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NDN leverages evidence about what has worked on the Internet over the past 30-plus years.

UCLA will host a consortium of universities and leading technology companies on September 4 and 5 to promote the development and adoption of Named Data Networking (NDN) – an emerging Internet architecture that promises to increase network security, accommodate growing bandwidth requirements and simplify the creation of increasingly sophisticated applications.

The consortium is being organized by a team of NDN researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Other founding academic members of the NDN project are UC San Diego, Colorado State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Illinois Urbana–Ch Dual SIM M2M router ampaign, the University of Memphis, the University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis.

The first NDN community meeting will be held September 4 and 5 at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, which has played a key role in envisioning the future of human communication over NDN since the project’s origins in 2010.

Among the industry partners planning to participate are Verisign, Cisco Systems and Panasonic. They will be joined by representatives from Anyang University (Korea), Tongji University and Tsinghua University (China), the University of Basel (Switzerland) and Waseda University (Japan).

“Collaboration with industry is an important step toward bringing Future Internet Architectures out of the laboratory and into the real world,” said Darleen Fisher, the NSF program officer who oversees the Future Internet Architectures program supporting NDN.

The NDN team’s goal is to build a replacement for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, the current underlying approach to all communication over the Internet. The consortium aims to generate a vibrant ecosystem of research and experimentation around NDN; preserve and promote the Industrial 3G Router   openness of the core NDN architecture; and organize community meetings, workshops and other activities.

“NDN has built significant momentum through a commitment to an open approach that aims to limit proprietary intellectual property claims on core elements of the architecture,” said Lixia Zhang, UCLA’s Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Science and a co-leader of the project.

“This has spurred substantial interest from both academia and industry. Our goal with the consortium is to accelerate the development of architecture that will lift the Internet from its origins as a messaging and information tool and better prepare it for the wide-ranging uses it has today and will have tomorrow,” Zhang said.

NDN leverages empirical evidence about what has worked on the Internet and what hasn’t, adapting to changes in usage over the past 30-plus years and  da monitoring  simplifying the foundation for development of mobile platforms, smart cars and the Internet of Things — in which objects and devices are equipped with embedded software and are able to communicate with wireless digital networks.

Since 2010, the National Science Foundation’s Future Internet Architectures program has provided more than $13.5 million to the NDN project led by UCLA, including a grant of $5 million that was announced in May.

“Cisco Systems is enthusiastic about the formation of the NDN community,” said David Oran, a Cisco Fellow and a pioneer in Internet Protocol technologies. “It will help evolve NDN by establishing a multifaceted community of academics, industry and users. We expect this consortium to be a major help in advancing the design, producing open-source software, and fostering standardization and adoption of the technology.”

The NDN project is co-led by Zhang and Van Jacobson, a UCLA adjunct professor and member of the Internet Hall of Fame. UCLA became the birthplace of the Internet in 1969, when a message from the lab of UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock was sent to the Stanford Research Institute — the first-ever message transmitted over the network that later became known as the Internet.

Image: UCLA newsroom

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Zoom-in of the carbon-fiber reinforced coiled muscle with a diameter of 0.4mm.

The pull-up, an exercise dreaded by  wireless router most, answers a basic question: are your muscles strong enough to lift your own body weight?

Some Illinois researchers working on artificial muscles are seeing results even the fittest individuals would envy, designing muscles capable of lifting up to 12,600 times their own weight.

MechSE assistant professor Sameh Tawfick, Beckman postdoctoral fellow Caterina Lamuta, and Simon Messelot recently published a study on how to design super strong artificial muscles in the journal Smart Material and Structures. The new muscles are made from carbon fiber-reinforced siloxane rubber and have a coiled geometry. These muscles are capable of not only lifting up to 12,600 times their own weight, but also supporting up to 60 MPa of mechanical stress, providing tensile strokes higher than 25% and specific work of up to 758 J/kg. This amount is 18 times more than the specific work natural muscles are capable of producing. When electrically actuated, the carbon fiber-based artificial muscles show excellent performance without requiring a high input voltage: the authors showed how a 0.4 mm diameter muscle bundle is able to lift half a gallon of water by 1.4 inches with only 0.172 V/cm applied voltage.

echSE assistant professor Sameh Tawfick, Beckman postdoctoral fellow Caterina Lamuta, and Simon Messelot recently published a study on how to design super strong artificial muscles in the journal Smart Material and Structures. The new muscles are made from carbon fiber-reinforced siloxane rubber and have a coiled geometry. These muscles are capable of not only lifting up to 12,600 times their own weight, but also supporting up to 60 MPa of mechanical stress, providing tensile strokes higher than 25% and specific work of up to 758 J/kg.

“The range of applications of these low cost and light weight artificial muscles is really wide and involves different fields such as robotics, prosthetics, orthotics, and human assistive devices,” Lamuta said. “The mathematical model we proposed is a useful design tool to tailor the performance of coiled artificial muscles according to the different applications. Furthermore, the model provides a clear understanding ofQR code vending machine all the parameters that play an important role in the actuation mechanism, and this encourages future research works toward the development of new typologies of fiber-reinforced coiled muscles with enhanced properties.”

The artificial muscles themselves are coils comprised of commercial carbon fibers and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). A carbon fibers tow is initially dipped into uncured PDMS diluted with hexane and then twisted with a simple drill to create a yarn with a homogeneous shape and a constant radius. After the curing of the PDMS, the straight composite yarn is highly twisted until it is fully coiled.

“Coiled muscles were invented recently using nylon threads,” Tawfick said. “They can exert large actuation strokes, which make them incredibly useful for applications in human assistive devices: if only they could be made much stronger.”

The team set a target of transforming carbon fibers, a very strong lightweight material which is readily commercially available, into artificial muscles.

“To use carbon fibers, we had to understand the mechanism of contraction of coiled muscles. Once we uncovered the theory, we learned how to transform carbon fibers into ultra strong muscles. We simply filled carbon fiber tows with the suitable type of silicone rubber, and their performance was impressive, precisely what we had aimed for,” Tawfick said. This study demonstrates that muscle contraction is caused by an increase in the radius of the muscle yarn due to thermal expansion or solvent absorption of the silicone filing. “The muscles flex when the silicone rubber locally pushes the fibers apart within the tow, by applying a voltage, heat or swelling by a solvent. The internal pressure exerted from the silicone rubber onto the fibers makes the tow diameter expand and uncoil causing a contraction stroke along the length WiFi M2M Router .”

During the experimental characterization, a DC voltage was applied to the ends of the coil to induce the heating of the composite and in turn cause tensile actuation. The top end of the coil was fixed, while a load was attached to the bottom to create tension. The tensile stroke was captured by a movie camera, and analyzed frame by frame. Tensile actuation was also induced through swelling via liquid hexane delivered to the coiled muscle.

Can these muscles flex even more, achieving larger strokes? The close agreement between mathematical predictions and experimental realization provides confidence in answering this question. The team found that the tensile actuation of the artificial coiled muscles can be limited by the ability of the guest material (silicone) to expand – a limit imposed by the thermal degradation properties of the guest material. This explains why muscles actuated by swelling have higher actuation strains, they are able to swell more than heat- induced muscles. The theoretical model proposed by the authors sheds light on how to design guest material which could enable muscles with an even more impressive performance.

Publication: Caterina Lamuta, et al., “Theory of the tensile actuation of fiber reinforced coiled muscles,” Smart Materials and Structures, 2018; doi:10.1088/1361-665X/aab52b

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Pluto’s first official surface-feature names are marked on this map, compiled from images and data gathered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flight through the Pluto system in 2015. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Ross Beyer

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has officially named 14 Pluto surface features and many more will soon be proposed to the IAU, both on Pluto and on its moons.

It’s official: Pluto’s “heart” now bears the name of pioneering American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. And a crater on Pluto is now officially named after Venetia Burney, the British schoolgirl who in 1930 suggested the name “Pluto,” Roman god of the underworld, for Tombaugh’s newly-discovered planet.

Tombaugh Regio and Burney crater are among the first set of official Pluto feature names approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features.

These and other names were proposed by NASA’s New Horizons team following the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. The New Horizons science team had been using these and other place names informally to describe the many regions, mountain ranges, plains, valleys and craters discovered during the first close-up look at the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

A total of 14 Pluto place names have now been made official by the IAU; many more will soon be proposed to the IAU, both on Pluto and on its moons. “The approved designations honor many people and space missions who paved the way for the historic exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the farthest worlds ever explored,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

“We’re very excited to approve names recognizing people of significance to Pluto and the pursuit of exploration as well as the mythology of the underworld. These names highlight the importance of pushing to the frontiers of discovery,” said Rita Schulz, chair of the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. “We appreciate the contribution of the general public in the form of their naming suggestions and the New Horizons team for proposing these names to us.”

Stern applauded the work of the New Horizons Nomenclature Working Group, which along with Stern included science team members Mark Showalter — the group’s chairman and liaison to the IAU — Ross Beyer, Will Grundy, William McKinnon, Jeff Moore, Cathy Olkin, Paul Schenk and Amanda Zangari.

The team gathered many ideas during the “Our Pluto” online naming campaign in 2015. Following on Venetia Burney’s original suggestion, several place names on Pluto come from underworld mythology. “I’m delighted that most of the approved names were originally recommended by members of the public,” said Showalter, of the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California.

The approved Pluto surface feature names are listed below. The names pay homage to the underworld mythology, pioneering space missions, historic pioneers who crossed new horizons in exploration, and scientists and engineers associated with Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

Tombaugh Regiohonors Clyde Tombaugh (1906–1997), the U.S. astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 from Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

Burney craterhonors Venetia Burney (1918-2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name “Pluto” for Clyde Tombaugh’s newly discovered planet. Later in life she taught mathematics and economics.

Sputnik Planitiais a large plain named for Sputnik 1, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

Tenzing MontesandHillary Montesare mountain ranges honoring Tenzing Norgay (1914–1986) and Sir Edmund Hillary (1919–2008), the Indian/Nepali Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.

Al-Idrisi Monteshonors Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100–1165/66), a noted Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work of medieval geography is sometimes translated as “The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons.”

Djanggawul Fossaedefines a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who traveled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetatio modem  n.

Sleipnir Fossais named for the powerful, eight-legged horse of Norse mythology that carried the god Odin into the underworld.

Virgil Fossaehonors Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets and Dante’s fictional guide through LTE cat 1 Connectvity hell and purgatory in theDivine Comedy.

Adlivun Cavusis a deep depression named for Adlivun, the underworld in Inuit mythology.

Hayabusa Terrais a large land mass saluting the Japanese spacecraft and mission (2003-2010) that performed the first asteroid sample return.

Voyager Terrahonors the pair of NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977, that performed the first “grand tour” of all four giant planets. The Voyager spacecraft are now probing the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space.

Tartarus Dorsais a ridge named for Tartarus, the deepest, darkest pit of the underworld in Greek mythology.

Elliot craterrecognizes James Elliot (1943-2011), an MIT researcher who pioneered the use of stellar occultations to study the solar system – leading to discoveries such as the rings of Uranus and the first detection of Pluto’s thin atmosphere.

The New Horizons spacecraft – built and operated M2M IoT router   at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, with a payload and science investigation led by SwRI — is speeding toward its next flyby, this one with the ancient Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, a billion miles beyond Pluto, on January 1, 2019.

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To prevent genetically modified bacteria from escaping into the wider environment, MIT researchers have developed safeguards in the form of two so-called “kill switches,” which they call “Deadman” and “Passcode.” These kill switches can cause synthetic bacteria to die without the presence of certain chemicals.

Many research teams are developing genetically modified bacteria that could one day travel around parts of the human body, diagnosing and even treating infection. The bugs could also be used to monitor toxins in rivers or to improve crop fertilization.

However, before such bacteria can be safely let loose, scientists will need to find a way to prevent them from escaping into the wider environment, where they might grow and cause harm.

To this end, researchers at MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University have developed safeguards in the form of two so-called “kill switches,” which can cause the synthetic bacteria to die without the presence of certain chemicals.

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers describe their two kill switches, which they call “Deadman” and “Passcode.”

Stand-alone circuits

There have been a number of attempts to develop kill switches over the past year, according to James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), who led the research.

These include efforts to reprogram the entire genome of the organism to ensure that it requires the presence of certain amino acids or other chemicals in order to survive, divide, and grow.

However, this approach can be both labor- and resource-intensive, and could introduce changes that might make the organism less useful as a monitoring or diagnostic tool, Collins says.

“In our case, we are introducing standalone circuits that can be popped in to any number of different organisms, without needing to rewire or change much of the genome in order for it to accommodate the switch,” he says.

The Deadman switch, for example, is part of a bacterial strain that needs an external chemical to prevent a continuously expressed toxin from killing the cell.

The switch was motivated by the so-called deadman brakes on old trains, which required a conductor to be in constant contact with the handle or pedal in order for the vehicle to move forwards, Collins says.

The system, which builds on previous work in Collin’s lab, consists of a genetic “toggle” switch made up of two transcription factor genes.

The switch can flip between two states, in which either one of the two transcription factor genes is turned on. The researchers altered the expression of these two transcription factors, leading to strong expression for one gene and weak expression for the other.

The presence of a small molecule keeps the switch in its weak state, but as soon as this is removed, the switch will flip to its strong state. The switch is programmed to express various toxins as soon as this strong state is turned on, Collins says.

“If the system does get flipped, by removing the small molecule, it would express toxins at a very high level that could industrial M2M router  then quite rapidly and readily kill off the bug,” he says.

A cellular logic gate

The Passcode switch, in contrast, acts like a logic gate in that it requires a specific combination of several chemical inputs in order to enable the genetically modified bacteria to survive and proliferate.

The switch consists of a set of modular transcription factors that contain separate domains for sensing small molecules — the inputs — and for regulating gene expression. By mixing and matching these functional domains, the researchers are able to construct hybrid transcription factors in which different small molecule inputs are linked to the control of a specific promoter for gene expression.

If the transcription factors detect that the right combination of small molecules are present in the environment, then the bacteria will survive. But if the correct combination of input signals is not present, the switch kills the bug, according to the paper’s lead author Clement Chan, a postdoc in Collin’s laboratory.

“If any of the required inputs are not correct, then the bug will die,” he says.

By using different transcription factors, the researchers can change the passcode combination of small molecules needed for the cell to survive. In this way the switches can be easily changed to meet the needs of different applications, Chan says.

“It makes our biocontainment system much more flexible, so you can apply the passcode system in a much wider range of applications.”

The switches could also be used to protect a company’s intellectual property, Chan says.

“Imagine that you own a certain bug, and you  industrial LTE router don’t want your competitors to use it. Then you could incorporate this device so that only people who know the passcode can use your bug,” he says.

Even if a competitor somehow managed to get hold of the passcode, the researcher could simply change it by using different transcription factors, he says.

Scaling up

The new safeguards have exciting possibilities for scaling kill switches in two important directions, according to Farren Isaacs, an assistant professor in the Systems Biology Institute at Yale University, who was not involved in the research.

First, they establish the feasibility of using kill switches across diverse species, Isaacs says.

“They also expand the passcode switches to a large combination of synthetic molecules and transcription factors for many unique sets of biocontained strains and customized cocktails of synthetic small molecules,” he adds.

fault detection

Having successfully tested the two kill switches in Escherichia coli, the researchers are now hoping to incorporate them into living diagnostic or therapeutic tools, designed to target a variety of bacterial infections, Collins says.

Publication: Clement T Y Chan, et al., “‘Deadman’ and ‘Passcode’ microbial kill switches for bacterial containment,” Nature Chemical Biology, 2015; doi:10.1038/nchembio.1979

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Artist concept shows the collision of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth’s core, with some particles ricocheting back into space. Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi

Planetary collisions are at the core of our solar system’s formation. Scientists have long believed that after the Moon’s formation, the early Earth experienced a long period of bombardment that diminished about 3.8 billion years ago.

During this period, called “late accretion,” collisions with moon-sized planetary bodies, known as planetesimals, embedded extensive amounts of metal and rock-forming minerals into the Earth’s mantle and crust. It is estimated that approximately 0.5 percent of Eart Vending Telemeter  h’s pre Industrial IoT Connectivity  sent mass was delivered during this stage of planetary evolution.

With the support from a NASA Exobiology grant and NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute, or SwRI, and University of Maryland have created high-resolution impact simulations that show significant portions of a large planetesimal’s core could penetrate all the way down to merge with Earth’s core—or ricochet back into space and escape the planet entirely.

The simulations show significant portions of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth’s core, and ricocheting back into space. On the right, particles are color coded with temperature, indicated in Kelvin. Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi

For a recently published paper in Nature Geoscience about the topic, Simone Marchi and his colleagues found evidence of more massive accretion onto the Earth than previously thought after the Moon’s formation. The mantle abundances of certain trace elements such as platinum, iridium and gold, which tend to bond chemica ethernet switch  lly with metallic iron, are much higher than what would be expected to result from core formation. This discrepancy can most easily be explained by late accretion after core formation was complete. The team determined the total amount of material delivered to Earth may have been 2-5 times greater than previously thought, and the impacts altered Earth in a profound way while depositing familiar elements like gold.

“These results have far-reaching implications for Moon-forming theories and beyond,” said Marchi. “Interestingly, our findings elucidate the role of large collisions in delivering precious metals like gold and platinum found here on Earth.”

Researchers at SwRI and the University of Maryland are part of 13 teams within SSERVI, based and managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. SSERVI is funded by the Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Publication: S. Marchi, et al., “Heterogeneous delivery of silicate and metal to the Earth by large planetesimals,” Nature Geoscience (2017) doi:10.1038/s41561-017-0022-3

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A new glasses-free 3-D video system uses three layered LCD panels displaying bizarre patterns (two images on the left & top right image) that collectively produce a coherent, high-resolution, multiperspective 3-D image. The bottom right image illustrates, roughly, the composite image that would reach one eye at one viewing angle. Images courtesy of the Camera Culture group

Similar to the dual layered LCD screens used by Nintendo’s 3DS to create glasses-free 3-D images, engineers at MIT developed a “Tensor Display,” which uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays to produce a convincing 3-D illusion.

As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the Media Lab system, dubbed a Tensor Display, uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), the technology currently found in most flat-panel TVs. To produce a convincing 3-D illusion, the LCDs would need to refresh at a rate of about 360 times a second, or 360 hertz. Such displays may not be far off: LCD TVs that b Dual SIM M2M router  oast 240-hertz refresh rates have already appeared on the market, just a few years after 120-hertz TVs made their debut.

“Holography works, it’s beautiful, nothing can touch its quality,” says Douglas Lanman, a postdoc at the Media Lab and one of the new paper’s co-authors. “The problem, of course, is that holograms don’t move. To make them move, you need to create a hologram in real time, and to do that, you need … little tiny pixels, smaller than anything we can build at large volume at low cost. So the question is, what do we have now? We have LCDs. They’re incredibly mature, and they’re cheap.”

Layers of research

The Nintendo 3DS — a portable, glasses-free 3-D gaming device introduced last year — uses two layered LCD screens to produce the illusion of depth, with the bottom screen simply displaying alternating dark and light bands. Two slightly offset images, which represent the different perspectives of  low cost cellular router the viewer’s two eyes, are sliced up and interleaved on the top screen. The dark bands on the bottom screen block the light coming from the display’s backlight in such a way that each eye sees only the image intended for it.

This technique is in fact more than a century old and produces a stereoscopic image, the type of single-perspective illusion familiar from 3-D movies. The bottom screen displays the same pattern of light and dark bands no matter the image on the top screen. But Lanman, graduate student Matthew Hirsch and professor Ramesh Raskar, who leads the Camera Culture group, reasoned that by tailoring the patterns displayed on the top and bottom screens to each other, they could filter the light emitted by the display in more sophisticated ways, creating an image that would change with varying perspectives. In a project they dubbed HR3D, they developed algorithms for generating the top and bottom patterns as well as a prototype display, which they presented at Siggraph Asia in 2010.

The problem is that, whereas a stereoscopic system such as a 3-D movie projector or the 3DS needs to display only two perspectives on a visual scene — one for each eye — the system the Media Lab researchers envisioned had to display hundreds of perspectives in order to accommodate a moving viewer. That was too much information to display at once, so for every frame of 3-D video, the HR3D screen in fact flickered 10 times, displaying slightly different patterns each time. With this approach, however, producing a convincing 3-D illusion would require displays with a 1,000-hertz refresh rate.

To get the refresh rate down to 360 hertz, the Tensor Display adds another LCD screen, which displays yet another pattern. That makes the problem of calculating the patterns exponentially more complex, however. In solving that problem, Raskar, Lanman and Hirsch were joined by Gordon Wetzstein, a new postdoc in the Camera Culture group.

The researchers’ key insight was that, while some aspects of a scene change with the viewing angle, some do not. The pattern-calculating algorithms exploit this natural redundancy, reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent to the LCD screens and thus improving the resolution of the final image.

CT industrial LTE router   in reverse

As it turns out, the math behind the Tensor Display is similar to that behind computed tomography, or CT, an X-ray technique used to produce three-dimensional images of internal organs. In a CT scan, a sensor makes a slow circle around the subject, making a series of measurements of X-rays passing through the subject’s body. Each measurement captures information about the composition of tissues at different distances from the sensor; finally, all the information is stitched together into a composite 3-D image.

“The way I like to think about it is, we’re building a patient whose CT scan is the view,” Lanman says.

At Siggraph, the Media Lab researchers will demonstrate a prototype Tensor Display that uses three LCD panels. They’ve also developed another prototype that uses only two panels, but between the panels they introduce a sheet of lenses that refract light left and right. The lenses were actually developed for stereoscopic display systems; an LCD panel beneath the lenses alternately displays one image intended for the left eye, which is diffracted to the left, and another for the right eye, which is diffracted to the right. The MIT display also takes advantage of the ability to project different patterns in different directions, but the chief purpose of the lenses is to widen the viewing angle of the display. With the three-panel version, the 3-D illusion is consistent within a viewing angle of 20 degrees, but with the refractive-lens version, the viewing angle expands to 50 degrees.

“The paper reveals how you would greatly improve the realism, and image depth, and physical simplicity of 3-D display systems, particularly those that don’t require you to wear glasses,” says Gregg Favalora, a principal at the engineering consultancy Optics for Hire and co-chair of the SPIE Stereoscopic Displays and Applications Conference. “It’s only possible when you have these really good mathematicians and signal-processing guys and optics experts all sitting in the same room.”

“It’s definitely suitable for commercial applications, because each component is commonplace, and it sounds easy to manufacture, so this ought to be something that a consumer-electronics company would license,” Favalora adds. “Honestly, this is a really big deal.”

PDF copy of “Tensor Displays: Compressive Light Field Synthesis using Multilayer Displays with Directional Backlighting”

Image: Camera Culture group

Reprinted with permission of MIT News

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A boxwood blight, caused by an aggressive fungus disease, has started to invade the North American continent, after it had spread throughout Europe and New Zealand. Last October, US authorities confirmed that the blight had jumped continents, and started infections in North Carolina and Connecticut.

The boxwood blight, caused by the Cylindrocladium fungus, was unknown before the year 2000. By mid-January, the fungus has turned up in at least five more states in the US — Virg digital signage  inia, Maryland, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Oregon — and in British Columbia in Canada.

The blight starts with spots on leaves, as well as black streaks on twigs. In a few weeks, a plump shrub can be transformed into a clump of bare sticks. Younger plants will die while older ones, which do survive, will regrow their leaves for a few cycles of attack by the fungus. However, topiaries and hedges will probably be ruined.

Once the fungus, either C. pseudonaviculatum or C. buxicola, s automation  trikes a garden, plant pathologists recommend drastic measures to fight off long-lasting fungal residue. In North Carolina, a grower burned 15,000 infected MV sensorboxwood plants as well as 15,000 uninfected ones. Boxwood plants haven’t evolved much resistance to this fungus, so it might come from an unfamiliar source. The fungus is difficult to trace, since all samples belong to just two lineages of clones, making a trace not very significant.

However, boxwood has managed to weather the storm in Europe and New Zealand, so the same will most probably apply to North American.

[via ScienceNews, images by the University of Georgia]

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Global warming means that icebergs are carving off Greenland’s ice sheets at an ever-faster rate. Photo by Ian Joughin

A new study has come up with the most accurate estimate yet for the melting of the polar ice sheets, possibly ending decades of uncertainty about whether the sheets will melt further or actually gain mass in the face of climate change.

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. The ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have been melting at an ever-quickening pace. The melting has contributed to an 11-millimeter rise in the oceans. The two polar regions are losing mass three times faster than 20 years ago and Greenland is shedding ice at five times the rate observed in the early 1990s.

This latest study uses data from 32 years of ice-sheet simulations and 20 years of satellite data. Some scientists had expected that warmer air would increase the snowfall over Antar industrial IoT Gateway  ctica, which would offset the increased ice loss from Greenland caused by warmer seas. However, both of these ice sheets are losing mass at an alarming rate, as ice streams speed up and bigger icebergs are discharged in to the ocean.

Previous estimates have not always been consistent. In this study, scientists used four techniques to determine whether the ice caps are gaining or losing mass. Two techniques involve lasers and radars on satellites to measure changes in the surface elevation of the ice. Another method uses input-output modeling to represent regional changes in snowfall and ice melt. The last measures changes in the ice-sheet mass from space using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

The team of 47 international experts analyzed the data from almost 30 previous ice-sheet studies, including 20 years of data from 10 different satellite missions and 32 years of model data on surface mass balance. This means that the results are supposed to be two to three times more accurate than the last IPCC report.

There are still some uncertainties for Antarctica, which isn’t losing ice as rapidly as indicated by many recent studies. Snowfall in east Antarctica is als distribution power line monitoring  o compensating for some of the melting in Antarctica, but not all of it.

It’s not yet clear how these trends will evolve in the future, whether such losses will continue to decline, whether they will level o cloud VMS  ff or accelerate.

[via Nature]