Hasta La Gadget!

The
California-based National Ignition Facility has begun testing 192 lasers in an effort to create a fusion reaction comparable in power to that of a miniature sun, according to Space.com. The end goal is to focus the lasers on compressing and heating a single, pea-sized fuel capsule to
more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, which should trigger a thermonuclear reaction–one that hopefully doesn’t separate California from the rest of the continental U.S. in the process.

“One of the major activities of the NIF is to explore the basics of fusion energy, building a miniature sun on Earth that could supply limitless, safe and carbon-free energy,” said Ed Moses, National Ignition Facility (NIF) program director, in the article. The idea is that–hopefully–the fusion reaction reaction will somehow generate more energy than it takes to begin the reaction in the first place.

The report said that ignition testing scheduled for 2010 would focus 500 trillion watts of energy on
the pea-sized capsule containing deuterium and tritium fuel. “NIF has already
produced 25 times more energy than any other existing laser system, and also
became the first fusion laser facility to create the equivalent energy of
10,000 100-watt light bulbs, or one megajoule,” the report said.

As we reported yesterday, GM and Segway jumped the gun on the beginning of the 2009 New York International Auto Show to announce the Project P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility) prototype. The joint venture is a two-person vehicle that can travel up to 35 MPH and can travel from 25 to 35 miles on a single charge.

We headed over to press day at the Auto Show and got a close-up demonstration of exactly what the P.U.M.A prototype can do. Check out our video, after the jump.

Hiroshi Ishiguro’s over-sized “baby” robot, CB2, has made a lot of progress since we last reported on him…er..it, in 2007. According to a report on Breitbart.tv, the 73-pound, roughly 4-foot-tall robot can now walk with assistance, and navigate its way around a room. It’s also very adept at creeping people out by following them with its inky-black eyes. Apparently CB2 has been programmed to record facial emotions, much as a baby would, to help it better respond to human interaction. The Breitbart report also notes that just below its gray, silicon skin are a host of sensors so it can react to all kinds of subtle touches.

The researchers’ goal is to have CB2 talking–in a child-like-way–within two years. The rest of report recounts much of what we already know about the rapid pace of robotics development in Japan. There is, however, a bizarre diversion to Kokoro (a subsidiary of Hello Kitty manufacturer Sanrio). The company actually makes some life-size robots of its own, and its planning department manager, Yuko Yokota, spoke to Breitbart. His words really speak for themselves:

“Robots have hearts,” said Yokota. “They don’t look human unless we put souls in them. When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.” 

Umm, yeah. Remind me never to buy one of those robots.

Ever wonder what it would look like to get sucked into a black hole in space? Me neither, but scientists have developed a computer simulation that shows what you would see if you were drifting toward a brain-crushing singularity, according to New Scientist.

Two scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder wrote code based on the equations of Einstein’s general theory of
relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time, the article said. “They follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops
down into a giant black hole weighing five million times the mass of the
sun, about the same size as the hole in the center of our own galaxy.”

The report said that the research could eventually help physicists understand what happens to matter and energy in a black hole. For the rest of us, it’s pretty cool to watch. Follow the link to see a short (45-second) video of the sequence, as light from other stars near the hole is swallowed up by the event horizon (the point at which nothing can escape the black hole).

Even as basketball fans gear up for a weekend of NCAA semifinal action, NASA’s roster of 64 candidates for its “Greatest Mission of All Time” has been pared down to its own Final Four, and the remaining field is surprising, to say the least. Gone are heavyweights such as Apollo 11, the Hubble Space Telescope, Voyager I and II, Cassini, the Viking Mars landers as well as Spirit and Opportunity, still roving Mars after 5 years.

The remaining missions include LRO (the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), SPB (that’s Super Pressure Balloon, for the uninitiated), the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The semifinals, for which the two-day voting period began today, pit New Horizons against SPB, which so far has been the Cinderella mission of this tourney, while the venerable SOHO faces LRO.