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Cellphones team up to make Wi-fi where it's needed
TECHNOLOGY SPACE SYSTEMS LABORATORY/DEPARTMENT OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING/UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
Half spacesuit, half robot FORGET the complex choreography involved in putting on a spacesuit: astronauts will one day be able to get suited and booted in seconds by stepping through the neck of an overlarge, part-robotic spacesuit. So say engineers David Akin and Shane Jacobs at the University of Maryland in College Park, US. Once you’re inside the baggy suit, its upper torso contracts using pneumatic artificial muscles to ensure a perfect fit. Its morphing design means it should be less unwieldy than today’s suits and allow astronauts to be more efficient, both during spacewalks and in planetary exploration, Jacobs told the recent International Astronautical Congress in Daejong, South Korea. “Our research shows that of the physical work astronauts actually do
on a spacewalk, only one-quarter of it is mission related. The rest goes into just moving the spacesuit around,” says Akin. Robotic actuators are also being applied to the suit’s gloves. The researchers’ “supersuit” also includes new visual aids in the form of stereo LCD spectacles
“Most of the physical work astronauts do on a spacewalk goes into just moving the spacesuit” and an in-helmet video screen. The LCD glasses can show a user augmented reality imagery, for example, allowing an astronaut to see the position of a nearby spacecraft that’s hidden from view. The smart spacesuit is being tested in the university’s neutral buoyancy tank.
–From underwater to outer space–
Cellphones make Wi-Fi hotspots
Play that funky music, tweet boy
THEY say many hands make light work. Now many cellphones make fast Wi-Fi. If a wireless network is lacking, most cellphones can be “tethered” to a laptop and used as a modem, but connection speed is limited. So a team of researchers at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore and the University of California, Santa Barbara, has designed a system called CoolTether, which allows groups of cellphones with Wi-Fi capabilities to pool their connections and create a high-speed wireless network for nearby computers. Cool-Tether requires software to be installed on the computer and cellphones used in this way. The system is most likely to be popular in places like India, where 10 times as many people access the internet via cellphones than using computers, say the team.
THE tunes may be a little avantgarde for most tastes, but they’re impressive achievements all the same. Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions into single, 140-character tweets. Earlier this year Dan Stowell, a computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, encoded the sound of waves crashing on the shore in the programming language SuperCollider. He tweeted the code and soon others responded with their own compositions. Now a free-to-download album
41%
of workers polled by security firm CyberArk admit they have taken company data that may be useful to them in their next job
of 22 original compositions for Twitter by 14 programmers has been released, entitled sc140. “My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, she’ll definitely love it,” says Stowell. SuperCollider is a language used by electroacoustic composers and some DJs to synthesise a wide variety of sounds. Tunes several minutes long – and containing many more than 140 notes – can be notated in 140 or fewer characters by incorporating code that denotes repeating sequences, for example, or random elements. For sample tracks go to newscientist.com/article/dn18173.
“We want this to feel more like a TV than a computer” Google engineer Matthew Papakipos on Chrome OS, the company’s new operating system for small laptops. Essentially a souped-up web browser, it boots up rapidly and uses web services – not the computer’s hard disc – to store data and programs (Chrome OS launch, 19 November)
28 November 2009 | NewScientist | 23
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
Half spacesuit, half robot FORGET the complex choreography involved in putting on a spacesuit: astronauts will one day be able to get suited and booted in seconds by stepping through the neck of an overlarge, part-robotic spacesuit. So say engineers David Akin and Shane Jacobs at the University of Maryland in College Park, US. Once you’re inside the baggy suit, its upper torso contracts using pneumatic artificial muscles to ensure a perfect fit. Its morphing design means it should be less unwieldy than today’s suits and allow astronauts to be more efficient, both during spacewalks and in planetary exploration, Jacobs told the recent International Astronautical Congress in Daejong, South Korea. “Our research shows that of the physical work astronauts actually do
on a spacewalk, only one-quarter of it is mission related. The rest goes into just moving the spacesuit around,” says Akin. Robotic actuators are also being applied to the suit’s gloves. The researchers’ “supersuit” also includes new visual aids in the form of stereo LCD spectacles
“Most of the physical work astronauts do on a spacewalk goes into just moving the spacesuit” and an in-helmet video screen. The LCD glasses can show a user augmented reality imagery, for example, allowing an astronaut to see the position of a nearby spacecraft that’s hidden from view. The smart spacesuit is being tested in the university’s neutral buoyancy tank.
–From underwater to outer space–
Cellphones make Wi-Fi hotspots
Play that funky music, tweet boy
THEY say many hands make light work. Now many cellphones make fast Wi-Fi. If a wireless network is lacking, most cellphones can be “tethered” to a laptop and used as a modem, but connection speed is limited. So a team of researchers at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore and the University of California, Santa Barbara, has designed a system called CoolTether, which allows groups of cellphones with Wi-Fi capabilities to pool their connections and create a high-speed wireless network for nearby computers. Cool-Tether requires software to be installed on the computer and cellphones used in this way. The system is most likely to be popular in places like India, where 10 times as many people access the internet via cellphones than using computers, say the team.
THE tunes may be a little avantgarde for most tastes, but they’re impressive achievements all the same. Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions into single, 140-character tweets. Earlier this year Dan Stowell, a computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, encoded the sound of waves crashing on the shore in the programming language SuperCollider. He tweeted the code and soon others responded with their own compositions. Now a free-to-download album
41%
of workers polled by security firm CyberArk admit they have taken company data that may be useful to them in their next job
of 22 original compositions for Twitter by 14 programmers has been released, entitled sc140. “My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, she’ll definitely love it,” says Stowell. SuperCollider is a language used by electroacoustic composers and some DJs to synthesise a wide variety of sounds. Tunes several minutes long – and containing many more than 140 notes – can be notated in 140 or fewer characters by incorporating code that denotes repeating sequences, for example, or random elements. For sample tracks go to newscientist.com/article/dn18173.
“We want this to feel more like a TV than a computer” Google engineer Matthew Papakipos on Chrome OS, the company’s new operating system for small laptops. Essentially a souped-up web browser, it boots up rapidly and uses web services – not the computer’s hard disc – to store data and programs (Chrome OS launch, 19 November)
28 November 2009 | NewScientist | 23