Jane Barbie was the woman who did the voice recordings for the Bell System.
The first telephone exchange opened on January 28, 1878, in New Haven, Connecticut.
Month after month, the little Bell Company lived from hand to mouth. No salaries were paid in full. Often, for weeks, they were not paid at all. In Watson’s notebook there are such entries during this period as “Lent Bell fifty cents,” “Lent Hubbard twenty cents,” “Bought one bottle beer–too bad can’t have beer every day.”
When Bell’s patent was sixteen months old, there were 778 telephones in use.
The first “Hello” badge used to identify guests and hosts at conventions, parties, etc. was traced back to September 1880. It was on that date that the first Telephone Operators Convention was held at Niagra Falls and the “Hello” badge was created for that event.
A newly published study examines the concentric gaps in the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star HL Tau, revealing the possibility of planets forming within the system.
A recent and famous image from deep space marks the first time we’ve seen a forming planetary system, according to a study by University of Toronto astrophysicists.
The team, led by Daniel Tamayo from the Center for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, found that circular gaps in a disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tau are in fact made by forming planets.
“HL Tau likely represents the first image taken of the initial locations of planets during their formation,” said Tamayo. “This could be an enormous step forward in our ability to understand how planets form.”
The image of HL Tau, taken in October 2014 by the state-of-the-art Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, sparked a flurry of scientific debate.
While those who observed the original image claimed that planets were most likely responsible for carving the gaps, some remained skeptical. It had been suggested that the gaps, especially the outer three, could not represent forming planets because they are so close together. It was argued that planets massive enough to carve such gaps should be scattered violently by the force of gravity and ejected from the system early on in its development.
But Tamayo’s study is the first to suggest the gaps are evidence of planetary formation because the gaps are separated by amounts consistent with what’s called a special ‘resonant configuration.’ In other words, these planets avoid violent collisions with each other by having specific orbital periods where they miss each other, similar to how Pluto has avoided Neptune for billions of years despite the two orbits crossing one another.
“The system can be much more stable in a resonant configuration and it’s a natural state for planets in the HL Tau system to migrate to,” said Tamayo.
The HL Tau system is less than a million years old, about 17.9 billion kilometers in radius and resides 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
Since young systems like HL Tau are shrouded by a thick cloud of gas and dust, they can’t be observed using visible light. ALMA resolves that issue by using a series – or an ‘array’ – of telescopes located 15 kilometers apart that use much longer wavelengths. The result is unprecedented access to high resolution images that Tamayo says will continue to revolutionize the study of planetary formation.
“We’ve discovered thousands of planets around other stars and a big surprise is that many of the orbits are much more elliptical than those found in our solar system,” said Tamayo.
“This and future ALMA discoveries may be the key to connecting these discovered planets to their original birth locations.”
While the HL Tau system remains stable in its relatively young age, Tamayo says over billions of years it will act as a “ticking time bomb.” Eventually the planets will scatter, ejecting some and leaving the remaining bodies on elliptical orbits like the ones found around older stars.
Our solar system does not seem to have undergone such a dramatic scattering event, notes Tamayo. Future observations could also go a long way in determining whether our solar system is typical or an oddity ideally suited for life.
“If further observations show these to be the typical starting conditions around other stars, it would reveal our solar system to be a remarkably special place,” says Tamayo.
Publication: Accepted in the Astrophysical Journal
An international team of astronomers has pushed back the cosmic frontier of galaxy exploration to a time when the universe was only 5% of its present age, revealing a galaxy that existed over 13 billion years ago.
The team discovered an exceptionally luminous galaxy more than 13 billion years in the past and determined its exact distance from Earth using the combined data from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and the Keck I 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. These observations confirmed it to be the most distant galaxy currently measured, setting a new record. The galaxy existed so long ago, it appears to be only about 100 million years old.
The galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, was originally identified based on its particular colors in images from Hubble and Spitzer and is one of the brightest and most massive objects in the early universe. “It has already grown to more than 15 percent of the mass of our own Milky Way today,” said Pascal Oesch, lead author of the study from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. “But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then.” The new distance measurement also enabled the astronomers to determine that EGS-zs8-1 was still forming stars very rapidly, about 80 times faster than our Milky Way galaxy today (which has a star formation rate of one star per year).
Only a handful of galaxies currently have accurate distances measured in this very early universe. “Every confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle of how the first generations of galaxies formed in the early universe,” said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale, second author of the study. “Only the most sensitive telescopes are powerful enough to reach to these large distances.” The discovery was only possible thanks to the relatively new Multi-Object Spectrometer For Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument on the Keck I telescope, which allows astronomers to efficiently study several galaxies at the same time.
Measuring galaxies at these extreme distances and characterizing their properties is a main goal of astronomers over the next decade. The observations see EGS-zs8-1 at a time when the universe was undergoing very important changes: the hydrogen between galaxies was transitioning from an opaque to a transparent state. “It appears that the young stars in the early galaxies like EGS-zs8-1 were the main drivers for this transition, called reionization,” said study co-author, Rychard Bouwens of the Leiden Observatory, Leiden, Netherlands.
These new Hubble, Spitzer, and Keck observations together also pose new questions. They confirm that massive galaxies already existed early in the history of the universe, but that their physical properties were very different from galaxies seen around us today. Astronomers now have very strong evidence that the peculiar colors of early galaxies seen in the Spitzer images originate from a very rapid formation of massive, young stars, which interacted with the primordial gas in these galaxies.
The new observations underline the very exciting discoveries that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will enable when it is launched in 2018. In addition to pushing the cosmic frontier to even earlier cosmic times, the Webb telescope will be able to dissect the infrared galaxy light of EGS-zs8-1 seen with the Spitzer Space Telescope and will provide astronomers with much more detailed insights into its gas properties. “Our current observations indicate that it will be very easy to measure accurate distances to these distant galaxies in the future with the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California Santa Cruz. “The result of Webb’s upcoming measurements will provide a much more complete picture of the formation of galaxies at the cosmic dawn.”
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.
Publication: P. A. Oesch, et al., “A Spectroscopic Redshift Measurement for a Luminous Lyman Break Galaxy at z = 7.730 Using Keck/MOSFIRE,” 2015, ApJ, 804, L30; doi:10.1088/2041-8205/804/2/L30
Source: Rob Gutro, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Engineering students from Rice University have developed a real-time 3D radar system as a concept for a next-generation collision-avoidance system for the auto industry.
Spencer Kent stands nervously in front of Team D.R.A.D.I.S.’ booth at Rice University’s annual Engineering Design Showcase. Judging begins in about 10 minutes, and his teammate Galen Schmidt is frantically typing computer code into a laptop beside the team’s custom-made radar system.
Kent, Schmidt and teammate Jeremy Hunt finished assembling their device — an impulse-based radar for real-time 3-D imaging — less than 12 hours earlier in an epic all-nighter. The trio can’t recall if it was their third or fourth sleepless night of the past week. They’ve lost count. “We knew it would be a race to the finish,” Kent said. “We’ve been doing this all semester.”
Three hours later, the team would be called to the award podium twice within a few short minutes to receive two of the showcase’s top three prizes. It was the first time that has happened in the contest’s history. D.R.A.D.I.S., which stands for “dynamic radar and digital imaging system,” captured the $5,000 top prize for Excellence in Engineering as well as a $3,000 Willy Revolution Award for Innovation in Engineering Design.
The system was designed as a proof of concept for a next-generation collision-avoidance system for the automotive industry. Current radar systems in cars sense when objects are near, but they do not attempt to image them. D.R.A.D.I.S. does. Its 16 pulse-radar antennae feed data to a high-end gaming graphics card that uses more than 2,000 processing cores to complete about a trillion calculations per second.
“They performed at or above the level I have seen from seasoned, practicing engineers,” said D.R.A.D.I.S.’ faculty mentor Gary Woods, professor in the practice of electrical and computer engineering. “The system design and integration were both a tour de force and high-wire act.”
Woods said the trio set a “very aggressive” schedule that called for custom designs or implementations of antennas, printed circuit boards, low-level software and high-level image reconstruction algorithms.
“They got the system to work just hours before the design showcase,” he said. “There was no room for error.”
For many, the word radar still evokes Cold War-era images of blips on screens and rotating antennae. That kind of radar works by sending out microwaves in a continuous beam. When the microwaves strike an object, some are reflected back, and by reading those reflections, “continuous radar” systems can tell how far away an object is and how fast it is moving.
D.R.A.D.I.S.’ “pulse radar” technology is different. It uses short bursts of low-power microwaves at a frequency around 10 gigahertz. The power level is about 10 million times less than a cellphone, which means the pulses travel only a short distance. But because they are pulses, they have a very large bandwidth, which means the reflected signals contain a great deal of information about the target.
To build their antenna array, Kent, Hunt and Schmidt purchased 16 off-the-shelf pulse-radar transceiver chips from startup XeThru, a reprogrammable piece of hardware called a “field programmable gate array” (FPGA) and an ARM processor like the ones used in smartphones. Almost everything else in D.R.A.D.I.S. was custom-built, including the 16 circuit boards for each transceiver and the backplane circuit board, which allows the transceivers to communicate with the FPGA and remain synchronized to within three-trillionths of a second. The team also wrote more than 10,000 lines of computer code.
The team’s sponsor, Aydin Babakhani, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, said Team D.R.A.D.I.S.’ attempt to incorporate off-the-shelf, low-power radar transceivers into a real-time 3-D imaging system is a first.
“They have not yet shown it is generating 3-D images, but they are still working and hope to finish before commencement,” Babakhani said. “If they do, we believe this will be the world’s first impulse-based, real-time 3-D imaging system.”
He said D.R.A.D.I.S. is important as a proof of concept because it shows what also might be accomplished using research-grade transceivers that work at more exotic wavelengths, such as the terahertz range.
“In terms of potential applications, the real-time image processing that the team has demonstrated could be used for security screening, for the automotive industry and for medical applications,” Babakhani said.
“With security, for example, the full-body scanners that are already used for airport screening are very expensive and huge,” he said. “If D.R.A.D.I.S.’ technology were fully developed, it could provide a similar type of screening at a fraction of the cost, and it would be far more compact.”
Kent, Schmidt and Hunt said the prior research of graduate student Peiyu Chen, a member of Babakhani’s research group, was helpful in the early stages of the design phase last fall. Chen had already published research about image processing with a single transceiver setup that had similarities to the multi-antenna device the team envisioned.
“We weren’t sure, at that point, which type of radar we were going to use, but we thought we should at least be familiar with what he had done,” Schmidt said. “He had existing code that he was using to generate images off of the data that he was using from his project, so we looked at that code, determined how it worked and began thinking about how we could scale that up and improve it for our system.”
Prior to the showcase, the team spent well over 500 hours writing computer code for D.R.A.D.I.S. For starters, Hunt compiled a custom version of Embedded Linux for the system. Image processing was done on an NVIDIA graphics card, which boasts four teraflops of capacity and a whopping 2,048 processor cores. Schmidt also wrote the image processing code using an NVIDIA processing library called CUDA. In addition, the team had to create its own software for the graphical user interface as well as software to reconfigure the FPGA controller.
Although the team members are slated to graduate this month with degrees in electrical engineering, D.R.A.D.I.S. will live on in Babakhani’s lab. Chen and other members of the research group are working with the team to transfer all the software and hardware so they can adapt the setup to work with various chipsets they are researching in the lab.
“We’re all hoping it gets used in the future,” Hunt said. “From the beginning, our goal was to build D.R.A.D.I.S. in such a way that it’s modular, with the idea that Dr. Babakhani and his students could pop in a different chipset and build upon what we’ve done.”
Oculus’ helmet is set to be released to the public after a rival headset from HTC
Virtual reality firm Oculus VR says its much anticipated headset, the Rift, will go on sale to consumers within the first three months of 2016.
Until now, the firm had only sold “developer” editions that were targeted at video games creators and did not represent the Rift’s final design.
Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2bn (£1.3bn) in 2014, despite it not having released a commercial product.
The release date means that HTC’s rival helmet should be the first available.
The Taiwanese manufacturer has promised to sell its own virtual reality headset, the Vive, to the public before the end of the year.
Oculus’ launch date could theoretically coincide with that of PlayStation’s Morpheus headset, which Sony has said will be released at some point during the first six months of 2016.
Unlike Morpheus, both the Rift and the Vive are designed to work with PCs rather than a video games console.
“All the hype around virtual reality grew up around Oculus over the last two years, and not to come to market before what is looking like a compelling proposition from HTC represents a moderate surrendering of the initiative,” commented Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games at the IHS Technology consultancy.
“But I don’t think we’re talking about it missing out on huge sales volumes at what will be an early stage of demand for VR.”
The virtual reality helmets will allow wearers to see both computer-generated and filmed images directly in front of their eyes.
Users will be able to change their view by moving their heads.
The idea is to give them a greater sense of immersion, helping owners feel as if they are actually within a video game or interactive film or documentary, rather than just watching it.
Sony’s Morpheus is designed to be paired with its PlayStation 4 console
There was a previous attempt to popularise virtual reality technology in the 1980s and 1990s, but the limitations and high cost of the products limited demand.
However, after Oculus successfully raised $2.4m by crowd-funding in 2013 to make new kit, there has been growing interest in the idea.
Samsung already sells versions of Oculus’ kit that use the screens and motion sensors of its Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note handsets.
But the forthcoming launch of headsets designed to work with more powerful computers has raised expectations of what the associated software will be capable.
“We’ve got these higher-end devices coming to market, but what we haven’t seen yet is fully-realised content,” said Mr Harding-Rolls.
“We’ve seen technical demos or the occasional short level. But the E3 video games expo will be an opportunity for all the stakeholders involved to show off content.”
E3 will take place in Los Angeles in June.
Oculus says the Rift can be used by users when they are sitting or standing up
For now, potential buyers are being teased with a promise that the Rift has a “more natural fit” and an “improved tracking system” than earlier models shown off by Oculus.
“In the weeks ahead, we’ll be revealing the details around hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming,” the firm said on its blog.
“Virtual reality is going to transform gaming, film, entertainment, communication, and much more.
Microsoft is working on its own headset that will allow new ways to play video games
“E3 is just around the corner – this is only the beginning,” it added.
Facebook’s challenge is that HTC’s Vive is being released as part of a tie-up with Valve, which is one of the leading video game developers in its own right, as well as being the owner of the best-selling PC games platform Steam.
Microsoft has yet to reveal whether it has virtual reality plans for the Xbox.
The firm has, however, shown off an augmented reality headset called the HoloLens, that it says will allow PC users to see graphics superimposed over views of the real world.
A bizarre video has emerged of a man driving down a US motorway with a snake slithering across his windscreen.
The footage, captured on a road in South Carolina last month, shows the unexpected passenger slinking out from under the vehicle’s bonnet as the driver continues on.
The reptile first makes for the roof, but is blown back down. It then tries to head around the side of the vehicle over the side mirror.
The disconcerting sight was captured by the driver on his mobile phone. Later describing the incident, he said: “I was driving I-385 North in South Carolina when this snake crawled out from under the hood. I almost crapped!”
South Carolina is home to 47 different types of snake, seven of which are deadly.
Three men say they had a frightening close call while boating in Argentina when a plane roared what seemed like just inches overhead.
“We were scared at first,” said Mariano Bradanini, a passenger in the boat.
The men were participating in a fishing tournament and air show in Goya, Argentina, Sunday. “It was my second time in the tournament,” Bradanini, 35, added via Twitter. “The tournament is a very good experience.”
The near-miss was caught on their video camera as the speed boat cruised along the lake only to have the low-flying plane buzz the men inside.
“We always film our fishing with GoPro cameras,” Bradanini said from his home in Concordia, Entre Rios, Argentina. “We were really enjoying ourselves, and when we saw the plane, we got scared.”
The men can be heard laughing after the plane went by. “We didn’t know it would come so close,” Bradanini, who works in tourism and the media, said.
It’s unclear whether the plane was part of the air show or whether the pilot made a mistake by flying too low, but Bradanini says the pilot knew what he was doing. “I’m sure he was experienced,” Bradanini said. “They did aerobatic shows every day, so we were scared, but then we realized that he was an experienced pilot.”
To be fair, Bradanini added, the tournament comes with some risks. “It’s not extremely dangerous, but in the beginning you have to be careful,” he said.
Despite the risks, Bradanini says he’ll be back again next year.
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