GoanTimes May, 24 2019

04 Technology
Friday, May 24, 2019 | www.goantimes.titosgoa.com | 12 Pages
Brian Cox says humans will soon
be living on Mars: ‘At some point
we will be Martians’
He says it is the only place beyond earth where humans could live
Professor Brian Cox has said humans
will one day live on Mars and be the
Martians of the future.
The pop star-turned-physicist said
Mars is the only planet that humans
will be able to go to and that it must
happen as people cannot remain on
Earth forever.
“It is actually the only place we can
go beyond Earth,” he said.
Plausible
“In any plausible scenario, there is
nowhere else that humans can go to
begin their step outwards from the
planet, other than Mars. If you think
of the other planets, there’s none of the
others we can land on.”
The presenter, 51, continued: “There
may or not be Martians and we need to
find out.
China creates facial recognition
app to tell pandas apart
“But there will be Martians, if we are
to have a future.
“At some point we will be the
Martians. That’s clear to me. Because
we can’t stay here forever.”
NASA
In 2015 NASA published its
strategy for human exploration and
colonisation of Mars. It stated 2030 as
the date of a crewed surface landing.
Donald Trump has said he wants
humans on Mars by 2033, but experts
have now warned this is unlikely due
to budget and political issues.
Robert Howard, Head of the future space
habitats lab at the Johnson Space Center
in Houston, reportedly said it could be the
2060s before humans land on Mars.
However, Elon Musk believes he can
send humans to the red planet as soon
as 2024. The SpaceX CEO also believes
humans living there could happen
far quicker than previous estimates.
Mr Musk is aiming for a series of 10
launches to start a city there by 2050.
Professor Cox is currently on his
“Universal Adventures in Time and
Space” world tour. His latest series, The
Planets, will see him explore the lives of
the eight planets that make up our solar
system. It begins on BBC2 on May 28.
Samsung Galaxy
Fold issues fixed,
likely to release
next month
After indefinitely delaying the release
of Galaxy Fold due to reported display
issues, Samsung has said that it will
finally be announcing the new release
date for its foldable phone next month.
According to a report, the South Korean
tech giant is testing out the redesigned
model and is expected to launch the
$2,000 worth device sometime in June.
To tackle the issue related to the
protective layer on the device's display,
Samsung has reportedly concealed the
edges of the screen guard under the
frame of the device to prevent users
from peeling it off.
Further, to address the hinge problem,
the company has reduced the gap at the
bottom which allowed for dust and debris
to enter the phone and cause damage.
To recall, Samsung had suspended
the release of Galaxy Fold after several
reviewers reported display breaking
issues on the company's foldable phone.
The Galaxy Fold comes with two
displays: a 4.58-inch HD+ (1960x840 pixels)
external screen with 21:9 aspect ratio,
and a foldable 7.3-inch QHD+ (2152x1536
pixels) Infinity Flex internal display
which offers a tablet-like experience.
Scientists create a four-winged robot
insect that flies with grace
Bee+ is more poised than its two-winged counterparts.
China has developed an app to track giant
pandas using facial recognition software
as a way to help conservationists tell the
large, lumbering animals apart.
Researchers also built a database with
over 120,000 images and 10,000 video
clips of giant pandas so they can be
identified. Almost 10,000 panda images
have been analyzed and annotated
since the research began in 2017.
"The app and database will help us
gather more precise and well-rounded
data on the population, distribution,
ages, gender ratio, birth and deaths
of wild pandas, who live in deep
mountains and are hard to track,"
Chen Peng, a researcher at the China
Conservation and Research Center for
Giant Pandas, told Xinhua.
The app was created by the China
Conservation and Research Center for
Giant Pandas along with researchers
in Singapore Nanyang Technological
university and Sichuan Normal
University.
China plans to build a Giant Panda
National Park to encourage breeding
among existing wild populations. The
$1.6 billion reserve in the southwest of
the country will be three times the size
of Yellowstone National Park in the US.
Giant pandas are slow to reproduce,
which has led to their status as
“vulnerable” on the International Union
for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red
List, along with habitat loss. There are
fewer than 2,000 living in the wild, with
548 in captivity globally.
It's difficult to make an insect-like flying
robot -- realistic four-winged bots are
typically too heavy, while lighter twowinged
models tend to fly erratically.
USC researchers have edged one step
closer to the dream machine, however.
They've created Bee+, a four-winged bot
(pictured at right) that flies with more of
the agility and poise of real insects while
weighing just over 0.003oz. The trick
was to drop earlier bimorph actuators,
cantilevers made of two layers of
piezoelectric material with a passive
layer in between, with unimorphs that
only have one piezoelectric layer. The
four actuators combined weigh half as
much as bimorphs would at just under
0.002oz, reducing the wing loading and
significantly improving control.
The tiny flier can follow paths, dodge
obstacles, perch and land. It's even
simpler to build than the earlier twowinged
model.
There's still much, much more work to
be done before there are robotic insects
in service. Bee+ flies tethered, since that
saves the team from factoring a battery
into the design. Size is also a concern.
While the robot is only slightly larger
than a penny, it's still much larger and
heavier than most real insects.
This does solve one of the larger
problems for minuscule flying robots,
though. And importantly, bots at the
size of Bee+ could still be useful for
a number of tasks, such as scouting
hazardous areas and locating survivors
in collapsed buildings. The challenge is
simply designing a robot that can carry
a full payload while remaining small
enough to fit into exceptionally tight
spaces.