Cool stuff

[GUNWOUNDS]

1.  The White Knight

http://channels.netscape.com/fotosrch/3/20040619LA101.jpg

plane that drives straight into space.

SpaceShipOne will try to climb 62 miles up Monday morning, leaving Earth's atmosphere for a few minutes to become the first privately funded, non-governmental manned spacecraft.

The feat would set up SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan as the leader among worldwide contenders for the Ansari X-Prize, which aims to boost space tourism. The prize will award $10 million to the first privately funded, three-seat spaceship to reach 62 miles and repeat the flight within two weeks.

If the mission is successful, Rutan will then enter his rocket plane in the X-Prize competition, which includes more than 20 other teams from around the world.

It also thrills those who have been there before - pilots who earned their astronaut's wings on similar suborbital flights during the X-15 rocket plane program decades ago.

``I'm tickled to death that Burt's doing this,'' said Joe Engle, 71, who made 16 flights in the X-15 and commanded two space shuttle flights. ``I think any way to demonstrate someone's desire to learn more about high-speed, high-altitude flight and make it safer for people downstream is a wonderful thing.''

Thousands of people are expected to watch the attempt on the ground around Mojave Airport, about 65 miles north of Los Angeles. An unusual entrepreneurial aviation brain trust developed the craft in secret at the airfield and without the vast overhead of the national programs responsible for all previous manned spaceflights.

SpaceShipOne was built by Rutan and researchers at his Mojave aerospace company, Scaled Composites, a backyard operation by comparison to NASA's standards - but still an impressive back yard.

Rutan became a household name in 1986 when his Voyager aircraft made the first nonstop flight around the world without refueling. His projects include the popular homebuilt VariEze light aircraft, new business planes, remotely piloted craft for defense and science, the 1988 America's Cup wing sail, a crew-return vehicle for the international space station and an upcoming jet for another world flight attempt.

SpaceShipOne's financial backing - an amount still unspecified - came from Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, whose rumored role was not confirmed until last December.

The entire program had been under wraps for years, originating as a concept in 1996, followed by some testing and then the start of full development about three years ago.

The low-profile approach lasted through a May test flight to an altitude of 40 miles. The builders then invited the public to watch the attempt to reach space. Motel rooms in the high desert town of Mojave, a 90-minute drive north of Los Angeles, sold out immediately.

Some secrecy remains. The decision about which of the project's pilots will make the historic flight was being withheld until a Sunday afternoon press conference by Rutan and Allen.

Looking like something out of an old ``Tom Swift'' story, SpaceShipOne has a stubby fuselage and a pointy nose covered with small portholes. There's room for a pilot and two passengers.

The rocket's nozzle extends out the rear, and wide stubby wings protrude from each side of the fuselage. Booms on each wingtip extend to the rear, flaring into tail assemblies.

Mission control is a truck equipped with antennas, telemetry radios, communications gear and avionics displays that duplicate what the pilot is seeing at the spaceship's controls.

Behind the scenes, there is a flight simulator, pilot training program, a rocket motor development company, a rocket test stand and other support equipment.

Weather-permitting, SpaceShipOne will be carried aloft at 6:30 a.m., slung beneath the belly of the White Knight, an exotic jet that resembles two slender sailplanes joined at the wingtips.

The mothership will take an hour to carry the rocket to launch altitude. Chase planes will tail them.

At 50,000 feet, the White Knight will release SpaceShipOne. Its pilot will light the engine and pull into a 2,500 mph climb, experiencing G-forces three-to-four times the gravity of Earth.

The rocket engine will burn for 80 seconds and then shut down. SpaceShipOne, its pilot now weightless, will coast to the peak of its trajectory and begin its descent.

The craft's twin tailbooms and the back half of each wing will rotate upwards at a right angle to the ship to create drag in the same way that feathering slows the flight of a badminton shuttlecock.

Re-entering the atmosphere, the tailbooms will rotate back to their normal position and the pilot will fly the unpowered ship on a 15-to-20-minute glide back to Mojave Airport.

``I think the pilot is going to be very busy and very focused,'' said Engle, the former X-15 pilot.

Enjoyment of the experience will probably come later upon reflection, he said.

``You don't have much time to notice what's going on. You're so focused and concentrated on the piloting task,'' he said.

The Rutan-Allen team has its sights on the X-Prize, but the $10 million would be unlikely to make a serious dent in the cost of developing SpaceShipOne, which Rutan and Allen describe only as modest. It's also clear they have their eyes on a much bigger prize.

``Without the entrepreneur approach, space access would continue to be out of reach for ordinary citizens,'' Rutan said earlier this month. ``The SpaceShipOne flights will change all that and encourage others to usher in a new, low-cost era in space travel.''

CNN.com

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2. Control video with brainpower alone

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Using thought alone and with some electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, four volunteers were able to control a video game, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

Simply by thinking the word "move", the volunteers played the simple video game, the researchers reported.

"We are using pure imagination. These people are not moving their limbs," said Dr. Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis who worked on the study.

Their findings add to work being done at several centers and are aimed at finding ways to help people control computers or machines using brainpower alone. Potentially, people paralyzed by disease or accidents could use such devices to work, read, write and even possibly to move around.

Leuthardt said they tested four patients with epilepsy.

"These electrodes are placed on peoples' brains on a routine basis for seizure localization," Leuthardt said in a telephone interview.

The patients have their skulls opened and the electrodes placed on the surface of the brain to find out where their seizures are originating, so the connections in that area can be cut in the hope of a cure.

"We piggy-backed our study on that," Leuthardt said.

Other researchers have worked with implanted electrodes in both monkeys and humans, but Leuthardt said this approach does not require putting anything deep into the brain.

"There is the potential for it to be very much less invasive," he said.

Writing in Monday's issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering, Leuthardt and Daniel Moran, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, said the patients learned in minutes how to control a computer cursor.

"It took six minutes of training and they all achieved control in less than 24 minutes," Leuthardt said.

"After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain," added Moran. "They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row."

During the study their patients were forced to stay in bed tethered to a computer for up to two weeks, but Moran and Leuthardt hope to develop electrodes that can transmit signals without physical connections.

"You can't keep wires directly from the brain to the outside world indefinitely because of the increased risk of infection," Leuthardt added. "We have to create a wireless system."

Leuthardt and Moran centered about 32 electrodes over the sensory motor cortex of the brain and a region called Broca's area, which is associated with speech.

The pair did their work on a small amount of money -- about $20,000 for the whole study, they said. "We really built this from matchsticks and paperclips," Moran said.

"There will have to be a rigorous study on monkeys for an indeterminate number of years before we can consider permanent implants in human subjects, but we're really excited about this advance," he added.

A team at Duke University in North Carolina reported in March they had used electrodes implanted deep in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients to transmit signals that might someday be used to operate remote devices.

CNN.com

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3. Teleportation breakthrough made

Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time, the journal Nature reports.

The feat was achieved by two teams of researchers working independently on the problem in the US and Austria. The ability to transfer key properties of one particle to another without using any physical link has until now only been achieved with laser light.

Experts say the capability to do the same with massive particles like atoms could lead to new superfast computers. This development is a long way from the transporters used by Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Kirk in the famous Star Trek TV series.

When physicists talk about "teleportation", they are describing the transfer of "quantum states" between separate atoms. These would be such things as an atom's energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties.

And in the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines.

Atomic dance

What the teams at the University of Innsbruck and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) did was teleport qubits from one atom to another with the help of a third auxiliary atom. It relies on a strange behaviour that exists at the atomic scale known as "entanglement", whereby two particles can have related properties even when they are far apart. Einstein called it a "spooky action".

The two groups used different techniques for achieving teleportation, but both followed the same basic protocol.

First, a pair of highly entangled, charged atoms (or ions) are created: B and C. Next, the state to be teleported is created in a third ion, A.

Then, one ion from the pair - let's say B - is entangled with A, and the internal state of both is measured.

Finally, the quantum state of ion A is sent to ion C, transforming it. This destroys the original quantum state of A.

The teleportation took place in milliseconds and at the push of a button, the first time such a deterministic mechanism has been developed for the process.

'Great potential'

The landmark experiments are being viewed as a major advance in the quest to achieve ultra-fast computers, inside which teleportation could provide a form of invisible "quantum wiring".

These machines would be able to handle far bigger and more complex loads than today's super-computers, and at many times their speed.

"In a quantum computer it's straightforward enough to move quantum information around by simply moving the qubits, but you might want to do things very quickly, so you could use teleportation instead," said Nist's Dr David Wineland.

Professor Rainer Blatt, of the University of Innsbruck, told BBC News Online: "This is a milestone.

"We are able to teleport in a deliberate way - that is, at the push of a button. This has been done before, but not in such a way that you can keep the information there at the end."

Professor Blatt's team, an Austrian-US group, performed the teleportation on calcium ions. The Nist team in Boulder, Colorado, used ions of the element beryllium.

Despite this and some differences in the experimental methods used by the two groups, both teams reached similar values of fidelity - around 0.75.

Fidelity is a measure of how well the quantum state of the second ion after teleportation resembles the original quantum state.

Commenting in an article published in Nature, physicists H Jeff Kimble and Steven Van Enk said: "These two experiments represent a magnificent confluence of experimental advances, ranging from precision spectroscopy and laser cooling.

"The fact that such diverse procedures performed so superbly in two separate laboratories attests to the flexibility and great potential of ion trapping for processing quantum information."

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40279000/gif/_40279873_teleportation_info416.gif

Step 1: A pair of entangled ions are created: B and C

Step 2: The state to be teleported is created in ion A

Step 3: One ion from the pair - in this case B - is entangled with A and both are measured

Step 4: The quantum state of A is sent to ion C

Step 5: The state created for A is teleported to C

[Dunenewt]

1 has already been posted about.  I was going to post about 3 lol.  There was a thread about it PRP.

[GUNWOUNDS]

1 has already been posted about.