Hasta La Gadget!

By Joni Blecher
Joni Blecher is a freelance writer who has spent her career covering tech and a myriad of lifestyle topics. When she’s not writing, you can find her exploring the food scene in Portland, Oregon.

What do you get when developers, engineers and space geeks from around the world come together one weekend for a hackathon? Over 900 projects aimed at solving the myriad issues surrounding planetary and space exploration. The International Space Apps Challenge, sponsored by NASA, was held in 135 cities around the globe earlier this month. The event brought together nearly 13,000 scientists, designers, educators, developers, entrepreneurs and students who used publicly available data to create solutions for global challenges.

The participants were tasked with coming up with solutions to 35 challenges across four categories: Outer Space, Earth, Humans and Robotics. The challenges included such topics as finding ways to show the value of asteroids as an exploration destination; mapping of drinking water resources; the benefits and feasibility of allowing astronauts to print their own food; and designing a drone for moving items around a manned spacecraft or station.

The challenges were announced a month in advance, so people could start thinking up ideas for the competition. Additionally, NASA provided data and tools that could be used in the projects. This year, the Space Apps Challenge kicked off at the Global Mainstage in New York with a Data Bootcamp focusing on “Women in Data” and featuring NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman and NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan, among other notable speakers.

Teams from Kathmandu to Kosovo also competed for local prizes awarded at the culmination of the hackathon. Here are a few of the winning projects and the challenges they were looking to solve.

OUTER SPACE
The 10 challenges in this category included things as varied as creating an asteroid mission, to finding ways to send messages to astronauts in space, to developing a camera that could orbit in deep space.

Challenge: Visualize the Asteroid Skies
Project: Asteroid Movement Simulation
This team used the data saved in NASA databases to create a visualization tool that allows users to track how each asteroid moves in the solar system. Check out the demo here.

Challenge: Print Your Own Space Food
Project: 3D Food Printer in Space
This team developed a concept for creating food with a 3D printer. Cartridges would contain vitamins, proteins, minerals, color and sweeteners. The printer would include software with a pre-programmed menu that provides astronauts with daily meals consisting of 2,600 calories.

EARTH
This theme featured nine challenges covering topics affecting our planet. Some of the topics in this category included clean water, food issues, open-source air traffic tracking, and observing volcanoes and icebergs from space.

Challenge: Clean Water Mapping
Project: Whered the Water Go
An Android app that can be used to access, update and modify data that tracks sources of fresh water on the planet.

Challenge: Volcanoes, Icebergs, and Cats from Space
Project: NatEv Explorer
A Web-based app featuring a 3D globe with the most interesting/dangerous events in a user’s location. The goal is to inspire users to explore additional data from the NASA Earth Observatory system and register new discoveries.

HUMANS
In this category, the 11 challenges focused on space and the human experience. For example, some of the options included a game that explores lava tubes on Mars, wearables, and what can be learned from metabolic observations of space explorers.

Challenge: Survivor: Mars Lava Tubes
Project: Lavamatic
An educational game that uses crowd-sourced data to explore lava tubes on Mars.

Challenge: Space Wearables: Designing for Today’s Launch & Research Stars
Project: AirOS
An augmented reality platform that uses gestures and voice to monitor a user’s vital signs and situation, and increases the user’s senses through external sensors.

ROBOTICS
This category only had five challenges, but they all included ways in which robotics can help in space. It had everything from building and programming your own robot, to using sensors to monitor for danger, to creating drones for space.

Challenge: Spacecraft Thermal Power Consumption
Project: RoboKitty
Managing a robot through a mobile app that uses heat sensors to evaluate power consumption and lost energy in the environment. (No video is available for this project)

Challenge: Robotic Observatory
Project: ScopeNet

A low-cost solution designed for hobbyist astronomers that provides the ability to automate and share telescopes online.

At the culmination of the hackathon, venues chose up to three projects (two global nominees and one people’s choice award) for consideration in the global judging process. You can get involved in the award process by taking to social media and voting for your favorite People’s Choice award. Check out the complete list of nominees at Space Apps Challenge Awards to learn more about each project and view the code. Next month, five finalists will be selected to move into the round of judging by NASA executives. Global winners will be eligible to attend a NASA launch event, and NASA will even provide transportation to and from the launch site.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

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CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — Katie Medley, nine months pregnant and crouching between the seats of a movie theater filling with tear gas, gunfire and screams, looked at her husband Caleb’s bloody face and told a friend, “He’s dead, he’s dead.”

Prodeo Et Patria was 14 that night, and sitting with his parents somewhere in the middle of the 421 people watching a midnight Batman premiere. He thought the gunfire was a joke until his father ordered him to the floor, where someone kicked off his glasses in the chaos.

His father told him to run and refused to leave his mother, whose arm and foot were shattered by bullets. Hoisting his wife onto his back, they made for an exit together. “That’s when I first felt a gunshot hit me,” Patria said.

They were the among the first of many prosecution witnesses in the death penalty trial of James Holmes, and their gripping testimony made clear the state’s determination to make sure jurors know the carnage Holmes caused inside the suburban Denver theater on July 20, 2012.

Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. warned jurors as the trial opened not to let sympathy and emotion influence their judgment. The defense team has conceded that Holmes was the killer, hoping to focus not on the crime itself or its lingering damage, but on what it sees as the only question jurors must resolve: whether Holmes was legally insane at the time.

But on this first long day of testimony, the judge repeatedly turned away defense objections to particularly gruesome and tragic details. Defense attorneys did not question any of the witnesses from the theater.

Defense attorney Katherine Spengler argued that grisly photos, a 911 recording of shrieks and screams, and the words “bloody victim” that a witness wrote on a diagram of the theater served only to inflame the jury. The judge dismissed her motions, reasoning that the evidence is relevant and fairly depicts a horrific crime.

Prosecutors say they will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was sane, therefore guilty, and should be executed. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; his defense hopes the jury will have him indefinitely committed to a mental institution.

Tuesday was Day One of testimony in a trial expected to last four months or more. If the prosecution keeps this up into August, the cumulative weight of the victims’ suffering could make the defense job even more difficult.

Perhaps the most riveting testimony was also the shortest so far, coming from Caleb Medley, an aspiring comedian who lost an eye and was left unable to walk and barely able to speak after Holmes fired a bullet into his brain.

Prosecutors asked him only two questions: Was he married to Katie? Was he at the theater that night?

From a wheelchair, he answered the first with a breathy, grunted “Yeah.”

To the second, he tapped out his answer on a poster board with the letters of the alphabet: Y, E, S.

His wife filled in the rest of their story, recalling her desperation between the seats before she decided to make a break for it, to try to save their baby. She said she took his hand, and felt him squeeze hers back, thinking she’d never again see him alive.

“I told him that I loved him and that I would take care of our baby if he didn’t make it,” she said.

She later gave birth to a healthy son, now 3, as Caleb underwent his third brain surgery in the same hospital.

She kept her composure Tuesday, even as her husband’s injuries were put on display, but sobbed as she returned to her seat in the courtroom. Others comforted her and said “good job.”

Robert and Arlene Holmes, sitting two rows behind their son, had no visible reaction to these descriptions of his slaughter. Neither did Holmes, who stared directly ahead. But Ian Sullivan, whose 6-year-old daughter Veronica was the youngest to die that night, fixed his gaze on Holmes, glaring intently at him from the audience for long periods of time.

In opening statements, the defense sought to focus instead on what was going on inside Holmes’ mind, which they say was so addled by schizophrenia and psychosis that his sense of right and wrong was distorted, and he lost any control over his actions. They won’t call their own witnesses or begin making the case for insanity until after the prosecution rests, many weeks from now.

Defense lawyers said Holmes was a “good kid” who sensed something wrong with his mind, even at a young age. Studying neuroscience at the University of Colorado was his attempt to fix his thoughts; Instead, “psychosis bloomed” when he failed in the doctoral program, and delusions then commanded him to kill, they said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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