Attention all astronomers! There is a new Type Ia supernova that has been seen in the nearby spiral galaxy M101, and it’s very young — currently only about a day old! This is very exciting news; getting as much data on this event as possible is critical.
Most likely professional astronomers are already aware of the supernova, since observations have already been taken by Swift (no X-rays have yet been seen, but it’s early yet) and Hubble observations have been scheduled. Still, I would urge amateur astronomers to take careful observations of the galaxy.
[As an aside, I'll note that this supernova won't get bright enough to see naked eye and poses no threat at all to us here on Earth. It may be visible in decent-sized telescopes, though, and as you'll see this may be a very important event in the annals of astronomy.]
So why is this a big deal?
First of all, a supernova is an exploding star — one of the most violent events in the Universe. There are different kinds of supernovae, but a Type Ia occurs, it’s thought, when a superdense white dwarf — the remnant core of a dead star — siphons material off a companion star. If enough material piles on top of the white dwarf, it can suddenly start to fuse hydrogen into helium. This starts a runaway effect, and the entire star explodes. This supernova can release so much energy it can actually outshine its host galaxy! If you want more details, I’ve written about Type Ia supernovae before: Astronomers spot ticking supernova time bomb and Dwarf merging makes for an explosive combo.
So this kind of supernova is incredibly bright, making them easy to spot over vast distances. These events are very important, because we think that each Type Ia supernova is very similar in the way it explodes, making them useful as benchmarks in gauging distances to very distant galaxies. In fact, it is the study of these explosions that has helped us nail down how fast the Universe is expanding, and also led to the discovery of dark energy. Clearly, the more we know about them, the better.
M101 is a spiral galaxy only about 25 million light years away, making it one of the closest big spirals in the sky. It’s also huge, boasting a trillions stars, ten times the mass of our Milky Way. You can read all about it in an earlier post featuring the image at the top of this article.
Given M101′s close distance, this new supernova will be relatively easy to study. And the best part is that the exploding star was caught young: most of the ones we see are far away, and too faint to be seen until they start to reach their maximum brightness after a few days. Getting data on them early is absolutely critical for understanding them, and it’s the hardest part of all this. I am not exaggerating to say this new supernova could be a linchpin in our understanding of these events.
Interestingly, Hubble took images of this galaxy in 2002, and astronomers dug up the archived images and looked at the spot of the supernova to see if anything was there back then. Nothing shows up in the blue filter, but in the red (shown here) there are two stars very close to the position of the future supernova (the circle is centered on the best measurement of the supernova’s position). From their brightness and color, both of these stars are red giants, stars like the Sun but near the ends of their lives. That would fit with the Type Ia supernova: red giants are so big that if there’s a white dwarf nearby, it could suck up their matter and start the chain of events that led to its doom. Further observations may pin this down. If one of these stars is what fed the supernova, that’s seriously cool; there are only a handful of supernova progenitor stars that have ever been seen*.
All in all, this is pretty much a big deal. The galaxy is close, pretty, a bit odd, and is hosting the nearest Type Ia supernova seen in decades which was caught when it was less than a day old. I’m excited! I know a lot of telescopes will be aimed at the northern skies over the next few days, and I’ll be very interested to find out what they see.
Image credits: Hubble M101 image: NASA, ESA, K. Kuntz (JHU), F. Bresolin (University of Hawaii), J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Lab), J. Mould (NOAO), Y.-H. Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana), and STScI; Type Ia art: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Hubble image: NASA/ESA/Hubble. Tip o’ the dew shield to paulwarren73.
* Technically, if one of the red giants was behind this event, it wasn’t the star that actually exploded — the white dwarf which actually blew up was far, far too faint to be seen here. Still, very cool.

The US company has confirmed it will use the Atlas 5 rocket to test its CST-100 ship on three flights in 2015.
An unmanned capsule will be used on the first and second launches. On the third, Boeing test pilots will take the vessel to the space station.
The plan is dependent on a successful development programme and the availability of sufficient funding.
Boeing is one of a number of companies being encouraged by the US space agency (Nasa) to develop a commercially operated crew transport service to and from low-Earth orbit.
The idea is that Nasa and other space agencies around the world would buy seats in these vehicles to get their people to the international orbiting platform and other destinations that might one day include privately run space labs and hotels.
Last month, Nasa retired its space shuttles, partly on the grounds of cost - they were hugely expensive to maintain.
The agency believes that by handing operational responsibility to the commercial sector, the price of getting into low-Earth orbit can be reduced substantially.
It is giving Boeing financial support to help it develop the CST-100 ship.
The conical design will be capable of carrying up to seven individuals.
The choice of the Atlas 5 as the CST-100's launcher is not a major surprise. It has an excellent record - 27 flights with a 100% success rate.
It also happens to be operated by a company that is part-owned by Boeing called United Launch Alliance (ULA). However, Boeing says that relationship played no part in the decision to use Atlas; it was simply that Atlas was deemed the best rocket for the task.
"Our approach is to produce a reliable spacecraft built on existing simple systems and then integrate that with a proven launch vehicle, all focussed on putting in place a very safe system, one that will be reliable and that can be operational as soon as practical so that we can start flying US crew from US launch sites post the shuttle era," said John Elbon, vice president and programme manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Programs.

The year 2015 will see the Atlas launch the capsule three times.
The first flight will put the ship in orbit. The second will take the CST-100 part-way towards space before practising an abort.
In this procedure, the capsule will push itself away from the rocket mid-flight as if there were some problem on the rocket. This will be a critical test of astronaut safety features built into the capsule in the event of an emergency.
Assuming these demonstration flights go well, the third mission will see Boeing test pilots take the CST-100 all the way to the International Space Station.
The CST-100 would then be ready for commercial service starting in 2016.
Boeing says the two pilots it plans to use on the manned mission in 2015 will emerge from a selection process that is already under way.
"We're actually interviewing now for the first one," said Mr Elbon. "I would like to get one on board so that they can be part of the design process and influence it from an operator's perspective."
The decision of Boeing to use the Atlas 5 follows hard on the heels of a recent agreement signed between Nasa and ULA to prepare the Atlas rocket for astronaut launch duties.
This work will determine which components on the Atlas already meet Nasa's stringent requirements for human spaceflight and which elements might need to be upgraded.
ULA is also developing an emergency detection system that would be placed inside the Atlas to give warning of a major malfunction. In addition, ULA needs to prepare a gantry structure that would allow astronauts to get in and out of a capsule when it is mounted on top of an Atlas at its launch pad.
"ULA will provide launch services from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station," explained George Sowers, ULA's vice president of business development.
"We will use the Atlas 412 configuration, which means it has a single solid rocket booster [attached to its liquid-fuelled core stage] and a dual engine Centaur upper stage.
"We believe the Atlas 5 provides the earliest possible initial launch capability for commercial crew and we'll be ready to support Boeing with both un-crewed and crewed test flights in 2015."
There are some people for whom being told that something is impossible is all the motivation they need. That seems to be the case for Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey, who were told that an in-flight hacking platform was impossible. In response, the pair plan on showing off their off their Wi-Fi hacking, phone-snooping, home-made UAV at the Black Hat and Defcon hackerfests in Las Vegas. They call their creation the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP.
Built from an old Air Force target drone, the WASP packs a lot of technological power into a flying high-endurance package. A tiny on-board computer (Linux powered, natch) is bristling with hacking tools, along with a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-forcing passwords, the BackTrack suite, a 4G T-Mobile card, an HD camera, and 32 GB onboard storage.
Just what does WASP do with those gigabytes? Originally, it was designed for Wi-Fi penetration — cracking network passwords while loitering above a target area. But the newly upgraded WASP can now trick GSM phones into connecting with its 4G card as if it were a standard cellphone tower. Once connected, the WASP quietly records any phone conversations or text messages while connecting the call via VOIP, thus giving the mark the impression that the call went through normally.
Keep in mind that nothing on the WASP is particularly new. The password cracking techniques have been around for quite some time, and the phone-spoof is based off a trick shown off at Defcon last year. But by placing them on a flying platform, Perkins and Tassey have shown that consumer technology and hacking techniques have progressed to the point where once untouchable targets are now vulnerable. In an enlightening quote from Forbes, they explain:
A military base like Area 51, Tassey points out, is surrounded by more than 25 miles of empty land to obscure it from outside snoops. “With WASP, we can cover that distance in about 20 minutes,” he says. “With radar designed specifically not to see birds, it’s very difficult to protect yourself from an object coming out of the sky and flying low.”
Not that they would ever dream of taking on Area 51, of course. Tassey and Perkins are both respected security researchers with lives and day jobs. Even when testing the hacking capabilities of the WASP, they took pains to ensure that they stayed within legal boundaries. They seem to have that motivation that has driven so many geeks, engineers, and tinkerers: Just to see if they can pull it off.
via geekosystem.com
In a blow to school children and Disney fans everywhere, Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006. The key argument against Pluto’s planet-hood was that other celestial bodies occupied its orbit, so Pluto was not the dominant gravitational object in that region.
The mere presence of other celestial bodies in Pluto’s orbit is only part of the story, though, because scientists have known for centuries that small objects called trojan asteroids can stably share an orbit with a larger celestial body. Astronomers have previously identified trojan asteroids in the orbits of Mars, Neptune, and Jupiter, but today astronomers from Athabasca University, UCLA, and University of Western Ontario are announcing the first direct observation of a trojan asteroid in Earth’s orbit.
Using Newton’s theory of gravitation, Joseph Louis Lagrange showed that there are five points, now known as Lagrangian points, in or near a planet’s orbit where a smaller object can orbit stably—the gravitational fields of the sun and the planet balance in these locations. The first two Lagrangian points (called L1 and L2) exist on either side of the planet on a line between the planet’s center and the center of the sun. L3 sits directly opposite the planet on the other side of the sun. L4 and L5 also sit in the planet's orbit, but in front of or behind it.
Each of these points are very important because they make excellent sites for space stations and observatories. For instance, the Solar and Heliocentric Observatory is located at Earth’s L1, and the James Webb Space Observatory is/was planned for L2. Langrangian points L3, L4, and L5 have been proposed as sites for future space stations and depots for the support of interplanetary missions. Similar Lagrangian points also exist in the orbit between the Earth and the Moon, and these could be exploited for lunar missions. There's a natural precedent for that, as small trojan moons have been identified in the orbits of some of Saturn’s moons.
Using Earth-based observations, it's easy to see whether objects occupy L1 or L2, because they are near Earth and sit either directly opposite the sun in the night sky or directly between the Earth and the Sun. We know that there are no trojan objects in these locations. From Earth, it's impossible to directly observe L3 because it is always on the opposite side of the sun from us. In principle, we should be able to observe objects at L4 and L5, but those observations are difficult because these points lie mostly in the daytime sky.
The authors of this study used archived data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to identify possible trojan asteroids at Earth’s L4 point, and the data revealed two candidate objects that were several hundred meters in diameter. This data was then combined with direct observations of the objects made in April 2011 at the University of Hawaii, which refined knowledge of the objects’ orbit. With this data, the researchers were able to positively identify one of those objects, called 2010 TK7, as the first known trojan asteroid in Earth’s orbit.
00:0000:0000:31The orbital oscillations of 2010 TK7. Paul Wiegert, the University of Western Ontario2010 TK7’s orbit is not quite as stable as Lagrange originally predicted. Measurements show that it doesn't actually occupy the Lagrangian point itself, but oscillates around it. It also doesn't sit still in a single Lagrangian point, but shuttles between L3 and L4 with a period of about 400 years, and it is currently located near L4 at one of its closest approaches to Earth. If the current orbital pattern holds, over the next 200 years, 2010 TK7 will accelerate ahead of Earth until it reaches L3, slows, and eventually returns to L4 over the second 200 years of its 400 year cycle.
Due to the gravitational influence of other planets and the significant contribution of chaos to an asteroid’s orbit, it is impossible to accurately predict 2010 TK7’s behavior over more than a 250 year span, so it may not continue the cycle described above. One likely way it could change its cycle would be to break its pattern at L3 and begin to oscillate between L3 and L5 rather than L3 and L4. Thus, it is unclear whether 2010 TK7 will remain a trojan or whether other forces will eventually throw it out of its stable oscillations.
Nature, 2011 DOI:10.1038/nature10233 (About DOIs)Paul Wiegert, The University of Western Ontario
This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Gas and dust likely form a torus around the central black hole, with clouds of charged gas above and below. Image credit: NASA/ESA
Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar—one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos—the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that’s at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world’s oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.
Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth. The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old. “The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Bradford leads one of two international teams of astronomers that have described their quasar findings in separate papers that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Read Bradford & team’s paper here.A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that is steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise, Bradford says. There’s water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less massive than in the quasar, as most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in the form of ice.
Nevertheless, water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years (a light-year is about six trillion miles), and its presence indicates that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is a chilly –53 degrees Celsius (–63 degrees Fahrenheit) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it’s still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what’s typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.
The water vapor is just one of many kinds of gas that surround the quasar, and its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in both X-rays and infrared radiation. The interaction between the radiation and water vapor reveals properties of the gas and how the quasar influences it. For example, analyzing the water vapor shows how the radiation heats the rest of the gas. Furthermore, measurements of the water vapor and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest that there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. Whether this will happen is not clear, the astronomers say, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or may be ejected from the quasar.
Bradford’s team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called Z-Spec at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO), a 10-meter telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Z-Spec is an extremely sensitive spectrograph, requiring temperatures cooled to within 0.06 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. The instrument measures light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum called the millimeter band, which lies between infrared and microwave wavelengths. The researchers’ discovery of water was possible only because Z-Spec’s spectral coverage is 10 times larger than that of previous spectrometers operating at these wavelengths. The astronomers made follow-up observations with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
This discovery highlights the benefits of observing in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, the astronomers say. The field has developed rapidly over the last two to three decades, and to reach the full potential of this line of research, the astronomers—including the study authors—are now designing CCAT, a 25-meter telescope to be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile. CCAT will allow astronomers to discover some of the earliest galaxies in the universe. By measuring the presence of water and other important trace gases, astronomers can study the composition of these primordial galaxies.
The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the CSO, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, Lis’s team was looking for traces of hydrogen fluoride in the spectrum of APM 08279+5255, but serendipitously detected a signal in the quasar’s spectrum that indicated the presence of water. The signal was at a frequency corresponding to radiation that is emitted when water transitions from a higher energy state to a lower one. While Lis’s team found just one signal at a single frequency, the wide bandwidth of Z-Spec enabled Bradford and his colleagues to discover water emission at many frequencies. These multiple water transitions allowed Bradford’s team to determine the physical characteristics of the quasar’s gas and the water’s mass.
By AATISH TASEER
Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."
My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.
Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesMohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947.
Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.
To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.
The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.
Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.
This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.
But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.
In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.
Rex USASalman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011.
Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.
But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.
Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.
Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.
But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.
As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.
The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.
In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.
The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.
This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.
The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.
This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.
The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.
Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.
Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).
Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing.
“All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon Valley.
“It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”
Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as today’s systems, which often cost $100,000 or more.
Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms and hands are only the first step.
There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a breakthrough in software that mimics perception.
Today’s robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, but researchers describe their skills as “brittle.” They fail if the tiniest change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a cumbersome fashion to do something else.
Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to begin to mimic humans.
Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.
The limits of today’s most sophisticated robots can be seen in a towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them in a pile.
It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times normal speed that the meager extent of the robot’s capabilities becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding shirts and socks.)
Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not yet yielded impressive results.
In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a rare launching window was available.
“We’re in a funny chicken-and-egg situation,” Dr. Brooks said. “No one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use because we don’t have a working hand, and because we don’t have a grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design.”
Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on building a generation of low-cost robots.
And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism.
Recently at an SRI laboratory here, two Stanford University graduate students, John Ulmen and Dan Aukes, put the finishing touches on a significant step toward human capabilities: a four-finger hand that will grasp with a human’s precise sense of touch.
Each three-jointed finger is made in a single manufacturing step by a three-dimensional printer and is then covered with “skin” derived from the same material used to make the touch-sensitive displays on smartphones.
“Part of what we’re riding on is there has been a very strong push for tactile displays because of smartphones,” said Pablo Garcia, an SRI robot designer who is leading the design of the project, along with Robert Bolles, an artificial intelligence researcher.
“We’ve taken advantage of these technologies,” Mr. Garcia went on, “and we’re banking on the fact they will continue to evolve and be made even cheaper.”
Still lacking is a generation of software that is powerful and flexible enough to do tasks that humans do effortlessly. That will require a breakthrough in machines’ perception.
“I would say this is more difficult than what the Watson machine had to do,” said Gill Pratt, the computer scientist who is the program manager in charge of Darpa’s Autonomous Robot Manipulation project, called ARM.
“The world is composed of continuous objects that have various shapes” that can obscure one another, he said. “A perception system needs to figure this out, and it needs the common sense of a child to do that.”
At Willow Garage, Dr. Bradski and a group of artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists have focused on “hackathons,” in which the company’s PR2 robot has been programmed to do tasks like fetching beer from a refrigerator, playing pool and packing groceries.
In May, with support from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Bradski helped organize the first Solutions in Perception Challenge. A prize of $10,000 is offered for the first team to design a robot that is able to recognize 100 items commonly found on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores. Part of the prize will be given to the first team whose robot can recognize 80 percent of the items.
At the contest, held during a robotics conference in Shanghai, none of the contestants reached the 80 percent goal. The team that did best was the laundry-folding team from Berkeley, which has named its robot Brett, for Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks.
Brett was able to recognize 68 percent of a smaller group of 50 objects. And the team has made progress in its quest to build a machine to do the laundry; it recently posted a new video showing how much it has sped up the robot.
“Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle,” said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group, “from dirty laundry in a basket to everything stacked away after it’s been washed and dried.”
I am pleased to preview ‘Dead Drops’ a new project which I started off as part of my ongoing EYEBEAM residency in NYC the last couple weeks. ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities. Full documentation, movie, map and ‘How to make your own dead drop’ manual coming soon! Stay tuned.
Dead drop (Wikipedia)
In the meanwhile drop some files here!
87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot)
Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo)
235 Bowery, NY (New Museum)
Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St)
540 West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)
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Udate:
I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for this unbelievable feedback I am got in the recent days. The preview post became a major release! This means while I try to hold up against a journalistic DNS attack I am putting together this site on the fly with my left hand:
The site is still a bit naked but step by step I am adding content (FAQ, how to, movie docu etc). If you want to embed your own dead drop in your city you are free to go. Check the instructions here.
via datenform.de