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NASA says the Mars Perseverance rover has collected its first sample
After initially failing to capture sample of rock, NASA has confirmed that Perseverance succeeded in its second attempt.
NASA's InSight probe is still struggling to crack the surface of Mars
It's been a rough few weeks on Mars for NASA's InSight lander. After overcoming a major hurdle and getting its drill running again a few weeks ago, a new problem has arisen - its heat probe has popped right out of the soil.
Shrimp-inspired robot claw could punch through rock
Shrimp may be small, but some of them can pack quite a wallop. One of the pistol shrimp's claws, for instance, delivers such an explosive amount of force that it creates a shockwave of superhot plasma that can take out prey or create impromptu shelters. It only makes sense, then, that scientists hope to harness that power. A team has developed a robot claw that mimics the pistol shrimp's basic behavior to generate plasma and, potentially a valuable tool for underwater science and industry.
NASA tests life-detecting tools for Mars in the Atacama Desert
NASA wanted to find out whether the Mars 2020 rover can truly drill for samples and look for signs of life at the same time. So, a team of scientists spent the whole February testing tools using a practice rover called the KREX-2 in one of the driest places on Earth: the Atacama Desert. It's the perfect location to trial instruments NASA plans to use on Mars, since it's as dry as the red planet and under constant assault from ultraviolet radiation. Microbes in the Atacama live underground or inside rocks -- if there's life on Mars, NASA expects to find it in similar locations.
Tiny 3D-printed drill is powered by a hearing aid battery
We've seen teeny-tiny 3D printers before, and now we're getting pint-sized creations to match. An ingenious engineer from New Zealand set out to make the world's smallest cordless drill, and the result is pretty remarkable. The tiny tool measures just 17mm tall, 13mm long and 7.5mm wide, with a 0.5mm twist drill that can pierce soft objects. Creator Lance Abernethy designed the outer shell in Onshape with a regular drill for reference, before printing it with his trusty Ultimaker 2 3D printer. It's powered by a hearing aid battery and connected with wiring stripped from a headphone cable. The hardest part, unsurprisingly, was assembling all of the parts inside, because the wires kept breaking off and threatening to short-circuit the battery. Needless to say Abernethy pulled through, giving Borrowers everywhere an ideal power tool for their next home renovation.
Curiosity learns to drill into Mars rocks without breaking them
It's no secret that scientists want the Curiosity rover to drill into Mars more often. However, it first has to learn how to drill properly -- until now, it was so aggressive that it sometimes broke the rocks it was trying to sample. Thankfully, NASA has a fix. It recently started testing a new drilling algorithm that starts at the lowest power levels and ramps up only if there isn't much progress. This gentler touch appears to be successful in early tests: as you can see above, Curiosity bored into a relatively fragile rock without smashing it to bits. It's too soon to say whether or not the technique will work well in every circumstance, but researchers can at least be confident that they won't destroy crucial evidence before they've had a chance to look at it. Update: NASA has released a Curiosity selfie (below) at its latest drill site showing a lot recent landmarks. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]
Curiosity rover drills into Martian rock, looks for more evidence of water
NASA scientists won't have to wait until InSight's 2016 drilling mission to see what lies beneath the surface of Mars -- Curiosity is already on the case. After developing a taste for Martian soil late last year, the intrepid rover has started exploring the red planet's bedrock, drilling a 0.63 inch (1.6 cm) wide hole 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep into Mars' surface. Curiosity will spend the next several days analyzing the resulting powder in hopes of finding evidence of a once-wet planet. The shallow hole marks the first drilling operation ever carried out on Mars, and getting there wasn't easy. "Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program," explained Louise Jandura, the chief engineer of the rover's sample system. "To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth." The Rover tested its drill by creating a shallower hole earlier this month, though samples will only be used from the second, deeper cavity. Check out the source link for more images of the operation, including an animated GIF of the drill in action.
Researchers to bore through 3km of Antarctic ice, seek organisms isolated for 100K years
UK researchers are ready to see if life can exist in one of the harshest environments on the planet: Lake Ellsworth in the Antarctic, 3 km (2 miles) below a glacier. They'll try to drill through the ice by December 12th using a high pressure sterile water jet heated to 90 degrees Celsius (194 Fahrenheit) and sterilize the patch of lake with intense ultraviolet light before attempting to retrieve a sample. If any organisms can be found, they'll have evolved in isolation for at least 100,000 years, according to team, and probably even much longer. That could help scientists understand more about how life evolves on this planet, and possibly elsewhere -- like iced-over oceans on Europa, Jupiter's moon, or other harsh planetary environments. It'll be the deepest borehole ever made with hot water, and the team will have a mere 24 hours to sterilize the lake entry and collect samples before it refreezes. When asked which part of the tricky experiment worried him the most, lead scientist Chris Hill replied, "everything." For a video tour of the drill site, head below the break.
Polaris rover will travel to the Moon in search of polar resources, try to survive the long lunar night
The Polaris rover may look a little punk rock, but that mohawk is no fashion statement. It's for catching solar rays which shine almost horizontally at the Moon's north pole, a location Polaris is due to explore before 2016. Built by Astrobotic Technology, it'll be ferried aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to our celestial companion, where it'll drill into the surface in search of ice. The company, spun out of the Carnegie Mellon University, hopes to identify resources at a depth of up to four feet that could be used to support manned Moon expeditions in the future. The plan is to complete the mission during a 10-day window of sunlight, digging at up to 100 sites over a three-mile stretch. However, if it can live through the harsh two-week-long nights, then it may continue to operate "indefinitely." NASA is backing the project, providing ice-prospecting gear and money, although Astrobotic hopes to get more cash for its work -- over $20 million from Google's Lunar X Prize. Right now, Polaris is a flight prototype and there are still improvements to be made, mainly on the software side, before it tackles the rough terrain. Check out the short video of its public unveiling below, although we don't think the soundtrack quite matches the hairdo.
Cranial Drilling Device puts a hole in skulls, not brains
If you told us on Monday that we'd be capping our week off by checking out an innovative cranial drill, we likely would have just stared at you funny. But here were are and here it is, a device referred to, quite straightforwardly, as the Cranial Drilling Device with Retracting Drill Bit After Skull Penetration. The drill was designed by a team of researchers at Harvard in order to address a major shortcoming with manual drills. Such devices require neurosurgical training in order to know precisely when to stop so as to not damage underlying brain tissue. In certain instances, such as emergency rooms and the backs of ambulances, medical practitioners may require a cranial drill in order to perform procedures such as the insertion of pressure monitors, with nary a neurosurgeon to be found. The Harvard team has concocted a drill that automatically retracts back into its protective casing, as soon as it's finished drilling through the skull, using a bi-stable mechanism that is active as the drill spins. After the break, team member Conor Walsh explains the technology is a manner that, thankfully, is not quite brain surgery.
Swarming quadrocopters complete trial recon mission for Japanese police (video)
Formation-flying quadrocopters have already given us hours of entertainment, but now they've also accomplished something serious. Earlier this month, mini choppers developed at Japan's robot-loving Chiba University assisted in an emergency drill that simulated an explosion at a chemical plant. Four machines and a host computer (shown off after the break) used spherical markers, image processing and a heck of a lot of math to autonomously scan the site for survivors. The researchers claim the exercise went "very well" and that the local police force would like to "introduce this system" for genuine reconnaissance. That could include monitoring volcanic eruptions or inspecting power lines, but alas there's no mention yet of using quadrocopter swarms to sneak up on yakuza.
Lyneborg bot carves models of magnetic fields, dares the future to have a look (video)
If you're going to create a robot that carves something, have it carve models of an invisible field. This is what Frits Lyneborg, creator of the Yellow Drum Machine, has done with a new homemade bot that uses a combination of motors, pulleys, small drills, makerbeams and magnetic sensors. The end result is a robot that, when combined with the interpretative software, can literally read a magnetic field and move the robot's components to cut an accurate model from a crumbly-yet-strong material known as 'Oasis Brick.' You can witness the magic yourself in a video after the break, and if you've any advice for making it better, drop Frits a line there in the via link.
Scientists propose a 'journey to the mantle of the Earth'
This particular "journey" may not involve any humans descending into the Earth, but that doesn't mean it isn't still plenty ambitious -- a pair of scientists are now proposing to drill to the Earth's mantle and bring back some samples, effectively picking up where the first attempt to do so left off some fifty years ago. Of course, the key word here is "proposing," but the scientists, Damon Teagle and Benoît Ildefonse, say that we now have the technology and knowledge necessary to do so, and that drilling could begin by 2020 if everything goes as planned. They're looking to get things underway well before that, however, and are already planning an expedition in the Pacific as soon as next month where they say they will "bore further into the oceanic crust than ever before."
Mesmerizing Touch Wood SH-08C ad showcases Japan's beauty, mankind's ingenuity (video)
Sharp isn't apt to sell but 15,000 of its Touch Wood SH-08C handsets, but after watching the ad below, you can bet there will be demand for more. It's a bit baffling to think of the trouble Drill, Inc. went through in order to assemble the pieces necessary for a wooden ball to trickle down a homegrown marimba, particularly in the midst of Kyushu, Japan's woodlands. Kenjiro Matsuo was responsible for the creation of the instrument, while Morihiro Harano is being handed credit for the idea itself; in fact, he confirmed to The New York Times that no artificial music was added whatsoever, with only the background levels being adjusted up for effect. You may have never listened to a piece of classical music in your life, but you're sorely missing out if you ignore Bach's Cantata 147, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." Or, at least the version in that video below.
Found Footage: The Powerbook snowboard
Ok, we'll admit it -- the recent snowpocalypse may have driven some people nuts. But probably not this nuts -- these two German guys wanted to go snowboarding, but didn't actually have a snowboard around, so they did what most of us would naturally do in this situation: take two old PowerBooks, connect them together and put some shoes on them, and go snowboarding. Ok, so most of us might not do that (and while our German isn't that great, this actually looks like a viral plug for some Asus laptops), but those laptops actually hold up pretty darn well. The keyboard can't take a drill, and they probably shouldn't be breathing that smoke. But in terms of structural integrity, it looks like you can actually snowboard with an old PowerBook. Even if this is just a viral, we'd like to see them try the same thing with the laptops they're hawking in five to ten years.
Video: Miniature, operational electric drill perfect for smurfing smurfs
The gang over at Make have dug up a pretty sweet electric drill that's looks to be about the right size for the Smurf in your life. Powered by a button cell battery, the inventor (a shadowy figure known only as s8) has plans to make these commercially available -- as soon as he figures out how to configure his website. Not too many details on how this was put together, but you can see several prototypes above. Video after the break.[Via Book of Joe]
Porsche swerves to the power tool realm with P'7911 Multihammer
We've noticed that the folks at Porsche Design have been branching out to new endeavors of late, but this joint venture takes brand extension to an entirely new level. The group has apparently partnered with Germany's Metabo to unveil the Multihammer P'7911 power drill, which "combines all the essential functions of a drill with the power of a pneumatic hammer," sports a carbon fiber / aluminum housing, and includes an impeccably balanced grip that makes this bad boy easier to handle. The 705-watt device has no problem with scratches here and there from drilling through concrete, stone, wood, and steel, and the five different function settings allow you to tweak the tool for the job at hand. No word just yet regarding the (presumably lofty) price, but be sure to leap on through to see this luxury power tool hard at work.[Via Sybarites]
Radio Allergy delayed to March
Bad news for both of the people that preordered this one. O3 have delayed the US release of Milestone's shmup Radio Allergy until March 30th. The game, known as Radilgy in Japan, was released on the Gamecube in May of last year. We understand the delay-- shooting games have so much text to translate. Or maybe they didn't want to bring the game out in the midst of a busy Gamecube release season. Also (and this is what makes this news item explicitly appropriate for Wii Fanboy) O3 have deployed the "Rhythm Tengoku trick" in marketing their game-- there's a little "Wii Compatible" icon on the box. They might as well use every tactic they can think of; we get the feeling that selling a shmup for the Gamecube in 2007 is harder than, well, a certain kind of frantic videogame that is notorious for difficulty.We'd actually like to see the "Wii Compatible" tactic used by other developers to sell localized versions of obscure titles from the Gamecube back catalog at budget prices, but we think it would take a more popular game to start a trend. What do you think?
New low-intensity pulsed ultrasound device helps re-grow teeth
We'd gladly trade in most of our gadgets if it meant we never had to go under the drill at the dentist again. But researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada don't want our electronics, they just want a few more years to perfect their low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) technology that they hope will ultimately be able to re-grow lost or severely damaged teeth from the root, eliminating the need for pricey prosthetics and painful procedures. The pea-sized device, which can be held in place by a bracket or a crown, is controlled by a wireless remote and needs to gently massage the gums for 20 minutes a day over the course of four weeks to attain noticeable growth. This tech isn't expected to be available to the public for another two years, so hold off on that all-candy and Red Bull diet you've been planning for just a little longer while you ponder the rather incredible possibility that this method could eventually be used to grow human bones and actually make people taller without subjecting them to any kind of medieval torture.
