Berkeley's two-armed robot, seen at 5x speed. Video: Adriel Olmos / UC Berkeley
Pick up a glass of water, then lift a fork: Without thinking, you chose the best way to grasp each object. Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a robot that makes the same calculation, choosing on the fly whether to grab an object with pincers or lift it with a suction cup.
Why it matters: Reliable robot grabbers are the just-out-of-reach holy grail for e-commerce outfits like Amazon and Walmart, who still rely mainly on human hands for the job. Smart picker-uppers would clear a serious bottleneck in shipping and could change the nature of warehouses entirely.
How it works: Berkeley's two-armed robot, seen in the video clip above, first considers the contents of a bin and calculates each arm's probability of picking up an object.
Its suction cup is good at grabbing smooth, flat objects like boxes, but bad at porous surfaces like on a stuffed animal. The pincers, on the other hand, are best with small, odd-shaped items.
The system learned its pick-up prowess not from actual practice, but from millions of simulated grasps on more than 1,600 3D objects. In every simulation, small details were randomized, which taught the robot to deal with real-world uncertainty.
The bot can pick up objects 95% of the time, at about 300 successful pickups per hour, its creators write in a paper published today in Science Robotics.
Whoever succeeds could kick off a total reimagining of warehouse distribution, says Ken Goldberg, a Berkeley robotics professor and co-author of the paper.
"You could have very dense warehouses where you could have these bins and robots in really tight quarters," says Goldberg. Think small, vertical warehouses throughout Manhattan, rather than a few huge warehouses mostly outside the city.
We've reported on a JD.com warehouse in China that only employs four humans — but it only handles boxes, not loose items. The difficulty of grabbing never-before-seen items — trivial for a human — means totally automated warehouses are still a ways off.
One limitation of the Berkeley bot is that it can't change its plans once it begins moving to pick up an object, and therefore can't react to its environment — like items resettling in a jostled bin — says Jonas Schneider, head robotics engineer at OpenAI, who was not involved in this research.
Jeff Mahler, a Berkeley researcher and the paper's lead author, says the system only "sees" the bin once every 12 seconds, causing more problems if things shift around.
What's next: Mahler says robots will eventually need to place objects in precise orientations — on a conveyor belt used in a factory, say — and to tightly pack a shipping box. Perhaps most valuable would be a bot that can rummage through a box to find a specific item.
Triangulum Galaxy Shows Stunning Face in Detailed Hubble Portrait
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope brings the vastness of space into perspective in this mosaic image of the Triangulum galaxy (M33), our neighbor in a collection of dozens of galaxies called the Local Group.
The unprecedentedly detailed portrait of Triangulum is composed of 54 Hubble fields of view stitched together, revealing nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. The borders of individual Hubble images trace the jagged edge of the mosaic, which spans 19,400 light-years across. Striking areas of star birth glow bright blue throughout the galaxy, particularly in beautiful nebulas of hot, ionized hydrogen gas like star-forming region NGC 604 in the upper left.
Triangulum is oriented with its face toward us, ideal for studying the distribution of stars and gas in its well-defined spiral structure. While astronomers are still delving into the immense trove of data collected by Hubble, a few characteristics stand out immediately, inviting key comparisons and contrasts with our own Milky Way galaxy and the third large spiral in the Local Group, the Andromeda galaxy.
"My first impression on seeing the Hubble images was, wow, that really is a lot of star formation," said astronomer Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the project. "The star formation rate intensity is 10 times higher than the area surveyed in the Andromeda galaxy in 2015."
Astronomers think that Triangulum has been an introvert, avoiding disruptive interactions with other galaxies, instead spending the eons tending its well-ordered spiral and turning out new generations of stars. Further research may determine if Triangulum is actually a newer member of the Local Group of galaxies, and perhaps its quiet days will soon be over.
This mosaic was created from images taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys between February 2017 and February 2018.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
“Traditionally, a wolf moon is the first full moon in January,” said Tracy Gregg, planetary scientist at the University at Buffalo.
Why is it called a ‘wolf moon’?
“No one knows for sure why it's called that," Gregg said. "But I'm sure you can imagine cold, dark European winters a thousand years ago, with the wolves howling in the distance."
(Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images FILE) A multi-exposure image of a blood and supermoon is seen across Canada with clear skies in Montreal on the night of Sept. 27, 2015. Astronomers claimed a blood moon would return in 33 years.The above notes are clips from ABC News.
Join us as we set our telescopes up at the Nature and Wildlife Discovery Center to view the super blood wolf moon total lunar eclipse! We will be set up behind the restaurant next to the yurt. The NWDC has offered to open up the yurt and have some heaters inside as well as hot beverages to help stay warm as we watch the Moon pass through the Earth's shadow.Bring the family out and watch this rare event with us! This is the last time that Colorado will get to experience a total lunar eclipse from beginning to end until 2025!
Make sure to dress warm and check back here to make sure that the event is still a go if the weather doesn't look cooperative.
AT2018cow erupted in or near a galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, which is located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. This zoomed-in image shows the location of the "Cow" in the galaxy. Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey
The oceans are warming faster than climate reports have suggested, according to a new synthesis of temperature observations published this week. The most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made what turned out to be a very conservative estimate of rise in ocean temperature, and scientists are advising us to adjust our expectations.
“The numbers are coming in 40 to 50 percent [warmer] than the last IPCC report,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an author on the report, published in Science Magazine on Thursday.
Furthermore, Trenberth said, “2018 will be the warmest year on record in the oceans" as 2017 was and 2016 before that.
By Leah Crane of NewScientist
If humans ever settle on Mars, they will need water for drinking, growing food and maybe even making rocket fuel. There’s just one problem – the Red Planet doesn’t seem to have any accessible liquid water, only huge sheets of ice.Luckily, we know how to drill ice for water. Such wells are already in operation in Antarctica, and now it seems it might be possible to get them working on Mars too.
In 2018, pictures from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed eight cliffs of water ice covered in just a few metres of rock and dust. They are likely to be at least 130 metres thick, and there may be many more hidden underneath the Red Planet’s dusty surface.
These sheets may be the best place on Mars for future explorers to get water. There is not enough water vapour in the atmosphere to be useful, the planet’s polar ice caps would be difficult for astronauts to reach, and once-promising signs of surface water flowing down hills may actually be dry sandslides.
Drill, baby, drill
There are cold areas on Earth where we need to drill down and melt ice for water as well. In the early 1960s, the US Army developed a type of reservoir called a Rodriguez well, or Rod well, for army camps in Greenland, and they have been used ever since in remote areas including the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.
Stephen Hoffman at the Aerospace Corporation in Texas and his colleagues adapted simulations used to predict the performance of earthbound Rod wells to see how they would fare on Mars.
A Rod well works by drilling through the ground into the ice, melting some of the ice to create a pool, and then pumping water back up from that pool. If you keep pumping heat into the pool, it creates a reservoir and a continuous water supply.
Hoffman and his team found that a Rod well on Mars could, in theory, produce about 380 litres of water per day and maintain a water reservoir of constant size at the bottom of the well by pumping in 9 kilowatts of power.
That’s close to the average daily water use per person in the US, but about 10 times what each astronaut on the International Space Station uses daily, because there is much less washing to do in space. It is plenty to support a few explorers on Mars’s surface, and extra equipment and more power could increase the water yield, Hoffman says.
Safety first
Still, the first missions will probably want to bring their own water, as there is no guarantee a Rod well would work, and the last thing you want is to get stranded on Mars with no water.
“We have the technology for Earth, but that doesn’t mean we have it for Mars,” says Bruce Jakosky at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It’s a different environment in which it would need to operate, with a different ability of people to handle and operate equipment.” This is similar to many other technologies we would need to maintain a human presence on Mars, he says, so it should not deter us from giving it a try.
There are other barriers we’ll need to surpass before we can start drinking Martian well water. Ali Bramson at the University of Arizona says we don’t know the how pure the ice sheets are. We’ll have to sample them first to determine what sort of processing they require to be safe to use and drink.
Nevertheless, Bramson says, “I do think that drilling subsurface massive ice sheets is our best chance to be able to extract the quantities of water that will be needed to support humans on Mars”.
This illustration shows a young star undergoing a type of growth spurt. Left panel: Material from the dusty and gas-rich disk (orange) plus hot gas (blue) mildly flows onto the star, creating a hot spot. Middle panel: The outburst begins - the inner disk is heated, more material flows to the star, and the disk creeps inward. Right panel: The outburst is in full throttle, with the inner disk merging into the star and gas flowing outward (green). Credit: Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)
An adolescent star in the midst of a dramatic growth phase has been observed with the help of two NASA space telescopes. The youngster belongs to a class of stars that gain mass when matter swirling around the star falls onto its surface. The in-falling matter causes the star to appear about 100 times brighter. Astronomers have found only 25 stars in this class, and only about half of those have been observed during an outburst.
The new findings shed light on some long-standing mysteries surrounding the evolution of young stars, including how they acquire all of their mass. This rarely observed outbursting behavior could be common but might typically be hidden from our view by thick clouds of dust.
The newfound star, called Gaia 17bpi, was first spotted by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, but NASA's asteroid-hunting Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) satellite serendipitously observed the star's brightening at the same time that Gaia did. Additional searches in NEOWISE's data archives and the archives of NASA's infrared-sensing Spitzer Space Telescope showed that these spacecraft had detected the flare-up in infrared light more than one year earlier.
You can read the full story from the Caltech news office here. Caltech manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA. The research is detailed in a new study titled "Gaia 17bpi: An FU Ori Type Outburst."
JPL manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL also manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at IPAC at Caltech.
An efficiency boost might be on the way. stevanovicigor/Getty
By Michael Le Page of NewScientist
Intelligent design has triumphed where evolution has mostly failed. Biologists have boosted the biomass of tobacco by around 40 per cent by compensating for a fundamental flaw in photosynthesis.
The team is now working trying to introduce the same changes into food crops, starting with cowpeas and soybeans. “The funding agencies are really keen on getting this technology into the hands of the world’s poorest,” says team member Amanda Cavanagh at the University of Illinois in Urbana.
The key ingredients of life are molecules made of chains of carbon atoms. Plants assemble these chains from carbon atoms taken from the carbon dioxide molecules in the air.
Evolution’s greatest mistakes
But the enzyme that grabs hold of CO2 and adds it to a carbon chain often grabs hold of an oxygen molecule by mistake. This generates toxic molecules that plants have to expend energy to mop up. This fundamental flaw has been described as one of evolution’s greatest mistakes.
To be fair, it wasn’t a huge issue when photosynthesis first evolved, because there was little oxygen around. But as oxygen levels rose and CO2 levels declined over the aeons, it became a huge problem for plants. The grabbing of oxygen by mistake – called photorespiration – now happens so often it can reduce the efficiency of photosynthesis by as much as 50 per cent.
A few plants have evolved a solution: they concentrate CO2 inside them to reduce the odds of oxygen being grabbed by mistake. But most of the plants we eat, including almost all vegetables and fruits, and key crops such as wheat, rice and soybeans, can’t do this. Biologists have been trying to find a fix for decades.
Rerouting the process
Based on this work, Cavanagh and colleagues designed three alternative pathways for dealing with the toxic byproducts of photorespiration. “What we tried to do was to reroute the entire process,” she says.
They genetically engineered these pathways into tobacco, chosen because it’s an easy plant to modify and has a short life cycle. In field tests over two seasons, the biomass of the best performing plants was boosted by more than 40 per cent.
But making fundamental improvements in photosynthesis might have some risks. In theory, upgraded crop plants that turn feral or interbreed with wild relatives could have a competitive advantage over most other plants.
But even if this trait does spread beyond farms it’s unlikely to cause serious problems, says plant geneticist Maureen Hanson of Cornell University.
“Enhanced growth of a weedy species is not likely to disturb ecology as much as we already disturb it through the environmental effects of traditional agriculture,” she says.
And in the wild plant growth is mainly limited by the availability of water, nitrogen and phosphorus, not by photosynthetic capacity, says Andreas Weber of the Institute for Plant Biochemistry in Duesseldorf, Germany. “I don’t think that the trait would provide a selective advantage to natural vegetation.”
Big boosts
The risks also have to be weighed against the benefits. Most efforts to improve crops produce only tiny yield increases. Big boosts are desperately needed to feed the world’s growing population while reducing greenhouse emissions via bioenergy and still leaving space for the wildlife we depend on.
Berkeley's two-armed robot, seen at 5x speed. Video: Adriel Olmos / UC Berkeley
About this image
AT2018cow erupted in or near a galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, which is located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. This zoomed-in image shows the location of the "Cow" in the galaxy. Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey
The oceans are actually warming 40 to 50 percent faster than the most recent IPCC report suggested. (iStock)
This illustration shows a young star undergoing a type of growth spurt. Left panel: Material from the dusty and gas-rich disk (orange) plus hot gas (blue) mildly flows onto the star, creating a hot spot. Middle panel: The outburst begins - the inner disk is heated, more material flows to the star, and the disk creeps inward. Right panel: The outburst is in full throttle, with the inner disk merging into the star and gas flowing outward (green). Credit: Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)
An efficiency boost might be on the way. stevanovicigor/GettyBy Michael Le Page of NewScientist
Strange snowman NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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