Robo-mate exoskeleton under development in Europe

Efforts to develop an exoskeleton for the workplace are under way, backed by EU funds.

Twelve research institutions from seven European countries are involved in the Robo-mate project, which hopes to test a robotic suit that can be worn by factory employees within three years.
They say the machine could reduce the number of work-related injuries.

One expert warned employers would need to be convinced the equipment would not pose safety issues of its own.

Manufacturers including Italian carmaker Fiat and the French vehicle recycler Indra are working with the teams.

The companies will suggest situations in which the tech could prove useful and have also said they would help test it.

The EU has committed 4.5m euros (£6m; £3.8m) to the scheme.

Heavy weights

The project aims to address the fact that many manufacturing tasks are difficult to automate.

For example Indra has to deconstruct many different types of car, and at present humans, rather than robots, are the only ones capable of handling the complexity of the choices involved.

Because of the weights involved, this can put staff at risk of developing medical problems.

"People have to manipulate parts or components that weigh more than 10kg [22lb]," said Dr Carmen Constantinescu, from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, one of the organisations involved.

"These activities are not carried out just once per day, but are repetitive.

"An exoskeleton with a human inside represents a new type of research for the manufacturing industry.

"It offers a hybrid approach in which the robotic parts support the human who can provide the decisions and cognition needed."

The partners have highlighted a study by the UK's Work Foundation think tank that suggested as many as 44 million people in the EU have suffered work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

Not all would be preventable by such an exoskeleton, and one of the other researchers involved said part of the challenge would be indentifying where the tech could prove useful.

"One area would be, is it useful to lift heavy loads?" Prof Darwin Caldwell, from King's College London, told the BBC.

"The other is situations when people are working above their head.

"If you hold a paint brush or a screwdriver above your head for more than two to three minutes your arms become very fatigued and it can be very bad for your heart."

However, he said the engineering teams were mindful of the risks involved.

"At the minute the motors or hydraulic systems required tend to be rather large and clumsy," Prof Caldwell said. "What we have to do is find ways to miniaturise those.

"What we also have to remember is that an exoskeleton is essentially a robot in physical contact with a human.

"That raises safety issues so we will be looking at making the interaction between the two softer and more organic - it won't be like having a large industrial robot which is dangerous."

The researchers have already suggested some of the technologies they plan to include

One roboticist who is not involved in the project said he expected such technology to become commonplace within the next two to three decades.

"A number of exoskeletons have been developed for military use in the US, and for helping the disabled and frail older people to walk again in Japan - industrial use is an obvious next step," said Prof Noel Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield.

"But one hard problem is how the human user interfaces with the device. It is vital that the operator can perform dextrously with natural movements without having to think about it.

"Another problem is how to work in environments with other humans without hurting them. This will require new natural collision avoidance methods."

Nissan launches Nismo smartwatch for drivers

A smartwatch that monitors the performance of a vehicle as well as the driver has been launched by car manufacturer Nissan.

Like many other smartwatches, the Nissan Nismo measures the user's heart rate, temperature and other biometrics.

But it also allows users to keep an eye on their car's performance - including average speeds and fuel consumption.

Experts say that the watch could be an important step towards greater connectivity in cars.

"Connectivity is the new battleground for car manufacturers," said Chas Hallett, editor-in-chief of  

What Car?

"In-car internet is coming and now with consumer electronics focusing on watch-based connections, Nissan is getting ahead of the game and joining the two together very cleverly."

The Nismo watch can be connected to the car's on-board computer system to allow users to monitor vehicle telematics and performance data. Users can also receive tailored messages from Nissan via the gadget.

It was unveiled ahead of the Frankfurt Motor Show, which runs until 22 September.

Concentration levels

"Wearable technology is fast becoming the next big thing and we want to take advantage of this innovative technology," said Gareth Dunsmore, marketing communications general manager at Nissan, Europe.

A glut of smartwatches has hit the market recently, including Samsung's Galaxy Gear and Sony's Smartwatch 2.

Car-connected watches could be even more useful than those offered by consumer electronic firms, thinks Mr Hallett.

"Imagine if you could heat up your car on a cold day before you got into it or shut the roof of your convertible when it started raining and it was parked outside," he said.

The Nissan Leaf electric car already allows users to interact with it via their mobile phone, said Mr Dunsmore, and such functionality should be available in the firm's next-generation watches.

The current gadget is one of the first products to come out of its Nismo laboratory, which captures live biometric and telematics data from Nissan racing cars and their drivers. 

The lab plans to use electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG) in the future to capture a range of heart and brainwave data.

The eventual aim would be to create wearable technology for drivers that can spot fatigue, monitor drivers' levels of concentration and emotions and record hydration levels.

The Nismo, which comes in three colours and has a battery life of around a week, can be controlled by two buttons on the screen.

 

Why you can't vote online yet

Online voting companies like Everyone Counts, whose system is shown here, face a slew of obstacles in the U.S. - even as other countries take the digital plunge.

Online voting is taking off in local elections, particularly overseas. But Americans shouldn't expect to vote for the president on their laptop or iPad anytime soon.

The battle over whether to digitize the voting process has become a full-blown war in the United States, even as countries like Canada, Norway and Australia have increasingly adopted online systems. Proponents say going digital will boost voter turnout, while naysayers cite hacking and other security threats as risks too great to overcome in the near future. 

"It's such a different world than it was 20 years ago, and yet very little has changed in our voting process," says Rob Weber, a former IT professional at IBM (IBM, Fortune 500), who started the blog Cyber the Vote in 2010. 

Like many supporters of online voting, Weber points out that many young Americans don't vote. Bringing the voting process to a format they're familiar with -- a website on a PC, tablet, or even a mobile phone -- would overcome the "enthusiasm gap," he believes.

But that argument hasn't been enough to bring online voting into the mainstream. For that, Weber places the blame squarely on election officials whom he says aren't interested in changing the status quo.

"They find online voting culturally distasteful," Weber says. "They bring up theoretical hacking situations in order to make people afraid of the concept of change. And unfortunately it works."

Security researchers don't think those concerns are merely theoretical. Michael Coates, chair of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and director of security assurance at Firefox maker Mozilla, says hackers will attack anything worth hacking. 

"It's guaranteed that such a system [online voting] would be attacked, for sure," Coates says. "All important systems, from financial to government, face skilled hackers. There are security flaws in every system; it's a matter of how you detect and respond to them." 

Home PCs, in particular, are susceptible to a myriad of cyberattacks that could be used to alter a user's vote.

"Until we can reliably foil malware and viruses -- and who knows when that will be -- it's hard to consider a system in which we vote from our home computers," Coates says.

Such issues have felled some past attempts at online voting in the United States.

In 2004, the military began testing the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), which would have let service members stationed overseas vote online in the general election. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz scrapped the plan after government-commissioned studies warned of extensive security flaws. 

Another oft-cited failure came in 2010, when Washington, D.C., conducted a pilot project to allow overseas or military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the Internet. Before opening the system to real voters, D.C. invited the public to evaluate whether the system could be hacked.

It was. Within 36 hours of going live. 

A University of Michigan team "found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters' secret ballots," professor J. Alex Halderman later wrote in a blog post about the hack.

Halderman termed the system "brittle" and proclaimed online voting too dangerous to implement anytime soon. 

"It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology," he wrote.

Such high-profile debacles are a difficult obstacle for online voting companies like Everyone Counts, says CEO Lori Steele.

"The problem with the D.C. hacking is that it was a less-than-mediocre system run by people who had no experience," Steele says. "When people use it as an example, it's like, c'mon -- those issues were all security 101." 

Bad PR for any online voting attempt undermines the entire cause, Steele says. Still, California-based Everyone Counts has run online elections for local and municipal contests in U.S. locations including West Virginia, Honolulu, El Paso, Chicago and Washington state, in addition to the United Kingdom and Australia.

Everyone Counts uses "military-grade encryption" for its ballots, and can also provide a paper trail for clients who want it, Steele says. A "transparent code" policy allows any client to inspect the company's source code. 

While Steele admits that online voting, like any system, is susceptible to attacks, she thinks the sheer number of devices in the wild would make it difficult for would-be hackers to hit their targets.

"They don't know which PCs or tablets or phones will be used for voting," Steele says. "Plus, people talk about paper being the Holy Grail of security, but that is so far from reality."

The biggest limitation of paper ballots was on display last week, when Hurricane Sandy decimated parts of the northeastern United States. The storm's destruction cut many voters off from their scheduled polling station. 

On Saturday, New Jersey announced that displaced storm victims will qualify as "overseas voters," meaning they are eligible to vote via e-mail or fax.

"The storm was awful, but it could serve as a wider reminder that we need to reform the system," says Michelle Shafer, director of communications at Scytl USA. 

Scytl's Spanish parent company has conducted online voting in over 30 countries worldwide. In the U.S., it's slowly gaining steam. The company has completed online "ballot delivery" -- digitally delivering a paper-ballot-like form that voters can fill out and submit -- in six U.S. states. Those digital ballots are typically used by military members and overseas residents. It has also run direct online voting for local elections in West Virginia, Florida and Alaska. 

"I don't think we'll be voting online by [2016's general election], but my hope is that we'll continue to take slow and measured steps toward that eventuality," she adds.

While the United States takes it slow, countries like Canada and Norway continue to expand online voting.

Dean Smith, president and founder of Canada's leading online-voting firm, Intelivote, says the divide between his home country and the United States is vast. Popular Canadian labor unions have used online voting for years -- which means users have grown accustomed to the process -- and the country's ballots tend to be far less complex than those in the United States.

"In general, people here see the benefits of online voting and there's an acceptance," Smith says of Canada. "The U.S. would be a great coup, but there are so many academics who made their name by being naysayers. There's so much fighting about it. Right now, we don't need the additional problems."

 

Ice Wall Offers Thin Hope for Fukushima Recovery

Enclosing the leaking Fukushima nuclear power plant in a wall of ice might keep radiation-contaminated water out of the Pacific Ocean, but it wouldn't solve the problem of what to do with the water, which is currently being stored in tanks. The fact that problems persist after more than two years may be a sign that Japan needs outside help to address the challenges at Fukushima.

The Japanese government on Tuesday announced it would be allocating US$473 million to help the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), build an ice wall to prevent water being used to cool it from poisoning the surrounding groundwater.

Currently, it's estimated that more than 79,000 gallons of contaminated water are leaking from the plant into the Pacific Ocean every day.

However, the proposed ice wall would be at best a short-term solution to the troubled facility's problems stemming from a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The ice wall would be created by drilling 90-foot shafts into the soil surrounding the power plant and filling them with a coolant. That would turn the soil into a frozen wall that would keep groundwater from mingling with the water used to cool the plant. It would not, however, address the problem of what to do with the contaminated water cooling the facility.

"They're running out of room for tanks to store the contaminated water," Akira T. Tokuhiro, director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Idaho, told TechNewsWorld. Tokuhiro recently visited the Fukushima site.

 

International Help Needed

Reduction in the inventory of contaminated water that's been accumulating for two and a half years is a major problem facing TEPCO.

"I'm not sure frozen walls are a good solution," Tokuhiro said.

"They have to massively reduce the inventory," he continued. "They have to filter off the contamination and boil off the rest."

The fact that problems persist after more than two years is a sign to Tokuhiro that Japan needs outside help to address the challenges at Fukushima.

"They should reach out to the international community to ask for some expert opinion," he recommended.

"That's something they haven't really done. The people who have the experience and solutions are in the U.S., Russia and France. [Japan needs] to reach out to the international community to identify where the leak at the plant is coming from," Tokuhiro maintained.

"The technical challenges aren't untenable," he said. "There are people with experience handling those challenges, but the Japanese don't have that experience."

Seventy thousand gallons, or 300 metric tons, of contaminated water isn't much compared to the volume of water in the Pacific Ocean, "but if you're doing it every day and you don't know how long it will be before it can be stopped, then it's an issue that needs to be looked at," Tokuhiro said.

"They should make Fukushima an international cleanup site," he suggested.

Balanced Power

The situation at the nuclear power plant is an unprecedented crisis that is getting worse, Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, told the BBC.

In fact, it may not get any better for generations.

"It's going to take the next 30 or 40 years and at least $100 billion to manage," Tokuhiro predicted.

The long-term impact of Fukushima on the nuclear power industry remains to be seen.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that there have been a number of nuclear power plant cancellations or announced shutdowns," said Shel Horowitz, coauthor of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

"The economics have never made sense," he told TechNewsWorld. "The safety has never made sense, and now with the public eye on it a little more than in the past, its flaws are painfully obvious."

While Fukushima was a bad accident, nuclear programs continue to be pursued around the world, countered Eileen M. Supko, a principal with Energy Resources International.

"What has dampened building new nuclear power plants more so than being associated with Fukushima has been the current fiscal environment worldwide and the availability of funding and the low price of natural gas," she told TechNewsWorld.

"But natural gas prices cycle up and down, and at some point, they'll cycle back up," Supko continued.

"I believe there is a value in having a balanced mix in the way we create electricity," she added. "Nuclear should be a part of that."

Kodak emerges from bankruptcy with 'tech' focus

"I love this company. I Iove what we have done": Kodak CEO Antonio Perez. Photo: AP

A slimmed-down Kodak has emerged from bankruptcy protection and says it will specialise in technology focused on imaging for businesses.

You can feel the spirit of George Eastman in Antonio Perez's office.

A picture of Eastman, who founded Kodak in 1880, sits among the current chief executive's collection of family photos. The outer areas of Perez's office, built and first inhabited by Eastman about a century ago, include some of Kodak's Oscar and Emmy awards, along with a collection of historic photos. A large portrait of Eastman, who died in 1932, hangs near the entrance.

Perez's surroundings serve as a constant reminder of Kodak's hallowed history in the print and movie film industries – and of the pressure he is under to revive the ailing company.

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Kodak emerged from bankruptcy protection this week vastly different from the company of old. Gone are the cameras and film that made it famous. The company hopes to replace them with new technologies such as touchscreens for smartphones and smart packaging embedded with sensors. Over Perez's desk hang pictures depicting Kodak's future – including one of the company's ultra-fast commercial inkjet printer, the Prosper Press.

"Look for a case of a company that had to go through this kind of excruciating restructuring and kept innovating," Perez said. "It just doesn't happen, but we've done it."

Kodak said its old stock is cancelled as of Tuesday. Creditors are getting stock in the restructured company.

The week before Kodak exited Chapter 11 protection, Perez sat down for a rare 90-minute interview. He spoke candidly about Kodak's restructuring and laid out his vision for what lies ahead.

The decline

Eastman Kodak, credited with popularising photography at the start of the 20th century, started to struggle toward the end of the century, first with Japanese competition and later when it failed to react quickly enough to the shift from film to digital photography.

Perez was appointed CEO in 2005. Under his leadership, the Rochester, New York, company had restructured its money-losing film business by 2007. The company closed 13 factories, shuttered 130 film-processing labs and eliminated 50,000 workers around the world at a cost of about $US3.4 billion ($A3.7 billion).

Kodak expected demand for film to decline, but gradually. The company anticipated that new demand from emerging markets such as China would offset some of the decline in the US. But Perez said Chinese consumers opted for smartphones instead of cameras, and demand for film plummeted.

Meanwhile, the economic collapse of 2008 and the resulting plunge in interest rates left some of the company's pension obligations underfunded. It was those obligations, along with other legacy costs, that Perez said eventually resulted in the January 2012 bankruptcy filing.

Revenue dropped from about $US13.3 billion ($A14.6 billion) in 2003 to $US6 billion ($A6.6 billion) in 2011.

Under court oversight, Kodak continued to shed costs in the form of businesses, facilities and workers. It shut down its consumer camera business and sold off an online photo service. It spun off its personal and document imaging businesses to its pension plan and sold off many of its patents. It took its name off the theatre that hosts the Academy Awards each year. In fact, much of Kodak is gone except for its commercial and packaging printing businesses. The company will emerge with about 8500 employees, just a fraction of the 145,000 it had at its peak in the 1980s. Revenue is expected to total $US2.7 billion ($A3 billion) this year.

New businesses

Perez said that by slimming down, Kodak is able to focus research and development on businesses the company sees as more profitable.

The restructured company's operations are split between a trio of businesses: packaging, graphic communications and functional printing. All three are rooted in Kodak's commercial printing technology.

Kodak scientists created printers, inks and other materials designed to improve resolution, while also increasing the variety of surfaces that can be printed on. In doing so, it has boosted printing speed and lowered costs for customers.

Kodak executives point to the Prosper Press as one of the best examples of its printing technology at work.

Bill Schweinfurth, Kodak's manager for inkjet components, said publishers have favoured offset printing over inkjet for years because of its lower per-page cost and superior image quality. Offset printing uses metal plates to create an image, whereas inkjet printing uses tiny nozzles to spray ink. Offset printing is most cost effective for large printing runs, good for things such as newspapers and popular novels. It's also considerably faster.

For smaller runs, publishers were forced to use inkjet printers, which had a much higher per-page cost and didn't offer the same level of quality. Schweinfurth said the Prosper Press, which Kodak launched in 2010, changed all that. It's inkjet technology that offers cost, quality and speed comparable to offset printing.

Kodak's Prosper Presses contain more than 100,000 computer-controlled inkjet nozzles that spray special Kodak-made ink that allows for crisp resolution. Meanwhile, cameras and software monitor the print process, looking for defects. The presses can reach speeds of up to 650 feet of paper per minute.

Kodak won't say how many of the presses it has sold, but said the real money is in the consumable products, such as ink, that it sells to go with them.

The presses are also useful when it comes to customising publications, something offset presses can't do.

Christian Schamberger, president of Mercury Print Productions, said the customisation capabilities are a big reason why his company made Prosper Presses a key part of its operations.

Mercury, also based in Rochester, contracts with major educational publishers to print textbooks ranging from primary to university level. The company uses Kodak technology for about 75 per cent of its production. Schamberger said that because educational requirements vary between states, and in some cases between school districts, textbooks need to be customised. That reduces the number of each version ordered and makes production on the Prosper Press more practical than offset printing.

Although inkjet printing is on the rise, the company said it continues to invest in technologies for offset printing, including new processes that reduce costs and environmental impact.

It also sees great potential for its printing technology in the rapidly growing packaging industry. Douglas Edwards, Kodak's president for digital printing and enterprise, said that while the publishing industry may be in decline amid a shift toward online publications, "there's no electronic substitution for packaging." Edwards said Kodak's technologies make it cheaper and easier to print high-resolution images on everything from cardboard to plastic and cans.

Randy Ottinger, a former technology and banking industry executive, noted that although Kodak faces tough competition, its competitors face many of the same challenges.

Ottinger, who now serves as an executive vice president at the business advisory firm Kotter International, said the old company was hurt by its complacency. He said the new Kodak needs to put innovation above short-term profits and be willing to shake itself up to make itself relevant.

New applications

Part of Kodak's restructuring has been a move away from manufacturing all of its products by itself. The company now focuses on what it does best and looks for partners to help with the rest, Perez said.

Brad Kruchten, a 30-year veteran of Kodak and now its president for graphics, entertainment and commercial films, gave this example of how the company once did everything itself: when he ran its Colorado office years ago, there were cows grazing on its property because the company used them to make gelatin for film production. It also grew its own corn to feed the cows.

"Now we just look at what we know how to do and invest in that," Kruchten said.

One of the company's biggest projects in development is a cheaper touchscreen for smartphones and tablets. Touchscreens currently work through the use of a very rare, but transparent, metal called indium that's laid out in a grid pattern applied to a thin sheet of glass. Kodak wants to use its printing capabilities to lay out super-thin lines of metals such as copper and silver, which can be more effective than indium and cheaper to obtain. The new technology could also allow the screens to be flexible and foldable, allowing them to be installed on a host of new objects.

Although the technology is still being developed, a production facility is under construction. Kodak has reached deals with undisclosed electronics makers and expects to begin production of the screens by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Kodak wants to use the same technology to eventually create smart packaging, which could include sensors that, for instance, tell consumers if a bag of food had been out of the refrigerator too long.

Todd Watkins, who worked for Kodak in the 1980s and now serves as an economics professor at Lehigh University, said that for the new Kodak to survive, it will need to find a way to stand out in a fiercely competitive market where companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox are already entrenched and struggling with problems of their own.

Even as some of Kodak's technology has potential, Watkins said, it remains to be seen whether the company can transfer that into profits.

"It's cool, absolutely, but is it a business? That's the question," Watkins said.

Ari Zoldan, CEO of Quantum Networks and a technology analyst and entrepreneur, was more sceptical about Kodak's ability to compete in commercial printing.

He said while Kodak symbolised the gold standard in the printing industry for many years, it failed to evolve with the times and its competitors now have too strong of a hold on the market. But he said Kodak's research and development capabilities are very strong, so the company could succeed if it can quickly focus itself on just a few niche areas.

"Can they hang their hat on these technologies?" Zoldan asked. "It's a long shot. By no stretch of the imagination is it a slam dunk."

New beginnings

Perez said he's confident that Kodak's post-bankruptcy balance sheet, combined with its new focus and technologies, will set the company up for financial success in the years to come.

As for region's future, Sandra Parker, president and CEO of the Rochester Business Alliance, said the city is no longer dependent on Kodak. In the years since the company began cutting jobs, Rochester's workforce has diversified.

Kodak now employs about 3500 workers in the Rochester area, just a fraction of 60,000 it had in its heyday of the 1980s. The University of Rochester has replaced Kodak as the area's top employer, Parker said. The Business Alliance's top priority is finding a way to fill Kodak's massive Eastman Business Park. Although Kodak still does some manufacturing there, it has also opened the space up to other companies and is now about two-thirds full with more than 40 tenants.

Meanwhile, Perez is preparing to step down. He'll give up the CEO job sometime in the next year once a replacement is found. He plans to remain as an adviser.

In recent years, Perez has faced considerable criticism for Kodak's decline in value and lost jobs. But he brushed it off saying, "I have a very high threshold for the opinions of the uninformed."

Perez said the time is right for him to leave the company. He remains proud of how Kodak has continued to innovate, despite its financial hardships.

"I love this company. I Iove what we have done," Perez said. "But now it's time."

NBN to provide economic benefits to Australians: broadband report

Labor's NBN would provide multiple economic benefits to households, a report has found. Photo: Nic Walker

Labor's national broadband network has been given an independent boost with a study of its future economic benefits concluding it will add $3800 per year to the wealth of the average connected household in 2020.

The study, by economic modelling firm Deloitte Access Economics, has found "super-fast" broadband, would provide multiple economic benefits to households through practical changes and such developments as e-commerce, e-medicine and tele-working.

The NBN proposes download speeds of up to 1000 megabits per second, which would facilitate the download of a high-definition television show for example, within seconds.

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The study was commissioned by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

It did not model the comparative benefits of the Coalition's cut-price NBN plan that would stop short of the full fibre-to-the-home system proposed under Labor's plan. Labor's NBN is set to cost $37.4 billion compared with the Opposition's roughly $20 billion option using fibre to the node – essentially a cabinet at the end of each street – and then relies on the established copper network for the final link to the property.

The Deloitte study analysed 10 types of households and found that those connected and utilising the super-fast system would reap financial benefits of thousands of dollars per year by 2020, when the system is due to be fully operational.

A single-income household with a small business and two children to support would be $7000 a year better off, and older Australians would also achieve savings of that amount due to potential for e-health to improve living standards and delay an eventual move into nursing home accommodation.

"Our estimate is average annual household benefits will be worth around $3800 in 2020, in current dollars," the report states. "Around two-thirds of these benefits [$2400] are financial benefits, the rest are the equivalent monetary value of consumer benefits such as travel time savings and convenience of e-commerce."

NHS Given Millions For High-Tech Hospitals

 By Thomas Moore, Health Correspondent

 An extra £240m takes the total funding boost to £1bn and will help pay for electronic records and prescriptions.

The NHS has been given an extra £240m to develop technology that enables staff to provide safer patient care with less bureaucracy.

The Government money is on top of a £260m e-prescribing budget announced by the Department of Health earlier this year.

Hospitals and other NHS organisations will also add £500m to the technology fund.

Much of the money will be spent on systems that allow hospitals, GP surgeries and out-of-hours doctors share access to patients' electronic medical records.

The Department of Health said doctors, nurses and social care workers will be able to provide emergency care with full knowledge of a patient's medical and care history.

It should stop drugs being prescribed incorrectly and prevent patients having to repeat their medical history to a chain of health professionals.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "It is simply maddening to hear stories of elderly dementia patients turning up at A&E with no-one able to access their medical history.

"That's why I've set the NHS the challenge of going paperless by 2018.

"The public are rightly sceptical about NHS IT after the failures of the past but we can't let past failures hold patients back from seeing the benefits of the technology revolution that is transforming services all around us."

The £1bn technology fund will also allow all patients to book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions online by March 2015.

Patients will also be able to access their GP record.

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust uses software to track patients' progress through A&E. Staff also use tablets to access patients records, reducing medical errors.

Chief Executive Dame Julie Moore said: "It's encouraging that the Government are placing such a priority on improving technology in the NHS, and backing hospitals to become more hi-tech.

"Technology has been key to helping us improve safety and drive up standards for patients in Birmingham." 

Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patients and Information for NHS England said: "A single patient record will help make the patient journey from hospital to home seamless, giving professionals from different health and care organisations access to information when they need it most, without patients having to repeat themselves every time they speak to a different doctor, nurse or care professional."

NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon under Greenland Ice Sheet

 Hidden for all of human history, a 460 mile long canyon has been discovered below Greenland's ice sheet. Using radar data from NASA's Operation IceBridge, scientists found the canyon runs from near the center of the island northward to the fjord of the Petermann Glacier.

Data from a NASA airborne science mission reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.
The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.
"One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped," said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study. "Our research shows there's still a lot left to discover."
Bamber's team published its findings Thursday in the journal Science.
The scientists used thousands of miles of airborne radar data, collected by NASA and researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the Greenland ice sheet.

A large portion of this data was collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice. One of IceBridge's scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.

In their analysis of the radar data, the team discovered a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.

At certain frequencies, radio waves can travel through the ice and bounce off the bedrock underneath. The amount of times the radio waves took to bounce back helped researchers determine the depth of the canyon. The longer it took, the deeper the bedrock feature.

"Two things helped lead to this discovery," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was the enormous amount of data collected by IceBridge and the work of combining it with other datasets into a Greenland-wide compilation of all existing data that makes this feature appear in front of our eyes."

The researchers believe the canyon plays an important role in transporting sub-glacial meltwater from the interior of Greenland to the edge of the ice sheet into the ocean. Evidence suggests that before the presence of the ice sheet, as much as 4 million years ago, water flowed in the canyon from the interior to the coast and was a major river system.

"It is quite remarkable that a channel the size of the Grand Canyon is discovered in the 21st century below the Greenland ice sheet," said Studinger. "It shows how little we still know about the bedrock below large continental ice sheets."

The IceBridge campaign will return to Greenland in March 2014 to continue collecting data on land and sea ice in the Arctic using a suite of instruments that includes ice-penetrating radar.

For more information about NASA's Operation IceBridge, visit:

Solar plane pilots hope historic flight ushers in clean energy era

The Solar Impulse airplane made a dramatic early landing late Saturday when damage was observed on one of the aircraft's wings. Here the plane sits in Hangar 19 at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

NEW YORK — The two Swiss pilots who flew a solar-powered airplane on a record-setting coast-to-coast flight across the United States say they hope their accomplishment will draw the world's attention to the vast potential of sustainable energy.

André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard alternated flying the solar plane, called Solar Impulse, on the five legs of the aircraft's cross-country journey.

Solar Impulse is the first solar-powered plane capable of flying both day and night without using any fuel. During the day, the plane collects and stores energy from the sun to power its four electrical motors and onboard batteries, allowing the aircraft to fly even when the sun goes down. [Images: Cross-Country Flight in a Solar-Powered Plane]

Solar Impulse's cross-country expedition began near San Francisco, Calif., and ended late Saturday when the plane touched down in New York City. Along the way, Solar Impulse also made stops in Phoenix, Dallas, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Washington.

'The plane that never sleeps'

Ending the flight in New York was an important symbol of Solar Impulse's mission, Piccard told reporters Monday at a news briefing here at Hangar 19 at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

"For the plane that never sleeps, which other destination could we have but the city that never sleeps?" Piccard said. "Having Solar Impulse in New York, it's a great emotion for us. I think if we didn't have so many cameras in our face, we would have a little tear on the side of our eyes."

Previously in 2010, Solar Impulse successfully completed a record-setting 26-hour overnight flight. Two years later, in 2012, the team flew from Switzerland to Morocco. But for Piccard and Borschberg, flying coast-to-coast across the United States was always within their sights.

"We had this airplane flying in Switzerland, flying over Europe, flying to Morocco, across the Mediterranean, and then we sat with André and the rest of the team and put our credibility on the table," Piccard said. "If it can fly in Europe, why don't we make history continue and fly in the country where aviation was born?"

Challenges galore

While the entire Solar Impulse team is celebrating the end of a successful cross-country journey, the individual flights were not without challenges.

Flight controllers had to adjust the plane's route from Dallas to St. Louis in early June to dodge severe weather. On the fifth and final leg of the trip, Borschberg was forced to land the single-seater plane several hours early, after a large tear in the fabric on the plane's left wing was observed midflight.

Neither Borschberg nor the plane was in danger because of the tear, according to company officials, but the decision was made to land early to ensure the safety of the pilot.

Piccard and Borschberg still do not know what caused the damage to Solar Impulse's wing, though Borschberg said the handling of the plane was not affected, which further demonstrates the reliability of the solar-powered aircraft.

 

 

The Swiss-made plane is attempting a record-breaking trip across the U.S. powered only by the sun

 Critical energy milestone

Borschberg's early landing on Saturday prevented him from being able to fly over several iconic New York City landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, but he said the cross-country journey is a critical milestone for the future of clean energy solutions.

"What was a year ago an idea became, nine months ago, a project," Borschberg said. "For the last eight weeks, it was a reality for us, and now it's already history."
Yet, that feeling of accomplishment is still somewhat surreal, Piccard said.

"In a mission like this one, in order not to tempt fate too much, we never visualize how the arrival will be," he said. "You go through one problem at a time, and you just progress. Then suddenly, when you make it, it's like a surprise. It's a flash of light. Wow, we made it! You have to realize that you are at the place and the moment you have dreamed to be for such a long time. This is something we said to each other: 'Do you realize we made it? We're here. It's a reality now.'"
Borschberg and Piccard will remain in New York City for roughly a week. During that time, they will participate in a NASDAQ Opening Bell Ceremony in Times Square, and are scheduled to meet with U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon on Tuesday.
To continue promoting clean technologies, Piccard and Borschberg plan to circumnavigate the world in the solar-powered plane in 2015.

NASA looks to future exploration, funds 6 next-gen space tech ideas

A scoop-and-scramble Mars sample return mission has long been sought by the scientific community.

NASA has granted funding to six next-generation technology concepts that it believes could help advance humanity's understanding and exploration of the cosmos down the road.

The six ambitious ideas, which were selected under Phase 2 of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, cover a wide range of potential future applications. One proposal, for example, aims to develop laser thrusters for spacecraft, while another seeks to build tiny but tough robots that could explore other planets and moons en masse.

"As NASA begins a new chapter in exploration, we're investing in these seed-corn advanced concepts of next-generation technologies that will truly transform how we investigate and learn about our universe," Michael Gazarik, NASA's associate administrator for space technology in Washington, D.C., said in a statement Thursday. [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight (Gallery)]

"Advancing these proposals from universities, private companies and NASA researchers to Phase 2 studies allows new, futuristic ideas to move closer to becoming real tools for exploration," Gazarik added.

Phase 2 awards are worth up to $500,000 and fund research and development activities for two years. They're granted to the most promising proposals that have previously received NIAC Phase 1 awards, which give research teams about $100,000 to conduct nine-month initial analysis studies.

All six of the newly announced Phase 2 projects — which were chosen via a peer-review process that prioritized technical feasibility, potential impact and innovation — are still in their early stages. Most are at least a decade away from possible use on a mission, NASA officials said.

"Early study and continued development are critical to guiding our technology investments," Jay Falker, NASA's NIAC program executive in Washington, said in a statement. "Some of the Phase 2 studies that started last year are already attracting the attention of other NASA programs, as well as potential external partners."

The six selected concepts, along with their principal investigators, are:

• Propellant-less Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters (Young Bae, Y.K. Bae Corp., Tustin, Calif.)
• SpiderFab: Architecture for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures (Robert Hoyt, Tethers Unlimited Inc., Bothell, Wash.)
• A Gravitational Wave Detector Based on an Atom Interferometer (Babak Saif, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.)
• Super Ball Bot: Structures for Planetary Landing and Exploration (Vytas SunSpiral, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.)
• Nomadic Exploration: Following Routes of Solar Sustenance and Temperate Climate (David Wettergreen, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.)
• Sample Return Systems for Extreme Environments: Phase II (Robert Winglee, University of Washington, Seattle)

NASA prepares to launch 600Mbps space laser system to replace conventional radio links

NASA is preparing to launch the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD), a testbed that will use lasers to send and receive data between Earth and the Moon. This will be the first time that NASA uses lasers instead of conventional S-band radio waves to communicate with spacecraft, allowing for massive data rates of up to 600 megabits per second, while also consuming much less power and requiring much smaller antennae. Ultimately, shifting to laser-based communications will allow NASA to receive much more data from spacecraft, allowing them to be outfitted with high-res cameras and other modern sensors that generate more data than S-band links can support.
Optical communications, as opposed to radio frequency (RF) communications (or simply “radio”), are desirable for three key reasons: Massive bandwidth, higher security, and lower output power requirements. All of these traits derive from the frequency of optical and radio waves. While S-band signals are in the 2-4GHz range (similar to your GSM, LTE, or WiFi link), the laser light used by the LLCD (near-infrared in this case) is measured in hundreds of terahertz. As a result, the wavelength of S-band signals is around 10cm, while near-infrared has a wavelength of just 1000nm — or about 100,000 times shorter. Not only can you cram a lot more data into into the same physical space, but there’s also terahertz (compared to megahertz in the S band) of free, unlicensed space that can be used.

Because the wavelength is smaller, the sending and receiving antennae can also be a lot smaller, allowing for smaller/lighter spacecraft and much easier reception here on Earth. By the time a conventional RF signal arrives at Earth from outer space, the beam can cover an area as wide as 100 miles, requiring very large dish antennae (such as the Deep Space Network) to pick those signals up. Receiving laser signals, which are 100,000 times shorter, requires a much smaller dish. As a corollary, due to these beams being much tighter, they’re much harder for an enemy to snoop on, thus increasing security. Transmitting data via laser also requires less power than RF.

The LLCD will be deployed upon the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which is scheduled for launch in September. LADEE (which could be pronounced lay-dee or lad-ee, we’re not sure) will orbit the Moon, seeking to confirm whether the mysterious glow observed by Apollo astronauts was caused by dust in the lunar atmosphere. Thanks to the LLCD, NASA will have a 20Mbps uplink to LADEE (apparently 4,800 times faster than existing S-band uplinks), and LADEE will have a 600Mbps downlink to NASA (five times faster than current state-of-the-art lunar-distance links). The mission will only last for 30 days, after which, if it’s a success, NASA will launch the long-duration Lunar Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which will hitch a ride aboard a commercial Loral satellite. The LCRD will allow NASA to perform further testing of space laser communications, with the hope of eventually replacing RF links in future spacecraft.
Moving forward, space laser communications will allow for the creation of spacecraft that are smaller, cheaper, and capable of more advanced functionality. With 600Mbps of downlink capacity, we’ll be able to outfit spacecraft with high-resolution cameras and other advanced sensors that generate vast amounts of data — and view that data in real time, rather than waiting for the data to slowly dribble over the airwaves.

Photos from the end of the world

A bunker being eroded by the Atlantic at Cap Breton. Picture: Reuben Wu

UK photographer Rueben Wu likes to shoot abandoned places. 

 

Wu is a musician from UK electro band, Ladytron, whose fame has allowed him access to some places of the world few of us will ever get to see.

He says that he has become attracted to the "dark and hidden things which most people have forgotten about," he tells Gizmodo .

These places include a long abandoned research base in Norway's arctic archipelago of Svalbard, observatories in Chile's Atacama Desert, a series of coastal forts built by the Nazis along western Europe and Scandinavia between 1942-1945, sea forts along the English Channel built during World War II to monitor Nazi aircraft and "sound mirrors" built to detect early radar signals.

Wu says he is interested in shooting places where "humans don't belong".

World War II Nazi surveillance sea forts built by the British. Picture: Reuben Wu

These British sea-forts were built to spy on Nazi aircraft during World War II. Picture: Reuben Wu

"I was interested primarily in settlements in remote and extreme locations, the scarcity of light over winter and the strangeness of the landscape," he told travel blog The Island Review .

Svalbard in particular is not a place of comfort, he says. "It is the only place in the world where natural burial is illegal, as the environmental conditions mean that dead bodies simply will not decompose."

"Humans don't belong there and they can't survive without huge effort," he said. "I found that I had stopped thinking about life at home and had become completely absorbed by the environment - a bizarre sensory deprivation where I became unable to judge the existence of anything apart from the shape of my travelling companion in front of me."

An abandoned building in Barentsburg, Svalbard. Picture: Reuben Wu

Grave sites in Chile's Atacama Desert. Picture: Reuben Wu

Wu's obsession with abandoned places stems from the writing of JG Ballard, Philip K Dick and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and their stories and themes of "ruin, decay and time".
"I think abandoned buildings separate themselves from their original purpose of existence by the path of time," he said.
"They signify that everything will come to an end, and we only have a short time to look around before we die."
Check out some of Wu's photos below, or on his Facebook, blog and professional website, and next time, before you miss the train, remember how lucky we are not to be living at the end of the world.

Some kind of abandoned machinery in Svalbard.

A UK and US nuclear climatic test chamber in Suffolk, England.

A nuclear climatic test chamber reclaimed by rabbits in Suffolk, England.

An atomic weapons research establishment at an early radar test site at Orford Ness.

A torch marking a Russian settlement in Barentsburg, Svalbard.

A long since abandoned ship trapped in ice

A silhouetted figured in Última Esperanza, a southern province of Chile meaning "Last Hope Province.