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Read more at: Japan PM Abe rides around Tokyo in self-driving vehiclesJapanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took a ride in several self-driving vehicles on the public roads in the capital on Saturday, showcasing the technology ahead of Tokyo Motor Show.
Abe tried auto-piloting vehicles from Toyota, Honda, and Nissan on the roads around Japan's National Diet Building, as major international automakers compete with likes of Google and other IT firms to develop new types of cars with the goal of helping to reduce accidents by eradicating human error.
A new "broadband" invisibility cloak which hides objects over a wide range of frequencies has been devised.
Despite the hype about Harry Potter-style cloaks, our best current designs can only conceal objects at specific wavelengths of light or microwaves.
At other frequencies, invisibility cloaks actually make things more visible, not less, US physicists found.
Their solution is a new ultrathin, electronic system, which they describe in Physical Review Letters.
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If you want to make an object transparent at all angles and over broad bandwidths, this is a good solution”
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Andrea Alu
University of Texas
"Our active cloak is a completely new concept and design, aimed at beating the limits of [current cloaks] and we show that it indeed does," said Prof Andrea Alu, from the University of Texas at Austin.
"It's an interesting implementation but as presented is probably a bit limited to certain types of objects," he told BBC News.
"There are limitations even on active materials. It will be interesting to see if it can be experimentally realised."
Prof Smith points out that even an "imperfect" invisibility cloak might be perfectly sufficient to build useful devices with real-world applications.
For example, a radio-frequency cloak could improve wireless communications - by helping them bypass obstacles and reducing interference from neighbouring antennas.
"To most people, making an object 'invisible' means making it transparent to visible wavelengths. And the visible spectrum is a tiny, tiny sliver of the overall electromagnetic spectrum," he told BBC News.
Autonomous cars took to the roads of Tokyo for the first time on Saturday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a passenger. The Prime Minister rode on the public roads in the National Diet Front Garden in a Nissan Leaf and autonomous cars built by Honda and Toyota. According to Nissan, Saturday’s drive was meant to show the Japanese government’s support for the development of autonomous cars, as was symbolized by the venue located between Japan's parliament and the Imperial Palace.
E-volo recently celebrated the maiden launch of its electric two-passenger, 18-rotor VC200 "Volocopter," touting the vehicle's safety and simplicity after an indoor flight inside the dm-arena in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 17. While the copter is similar in form to both quadcopters and helicopters, the company resists the helicopter label, pointing out the numerous radically different safety and design choices that set the vehicle apart.
(Phys.org) —High-temperature superconductors exhibit a frustratingly varied catalog of odd behavior, such as electrons that arrange themselves into stripes or refuse to arrange themselves symmetrically around atoms. Now two physicists propose that such behaviors – and superconductivity itself – can all be traced to a single starting point, and they explain why there are so many variations.
Extreme weather, like the insane Colorado flooding in September and the tornadoes that ripped through Illinois in November, is rocking the Midwest.
Normally we don't have much advanced warning for storms like these, but a new tool from researchers at Utah State University could help predict when this kind of destructive extreme weather is more likely.This weather-predicting index was created by monitoring a specific weather pattern — a low-level jet stream that interacts with another circumglobal stream — that makes strong storms and tornadoes form in the Midwest.
Before any storm can form the water in the air has to rise and condense, said study researcher Robert Davies. Davies hopes the index can be used with climate models to predict which areas should be expecting some extreme weather up to 60 days before they happen.
The researchers analyzed precipitation data from the past 32 years to create the index.
Feeling chilly? Here's cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for soul-crushing cold
Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Better yet, don't. That's so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe.
A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees.
The old record had been -128.6 degrees.
Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the record low temperature is about 50 degrees colder than anything in Alaska.
(Phys.org) —Several geologists from around the world are presenting a case for missing or underreported earthquakes at this year's American Geophysical Union Fall meeting being held in San Francisco. They suggest that faulty or missing data from before 1900 might be leading to underestimations of the numbers of big quakes to expect in the future.
High energy laser weapons are a hot area of research with companies including Lockheed Martin, Rheinmetall and Northrop Grumman all developing systems. Boeing is also in the mix with its High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), which is being put through its paces by the US Army. Between November 18 and December 10, the HEL MD successfully took out mortar rounds and UAVs in flight, marking a first for the vehicle-mounted system.
The recent tests, which took place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, followed on from low- and medium-power test demonstrations conducted in 2011. These latest tests were the first full demonstration of the HEL MD in a configuration that included the laser and beam director mounted in the vehicle. A surrogate radar, the Enhanced Multi Mode Radar, provided support by queuing the laser.
It's another small step on the long march toward laser weapons.
The US Army said this week that its big, boxy HEL MD system turned in a bang-up performance in its recent shoot-'em-up on the test range. During a three-week run between November 18 and December 10 at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the truck-mounted High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (PDF) successfully engaged more than 90 mortar rounds, along with "several" unmanned aerial vehicles in flight.
No specifics were given on what exactly constitutes a successful engagement, but judging by various earlier tests of laser weapons prototypes, HEL MD's beam likely scorched a hole in the side of its targets and disrupted their trajectories, perhaps even causing them to explode in the air.
German laser weapons hobbyist Patrick Priebe, the creator of such one-off curiosities as the Iron Man Gauntlet and the Crysis 2-inspired Gauss Rifle, has now gone and made a laser rifle. While it won't bring down a storm trooper or an alien facehugger, it'll make short work of things like wood, Styrofoam and glass.
The mostly aluminum-bodied 12-lb (5.4-kg) rifle incorporates a 7-watt infrared burning laser, along with a 2-milliwatt red aiming laser. Power comes from an 18-volt rechargeable battery pack converted to run at 12,000 volts, while a 12-volt pump circulates one liter of distilled water to help keep things cool. An LCD screen indicates when the temperature of that water is getting too high (28ºC/82ºF), at which point the gun has to stop shooting things for a while.
Invisibility gun uses a beam of darkness to make objects vanish from sight | ExtremeTechResearchers at the National University of Singapore have built a beam of darkness that can make objects invisible from a long distance away. This isn’t the plot from some not-so-distant sci-fi movie: It really works. The beam of darkness can create a 3D region of invisibility — or “empty light capsule” as the researchers call it — that can hide macroscopic objects.
The darkness beam, developed by Chao Wan and fellow researchers in Singapore, creates invisibility in a fundamentally different way to the invisibility cloaks that we usually cover on ExtremeTech. For the most part, the bleeding edge of invisibility cloak tech consists of a metamaterial enclosure that bends radiation (microwaves, not light) around an object. If we could build large, flexible, and lightweight invisibility cloaks of metamaterials, that’d be cool — but sadly, we’re years and years away from such an invention. For now, metamaterial invisibility cloaks are mostly limited to a single dimension and a narrow range of radiation frequencies — and, as we’ve covered before, due to the cloak’s clunky physical dimensions, most of these cloaks actually increase the RF footprint of an object due to scattering of radiation that isn’t picked up by the metamaterial.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have proposed the first design of a cloaking device that uses an external source of energy to significantly broaden its bandwidth of operation. Andrea Alù, associate professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering, and his team have proposed a design for an active cloak that draws energy from a battery, allowing objects to become undetectable to radio sensors over a greater range of frequencies.
International flights take forever. Just for a "quick" jaunt to Europe, you’re looking at sitting on an airplane for at least six hours. The experience is always miserable, unless you’re lucky enough to get upgraded to first class (or have the dollars to pay for it). Now imagine if that trip only took an hour or two. If hypersonic airplanes can be realized, you could fly from New York to Beijing in just two hours, taking advantage of a new design from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
WASHINGTON: Scientists have designed an 'invisibility cloak' that draws energy from a battery, allowing objects to become undetectable to radio sensors over a greater range of frequencies.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have proposed the first design of a cloaking device that uses an external source of energy to significantly broaden its bandwidth of operation.
The proposed active cloak will have a number of applications beyond camouflaging, such as improving cellular and radio communications, and biomedical sensing.
Cloaks have so far been realised with so-called passive technology, which means that they are not designed to draw energy from an external source.
In a remote cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 50,000-year-old bone from a toe that tells a story about life — and love — among some of the earliest humans.
They did it by analyzing DNA from that bone.
Back in 2010, scientists stunned the world by retrieving recognizable DNA from a Neanderthal bone that was tens of thousands of years old. They compared it with modern human DNA, and — what do you know? There's some Neanderthal DNA in many of us. Apparently, we Homo sapiens occasionally interbred with our primitive cousins.
Since then, the plot has thickened.
Scientists subsequently found a finger bone from a place called the Denisova Cave, in Siberia. They thought: Neanderthal. But no, it wasn't Neanderthal. Nor was it from a modern human, H. sapien. It was from some previously unknown but close relative. The scientists called them the Denisovans, a third kind of early human, whose DNA had been analyzed. And we know almost nothing about them.
So now comes yet another bone fossil — a toe from the same cave. It's from a female Neanderthal this time. And all the DNA is still there. It shows that her ancestors also interbred with Denisovans.
An international team of researchers has found evidence that Neanderthals, like modern humans, had the ability to speak.
By analyzing a fossilized Neanderthal hyoid bone–a horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck that’s crucial for speech–Stephen Wroe of the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, and his colleagues were able to determine how the structure worked in these early humans.
The findings are “highly suggestive” of complex speech in Neanderthals, the team wrote in a paper published in the journal Plos One.
The hyoid bone is critical for speech as it supports the root of the tongue. Non-human primates are incapable of vocalizing like humans because their hyoid bones aren’t in the right position.
The team analyzed the Neanderthal hyoid bone using computer modeling and 3D Xray imaging. This allowed the researchers to see how the hyoid behaved in relation to the other surrounding bones.
“We would argue that this is a very significant step forward,” Wroe told BBC News. “It shows that the Kebara 2 hyoid doesn’t just look like those of modern humans–it was used in a very similar way.”
Wroe said the findings not only alters our understanding of Neanderthals, but of ourselves as well.
