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Gizmorama - July 22, 2015
Good Morning,
The very first hitchhiking robot has been developed and it's ready to hit the road. Be sure to keep an eye out for a robot that might need help with directions. I guess robots need to get away, too.
Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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* Hitchhiking robot begins journey across U.S. *
BOSTON (UPI) - Canada's first hitchhiking robot began its journey across the U.S. Friday and has already landed its first ride.
HitchBOT, a bucket-shaped robot from Ontario, is an art project with a social twist, existing to test the trustworthiness of human strangers on its journey. The bot has a personality of its own, and even a "bucket list" of American hot spots it hopes to visit.
Having started its trip at the Peabody Essex Museum in Boston, the well-traveled bot is expected to rely on helpful strangers to make its way to the Exploratorium San Francisco museum fully intact, and with plenty of stories to tell via social media.
"This trip will be unlike any other," said co-creator Dr. David Harris of hitchBOT, which has already explored Canada, Germany and the Netherlands thanks to helpful humans. "HitchBOT's goal is not only to hitchhike across the U.S., but also to visit a number of historic sites and monuments."
A full American bucket list was posted on its official Twitter page last week; popular destinations listed are Times Square, Disney World, Mt. Rushmore and the Hollywood sign.
"Usually, we are concerned whether we can trust robots," Dr. Frauke Zeller, hitchBOT's other co-creator said in a statement. "But this project takes it the other way around and asks: can robots trust human beings?"
Taking on a life -- and voice -- of its own, hitchBOT is about 3 feet tall and weighs about 25 pounds. It sees the world using "camera vision" and communicates using a microphone and speaker system. Being sociable, the little bot converses with humans using Cleverscript speech technology, allowing it to answer simple questions about its favorite hobbies or where its from. HitchBOT also uses a GPS to sense where it is, and communicates where it wants to go next.
"HitchBOT was very well received as it made its way across Canada, Germany, and the
Netherlands," Zeller said, "proving that robots can indeed trust humans."
"Given that hitchBOT is built out of a bucket, we thought it would be only natural if we let it have a bucket list for this exciting new adventure."
* Lab develops method for imaging nanoparticles *
BERKELEY, Calif. (UPI) - Researchers have for the first time found a way to photograph nanoparticles in a solution by combining three separate imaging techniques in order to produce 3D images of their structures.
Nanoparticles are thought by scientists to be the building blocks for next generation materials, making the ability to see and understand their structure vital.
"Understanding structural details of colloidal nanoparticles is required to bridge our knowledge about their synthesis, growth mechanisms, and physical properties to facilitate their application to renewable energy, catalysis and a great many other fields," Paul Alivisatos, director of the Berkeley Lab, said in a press release.
The technique is called SINGLE, which stands for 3D Structure Identification of Nanoparticles by Graphene Liquid Cell Electron Microscopy, researchers said.
The goal of researchers was to understand how nanoparticles grow. Normally, images of nanoparticles are taken after they have fully grown and been removed from solutions. The major challenge of photographing nanoparticles while still in solution is that they move around, leading the combination of three other technologies in order to generate the images.
Researchers used a beam of electrons to illuminate the area for photography instead of light because, however electron beams are generally used in a vacuum because molecules in the air can disrupt the beam. Liquids evaporate quickly in a vacuum, so researchers had to then employ hermetically sealed containers, called cells, that have a thin viewing window allowing for the imaging.
Finally, to combat the issue of nanoparticles moving in the solution, the researchers used electron detectors that produce movies with millisecond frame-to-frame time resolution of the rotating nanocrystals.
The combination of the three allowed for thousands of two-dimensional images of the rotational motions of individual nanoparticles of platinum less than two nanometers in diameter to then be taken and reconstructed into 3D images.
"In materials science, we cannot assume the nanoparticles in a solution are all identical, so we needed to develop a hybrid approach for reconstructing the 3D structures of individual nanoparticles," said Peter Ercius, a staff scientist with the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at the Molecular Foundry.
The study is published in Science.
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