Gizmorama - April 8, 2013

Good Morning,

When you read a headline like - Robot jellyfish could be surveillance tool - you then begin to think about when those sharks with lasers on their heads are going to emerge.

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Surveillance technology comes under fire --*
SAN FRANCISCO - Investigators in California are using a surveillance system to gather cellphone data to track suspects without detailing the practice to judges, documents show. The use by U.S. investigators of a sophisticated device known as a StingRay, which simulates a cellphone tower and enables agents to locate and monitor individual cellphones, was revealed Wednesday in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, The Washington Post reported. Privacy groups and some judges suggested the use of the technology, which is so sensitive it can penetrate the walls of homes, shouldn't be allowed without a warrant. They question whether federal agents are providing sufficient evidence to judges to justify the use of a tool that captures data not only from a suspect's wireless device but also from those of bystanders in the vicinity. Some judges in Northern California have expressed misgivings about the use of the StingRay technology. "It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using [StingRay] technology in the field although the [surveillance] application does not make that explicit," Miranda Kane, former chief of the criminal division of the Northern California U.S. attorney's office, said in May 2011 email obtained by the ACLU. Some judges around the United States have begun to insist investigators first obtain a warrant before deploying the technology. "By withholding information about this technology from courts in applications for electronic surveillance orders, the federal government is essentially seeking to write its own search warrants," Linda Lye, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, told the Post.


*-- Lasers could yield particle research tool --*
SOUTHAMPTON, England - A laser system using telecom technology may produce a next-generation particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, physicists say. The International Coherent Amplification Network consortium, an international group of physicists from a number of research organizations, said a laser system composed of massive arrays of thousands of fiber lasers could be used for both fundamental research at laboratories such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, Switzerland, and more applied tasks such as proton therapy and nuclear transmutation. Lasers can provide extremely short bursts of energy of great power measured in petawatts -- 1,000 times the power of all the power plants in the world, the consortium said in a study published in Nature Photonics. Such a system could be used for applied tasks in medicine, such as proton therapy for cancer treatment, or the environment, where they could offer the prospect of reducing the lifetime of dangerous nuclear waste from 100,000 years to decades or less, a release from Britain's Southampton University, a consortium participant, said Thursday. Such laser accelerators would be much more compact than present day systems, the researchers said. "One important application demonstrated today has been the possibility to accelerate particles to high energy over very short distances measured in centimeters rather than kilometers as it is the case today with conventional technology," said Gerard Mourou of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, another consortium institution. "This feature is of paramount importance when we know that today high energy physics is limited by the prohibitive size of accelerators, of the size of tens of kilometers, and cost billions of euros. "Reducing the size and cost by a large amount is of critical importance for the future of high energy physics," he said.


*-- Robot jellyfish could be surveillance tool --*
BLACKSBURG, Va. - U.S. researchers have unveiled a large robotic jellyfish they say could autonomously patrol oceans for surveillance and environmental monitoring. Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers say their robotic device, dubbed Cyro, is 5-foot, 7-inches in length and weighs 170 pounds. Cyro is a follow-on to an earlier robot dubbed RoboJelly that was about the size of a man's hand and typical of jellyfish found along beaches, a Virginia Tech release said Thursday. "A larger vehicle will allow for more payload, longer duration and longer range of operation," doctoral student Alex Villanueva said. "Biological and engineering results show that larger vehicles have a lower cost of transport, which is a metric used to determine how much energy is spent for traveling." Both Virginia Tech robots were developed as part of a multi-university, nationwide $5 million project funded by U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research. The goal is to create self-powering, autonomous machines that can travel the world's ocean for surveillance, monitoring the environment, studying aquatic life, mapping ocean floors and monitoring ocean currents, researchers said. Cyro showed its ability to swim autonomously while maintaining a similar physical appearance and kinematics as the natural species," Virginia Tech project leader Shashank Priya said. Cyro is simultaneously able to collect, store, analyze, and communicate sensory data, he said.

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