Aberystwyth University researcher Stephen Pugh has developed a picture-taking robot designed to look for signs of life on Mars. Pugh is fine-tuning the robot’s onboard panoramic cameras and teaching it to point and shoot at features on the planet’s surface. “I have been looking in particular at how the robotic rover can point its camera at specific targets, such as rocks, without human intervention,” he says. The research’s long-term goal is to increase scientific data for all future planetary missions. “NASA has already found evidence of ice on Mars, but I don’t think rover will find evidence of anything more than water because if it was there I think we would have found it by now,” Pugh says. The researcher is developing software that will enable the robot to discover locations of interest more quickly and to choose targets for pictures by itself, without communicating with scientists on Earth.
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Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin announced that the government would spend more than a tenth of its budget on science and innovation this year. “We have assigned about 1.1 trillion rubles ($36.8 billion), or more than 10 percent of the federal budget, for fundamental and applied sciences, higher education, high-tech medicine, and specialized federal programs,” Putin said. The government increased its science and innovation spending by more than 300 billion rubles in 2009 compared to 2008. The new effort to promote science and innovation includes requiring competition for scientific projects and giving preference to innovative options when the state buys products and services. Separately, Putin announced that Russia has allocated 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia. Last year Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University’s Research Computing Center. Lomonosov has a peak speed of 420 teraflops and is ranked as the 12th fastest computer in the world.

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The European Union 3Plast research consortium plans to develop sensors that can be printed onto plastic film and attached to everyday objects. The sensors are being designed to respond to changes in temperature and pressure, which would enable them to detect the movement of a finger. “The sensor is combined with an organic transistor, which strengthens the sensor signal,” says project leader Gerhard Domann. Researchers have already printed sensors onto film, and are now optimizing transistors that can amplify changes in temperature and pressure. “By providing everyday objects with information about their environment–for example, whether a person is approaching–by means of pressure and temperature sensors, we can create and market new devices that can be controlled just by pointing a finger,” Domann says. It will likely take several years to print sensors on large surfaces, he says.
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The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access recently released a report addressing the problem of ensuring that digital information will be accessible in the future. The report provides principles and actions to facilitate long-term economic sustainability and context-specific recommendations geared toward four specific scenarios–scholarly discourse, research data, commercially-owned cultural content (such as digital media), and collectively produced Web content such as personal Websites and blogs. “Valuable digital information spans the spectrum from official e-documents to some YouTube videos,” says Task Force co-chair Fran Berman. The report also cites four distinct prioritized courses of action–organizational action, technical action, public policy action, and education and public outreach action. The report concludes that preservation strategies need to develop at their own pace. “A key element of a robust sustainability strategy is to anticipate the effect of these changes and take steps to minimize the risk that long-term preservation goals will be impacted by short-term disruptions,” says Task Force co-chair Brian Lavoie.
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Science and math educators are keeping classes knowledgeable and interesting, but they are not promoting science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers, according to most students surveyed by Harris Interactive for the American Society for Quality (ASQ). High school student respondents also say they do not think STEM knowledge is crucial to acquiring a good job. “We believe that as students get older and begin to diversify their studies and become more aware of the wide range of available career opportunities, they start to think that math and science aren’t necessarily critical to their job hunt,” says ASQ’s Maurice Ghysels. He says that teachers often leave out discussions of career options because of time and budget constraints. One of the challenges is that teachers themselves may have little knowledge of the wide variety of available STEM career options. Despite these drawbacks, there are ways to kindle interest in STEM careers among students, one of them being to offer hands-on lab activities and real-world examples of STEM applications at an earlier educational level such as elementary school.
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Recently discovered problems with the paper records produced by electronic voting machines in Cuyahoga Country, Ohio, could make a recount after next year’s presidential election a disaster. More than 20 percent of the paper printouts from touch-screen voting machines were found to be unreadable. The recount was necessary because the vote counting software crashed twice on election night and the margin of victory was one-half of one percent or less. Election workers found the unreadable ballots while conducting a recount of two races, which involved only 17 of the county’s 1,436 precincts. Board of Elections director Jane Platten says recounting the ballots for the entire county in the 2008 presidential election could take more than a week. Cuyahoga County uses Premier Elections Solutions (formerly Diebold) touch-screen voting machines that store votes on a memory card inside each machine. During the election a paper record of each vote is printed on a long reel of paper that is stored inside the machine. The paper record is used during recounts, but can be damaged or unreadable, usually because of a paper jam while printing. Premier Elections Solutions’ Chris Riggall says the company will investigate the situation.
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The number of doctorates awarded in science and engineering (S&E) fields has risen for the fourth consecutive year, according to the National Science Foundation. Last year the United States produced 29,854 doctorate degrees in S&E fields, an increase of nearly 7 percent from the previous year. Computer science doctorates led the way with a 28 percent increase to 1,452 degrees, following a double-digit increase in CS doctorates from the previous year. CS doctorates are up 79 percent since 2002 and now represent a considerable share of not only S&E doctorates but all doctorate degrees. Non-U.S. citizens have been key to the growth in CS doctorate degree production. In the mid-to-late 1990s permanent or temporary visa holders received about half of CS doctorates, but last year they accounted for 61 percent. CS doctorates to U.S. citizens rose 42 percent from 2002 to 2006, but jumped 115 percent for non-U.S. citizens over the same period.
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s “Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged” program enables students with severe physical disabilities to make music by just moving their heads. The system uses a digital video camera to track a student’s head movements on a computer screen and then translates the movements into piano scales or drum beats. Zane Van Dusen, a RPI undergraduate student in computer science and electronic media arts and communication, developed the idea of using a digital video camera to track the user’s head. A cursor is digitally placed on a portion of the student’s head, usually the tip of the nose, to follow the user’s movements. As the cursor moves, sounds are created based on the user’s movements. Moving the head completely in one direction will create a scale climb on the piano or a quick series of drum beats or a drum roll. The project’s ultimate goal is to eventually enable students to compose their own pieces to help students learn the creative process and build communication skills. “The client or patient doesn’t have to be a musician to participate,” says the American Musical Therapy Association’s Al Bumanis. “The goal is not usually a performance, it’s increasing communication skills, understanding, relearning lost skills.”
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University of the Basque Country (UBC) researchers are studying how hyperspectral images can be applied to mobile robots with the goal of enhancing the robots’ capacity for spatial orientation and their resources for detecting their surroundings. UBC’s Ivan Villaverde studied how the visual navigation of small robots can be improved by applying new techniques such as lattice computing, which involves a system based on a series of data with concrete internal ordering. The researcher used lattice computing for the self-location of the robot on qualitative maps and for the detection of visual markers. Villaverde also used optic cameras and three-dimensional cameras to improve the robots’ navigation systems. Villaverde’s research found that these innovative techniques are valid for the visual navigation of robots. Though the robots did not have to complete more than some simple tasks in this first phase experiment, it did provide positive results, and more extensive research will follow.
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Advanced computer modeling has enabled British Petroleum (BP) to determine the best design and operating conditions for its oil refinery in Kwinana. BP teamed up with the Curtin University of Technology and the University of Newcastle to develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for the refinery’s catalyst strippers, which use steam to separate hydrocarbons from the process that breaks up heavy crude oil into smaller molecular parts. A team led by Curtin’s Center of Process Systems Computations (CPSC) used the CFD model to evaluate the internal structure that impacts the interactions between gases and solids, and to determine the optimal mix of steam, catalyst, and hydrocarbons inside the stripper. CPSC director Vishnu Pareek says simulating a few seconds of real-time interaction in the catalyst stripper used to take weeks. “This project used innovative techniques to achieve realistic flow predictions with the least amount of computational effort required,” he says. BP says the CFD model will help save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on steam usage.
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