Astronauts Are About to Install a Parking Space for SpaceX and Boeing

As reported by Popular Mechanics:Starting in 2017, Boeing and SpaceX will become the first private companies to send NASA astronauts into orbit. When that happens, the International Space Station is going to need a new space parking space. So, on Friday, astronauts Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins will venture outside the ISS to finish installing a new docking adapter.

Installing these adapters is a necessary step in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which seeks to spur development of commercial crew spacecraft. Since the space shuttle was discontinued in 2011, NASA has had to pay Russia million to take its astronauts to the ISS. The Commercial Crew Program will give NASA cheaper options in crewed spaceflight.

The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 8:05 a.m. on Friday, and live coverage will start at 6:30. This will be Williams' fourth spacewalk, and Rubins' first. Here is a video describing exactly what the spacewalk will entail:

Beartooth Turns Your Smartphone Into An Industrial Radio

As reported by Gadget Review: All a smartphone is, is a radio with a computer bolted to it. Seriously. That’s it; it’s just radio waves, the same radio waves pumping Today’s Classic Hits through the atmosphere. Of course, smartphones aren’t on the same channel as professional, industrial radios… but Beartooth makes it possible for them to get on those frequencies.

A Radio On Your Radio

Essentially, Beartooth is a radio you attach to your smartphone, and which interacts with your smartphone in various ways using publicly available radio bandwidth. It’s not dissimilar to the GoTenna in that respect, but Beartooth adds a few elements, especially in the physical realm, which make it much more interesting to the outdoorsy and those who just like fiddling with microwave radiation.

The Citizen’s Band, Improved

Essentially, it’s a CB radio with all the features you want from a smartphone. For example, you can have one-to-one calls, or group in more people, although they will need a Beartooth to participate. If you’ve got a friend you want to send a text message to, that’s as easy as using your phone. There’s even a confirmation of message receipt built into the phone, and you can also send out an SOS signal if you need it, making this crucial for campers and outdoorsy types. Also useful is the fact that another battery is built into the case, doubling the life of your phone.

The Great Outdoors

The simple fact of the matter is that if you’re going outdoors and getting out of contact range, you should probably have a radio, signal beacon, or other tool available to reach help if you get stuck. So, just by that standard, the Beartooth is a useful tool to have in your camping gear. And, also, it means you can send text messages to your friends when you’re waiting for the food to cook, so that’s useful time spent right there.

With Walabot, Your Phone Can "See" Through Walls

As reported by FastCompany: In the first demo, Raviv Melamed, CEO and cofounder of Vayyar and Walabot, uses the camera on his phone to see through our conference room table and detect the number of fingers he's holding up beneath the surface. Next, there's a video of a person walking down a hall and moving behind a barrier; the technology senses the human form even though it's no longer visible to our eyes. Then comes a clip of vodka being poured past a couple of sensors to determine the purity of the alcohol on a microscopic level.

This superhero-like X-ray vision comes courtesy of a new microchip-based, radio frequency sensor technology. It can be used to analyze and create 3-D images of pretty much anything behind or inside objects (the only thing it can't "see" through is metal). Radio frequency tech has been around for decades; what makes this chip innovative is that it instantly transforms RF waves into digital output. Radio waves emitted from the chip sense how much of the signal is absorbed by an object in its path. Algorithms can then be applied to the digital data translated from the RF signals and determine all kinds of information about those objects: their density, dimensions, and using software, what those objects actually are.

Though it's not the first technology capable of turning RF into digital, it's certainly among the smallest and least expensive—the sensor could fit inside a mobile phone. Vayyar, which created the chip technology and is selling Walabot, is based in Tel Aviv with 36 employees, and has raised $34 million in funding. It's part of the rapidly evolving imaging technology sector that includes the handheld ultrasound device from Butterfly Network Inc., the space-mapping camera fromMatterport, and the security scanner that can detect weapons underneath clothing from the U.K.-based company Radio Physics.

The first application of Vayyar's chip is medical: It's being developed to detect tumors in breast tissue. Since it can be produced at a fraction of the cost, and physical size, of today's solutions, it potentially makes breast cancer screening accessible and affordable to people around the globe.

What else could it be used for? That's where you come in. Walabot is being released publicly in April so that robot makers and hardware tinkerers can build their own apps for Android, Raspberry Pi, or most any other computer with a USB connection. "Why limit the technology for one startup when you can actually go and allow other people to innovate?" says Melamed, a former Intel executive and Israeli Defense Forces engineer.

Walabot has seemingly endless potential applications. It could be used to analyze your breathing while you sleep, or examine root structures in your garden, or track the speed of cars racing past your house. And when it comes to video gaming, Melamed says this technology is far more accurate than any other single motion sensor currently on the market. It could help untether VR headsets by pairing with sensors placed on the body—perhaps simple bands around players' arms and legs.

Melamed uses the example of a simple virtual ping-pong match. Right now, the only moving body parts would be the head and a hand, since that's all that can be tracked. "I want to see your body, I want to see your movement, right?" says Melamed. "You have those other technologies, like accelerometers—the problem with accelerometers is they drift. What we can do with this technology is actually put several sensors on your body and track your body in a room like 5 meters by 5 meters, to the level of a centimeter, and now this is a totally different kind of feeling, I can actually see your limbs and we don't drift."

Of course, accelerometer-based technologies like the Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard have all addressed and continue to minimize the drift issue by applying other sensor-based technologies to their processes—and there are other companies on the market that are attempting to bring the full-body experience to VR via sensors placed on the body. The difference is that RF technology can be deployed for virtual reality pretty successfully without the aid of other devices like accelerometers or magnetometers.

How does Vayyar's technology differ from something like the Kinect? Well, for one thing, the Kinect is primarily a camera-based optics system, while Vayyar's system is radio frequency based. Kinect works pretty well in the dark, but radio frequency works without any light. For another, the Kinect offers 30 frames per second, while Melamed claims that Vayyar's technology can process 100 frames per second.

This breakthrough in imaging tech is what can happen when a successful executive moves on to the next chapter. Melamed was the vice president of Architecture and General Manager of Mobile Wireless at Intel back in 2010, when he asked himself: What's next? He began looking at medical imaging, which still relies on technology that was developed before mobile computing made chips and sensors low cost and lightweight.

"I started to ask the questions, 'How come there is no simple, easy-to-use modality that you can bring to people instead of these big machines that cost so much money?" he recalls. "Breast cancer was a huge problem to solve and a big market, so a good combination," he adds (it's also an illness that touched his life personally when his mother developed the disease). Melamed decided to apply expertise from both his work inside the Israeli Defense Force 20 years ago and his time at Intel working with high-end communication chips to build a better detection system for breast cancer—and soon realized that the radio transmission-based technology he was developing could be applied to a range of industries and problems. Vayyar was born.



In the lead-up to its April launch, the Walabot team is giving the technology to a handful of leading makers and holding internal hackathons, and studying how people play with the Vayyar chip. "The whole point is to start a community around it and have people kind of play around with it and develop around it," Melamed says, adding that he hopes developers will share their application code with each other.

Melamed says he believes great innovations occur when people find ways to apply technological breakthroughs in one industry to another—and thinks his work on Vayyar, which combines his experiences in the digital communications world with radio frequency technology, is a prime example of that. "I think a lot of the breakthroughs came when people took one technology from one industry and implemented it in a totally different industry, and that is basically what we are trying to do here," he says. "I went and looked at what people did in the past, and for the last 30 years people are trying to do breast cancer imaging or any other imaging with radars with radio frequencies—but they kept bouncing into the same problems," Melemed says. "With the architecture we are using in communication and the things that we are able to do over there, bringing technology from that world into this world, that's kind of created that breakthrough, the ability to put so many transceivers and such a high-end kind of technology into a small silicon.



Walabot will be sold in three models—each a bit more powerful than the next—and cost between $149 and $599. It started shipping in April 2016 when the public developer API also became available.

Audi Cars Will Start Talking to City Traffic Systems This Fall

As reported by Engadget: If you've ever been stuck at a red light that seems to last an eternity, you'll be happy to know that Audi announced that it's going to start work with municipalities to tell its cars when a light is about to turn green. The automaker says this is the first step in a Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) partnership with cities that will be launching this fall.

The Audis won't be talking to the traffic lights directly, instead the vehicles will use their built-in LTE connection to get information from a participating city's central traffic control system. Using that data and GPS, the cars will be able to show on the dashboard when an upcoming signal will turn green.

The system does not use the upcoming DSRC V2V (vehicle to vehicle)/ V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) standard. Instead it uses partner Traffic Technology Services to establish a data relationship with the municipalities. As a vehicle enters a "zone" it requests a one-time unique token to establish communication with the infrastructure to request the stop light phase.

As for DSRC, Audi product and technology communications senior specialist, Justin Goduto said it's not quite ready for widespread deployment yet. Audi wants to move forward now. "For the time being using this methodology gives us true integration to the infrastructure," Goduto said.

The technology needed to get all that green light information is available in 2017 Audi Q7, A4 and A4 Allroad vehicles built after June 1, 2016. Drivers will also need to subscribe to Audi Connect Prime. As for the cities, the automaker isn't ready to announce where the V2I infrastructure will roll out first. But it hopes the system will be working in five to seven metropolitan areas by the end of the year.

SpaceX Nails a Tricky Fourth Rocket Landing at Sea

As reported by Engadget:SpaceX is good enough at sea-based rocket landings that they've nearly become commonplace. The private spaceflight outfit has successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket aboard a drone ship for the fourth time, or its sixth landing overall. And this wasn't a particularly easy trip, either. On top of the inherent challenges of a sea landing, the destination for the rocket's payload (the JCSAT-16 communications satellite) meant that the vehicle had to contend with both "extreme velocities" and high re-entry heat.

No, SpaceX still hasn't reused a rocket yet -- that's happening in the fall. However, the touchdown suggests that the company might just meet its objective of launching a rocket every two weeks by the end of 2016. There are no guarantees that it'll land every time (just ask SpaceX what happened in June), but the success rate is now consistent enough that Elon Musk and crew can expect that rockets will return intact.

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This Is Where the First U.S. Offshore Wind Turbines Were Just Installed

As reported by Fortune: The first wind turbines to be installed off the coasts of the United States were constructed over the past few days about three miles offshore of Block Island, Rhode Island.

While wind farms have been built all over the U.S. on land, the market for building wind farms in U.S. waters has stalled thanks to legal threats, lack of regulatory support, and push back from coastal property owners. At the same time, the “offshore wind” industry has boomed throughout Europe.

The construction milestone is an indicator that offshore wind is finally becoming a reality in the U.S. after many years of fits and starts, and could one day provide substantial amounts of clean energy to Americans.

Last Tuesday, clean energy developer Deepwater Wind began installing the first wind turbine on top of the towers at its Block Island Wind Farm. By Wednesday night, the company had put in the first turbine blade. By Thursday, the first wind turbine had been completed.Construction on the wind farm, which is using gear from GE among others, started about a year ago. When completed later this year, the farm is supposed to provide about 30 megawatts of energy, a relatively small amount compared to what natural gas and coal plants, or even large-scale solar farms, can generate.

However, what the Block Island Wind Farm lacks in size, it makes up for in timing. Multiple offshore wind projects have been planned for the eastern seaboard for years, but many have stalled.

The poster child for the lagging offshore U.S. wind industry is Cape Wind, a once planned $2.6 billion project to install wind turbines across 24 square miles off the coast of Nantucket. After years of legal battles, including from residents that didn’t want their views spoiled by turbines, the companies that had committed to buy the energy from Cape Wind backed out.

The Block Island Wind Farm is the first of about a dozen planned offshore wind projects in U.S. waters and represents growing support for the clean energy option.

Last week, the Massachusetts legislature passed an energy bill that includes the largest state commitment to offshore wind in the U.S. to date. Under the law, which the state’s Governor still needs to sign, utilities would have to buy a combined 1.6 gigawatts of electricity from offshore wind farms in a little over a decade.

Massachusetts is home to waters that have some of the biggest potential for U.S. offshore wind. In addition to the Cape Wind project, DeepWater Wind and Danish energy company Dong Energy hold leases off the state’s coast.

Dong Energy is the world’s largest offshore wind developer. The company, which is partly owned by the Danish government and Goldman Sachs, went public in June, largely based off of the success of the offshore wind industry in Europe.

In Europe, over 11 gigawatts of energy are being produced by offshore wind farms. There are 84 offshore wind farms either operating or under construction in the seas around 11 countries in the continent. Dong Energy plans to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm, called the Hornsea project, off the coast of Yorkshire in Northeast England.One of the reasons offshore wind hasn’t taken off in the U.S. is because the costs of building the first projects, and thus producing the first energy, have been high. The energy from the Block Island Wind Farm has an initial contract of 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is about 10 cents more than Rhode Island residents currently pay for their electricity, according to Scientific American.

However, prices for offshore wind in Europe have dropped significantly, and they can expect to do so in the U.S., too, as more projects come online. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, offshore wind could cost on average 12 cents per kilowatt hour by 2025.

Dong Energy recently won a contract to produce offshore wind off the coast of the Netherlands for eight cents per kilowatt hour. At that price, the power is competitive with fossil fuel-based energy.

Billionaire Entrepreneur to Send World's First Private Landing Craft to the Moon

As reported by NBC News: A billionaire entrepreneur who made his fortune during the dot com boom is one step closer to making a literal moonshot of a business opportunity become a reality.

Moon Express, a private space company co-founded by Naveen Jain, along with fellow entrepreneurs and space fanatics Bob Richards and Barney Pell, gained the Federal Aviation Administration's approval on Wednesday to send an unmanned lander to the lunar surface.

"This approval makes us the first company ever in history to ever be granted an approval to leave Earth's orbit and land on a celestial body," Jain told NBC News.

The Outer Space Treaty, which was adopted by the United Nations and went into effect during the great space race of the 1960s, requires "non-governmental entities" to get permission from the "appropriate state party to the treaty."

The Cape Canaveral-based company sees an opportunity to harvest the moon's resources, which include many valuable minerals also found on Earth, such as titanium and platinum.

"The moon has been collecting the asteroid material for the past four billion years and has an abundance of real Earth elements and water," Jain said. "It's good for business."

"Imagine getting engaged and instead of a diamond, giving your fiance a moon rock ring," he said.

If everything goes according to plan, in 2017 a rocket that cost Moon Express "under $5 million" will launch its small lander, which Jain says is about four to five feet in diameter.

After a successful soft landing, the plan is for the Moon Express lander to "hop" around the moon's surface during the initial exploratory mission, according to Jain and the plan outlined by the FAA.

"Our goal is to not only bring back the resources from the moon for the benefit of humanity on Earth, but also as a destination we could colonize, which becomes a stepping stone for us to colonize Mars," he said.

Jain said it's too early to say how much that moon rock engagement ring could cost, but he also sees another business opportunity for after couples tie the knot.

"My goal is one day the honeymoon will really be about taking the honey to the moon, not Hawaii," he said.

Moon Express is also poised to win Google's $20 million Lunar X-Prize, which will be awarded to the first company that lands on the moon, moves at least 500 meters on the surface and sends high-definition photos and video back to Earth.