GPS
Hybrid products are ubiquitous in today's marketplace: phones with cameras, watch/cameras, MP3 players with GPS systems. How can consumers understand the functions and features of these new products? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research discovered a technique for helping consumers make sense of the ever-changing product landscape.
Scientists from the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society may have referred to the wolverine they were tracking as simply ''M304,'' but ''Lance Armstrong'' may be more descriptive as the young male embarked on a six-week journey that covered some 550 miles within three western states. The results of the study are published in the latest issue of the journal Northwest Science. The WCS scientists had equipped the wolverine with a Global Positioning System collar to better understand the habitat needs of this largest member of the weasel, weighing in at up to 55 pounds. After WCS released the collared animal, it immediately moved from Wyoming's Grand Teton Mountains to the Portneuf Range in Idaho and then back again, covering some 256 miles in just 19 days.
With the approaching return of the Space Shuttle fleet to flight in 2005, NASA is preparing for their safe arrival home with the recertification of Kennedy Space Center's runway guidance system. Known as the Microwave Scanning Beam Landing System (MSBLS), the system acts like a homing beacon for Space Shuttle orbiters returning to Earth. As an orbiter nears the runway, the system relays information to the pilot such as the vehicle's angle of approach and distance to touchdown, guiding it to a perfect landing.
Researchers have for the first time recorded a cluster of nearly 1,600 small earthquakes 20 miles beneath Lake Tahoe -- the world's second-largest alpine lake. Based on observations from the university's Nevada Seismic Network and an ultra-sensitive Global Positioning System station at Slide Mountain, the researchers believe the quake cluster coincided with an unprecedented 8-millimeter uplifting of the ski resort mountain in the Sierra Nevada.
Rush University Medical Center is among the first hospitals in the country to use a computer-assisted navigation system in orthopedic joint replacement surgery.
The image-guided navigation system is similar to the location and directional tracking systems used for cars and ships today -- it is, in effect, a global positioning system (GPS) for the surgeon. Informative positioning calculations are displayed on a graphically intuitive screen, which dynamically changes with the individual patient's anatomy.
Since its launch in October 2001, ESA's Proba micro-satellite has been returning remarkable imagery of some of our planet's major landmarks with a compact instrument called the High Resolution Camera. On display here are some notable examples, ranging from the monolithic Uluru or Ayers Rock in the Australian Outback to the tidal island of Mont St. Michel on the northern coast of France, and the Pyramids on Egypt's Giza Plain.
You would imagine that a 500,000 kilometre long arch of super heated plasma releasing energy equal to the simultaneous explosion of 40 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs would be as easy to "hear" as it is to "see" ? but it is not. Astrophysicists have long thought about using the acoustic waves in these flares to understand more about these gigantic events, that can be dozens of times bigger than the Earth, but have been unable to use effectively up till now. Now researchers at the University of Warwick, and Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics lab in Palo Alto, have found a way to "listen" to how these gigantic loops "shiver" - vastly increasing our ability to understand these huge events which are big enough to affect telecommunications, GPS satellites, and even energy supply lines.
"When blind people take a taxi, they will be able to give directions to the taxi driver!" says Jose Luis Fernandez Coya. The man speaking really knows what he is talking about: he is blind but also heads the R&D department of ONCE, the National Organization of Spanish Blind people. This association has always been looking for helpful innovations and has just developed a system based on GPS to guide blind people. The system called "Tormes", named after a famous Spanish 16th century story, is a computer with a Braille keyboard and satellite navigation technology that gives verbal directions. This personal navigator was presented to the press in Madrid recently. The European Space Agency (ESA) was involved in this event because ONCE and ESA are already working on how to improve "Tormes."
The newest atomic clock is so accurate that its creators theorize that it will neither lose nor gain a second in 4.5 billion years. And, they note that their clock is so promising, it's being tested for use in navigating Global Positioning System satellites and to time minute biological processes, such as protein folding. But how do you read the time on such a fast clock?
A new navigation tool to help blind people find their way around city streets is soon to be tested under a European Space Agency project. The hand-held device incorporates ESA's new satellite navigation technologies into the personal navigator for blind people. At present, satellite navigation based on GPS and without the use of inertial systems, is not accurate enough to guide pedestrians, especially around cities. When few GPS satellites are in view because of tall buildings, positioning accuracy can be little better than 30 to 40 m. ESA's EGNOS system, however, improves the accuracy of GPS positions to a few metres, making it sensitive enough to locate obstacles in the street.
Cruise missiles have proven themselves in combat many times since the Gulf War, but the Navy would like to drive their cost down--the ones currently in service cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has a program to use commercially-based equipment to build a "cruise-like" missile with good performance at a price ten times less than the norm. The new missile is called, appropriately, the Affordable Weapon.
Mauna Loa,? Hawaii's biggest and potentially most destructive volcano,? is showing signs of life again nearly two decades after its last eruption. Recent geophysical data collected on the surface of the 13,500-foot volcano revealed that Mauna Loa's summit caldera has begun to swell and stretch at a rate of 2 to 2.5 inches a year, according to scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and Stanford University. Surface inflation can be a precursor of a volcanic eruption, the scientists warn.
NASA has developed a way to pilot aircraft independent of local navigational aids, infrastructure and even good ol' landmarks. The NASA Global Differential GPS system at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has demonstrated the ability to achieve real-time aircraft positioning accuracy of 10 centimeters horizontally and 20 centimeters vertically, anywhere in the world. Think of it this way: Using the NASA system, a pilot could remotely navigate an unmanned aircraft from, say, Atlanta, Georgia and have it land within three inches of its target in Tokyo, Japan.
Plans for GPS-guided bombs to do much of the heavy lifting in a U.S. war on Iraq could be seriously hampered by a $40 device available over the Internet. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, so-called global positioning system "jammers" can interrupt the system's satellite signal. "At the Paris Air Show in 1999, a Russian company called Aviaconversia demonstrated a 4-watt GPS jammer, weighing about 19 pounds, capable of denying GPS reception for more than 100 miles," the paper says. "While we do not know the extent of our vulnerability, there is evidence to suggest that GPS jamming can significantly inhibit precision targeting," says Rep. Joseph Pitts (R., Penn.), co-chairman of Congress' Electronic Warfare Working Group. So far the only known fix is to boost the GPS signal strength. But without new satellites in place, there's only so far that approach can go.
