Swarms of small satellites coming soon

Swarms of small satellites coming soon
The first satellites were launched about 50 years ago as a way to conquer space. Now, satellites are essential for our civilian and military communications. But they remain large and expensive, some of them costing several hundreds of millions of dollars. This is why researchers from the University of Florida (UF) are building small satellites able to work as a team to take multiple and distributed measurements or observations of weather phenomena for example. These small satellites should cost only about $100,000 to produce. The first one should be launched next year by a NASA rocket and should not be larger than a softball. The goal is to mass-produce these satellites to even reduce their costs. But read more…

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Watching the nanoworld in 4-D
Caltech researchers have developed a new technique named 4-D electron microscopy to capture images of atoms in real time. They claim that their 4-D microscope will revolutionize the way we look at the nanoworld. Caltech adds that Ahmed Zewail, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and his colleagues, have introduced the time dimension into high-resolution electron microscopy. The Caltech news release is so enthusiastic about ‘this revolutionary development’ that it’s better to look at the technical papers published by the research team. Discover them…

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Fast and cheap blood tests
According to Technology Review, U.S. researchers have developed an integrated blood barcode chip which can identify what’s in your blood in less than 10 minutes. Instead of going to a lab, having a shot, and waiting for results for a day or two, this new chip will allow physicians to practice sophisticated exams in their offices by using a single drop of your blood. And these tests will be very cheap compared to existing procedures. If this chip becomes widely available, you might one day enter your physician’s office and learn a few minutes after that you have a cancer. Of course, such blood chips are a good thing, but they also are frightening. Read more…

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CTO: Hottest Job in Town
Sure, President-elect Barack Obama has a long list of jobs he needs to fill in the next couple of months. But the one the technology community is fixating on these days is the brand new Chief Technology Officer position Obama has promised to create. His inner circle of advisers are…
Source: voices.washingtonpost.com

A 1.4-gigapixel camera to detect asteroids
MIT engineers have developed silicon chips that will be at the heart of a telescope installed on Haleakala mountain, Maui, Hawaii, which will begin operation next month. The system, called Pan-STARRS (for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System), is being developed at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. ‘The primary mission of Pan-STARRS is to detect Earth-approaching asteroids and comets that could be dangerous to the planet.’ Apparently, it will be able to give us early warnings about dangerous asteroids and comets. The lead researcher says that they ‘get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera.’ In fact, this telescope will be able to detect ’stars 10 million times fainter than those visible to the naked eye’ and other moving objects near the Earth. But read more…

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