents were against it.  In the case of BJP too the proportion who wanted to give it a chance (33 percent) were outnumbered by those who were against it (52 percent).

For the post of chief minister, when given a choice between Arvind Kejriwal, Shiela Dikshit and Vijay Goel, 41 percent named Arvind Kejriwal, followed by 20 percent for Shiela Dikshit and 14 percent for Vijay Goel.  

A total of 3310 respondents were interviewed in the first wave, while 3325 were interviewed in the second wave.  The respondents were scientifically selected from the electoral rolls of 175 polling booths spread across 35 Assembly Constituencies.