actegratuit:

Joe Fig

Inside the painter’s studio

alxbngala:

Duality[x]

(via loveyourchaos)

99lions:

Smeared Skies by Matt Molloy

Matt busted out into the art scene with his smeared sky photos. Stacking 100 to 200 photos into one, he gave a new way to enjoy the view above us. 

(via loveyourchaos)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

(Source: aseaofquotes, via loveyourchaos)

ucresearch:

The first permanent mountaintop observatory was the Lick Observatory.  Built in 1888 by the Warner and Swasey Co., the telescope still sits in it’s original spot just east of San Jose and is still operating to this day. 

We recently visited the observatory and talked with Steve Vogt, an astronomy professor at UC Santa Cruz, who used to sneak into the observatory as a kid. 

Watch the video →

instagram:

In the Artist’s Studio with @Adam5100

There’s attention to detail, there’s obsessive attention to detail, and then there’s Adam Feibelman.

If you’ve never seen Adam’s Instagram feed, @adam5100, you’d probably never be able to tell that his exquisitely detailed paintings were actually produced with stencils. But as Feibelman’s photos make clear, every painting requires numerous stencil layers, each requiring an abundance of patience, precision, and X-Acto knife blades.

Feibelman brings his Instagram followers into his San Francisco, California studio, not only documenting progress made on his larger fine art works, but also sharing photos of his free-form daily warmups.

“Instagram is like the chapter marker of the day. I start in the morning with doing a single free hand papercut to loosen the brain, and when that’s done I post it,” Adam says. “Then it’s on to much harder stuff. If I finish another layer that day, I post it. Instagram is like a little reward for completing a step when it comes to my art.”

Posting photos from his studio helps keep friends and fans up to speed on his work. “Your friends can’t always be with you to share in seeing something crazy or making something fun. Instagram is all about the opportunity to open up a window into your life.”

Follow Adam’s artistic undertakings on Instagram at @adam5100.

indiehaz:

Orla Gartland - The Ground

I’ve posted this before, but I just can’t get over how good this is.

mister-nobody:

Bar Code Art: If you have troubles believing it, jump inside this post to see proof and few more “zoomed” images. Amazing! Note, that the numbers given in each bar code represent pixel co-ordinates of that particular bar code.

(Source: wacky-thoughts, via flavorpill)

neurosciencestuff:

Scientists Decode Dreams With Brain Scans

It used to be that what happened in your dreams was your own little secret. But today scientists report for the first time that they’ve successfully decoded details of people’s dreams using brain scans.

Before you reach for your tin hat, you should know that the scientists managed this feat only with the full cooperation of their research subjects, and they only decoded dreams after the fact, not in real time. The thought police won’t be busting you for renting bowling shoes from Saddam Hussein or whatever else you’ve been up to in your dreams.

All the same, the work is yet another impressive step for researchers interested in decoding mental states from brain activity, and it opens the door to a new way of studying dreaming, one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of the human experience.

In the first part of the new study, neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani and colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan monitored three young men as they tried to get some sleep inside an fMRI scanner while the machine monitored their brain activity. The researchers also monitored each volunteer’s brain activity with EEG electrodes, and when they saw an EEG signature indicative of dreaming, they woke him up to ask what he’d been dreaming about.

Technically speaking, this is what researchers call ”hypnagogic imagery,” the dream-like state that occurs as people fall asleep. In the interest of saving time, Kamitani and colleagues chose to study this type of imagery rather than the dreams that tend to occur during REM sleep later in the night. They woke up each subject at least 200 times over the course of several days to build up a database of dream reports.

In the second part of the experiment, Kamitani and colleagues developed a visual imagery decoder based on machine learning algorithms. They trained the decoder to classify patterns of brain activity recorded from the same three men while they were awake and watching a video montage of hundreds of images selected from several online databases. After the decoder for each person had been trained, the researchers could input a pattern of brain activity and have the decoder predict which image was most likely to have produced that pattern of brain activity.

But that much has been done before. Where Kamitani’s team went beyond previous work was in feeding the decoder patterns of brain activity collected while the subjects were dreaming. This enabled them to correctly identify objects the men had seen in their dreams, they report Apr. 4 in Science. Or rather, they could identify the type of object a subject had seen: it could predict that a man had dreamt about a car, not that he’d been cruising around in a Maserati. And the decoder only worked when the researchers gave it a pair of possible objects to chose from (whether it was a man or a chair, for example).

“Our dream decoding is still very primitive,” Kamitani said.

Decoding color, action, or emotion is also still beyond the scope of the technology, Kamitani says. Also, it only seems to work for imagery that occurred — at most — about 15 seconds before waking up.

Finally, the decoder is unique to each person. To decode the dreams of another person, the team would have to train up a new decoder by having that person view hundreds of images.

Even so, it’s remarkable that it works as well as it does, says neuroscientist Jack Gallant of the University of California, Berkeley and a pioneer of decoding mental states from brain scans. ”It took just a huge amount of non-glamorous work to do this, and they deserve big props for that,” Gallant said.

With refinements, Gallant says the method could be useful for studying the nature and function of dreams.

“There’s the classic question of when you dream are you actively generating these movies in your head, or is it that when you wake up you’re essentially confabulating it,” Gallant said. “What this shows you is there’s at least some correspondence between what the brain is doing during dreaming and what it’s doing when you’re awake.”

Kamitani is thinking about the possibilities too. ”One theory states that dreaming is for strengthening memory, but another theory states dreaming is for forgetting,” he said. “We could record the frequency of decoded dream contents for each memory item and see the correlation between the frequency and the memory performance.”

(via sagansense)

ikenbot:

NASA Wants You to Train Its Space Robot

Astronauts on board the International Space Station don’t have a lot of free time, which means the last thing they want to do is expend energy on mundane chores like vacuuming. Enter Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space that takes on these everyday tasks.

R2, which has been on the ISS since 2011, has a mission: clean handrails, vacuum air filters and take air-flow measurements. The problem is it doesn’t yet have the ability to learn and complete the work. So NASA is looking for someone to teach the bot. The Robonaut Challenge calls on contestants to write algorithms that allow R2 to interact with a training dashboard the space agency built.

“R2 is meant to contribute back to the ISS by freeing the astronauts up to do more scientific research and the more difficult tasks,” Allison Thackston of the Robonaut team tells Mashable via email. “We measure our cost savings in crew hours saved, which translates into more important scientific and engineering research being done.”

Competitors will start by writing code that enables R2 to “see” and recognize the state and location of LED-illuminated buttons and switches on the dashboard. Building on that successful algorithm, contestants will write control software that manipulates the objects that Robonaut can recognize and locate.

The contest started on Monday morning and will run for three weeks. However, the Robonaut team says it won’t take long for solutions to start trickling in.

“While there is no requirement for contestants to submit their solutions early, we usually begin seeing the first solutions within a week of launch,” says Robonaut’s Julia Badger.

NASA may eventually use the Robonaut 2 to prepare or clean up work sites for astronauts outside the ISS. However, as sophisticated as the technology is, R2 won’t likely replace humans in space.

“Robotics technology has a long way to go,” says Badger. “But having a robotic assistant is a great way to push that technology while still having the benefit of human interaction and supervisory control.”

NASA is hosting its Robonaut Challenge with TopCoder, the world’s largest open platform for the computer science community.

(via kenobi-wan-obi)

updownsmilefrown:

Canadian aquacade team, 1953

by Philippe Halsman

(via flavorpill)

sagansense:

How Do Astronauts on the Space Station Stay in Touch with Earth?

Gemini 8 was in trouble. The spacecraft was spinning rapidly, the astronauts were fighting to stay conscious, and worst of all — they were out of the reach of NASA’s Mission Control.

The astronauts eventually did make contact during that 1966 mission, and splashed down safely. Still, the incident illustrated a weakness of having scattered ground stations staying in touch with orbiting spacecraft. NASA had a large network of stations, including ships and remote satellite dishes, but there were large gaps in coverage.

Today, NASA and Roscosmos (the Russian space agency) have virtually 100% communications contact with orbiting astronauts and cosmonauts in the International Space Station, including video. That’s due to a network of satellites called the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system. The first of these satellites launched 30 years ago today (April 5) in 1983.

TDRS includes seven operational satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit (essentially, in an orbit that keeps them above a fixed location on Earth.) The satellites are designed to serve spacecraft that are orbiting in low Earth orbit, above 45 miles (73 kilometers) in altitude. They’re spaced out to make sure that customers receive coverage throughout the orbit. Operations on the ground consist of two ground terminals located near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Launching these satellites took years. Although the first satellite was deployed successfully, the second one was destroyed in the Challenger shuttle explosion of 1986. The rest of the first generation of TDRS satellites went into space between 1988 and 1995. Three more advanced satellites then launched between 2000 and 2002.

This means the TDRS fleet is getting pretty old, but luckily, there are fresh replacements on the way. TDRS-K launched in January and is still being tested before assuming operational status. TDRS-L will launch in 2014, and TDRS-M in 2015.

Image Credit: NASA

neuromorphogenesis:

A ‘light switch’ in the brain illuminates neural networks

Scientists can see which cells communicate with each other in the brain, by flipping a neural light switch

There are cells in your brain that recognize very specific places, and have that as one of their main jobs. These cells, called place cells, are found in an area behind your temple called the hippocampus. While these cells must be sent information from nearby cells to do their job, so far no one has been able to determine exactly what kind of nerve cells, or neurons, work with place cells to craft the code they create for each location. Neurons come in many different types with specialized functions. Some respond to edges and borders, others to specific locations, others act like a compass and react to which way you turn your head.

Now, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have combined a range of advanced techniques that enable them to identify which neurons communicate with each other at different times in the rat brain, and in doing so, create the animal’s sense of location. Their findings are published in the 5 April issue of Science.

“A rat’s brain is the size of a grape. Inside there are about fifty million neurons that are connected together at a staggering 450 billion places (roughly),” explains Professor Edvard Moser, director of the Kavli Institute. “Inside this grape-sized brain are areas on each side that are smaller than a grape seed, where we know that memory and the sense of location reside. This is also where we find the neurons that respond to specific places, the place cells. But from which cells do these place cells get information?”

The problem is, of course, that researchers cannot simply cut open the rat brain to see which cells have had contact. That would be the equivalent of taking a giant pile of cooked spaghetti, chopping it into little pieces, and then trying to figure out how the various spaghetti strands were tangled together before the pile was cut up.

A job like this requires the use of a completely different set of neural tools, which is where the “light switches” come into play.

Neurons share many similarities with electric cables when they send signals to each other. They send an electric current in one direction – from the “body” of the neuron and down a long arm, called the axon, which goes to other nerve cells. Place cells thus get their small electric signals from a whole series of such arms.

So how do light switches play into all of this?

“What we did first was to give these nerve arms a harmless viral infection,” Moser says. “We designed a unique virus that does not cause disease, but that acts as a pathway for delivering genes to specific cells. The virus creeps into the neurons, crawls up to the nucleus of the cell, and uses the nerve cell’s own factory to make the genetic recipe that we gave to the virus to carry.”

The genetic recipe enabled the cell to make the equivalent of a light switch. Our eyes actually contain the same kind of biological light switch, which allows us to see. The virus infection converts neurons that have previously existed only in darkness, deep inside the brain, to now be sensitive to light.

Then the researchers inserted optical fibres in the rat’s brain to transmit light to the different unidentified cells that now had light switches in them. They also implanted thin microelectrodes down between the cells so they could detect the signals sent through the axons every time the light from the optical fibre was turned on.

“Now we had everything set up, with light switches installed in cells around the place cells, a lamp, and a way to record the activity,” Moser said.

The researchers then turned the lights on and off more than ten thousand times in their rat lab partners, while they monitored and recorded the activity of hundreds of individual cells in the rats’ grape-sized brains. The researchers did this research while the rats ran around in a metre-square box, gathering treats. As the rats explored their box and found the treats, the researchers were able to use the light-sensitive cells to figure out which cells were feeding information to the place cells as the rat’s brain created the map of where the rat had been.

When the researchers put together all the information afterwards they concluded that there is a whole range of different specialized cells that together provide place cells their information. The brain’s GPS – its sense of place – is created by signals from head direction cells, border cells, cells that have no known function in creating location points, and grid cells. Place cells thus receive both information about the rat’s surroundings and landmarks, but also continuously update their own movement, which is actually independent on sensory input.

“One mystery is the role that the cells that are not part of the sense of direction play. They send signals to place cells, but what do they actually do?” wonders Moser.

“We also wonder how the cells in the hippocampus are able to sort out the various signals they receive. Do they ‘listen’ to all of the cells equally effectively all the time, or are there some cells that get more time than others to ‘talk’ to place cells?”

Images: (right)  Researcher Albert Tsao, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, uses a laser light to send a pulse of light into specially altered nerve cells in the rat brain. The light causes the nerve cells to be activated and illuminates the network of cells that communicate with each other. 

              (left): Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Kavli Institute of Systems Neuroscience have used advanced techniques to make select rat neurons light sensitive, enabling them to understand which cells talk to other cells in the brain. The picture shows a greatly enlarged rat neuron and a laboratory rat.

Credit:  Geir Mogen, NTNU

(via sagansense)

sagansense:

Upstart Company Wants to Deliver Your Stuff to the Moon

“I believe the first trillionaires will come from space,” said entrepreneur Bob Richards, clutching a small plastic model of the moon he was given as a gift.

Richards, the founder and CEO of a small startup company called Moon Express, isn’t predicting a race of super-wealthy aliens descending to Earth. Rather, he’s looking to space as a place of vast and potentially lucrative opportunity. His company wants to make money offering governments, institutions, or anyone else who can pay, the opportunity to send their stuff to the moon.

But Moon Express’ ultimate goal isn’t just to become an interplanetary FedEx. The company is playing a long game: They hope to one day mine resources from the moon, kickstarting the industrialization of space and perhaps beginning the process of moving people off this world.

Over the last 4 billion years, the lunar surface has received a shellacking from millions of asteroids, most of which contained rare earth elements and precious metals such as platinum. Many mines on Earth are the remains of former asteroid impact craters. But unlike our planet, the moon lacks plate tectonics that deform and swallow up surface material, so many of these resources should theoretically be easily reachable. Perhaps more importantly, the moon has water, which can be extracted for astronauts in a lunar base or broken down to its constituent hydrogen and oxygen and turned into rocket fuel.

“I’ve always thought that the moon is the next stepping stone, and that lunar resources are a game changer for the economics not just of the Earth but of the entire solar system,” Richards said.

But before all this can happen, he needs to win a contest.

Moon Express is one of 23 teams competing for the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize. Set up in 2007, the GLXP has competitors working to be the first to launch and land a rover on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters, and return pictures to Earth. The teams are meeting this week in Santiago, Chile for a summit to discuss their latest plans.

Moon Express is considered to be among the top teams in the contest. The company is betting it can win the GLXP using a small lander based on a former NASA project called the common spacecraft bus. The agency’s engineers developed the octagon-shaped vehicle on the cheap and it will be used on NASA’s upcoming Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission to the moon. Moon Express contracted with NASA to develop and modify the lander for their purposes. Rather than rove the 500 meters, Moon Express’ lander will touch down and then hop the distance to satisfy the competition’s requirements.

The going is tough and the risks are high. Participants in the GLXP are working to do something only ever accomplished using the resources of a nation. The logistical, engineering, and software challenges are countless and most teams are trying to get their rovers ready and launched on a miserly budget. Even Moon Express, which has raised more funds than most teams – around $10 million, is far from assured of making to the GLXP’s 2015 deadline. But Richards is determined and says that win or lose the competition, he wants to make Moon Express a business that can ferry material to and from the lunar surface.

“Space is a big gamble,” said Richards. “But what’s at stake here is the future of humanity.”

Moon Express’ offices are located on the campus of one of NASA’s West Coast facilities, the Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California. The company sits in the shadow of Hangar One, built in the 1930s to house zeppelins that could be used as flying aircraft carriers and which is now undergoing renovations that have stripped it to its metallic bones. The company has a growing workforce, and looking to hire about 10 or 20 new employees in the next six months.

With its plain, narrow hallways and tall ceilings, the Moon Express office building calls to mind a graduate student engineering department. Many of the workers are eager young men in their 20s who tape printed xkcd comics to their lab benches.

“Apollo was designed by 26-year-olds,” said Richards, invoking spaceflight’s past in his bid for the future. Richards himself is short, moon-faced, and very excited about his prospects.

“I’ve been a space cadet since my earliest days,” he said. “I’ve dedicated a lot of my professional life to building institutions and companies to make humanity a multiword species.”

As a student, Richards studied engineering, physics, and space science and at one point worked for astronomer and writer Carl Sagan. In 1987, he was a co-founder of the International Space University in France, which offers degrees in space studies and business and whose first chancellor was science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. He said that he took many lessons from rise and fall of the BlastOff! Corporation, an attempt in the late ’90s to create a sort of private sector version of NASA. BlastOff!, which as largely backed by Hollywood big wigs like James Cameron and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Peter Diamandis, folded after the first dot-com bust.

The very first company to register for the GLXP was Odyssey Moon Limited, a team Richards founded. He and Odyssey have since parted ways, and the company was later swallowed up by an Israeli team, SpaceIL. Richards subsequently created Moon Express in August 2010, and the company was awarded a NASA contract a month later worth up to $10 million to return data from the moon that the agency finds valuable.

Moon Express is akin to a startup technology business, and Richards and many of the key players in the company have close ties to or are veterans of Silicon Valley companies. That tech culture’s influence can be heard in the way they talk and think.

“With the internet, there are the people that built the fibers and then those that made the last mile solutions,” said entrepreneur Naveen Jain, who helped found information companies such as InfoSpace and Intelius, as well as Moon Express.

Jain means that some companies were responsible for the infrastructure – the wires and cables crisscrossing the world – while others handled the final leg, the connection that actually reached customers. In the space industry, he considers rocket companies launching satellites and other spacecraft as analogous to the infrastructure providers.

“But the people who made the most money in the internet were the people who provided the services,” he said. “So we want to build the last-mile solution.”

Moon Express aims to set up a business offering anyone who can pay for it a way to get to the lunar surface. As to what people want to send to the moon, the company is agnostic.

Watch; Moon Express in the Flight Zone

For their first planned landing to win the GLXP, Moon Express has contracted with International Lunar Observatory Association to put a shoebox-size telescope on the moon that could take images of stars or the Earth. The company also has deals with NASA and Google and is in talks with other private companies. Because there’s 40 years’ worth of pent-up need for more lunar science since Apollo, Richards is sure customers will line up if the company proves able to land on the moon. Scientists and universities will want to put probes and experiments on the lunar surface, and the company hopes to appeal to a wide range of commercial, academic, and government interests.

“There could be hardware or scientific or medical applications,” said Jain. “Someone could say, I want to put my child’s footprint in a stamp on the moon. Whatever! We just want to offer a platform.”

Moon Express estimates they could deliver items to the moon for around $3 million a kilogram, so putting a 1.33-kg cube-sat-size object on the surface would be within reach of a wealthy university or eccentric millionaire. Rather than building a specific lander for each different mission – which is what NASA does for the most part – the company hopes to cut costs by having everything ride on its common spacecraft and using off-the-shelf parts.

“Sometimes it’s better to take a vendor who can do a good job with slightly less performance,” and then make sure it’s robust enough to survive space, said engineer Tim Pickens, who leads propulsion planning for Moon Express. Pickens was formerly part of the Rocket City Space Pioneers, another GLXP team that was acquired by Moon Express in December. He was also the lead propulsion engineer on SpaceShipOne, the rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004 by flying to the edge of space twice in two weeks.

During the X Prize competition, Pickens said his team often came up with uncommon solutions to cut costs. At one point, they used paintball gun tanks to hold air for SpaceShipOne’s reentry control thrusters.

“I remember we called one of them Armageddon, and the other Apocalypse, and they were really lightweight and made to be abused,” he said. Though they weren’t designed for spaceflight, “they packed a better performance than anything we could do ourselves,” he added.

In this way, Pickens said a private company could identify cheap hardware, test it to make sure its space-worthy, and then even sell it to others in need of a similar solution.

“The government isn’t in the business of taking risks,” he said. “They’re trying to protect the taxpayers and so they do things in a conservative manner. It works but you don’t get disruptive solutions from that structure. In Silicon Valley, they expect to see unique solutions that create new markets, and that’s what we’re hoping to do in space.”

But private companies’ strength – their ability to take on risk – is also exactly what should be scaring Moon Express. To do things cheaply, they can’t afford NASA’s “failure is not an option” attitude. They might perform a flawless touchdown on the moon, or they could spectacularly crash and burn. Space is extremely expensive, and not a lot of companies can leave scorch marks on the lunar surface and then go back to investors and say, “Let’s try that again.”

In order to win the GLXP, Moon Express needs to do two things: show that their hardware is capable and, because launches are planned at least two years in advance, secure a space on a rocket by the end of this year. Yet there are growing doubts about whether any team can win the prize at this point.

Moon Express hasn’t publicly demonstrated its physical lunar lander system since 2011, though it has tested the landing software and avionics flight hardware in simulations at their labs and says it will have more tests in the fall of 2013. Most importantly, it has not yet announced a deal on a launch vehicle, putting it in some ways behind the two teams that have, Astrobotic Technology and the Barcelona Moon Team. Richards says his company is in talks with different launch providers and hopes to announce something later this year. Ideally they are seeking a contract from one of the darlings of the Silicon-Valley-space-industry crossover culture, SpaceX, which provides some of the cheapest rates to space.

Even if Moon Express wins the competition, that’s no guarantee of success. Burt Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, won the Ansari X Prize nearly a decade ago. Since then, they joined with Virgin to offer private tourists a trip to the edge of space. Overly ambitious plans and repeated delays have plagued the project and constantly pushed back its opening day. Space tourism has been the goal of Virgin Galactic but no one yet knows how large the market is for those looking to fly experiments and other hardware to the moon.

The most unknowns come from Moon Express’ ultimate goal, mining lunar resources. International treaties stipulate that the moon is the common heritage of mankind, and space lawyers are still debating the exact legal regime that would make moon mining possible. At this point, drilling, refining, and shipping rocks on a large scale in space remains more science fiction than proven concept. And until space launches come down in price by an order of magnitude or more, materials mined from the lunar surface will be far more expensive than similar elements on Earth.

Those involved with Moon Express are aware of these risks and all the potential pitfalls. But given the right types of investments and engineering, Naveen Jain does not consider them too much of a hindrance.

“People talk about failures and say, ‘Oh, entrepreneurs are risk takers.’ But they are really not,” he said. “Entrepreneurs are the best de-riskers. They say, ‘Here are the five different things that can go wrong. Let’s hire the right people to take the risk down.’”

A real risk taker is more like someone who jumps off a building without a parachute, Jain added. “So is a person jumping out of a good plane with a working parachute a risk taker? I don’t think so. I think we are actually calculating the risks and figuring out how to mitigate them.”

Richards was a bit more modest in his assessment. Looking at the large number of private companies getting into the space industry right now, many of whom have audacious plans, he offered a realistic outlook.

“A lot of space investments will fail,” he said. “But we have to try — the potential payoff is huge.”

Images: Alex Washburn / Wired

“When the stars are the only things we share, will you be there?”