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(BEIJING) — China has launched its first unmanned cargo spacecraft on a mission to dock with the country's space station.

The Tianzhou 1 blasted off at 7:41 p.m. (1141 GMT) Thursday atop a latest-generation Long March 7 rocket from China's newest spacecraft launch site, Wenchang, on the island province of Hainan.


It is programmed to conduct scientific experiments after reaching the now-crewless Tiangong 2, China's second space station. A pair of Chinese astronauts spent 30 days on board the station last year.

China launched the Tiangong 2 precursor facility in September and the station's 20-ton core module will be launched next year. The completed 60-ton station is set to come into full service in 2022 and operate for at least a decade.
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Electronic systems don't work well in heat – which is a problem, because apart from a few exceptions, heat is a normal byproduct of electricity. Researchers have now developed a thermal diode: a computer component that runs on heat instead of electricity. This could be the first step towards making heat-resistant computers that can function in extremely hot places, like on Venus or deep inside the Earth, without breaking a sweat.
A regular diode is a key logic component in electronic circuits that allows electricity to flow freely in one direction but blocks it from moving back the other way. These crucial components often fail under high temperatures or when exposed to ionizing radiation, so to help make hardier computer systems, a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have developed thermal diodes, powered by heat instead of electricity.

"If you think about it, whatever you do with electricity you should (also) be able to do with heat, because they are similar in many ways," says Sidy Ndao, co-author of the study. "In principle, they are both energy carriers. If you could control heat, you could use it to do computing and avoid the problem of overheating."

The team's thermal diode is made up of pairs of surfaces, where one is fixed and the other can be moved towards or away from its stationary partner. That movement is handled automatically by the system to maximize the transfer of heat: when the moving surface is hotter than the still one, it will actuate inwards, and increase the rate that heat moves to the cooler surface.

When performed at temperatures between 215° and 494° F (102° and 257° C), the thermal diode hit a peak heat transfer rate of about 11 percent, but the team reported that the device was able to function at temperatures as high as 620° F (327° C). Ndao believes that future versions could even operate at up to 1,300° F (704° C), potentially leading to computers that can work under extreme heat conditions.We are basically creating a thermal computer," says Ndao. "It could be used in space exploration, for exploring the core of the Earth, for oil drilling, (for) many applications. It could allow us to do calculations and process data in real time in places where we haven't been able to do so before."

Even when they're not running in the molten core of the planet, electronics can overheat and damage themselves if they aren't properly cooled by fans or water circulation systems. As heftier tasks are handed off to computers, more elaborate cooling tactics are needed, and to that end Lockheed Martin has tinkered with embedding microscopic water droplets inside chips, IBM developed the counter-intuitive technique of cooling with warm water, and Microsoft has turned to the power of the ocean itself to cool a large data center.

Using components like thermal diodes, the researchers say some of that wasted heat could instead be fed back into the system as an alternative energy source, improving its energy efficiency.

"It is said now that nearly 60 percent of the energy produced for consumption in the United States is wasted in heat," says Ndao. "If you could harness this heat and use it for energy in these devices, you could obviously cut down on waste and the cost of energy."

The researchers are now working on improving their thermal diode's efficiency. But since diodes aren't the only component in electronics, a true thermal computer would need the rest of its system to be able to withstand those temperatures as well.

"If we can achieve high efficiency, show that we can do computations and run a logic system experimentally, then we can have a proof-of-concept," Mahmoud Elzouka, co-author of the study. "(That) is when we can think about the future."
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Washington: Last month was the second warmest March in 137 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Last month was 1.12 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean March temperature from 1951-1980. The two top March temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years.

March 2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.27 degrees Celsius warmer than the March mean temperature. March 2017’s temperature was 0.15 degrees Celsius cooler than March 2016, but 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than any previous March.

The monthly analysis by the team at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations did not cover enough of the planet.
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When it comes to controlling robots, it isn't just a matter of finding ways to give them commands, but of making sure they're carrying out those commands properly. To help with this, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University has come up with a system that turns the operator into a human automatic fault detector to alert the robot when it makes a mistake
.Mind-controlled robots aren't new, but they're also still very much in the developmental phase. Direct control from brain to machine may do away with the problems of a mechanical interface or teaching a robot to respond to voice commands, but by itself it isn't enough. It's one thing to order a robot to do this or that, but it's another thing entirely to get to do it right.


According to MIT, past work on controlling robots has involved hooking up the operator to an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor, then teaching them to give the robot orders by thinking in certain, carefully prescribed ways, like looking at one of two bright light displays to tell the robot which task to perform. The problem is that it was very much a one-way process and exhausting because it required constant attention.The CSAIL approach was to make the command path into more like a feedback loop by monitoring the operator's brain in such a way that they tell the robot in real time when it's making a mistake without the operator doing anything.


"Imagine being able to instantaneously tell a robot to do a certain action, without needing to type a command, push a button or even say a word," says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. "A streamlined approach like that would improve our abilities to supervise factory robots, driverless cars, and other technologies we haven't even invented yet."


The idea is to look not at the brain's conscious commands, but at what the team calls "error-related potentials" (ErrPs). These are signal patterns that the brain puts out when a person notices a mistake. In other words, the operator can warn the robot when it's doing something wrong without consciously thinking about it. The signal is sent automatically to the robot and it takes on the burden of learning instead of the human.To develop this system, the team used a Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics to carry out simple sorting tasks under the instructions of a human operator wearing an EEG cap. Currently the system is limited to dealing with binary-choice activities, but running the signals through an algorithm saw the received brainwaves processed in about 10 to 30 milliseconds.


The CSAIL team says that the ErrP signals are extremely faint, so the feedback loop needed some tweaking to get the right results. This involved making sure the signals were properly classified and by monitoring what are called "secondary errors," where the robot fails to respond to the first error signal. When this happens, the brain provides additional reinforcement that improves accuracy, which the team hopes will reach as high as 95 percent once the system can recognize secondary errors in real time. The team also says that ErrP signals increase proportionally to the size of the robot's mistake, which could lead to future systems able to deal with more complex multiple-choice tasks.


In addition to controlling robots, the team hopes that the technology will also be of benefit to people who lack the ability to communicate verbally.


The study results are available here (PDF).


The video below gives an overview of the brain-controlled robot technology
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Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique to produce cutting-edge, versatile microchips that could revolutionise the speed, efficiency and capability of the next generation of computers.

Researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK developed an innovative new method to engineer computer chips more easily and cheaper than conventional methods.The discovery could revolutionise the production ofa optoelectronic materials – or devices that produce, detect and control light – which are vital to the next generation of renewable energy, security and defence technologies, the researchers said.


“This breakthrough will hopefully lead to a revolution in the development of vital new materials for computer electronics,” said Anna Baldycheva, from Exeter’s Centre for Graphene Science.

“The work provides a solid platform for the development of novel next-generation optoelectronic devices. Additionally, the materials and methods used are extremely promising for a wide range of further potential applications beyond the current devices,” Baldycheva said.

The innovative new research focused on developing a versatile, multi-functional technology to significantly enhance future computing capabilities. The team used microfluidics technology, which uses a series of minuscule channels in order to control the flow and direction of tiny amounts of fluid.

For this research, the fluid contains graphene oxide flakes, that are mixed together in the channels, to construct the chips. While the graphene oxide flakes are two-dimensional -consisting of length and width only – the research team used a new sophisticated light-based system to drive the assembly of the three-dimensional chip structures.Crucially, the research team have analysed their methodology to not only confirm the technique is successful, but also to provide a blueprint for others to use to help manufacture the chips. “We are very excited about the potential of this breakthrough and look forward to seeing where it can take the optoelectronics industry in the future,” Monica Craciun, Associate Professor of Nanoscience at Exeter added.
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Washington, Mar 3 (PTI) NASA is sending a new, nearly self-sufficient plant growth system to the International Space Station (ISS) that will help prepare astronauts to grow their own food during deep-space exploration missions.
The new plant system will this month join Veggie - NASAs first fresh food growth system already active on ISS.
The Advanced Plant Habitat will be used to conduct plant bioscience research on the space station, NASA said. Arabidopsis seeds, small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard, have been growing in the prototype habitat, and will be the first plant experiment, called PH-01, grown in the chamber aboard the space station. The new plant habitat is a fully enclosed, closed-loop system with an environmentally controlled growth chamber, said Bryan Onate, project manager at NASAs Kennedy Space Centre.
It uses red, blue and green LED lights, and broad spectrum white LED lights.
The systems more than 180 sensors will relay real-time information, including temperature, oxygen content and moisture levels (in the air and soil, near the plant roots, and at the stem and leaf level), back to the team at Kennedy.
"A big difference in this system, compared to Veggie, is that it requires minimal crew involvement to install the science, add water, and perform other maintenance activities," Onate said.
The large, enclosed chamber measures 18 inches square, with two inches for the root system and 16 inches available for growth height.
It is designed to support commercial and fundamental plant research or other bioscience research aboard the space station for up to a 135-day science investigation, and for at least one year of continuous operation without maintenance.
Some of the components of the new system have arrived at NASAs Kennedy Space Centre and are being prepared for delivery to the station on Orbital ATKs seventh commercial resupply mission to the station targeted to launch on March 19.
"A team of scientists here at Kennedy Space Centre have been developing the procedures for the first experiment using a prototype, or engineering development unit, of the plant habitat in the Space Station Processing Facility," said Howard Levine, the project scientist overseeing the development of the advanced system.
"I think that the new plant growth habitat will provide tremendous capabilities to do high quality plant physiology research with a variety of plant types on the space station," said Gioia Massa, a life science project scientist and deputy project scientist.
"The plant habitat will enable much more controlled and detailed studies of plant growth in spaceflight," said Massa. PTI SAR SAR
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A NASA science satellite orbiting Mars was forced to make a rare evasive manoeuvre to avoid a collision next week with one of the planet's two small moons, the US space agency said on Thursday.

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, commanded the MAVEN spacecraft, which is studying Mars' vanishing atmosphere, to fire up its engine on Tuesday to boost its speed by about 1.3 feet per second (0.4 meters per second).

The acceleration was necessary to slightly shift MAVEN's orbit and steer the satellite clear of the Martian moon Phobos, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a statement.

Without the tweak, MAVEN and the small, lumpy moon would have reached the same point in space within seven seconds of one another next Monday, March 6. In its new orbit, MAVEN will miss Phobos by about 2-1/2 minutes, NASA said.

MAVEN is in an egg-shaped orbit that regularly crosses the paths of other science satellites and of Phobos, which circles just 6,000 miles (9,656 km) above the Martian surface, closer than any other known moon to a planet in the solar system. At that distance, Phobos whips around Mars three times a day.

Flight controllers regularly monitor MAVEN's path for potential collisions. Tuesday's evasive action was the first time MAVEN had to dodge the potato-shaped Phobos, which measures about 10 by 14 miles by 11 miles (16 by 22.5 by 18 km).

MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, reached the red planet in September 2014.
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