ANBARASUASOKAN

NASA is taking an enforced holiday of sorts in April as it suspends Mars exploration missions for 17 to 21 days. This isn't due to budget cuts, but rather because Mars will be in conjunction with the Sun during April, which will make direct communications with the probes difficult, if not impossible. During this time, mission control will place NASA’s unmanned Mars spacecraft on low activity and will not send any new command signals.In April, Mars and the Earth will be on opposite sides of the Sun. Because of the different orbital speeds of the two planets, this occurs every 26 months and because Mars is so close to the powerful radiation of the Sun, this can disrupt communications with spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet or on its surface. This is especially true this year because Mars will pass at an angle of only 0.4 degrees away from the Sun’s disk on April 17. What is worse, this is during at the peak of the Sun’s active phase of its 22-year cycle. Though the Sun isn...

The oil and gas fields of the North Sea have been meeting the power needs of the UK population for a number of years but such things have a finite lifespan and there are different ways to get power from the sea. The world's largest and most powerful tidal power turbine has just been unveiled by Atlantis Resources Corporation ahead of installation at a special berth at the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland. The AK1000 will shortly be secured to the seabed off the choppy waters of Orkney and connected to the grid at EMEC. The company claims that the turbine is capable of generating enough electricity for 1,000 homes and is the first of a series of turbines to be deployed. Atlantis Resources Corporation  unveiled the AK1000 turbine at Isleburn Engineering in Invergordon, Scotland, where the system assembly took place. It will be transported from there to EMEC in Orkney later in the summer. Designed to withstand harsh weather and rough open ocean environme...

The skyrocketing popularity of smartphones and compact video cameras over the past several years has resulted in a certain class of products starting to show up a  lot  on Kickstarter – rigs for stabilizing video shot with the devices. We’ve recently covered models such as the  Circle Thing , the Stabil-i Case , and the  SteadeeGo . One of the latest such products, Steadibitz’ amazingly-named MojoFloCam, looks like it does a pretty good job at smoothing out the shakes. Unlike the curved   Steadicam Smoothee   and its various clones, the MojoFloCam (from hereon in to be referred to as the Mojo) is based around a straight vertical metal pole. At the top, a smartphone or camera (weighing up to 11 oz/342 g) is attached using either the designers’ universal phone mount, or simply a threaded screw mount. Below that is a pair of horizontally-extended counterweights, followed by the gimbal-mounted handle. Finally, another couple of counterweights are located a...

For the past few years, a consortium of six European research institutes has been collaborating on a project known as  RoboEarth . Essentially a “worldwide web for robots,” the idea is that it will allow robots to access a shared online database of each others’ software, thus allowing them to learn how to perform new tasks from one another. The first phase of the project, Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine, is now up and running. Named after a fictional castle in the sky inhabited by robots, Rapyuta’s main purpose is to allow robots’ data-processing functions to be performed in the cloud. This means that the robots themselves won’t require as much onboard computational hardware, and will thus be lighter, less expensive and more robust. Each robot using the service has its own secure cloud-based computing environment. Using a wireless connection, the robot uploads data to that environment, where it’s processed at a rate that’s reportedly much faster than would be possible ...

In a move that brings back memories of the  R.O.B.  (Robotic Operating Buddy) that was available for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Japanese hobbyist Izumi Ninagawa has simplified the controls of a modern fighting robot to work with a Famicom (8-bit NES) game pad – which has one of the most basic button configurations around. The NES-styled robot even competed in a robot boxing tournament earlier this year Ninagawa's XEMNES robot is based on a lightweight kit sold by De Agostini called  ROBO-XERO , which weighs less than one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and is powered by 24 Futaba servo motors. By attaching a Bluetooth dongle to the robot with a special micro controller, Ninagawa was able to take advantage of various wireless controllers, including the Nintendo Wii remote. The remote was then hidden inside the shell of a Famicom, and attached to the Famicom controller using an adapter to complete the set-up. Despite the NES pad's limited number of buttons, variou...