National Science Foundation and Others Award $37M in Co-Robot Funding

The development of co-robots in the U.S. has just received an injection in the arm.

This week the National Science Foundation (NSF)—in partnership with the DOD, DARPA, NASA, the NIH, and the USDA—announced a $37 million slew of awards to bolster the development of robots meant to work cooperatively with humans.

“Our engineers and scientists are creating a world where robotic systems serve as trusted co-workers, co-inhabitants, co-explorers and co-defenders,” saidPramod Khargonekar, NSF's assistant director for engineering. “The National Robotics Initiative serves the national good by encouraging collaboration among academic, industry, nonprofit and other organizations -- and by speeding the creation of the fundamental science and engineering knowledge base used by researchers, applications developers and industry.”

According to the NSF, the awards run the gamut of the development cycle, from fundamental research to prototyping and testing. Some examples of projects include improving brain-controlled prosthetic devices, designing robots for search and rescue efforts, and robots that can assist with healthcare tasks.

Toyota harbors big ambitions for 'partner robot' business

Toyota Motor Corp. is harboring big ambitions to become a significant player in the growing market for robots that help the elderly and other people get around in everyday life.

The company believes it can use its manufacturing expertise to become as crucial in a field it calls "partner robots" as it is to auto-making. Robotics engineers at Toyota currently number only 150 out of a worldwide staff of 300,000 but it is plowing money into research and development.

Toyota last month announced a $1 billion investment in a research company headed by robotics expert Gill Pratt in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics. It is already working with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on robotics.

New Microscope Creates Near-real-time Videos of Nanoscale Processes

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.

A Mysterious Radio Wave Coil Passing through Space

In 2001, West Virginia Univ. undergraduate student David Narkevic was poring through stellar data collected by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. What Narkevic stumbled upon would leave astronomers scratching their heads for years following. A powerful radio burst, estimated at originating some 1.6 billion light-years away, was picked up. According to New Scientist, the burst released energy akin to what the sun produces in a month in a manner of milliseconds.

Since then, scientists have detected 16 Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Now, an international team of scientists have linked FRBs with a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space.

“We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed,” said Univ. of British Columbia astronomer Kiyoshi Masui, the lead author of the study published in Nature.

Holometer rules out first theory of space-time correlations

There has never been anything like the Holometer.

Based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab in Illinois, the Holometer isn’t much to look at. It’s a small array of lasers and mirrors with a trailer for a control room. But the low-tech look of the device belies the fact that it is an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument, able to measure movements that last only a millionth of a second and distances that are a billionth of a billionth of a meter – a thousand times smaller than a single proton.

Our common sense, and the laws of physics, assumes that space and time are continuous. The Holometer challenges this assumption. We know that energy on the atomic level, for instance, is not continuous and comes in small, indivisible amounts. The Holometer was built to test if space and time behave the same way.

Advanced Reasoning Software

2015 Software/Services R&D 100 Award Winner

The amount of data streaming from cyber security appliances and logs is staggering. The number of raw data points is best measured in the millions of events per day, even for modestly sized institutions. Security analysts are trained to seek out and identify patterns that represent cyber threats hidden inside the massive data streams. Unfortunately, the velocity and volume of the streams are such that even large teams of analysts are typically forced into forensic mode, analyzing the data well after a compromise has occurred. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Champion Technology Co. Inc.’s CHAMPION (Columnar Hierarchical Auto-associative Memory Processing in Ontological Networks) advanced reasoning software system revolutionizes the detection of cyber threats. Behavior-based patterns are derived by combining subject matter expertise and knowledge of analysts with company-specific historical data, which allows security analysts to detect threats in near-real-time. Domain- and company-specific data programmed into the system for each specific user company makes the system domain agnostic.

New approaches for hybrid solar cells

Using a new procedure researchers at the Technical Univ. of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich (LMU) can now produce extremely thin and robust, yet highly porous semiconductor layers. A very promising material - for small, light-weight, flexible solar cells, for example, or electrodes improving the performance of rechargeable batteries.

The coating on the wafer that Professor Thomas Fässler, chair of Inorganic Chemistry with a Focus on Novel Materials at TU Munich, holds in his hands shimmers like an opal. And it has amazing properties: It is hard as a crystal, exceptionally thin and - since it is highly porous - light as a feather.

By integrating suitable organic polymers into the pores of the material, the scientists can custom tailor the electrical properties of the ensuing hybrid material. The design not only saves space, it also creates large interface surfaces that improve overall effectiveness.

Catching Cellular Impacts of Bubbles and Jets

Duke researchers have devised a way to take an in-depth look at a poorly understood phenomenon that commonly occurs in medical procedures using therapeutic ultrasound, such as shattering kidney stones, delivering drugs to cells, and, most recently, breaking the blood-brain barrier.

When ultrasonic pressure waves move through a liquid, they can cause bubbles to form and oscillate rapidly around gaseous imperfections. If these so-called cavitation bubbles collapse very close to a boundary or the surface of another bubble, they can produce fast-moving jets to erupt in their wake. The phenomenon can be so powerful that it can cause severe damage to ship propellers.

Cavitation bubbles form as high-amplitude ultrasonic pressure waves travel through liquid. While commonly exploited in many medical procedures, their interactions with tissues are not clearly understood, especially at the cellular level.

Cavitation bubbles are also behind a recent finding from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto in which a team successfully delivered cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier of a patient.

Innovation boosts study of fragile biological samples

Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a simple new way to study very delicate biological samples – like proteins at work in photosynthesis and components of protein-making machines called ribosomes – at the atomic scale using SLAC's X-ray laser.

Hasan DeMirci, a SLAC scientist with the Stanford PULSE Institute who teamed up with graduate student Raymond Sierra on the new system, has been using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser – a DOE Office of Science User Facility – to zero in on the details of ribosomes at work. In addition to their universal role in deciphering the genetic code to build proteins, ribosomes are also important targets for antibiotic treatments.

It is difficult to form ribosomes into crystals so they can be studied with X-rays because they are very fragile. The new system sprang from a desire to better preserve the ribosome crystals.

The research team did this by keeping the tiny crystals in the same solution they were grown in at temperatures approaching those in their natural environment, and by finding a more gentle way to deliver or "inject" them into a vacuum chamber, where they are struck by LCLS X-ray pulses.

One Stream Protects Another

The new system, dubbed coMESH, uses low-cost, off-the-shelf components to shape and protect a stream of crystallized proteins with a surrounding stream of electrically charged fluid. It was successfully tested in a 2014 experiment and featured in the Nov. 30 online edition of Nature Methods.

"Our strategy was to come up with an injector that can handle anything, not just ribosomes," DeMirci said. "We are addressing a definite need in the scientific community for a more universal way to deliver samples to LCLS."

In addition to demonstrating that the new system worked, the experiments also gave the scientists a more detailed, 3-D look at how one component of the ribosome binds to an antibiotic called paromomycin that is used to treat parasitic infections. "Now we have a more realistic picture of how this antibiotic interacts with ribosomes at temperatures close to those in their natural environment," DeMirci said.

The new system consists of a thin tube, about one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter, inside a slightly larger tube; the sizes can vary based on the dimensions of the crystal samples.

A charging electrode applies low electrical current to the fluid in the larger tube, which focuses the flow to a thin filament. Both tubes end at the same point and the electrical current in the outer fluid greatly narrows both streams of fluid as they emerge from the tubes.

Less Damage and Waste

The system is also designed to waste fewer crystals in experiments than some other sample delivery methods. The thickness and flow rate of the inner stream can be fine-tuned by changing the applied voltage and the width of the tubing to maximize the rate at which X-ray pulses strike the crystals flowing into their path.

DeMirci and Sierra said that based on the 3-D atomic-scale details they were able to see in the ribosome-drug complex and in samples of a photosynthetic protein complex known as photosystem-II, it doesn't appear the voltage damaged the protein structures.

"It's like birds sitting on an electrical wire," DeMirci said.

DeMirci and Sierra said they expect the coMESH system will find wider use by other scientists conducting experiments at LCLS. "We want this to be 'plug-and-play,'" Sierra said, "so all they have to think about during their experiment is collecting data and not troubleshooting sample delivery."

Scientists demonstrate DNA-based electromechanical switch

A team of researchers from the University of California, Davis and the University of Washington have demonstrated that the conductance of DNA can be modulated by controlling its structure, thus opening up the possibility of DNA’s future use as an electromechanical switch for nanoscale computing. Although DNA is commonly known for its biological role as the molecule of life, it has recently garnered significant interest for use as a nanoscale material for a wide-variety of applications.

In their paper published in Nature Communications, the team demonstrated that changing the structure of the DNA double helix by modifying its environment allows the conductance (the ease with which an electric current passes) to be reversibly controlled. This ability to structurally modulate the charge transport properties may enable the design of unique nanodevices based on DNA. These devices would operate using a completely different paradigm than today’s conventional electronics.

Google Releases Newest Machine Learning System to Everyone

Google’s internal deep learning infrastructure DistBelief, developed in 2011, has helped the technology company advance its capabilities. It helped improve speech recognition in the Google app by 25%, assisted the image search option in Google Photos and helped in a myriad of the company’s experiments.

“Machine learning is the secret sauce for the products of tomorrow,” said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with Google. “It no longer makes sense to have separate tools for researchers of machine learning and people who are developing real products. There should really be one set of tools that researchers can use to try out their crazy ideas, and if those ideas work, they can move them directly into products without having to rewrite code.”

This week Google announced the open source release of its software TensorFlow, the technology company’s second-generation machine learning system. 

“Part of the point of TensorFlow is to allow collaboration and communication between researchers,” Corrado said.

Saying No: Teaching Robots to Reject Orders

The anthropomorphic robot stands on a table.

“Sit down,” a nearby human says.

“Okay,” the robot says, before squatting down.

The human then tells the robot to stand and walk forward.

“Sorry, I cannot do that as there is no support ahead,” the robot responds.

“Walk forward,” the human reiterates.

“But, it is unsafe.”

“I will catch you,” replies the human, who subsequently requests the robot walk forward again.

The robot traipses towards the edge of the table, no sign of stopping. At the edge, the human catches it.

Supercomputers Help Model Gas Giants’ Storms

In 1664, jack-of-all-trades astronomerGiovanni Domenico Cassini set his telescope’s lens on Jupiter and observed the bands and spots of the planet. Later, in 1675, he discovered a narrow gap separating Saturn’s rings into two parts. The gap was later named the Cassini Division. His discoveries were monumental, but added more mystery to the celestial bodies above.

“Since the pioneering telescope observations of (Cassini) in the mid-17th century, stargazers have wondered about the bands and spots of Jupiter,” said Prof. Moritz Heimpel, who teaches physics at the Univ. of Alberta. “The average citizen can now pick up a backyard telescope and see the structures that we write about today. However, even in the present age with the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn and the Juno craft approaching Jupiter, there is considerable debate about the dynamics of the atmosphere of the giant planets.”

Computer system passes 'visual Turing test'

Researchers at MIT, New York University, and the University of Toronto have developed a computer system whose ability to produce a variation of a character in an unfamiliar writing system, on the first try, is indistinguishable from that of humans.

That means that the system in some sense discerns what’s essential to the character — its general structure — but also what’s inessential — the minor variations characteristic of any one instance of it.

As such, the researchers argue, their system captures something of the elasticity of human concepts, which often have fuzzy boundaries but still seem to delimit coherent categories. It also mimics the human ability to learn new concepts from few examples. It thus offers hope, they say, that the type of computational structure it’s built on, called a probabilistic program, could help model human acquisition of more sophisticated concepts as well.

How Do Scientists View Religion?

In 2005, two court cases—dealing with how science and religion intersect in the public domain—erupted in the United States, one in Georgia and the other in Pennsylvania. In Georgia’s Cobb County School District, a disclaimer sticker was slapped on public school biology textbooks saying evolution was only a theory. In Pennsylvania, a handful of parents were advocating teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes.    

Prof. Elaine Howard Ecklund, the founding director of Rice Univ.’s Religion and Public Life Program and the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, watched these scenes unfold. As someone who frequented religious circles due to nature of her academic work, Ecklund had heard religious people express the opinion that scientists negatively viewed them.

Tech Tats: The Future of Wearables?

A forlorn girl sits at the bottom of a staircase in her household. An adult comes by with a small plastic case, opening it to reveal a rectangle sheet. The adult applies the sheet to the girl’s arm and holds a cloth over it. The cloth is pulled away and a small circuit board-like array with glowing green dots is stuck to the girl’s deltoid. The adult pulls out her smartphone, where the girl’s vitals are displayed.  

“Rather than going to the doctor once a year to get your physical, this Tech Tattoo can be something that you just put on your body once a year and it monitors everything that they would do in a physical and sends that to your doctor, and if there’s an issue, they could call you,” said Eric Schneider, a creative technologist with Chaotic Moon, the developer of Tech Tats, in a video. 

“It can look at early signs of fever, your vital signs, heartrate, everything that it needs to look at to notify you that you’re getting sick, or your child is getting sick.”

New Image Sheds Light on Ancient Cosmic Collision

Three-hundred and sixty million years ago, elliptical galaxy NGC 5291 was impacted by a fast-moving galaxy that drove into its core. Huge gas streams were sent shooting off into surrounding space, eventually gathering to form a ring around NGC 5291. Scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have taken new images of this galaxy with the Very Large Telescope located at the Paranal Observatory.

But among the surrounding stellar debris astronomers discovered an unusual young dwarf galaxy, which they’ve dubbed NGC 5291N.

According to the ESO, NGC 5291B formed when material in the surrounding ring coalesced and collapsed into a handful of star-forming regions and several dwarf galaxies. In the new image, NGC 5291 sits center, a bright burning oval. The new dwarf galaxies are the blue and white regions peppered around it. NGC 5291B is among the largest dwarf galaxies in the vicinity.

Stormy Jupiter-like Stars

The L-dwarf star W1906+40 was discovered by scientists with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. With a temperature of about 3,500 F, the star is cool compared to other stars in the universe. It’s cool enough that tiny mineral clouds form in its atmosphere.

According to NASA, this presents the best evidence for cloudy storms on a star.

“The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said John Gizis, who is the lead author of a study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.“We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer.”

L-dwarfs can come in two flavors. Some are considered stars because they fuse atoms and generate light. Others, due to their lack of atomic fusion, are known as brown dwarfs, or failed stars.