Gizmorama - February 15, 2016

Good Morning,

Finally, drones are being used to help people! Drones are being trained to find lost and injured hikers. That's smart. In the future I'm sure that there will be a show called - Drones: Search and Rescue. Mark my words!

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

Until Next Time,
Erin

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* Scientists train drones to search for lost hikers *
ZURICH, Switzerland - Every year in Switzerland, emergency centers respond to more than 1,000 calls concerning injured and lost hikers. In larger countries, where more people venture into larger swaths of wilderness, the problem is even greater.

That's why robotics engineers and computer scientists in Switzerland are teaching drones to recognize and navigate forest trails. Drones are inexpensive and can more quickly cover ground, maximizing the efficiency of search and rescue missions.

The quicker a lost or injured hiker is found, the sooner medical assistance can be delivered.

But drones aren't yet adept and navigating through a dense array of obstacles. To teach drones how to fly through a forest, scientists at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Zurich have developed new nagivation software.

The software's algorithms allow the drone to process forest imagery and recognize man-made trails.

"Interpreting an image taken in a complex environment such as a forest is incredibly difficult for a computer," Alessandro Giusti, a researcher at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said in a news release. "Sometimes even humans struggle to find the trail!"

Giusti and his colleagues trained the drone by uploading 20,000 images of hiking trails, collected from a helmet cam taken on several treks through the Alps. Armed with the new visual data and its deep learning software, the drone was able predict the correct path of a trail 85 percent of the time -- compared to a human success rate of 82 percent.

The drone's software is constantly re-evaluating its surroundings, making decisions about the path of the trail ahead of it by analyzing its vast memory of similar trails.

"Our lab has been working on deep learning in neural networks since the early 1990s," added Juergen Schmidhuber, science director at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence. "Today I am happy to find our lab's methods not only in numerous real-world applications such as speech recognition on smartphones, but also in lightweight robots such as drones. Robotics will see an explosion of applications of deep neural networks in coming years."

The new research was detailed in the journal Robotics and Automation Letters.


*-- Einstein vindicated: Scientists find gravitational waves --*
WASHINGTON - A monumental first promises to revolutionize astronomy. A team of astronomers have confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time.

The waves were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, a pair of L-shaped antennas attuned to the cosmos in Washington and Louisiana.

The waves picked up by the antennas were produced by the ancient collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago -- a collision that continues to reverberate through space with an energy 50 times greater than that of all the stars in the universe.

The discovery was announced Thursday morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it!" David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO project, told an excited gathering of reporters.

The echo of the ancient collision lasted only a half-second, but LIGO's antennas captured it. Within the half-second clip, scientists say, are the details of a violent mashup of two black holes. As they came together, the black holes spun about each other, churning up the cosmic surroundings. As the two black holes finally became one, a massive blast of energy was propelled throughout the cosmos.

And that blast of energy, recorded in Louisiana and Washington, looks remarkably similar to the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.

"The description of this observation is beautifully described in the Einstein theory of general relativity formulated 100 years ago and comprises the first test of the theory in strong gravitation," Rainer Weiss, who initiated the LIGO project in the 1980s, said in a news release. "It would have been wonderful to watch Einstein's face had we been able to tell him."

Until now, the study of black holes has been largely theoretical. But the new discovery will allow scientists to more directly study the phenomena of black holes, dark matter and dark energy -- phenomena that have been mostly invisible to astronomers.

"We're missing some of the most violent, dynamic and exciting things in the universe," Cole Miller, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who didn't work on LIGO, told USA Today. "[Gravitational waves are] going to give us a remarkable view into a universe that has largely been denied us."

"[They will] allow us to see almost into the heart of a black hole," added Arizona State University's Lawrence Krauss, also unaffiliated with LIGO.

The scientific paper describing the major discovery is set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. But scientists hope the paper is just the beginning.

Astronomers say they detected a much smaller gravitational wave signal a week before the major discovery, and believe many more gravitational waves will be detected and measured moving forward.

"Whenever first detection happens, there's gonna be a party, no question," MIT astrophysicist Scott Hughes, who wasn't on the LIGO team, told Gizmodo. "But after that, when detection becomes routine, is when things start getting really interesting."

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