China Mobile capex to rise 22 percent in 2014, aims to sell 100 million 4G devices

(Reuters) - China Mobile Ltd's capital expenditure will increase 22 percent to 225.2 billion yuan ($36.34 billion) this year, the company said in a presentation on Thursday, as it pumps money into developing its mobile networks.
This will include building more than 500,000 base stations in 2014, to help bolster its high-speed 4G service launched in December.
China Mobile also plans to sell 100 million 4G devices such as smartphones and tablets this year, according to the presentation, which was released after the firm's 2013 earnings results.
Revenues from SMS and MMS messaging shrank 6.5 percent in 2013 while voice sales shrank 3.4 percent, as these formerly lucrative sources of income have been replaced by services like Tencent Holdings' WeChat, which are carried on a user's mobile data plan.
(Reporting by Paul Carsten; Editing by Matt Driskill)

Plasma Plume Keeps Earth Safe From Solar Storms

Earth has a magnetic field, which begins at the core and stretches far out into space. Typically, this magnetic field is a useful shield for solar activity. However, if the Earth's magnetic field bumps up against the sun's magnetic field, all types of madness can ensue, including geomagnetic storms, or space weather that can affect the International Space Station.
This meeting of the magnetic fields is known as magnetic reconnection. During this process, the sun's electrical currents can enter Earth's atmosphere, and in the process, some of our own magnetic field gets stripped away. A new study from MIT and NASA, published in the journal Science this week, explores how a plume of plasma adds extra reinforcements to keep us earthlings safe during solar activity.
The plume is not terribly unlike a river, with particles that flow through a stream. "This higher-density, cold plasma changes about every plasma physics process it comes in contact with," MIT Haystack Observatory associate director John Foster said in a statement. "It slows down reconnection, and it can contribute to the generation of waves that, in turn, accelerate particles in other parts of the magnetosphere. So it's a recirculation process, and really fascinating."
Since space weather events create radio wave distortion, scientists at the Haystack Observatory have been analyzing radio signals to determine plasma particle concentration, using the data to map the plasma plumes from Earth. While they have been performing the research for 10 years, the researchers note that this is still just an estimate. So the team matched the Earth-based research with space-based data, monitoring a solar storm last January. Three spacecraft crossed one point in the magnetic field where a plasma plume was estimated to be. Data from those craft confirmed that dense plasma plume, which extended to the place where Earth's field met the solar storm.

Computer Programmers: Help NASA Spot Earth-Threatening Asteroids

I'm a writer. My barely-out-of-college kid brother is a computer programmer. Only one of us has the skills to save the world from asteroids. (Okay, spoiler, it's not me.)
NASA is calling on coders to develop software that automatically spots asteroids in photos taken by large ground telescopes. The software has to work better than existing software, which depends on comparing telescope photos of the same patch of sky, taken at different times, to determine which objects in the photos move. In a description of the contest, NASA's Tournament Lab says, "The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers."
The winning solution(s) will also win a total of $35,000 in prizes, according to statement from Planetary Resources. The asteroid-mining company signed an agreement with NASA to manage the contest, which is called Asteroid Data Hunter.
The contest is part of NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge, an overall program to develop ways to detect if an asteroid threatens Earth. The agency already has plans to capture an asteroid and send astronauts to study it. The point of the Asteroid Grand Challenge is to partner with organizations outside of NASA, including citizen scientists, for asteroid-impact prevention.
You can find out more about what NASA wants for its asteroid-spotting software on the contest's website. There are also links there for registering for the contest, which opens March 17.

Big Pic: A Hypergiant Star And Its Clingy Companion

The astronomer who discovered the size of this star says it's shaped like a peanut, but we disagree; that one "lobe" is much too large. Perhaps that's because the larger star is, in fact, one of the 10 largest stars ever discovered. Its diameter is 1,315 times that of Earth's sun.
Astronomers have seen the star, named HR 5171, before. In a new study, however, an international team of scientists learned much more about it. For example, they discovered that HR 5171 is a binary system with a small companion star that touches and orbits the larger star. The astronomers also calculated HR 5171 A's (the bigger star's) surprising size. The star is almost twice as large as scientists expect for stars of its type.
HR 5171 A is a yellow hypergiant, a type of star that's rare in our galaxy. Like its type-mates, HR 5171 A is big, bright and unstable. It's about 1 million times brighter than the sun. Over the past four decades, it's been cooling, enlarging and expelling material outwards.
The team made its new observations from data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The astronomers also analyzed archival data extending back 60 years, to learn what HR 5171 A has been doing over time. They published their work today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. You can see the full text of a version of the paper on the arXiv, where they posted it publicly before it was peer-reviewed.

What's the latest cosmology gossip? According to the Guardian, the field is awash with rumors that next week, American scientists will announce the detection of gravitational waves: incredibly small ripples carrying energy across the void of the universe.
Space.com reports simply that at a press conference scheduled for 12:00 noon EDT on Monday, March 17, "[A] team of scientists will unveil what they bill as a 'major discovery' in the field of astrophysics...at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."
Predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves are speculated to be “an echo of the big bang [sic] in which the universe came into existence 14bn year ago,” writes the Guardian, which caught an echo of the intense excitement that seems to be swirling among scientists with these and other quotes:

"If they do announce primordial gravitational waves on Monday, I will take a huge amount of convincing," said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London. "But if they do have a robust detection … Jesus, wow! I'll be taking next week off."
..."If a detection has been made, it is extraordinarily exciting. This is the real big tick-box that we have been waiting for. It will tell us something incredibly fundamental about what was happening when the universe was 10^-34 seconds old," said Prof Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist from Imperial College, London, who works on another telescope involved in the search called Polarbear.

This seems to be a fantastic moment in time to be a physicist. In addition to this possible discovery of gravitational waves, theorists are still digesting data gathered in 2012 from the Large Hadron Collider, including proof of the existence of the elusive Higgs particle. That's the story covered in the engrossing new film “Particle Fever,” which you should definitely go see.

Robotic Fish and Inflatable Tentacles: How MIT is Solving Hard Problems with Soft Robots

This is a soft-bodied, inflatable robotic fish developed at MIT that uses carbon dioxide, as opposed to motors, to pull off agile underwater maneuvers.

Melanie Gonick, MIT News

In the interest of not burying the lead: MIT is developing inflatable robotic tentacles, motor-free limbs that are able to flex and grip in response to targeted bursts of air. But the inspiration for those undulating components is a fish. And that’s the more appropriate bot to start with.
As robots go, MIT’s new autonomous fishbot is a relatively humble, single-minded machine. It was created to curve, with a flexible, silicone rubber tail that uses carbon dioxide to power its wriggles and flaps. Each release of gas inflates one half of the tail, curving it. With alternating right inflations, the robotic fish will swim along. It’s a neat approach to locomotion, but not the machine’s real speciality—it bleeds fuel with each movement, and the onboard CO2 tank isn’t large enough for sustained, long-distance swimming. What makes this robot interesting is what it can do in an emergency, because of its soft body.
Real, biological fish can perform what’s referred to as an escape maneuver, an extremely rapid turn intended to ditch pursuers. MIT’s robofish can do the same, using a powerful burst of CO2 to quickly whip its body to one side, turning as much as 100 degrees in roughly 100 milliseconds. It’s a high-performance move for any kind of robot, and further evidence of the importance of being soft.
The established advantages of soft bots are easy to guess at. Researchers at iRobot and Hiroshima University have shown off machines that ooze around, deforming in genuinely unsettling ways to through narrow openings, or with a minimum of sensing and control algorithms. A robot that’s soft, in other words, might navigate its environment with fewer snags and stumbles than one that’s hard and hard-edged. The other obvious benefit of softness is safety—a squishy bot might be able bump into things or people without inflicting damage.
What MIT’s robotic fish demonstrates is less obvious: being soft can ramp up performance. A rigid system might be able to pull off something similar to the fishbot’s escape maneuver, but it would require far more mechanical complexity, and possibly some help from propellers. By deforming along its entire length—not bending at right angles, but throughout the soft structure—the flexible tail optimizes its underwater pivot. It moves fast, and with power, without relying on a fast, powerful motor.
Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, hopes to test the fish in open waters this summer, preferably in a coral reef environment, where the machine’s agility could be an asset. “We want to see what kind of new information we can get, inside a complex environment,” says Rus. The fish might allow for observation of real schools of fish, without disrupting or alarming them. And there are other, more obviously commercial applications for a similar system. “If you’re talking about pipe inspection, there’s the possibility to go inside the pipe, as well as outside,” says Andrew Marchese, an MIT grad student and lead author of the fishbot paper. “With fish-like locomotion, you’re not limited by a traditional propeller. So you could swim in oil, or a medium of some viscosity.”
But whatever its role in oil or water might ultimately might be, the fish tail could hold even more promise on land. Along with developing the fishbot, Marchese and the rest of the MIT team have been working on a soft robot arm, whose linked segments closely resemble those flexible tails, and that also curve through inflation and deflation. And like the fishbot, this tentacle can be fabricated far more easily than a standard, motor-driven robot, by pouring rubber into 3D-printed molds. “We’re not spending our time installing screws and bolts and precisely machining things,” says Marchese. “Once your designs are stable, and you have the mold, you cast these robots.”
The full details of the inflatable tentacle will have to wait until May, and the presentation of the related paper. And though the initial device is relatively straightforward, curving in two dimensions, the approach could be integral to the creation of soft bots that work alongside people, foregoing motors without sacrificing performance. “Baxter has software mechanisms that make it safe,” says Marchese, referring to the humanoid menial laborer from Rethink Robotics, and its ability to freeze when humans approach. “Ours has safety inherent to its design.”
There’s one more possibility, afforded by gas-filled, high-performance tentacles. Attached to a bot that’s similarly light and soft, those appendages could be used used to move the entire system, as well as to manipulate objects. “You could make an octopus,” says Rus.

A Waterwheel That Picks Up Floating Trash

This spring, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor will become home to the first permanent waterwheel-powered trash interceptor. With energy from the Jones Falls River current and solar panels, the floating device sweeps litter up a conveyor belt and straight into a Dumpster for easy disposal.

The Parts

A) Booms direct trash onto the conveyor
B) Rake system breaks up the intertwined debris
C) Conveyor belt lifts the trash out of the water
D) Dumpster collects the waste for later disposal
E) Waterwheel turns the conveyor belt
F) Solar panel array provides supplemental power
Source: John Kellett of Clearwater Mills, LLC and Ziger/Snead Architects
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Ask Anything: What Happens In Your Computer When You Turn It On?

Before a computer can load its operating system and locate drivers for its components, it must recognize that it has been turned on at all. This task falls to a relatively simple device known as the power-on reset circuit. “In its very basic form, it’s simply a little capacitor and a resistor and a little inverter, something like that,” says David Blaauw, a professor in the Michigan Integrated Circuits Laboratory at the University of Michigan. The power-on reset circuit is hardwired to recognize a minimum voltage level. When voltage crosses that threshold, the circuit signals the processor to execute a set of commands that allow for the loading up of the system.
This “instruction zero” could be hardwired, says Blaauw, but it’s generally placed on a flash chip on the computer’s motherboard. That way, the details of what it says can be left to the people who put the computer together.
Power-on reset circuits tell a computer how to start but also how to stop. Left unsupervised, a loss of voltage can be very damaging. At zero voltage, a processor won’t do anything at all, but at very low voltages, its behavior turns erratic. In a worst-case scenario, it may start making unpredictable changes to memory locations. That’s where the power-on reset circuit comes in: “It will detect that you have lost power,” says Blaauw, “and then it will assert a reset signal that stops the processor from doing anything foolish.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.

A Solar-Powered Drone Designed To Fly For Five Years Nonstop

If a drone never had to land, it could track hurricanes, spot pirates and smugglers, follow animal migrations, and even act as an auxiliary GPS. In essence, it would be a geostationary satellite without the expense of going to space. Later this year, the company Titan Aerospace will test a drone that could do just that. The Solara 50, named for its 50-meter wingspan, will fly at 65,000 feet—above most other aircraft and above weather that could disturb its flight and block the sun, its source of power. Titan will market it as an “atmospheric satellite."

This article originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.