Biggest-Ever Telescope Approved for Construction

The world's largest telescope has gotten its official construction go-ahead, keeping the enormous instrument on track to start observing the heavens in 2024.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will feature a light-collecting surface 128 feet (39 meters) wide, has been greenlit for construction atop Cerro Armazones in Chile's Atacama Desert, officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced Thursday.

"The decision taken by Council [ESO's chief governing body] means that the telescope can now be built, and that major industrial construction work for the E-ELT is now funded and can proceed according to plan," Tim de Zeeuw, ESO's director general, said in a statement. "There is already a lot of progress in Chile on the summit of Armazones, and the next few years will be very exciting."

E-ELT construction was first approved in June 2012, but on the condition that contracts worth more than 2 million euros ($2.48 million at current exchange rates) could be awarded only after 90 percent of the total funding required to build the telescope (1.083 billion euros, or $1.34 billion, at 2012 prices) had been secured. An exception was made for "civil works," including the leveling of the site and a road up Cerro Armazones, ESO officials said.

The 90-percent threshold was reached in October, when Poland agreed to join ESO, officials said, but making the numbers work took some tweaking. ESO split E-ELT development into two phases: 90 percent of the project's costs go toward "Phase 1," which will get E-ELT up and running, and 10 percent of the costs are allocated to "Phase 2," for the development of nonessential elements. These include about one-quarter of E-ELT's 798 individual mirror segments (which together make up the huge main mirror) and part of the telescope's adaptive optics system, which helps cancel out the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere.

The current construction approval applies only to Phase 1; contracts for this work will be awarded in late 2015. The Phase 2 components will be approved as more funding becomes available, ESO officials said.

"The funds that are now committed will allow the construction of a fully working E-ELT that will be the most powerful of all the extremely large telescope projects currently planned, with superior light-collecting area and instrumentation," de Zeeuw said. "It will allow the initial characterization of Earth-mass exoplanets, the study of the resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies as well as ultra-sensitive observations of the deep universe."

As de Zeeuw said, E-ELT is not the only giant ground-based telescope in the works. The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will soon start taking shape atop Las Campanas, another Chilean peak. GMT will arrange seven 27.6-foot-wide (8.4 m) primary mirrors into one light-collecting surface 80 feet (24 m) across; project officials are aiming for "first light" in 2021.

And the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) — which, not surprisingly, will boast a light-collecting surface 30 m, or 98 feet, wide — is slated to start observing from Hawaii's Mauna Kea in 2022. Like E-ELT, TMT's primary mirror will be composed of hundreds of relatively small segments.

All three megascopes should help researchers tackle some of the biggest questions in astronomy, including the nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe.

Cyberwarfare? New System Protects Drones from Hackers.

Military drones are often used to store sensitive data, ranging from troop movements to strategic operations. While this may make them vulnerable to enemy interference, a new system is aiming to protect these unmanned aerial vehicles from cyberattacks.

Researchers at the University of Virginia and the Georgia Institute of Technology developed the system and tested it in a series of live, in-flight cyberattack scenarios. As military and commercial drone use continues to grow, protecting against such attacks will become a priority, the scientists said.

When installed on a drone, the System-Aware Secure Sentinel system detects "illogical behaviors" compared to those expected of the vehicle, said project leader Barry Horowitz, a systems and information engineer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

"Detections can serve to initiate automated recovery actions and to alert operators of the attack," Horowitz said in a statement.

In the demonstration, the researchers simulated various threats, including cyberattacks launched from enemies on the ground, attacks from military insiders and interference with supply chains. The "attacks" took place over the course of five days, and focused on interference in four different areas: GPS data, location data, information about imagery, and onboard surveillance/control of payloads.

"The inflight testing gauged the effectiveness of the countermeasure technology in hardening the unmanned system's cyber agility and resiliency under attack conditions," the researchers said.

In each scenario, the cybersecurity system was able to rapidly detect cyberattacks, notify the team and correct the system's performance, the researchers said.

The research center that developed the technology is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. The University of Virginia recently licensed the technology to the software company Mission Secure Inc., which is working to commercialize it for the military, intelligence and civil sectors.

Amazon's Robot 'Elves' Help Fill Cyber Monday Orders.

On one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, thousands of bright-orange, pancake-shaped robots are buzzing around Amazon's shipping centers, rushing to fill the company's Cyber Monday orders.

Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he eventually plans to use drones to deliver packages to online shoppers, but while the Federal Aviation Administration crafts official regulations for the commercial use of drones, the online retail giant has found an intermediate step: flat, wheeled robots that zoom around Amazon's warehouses, carrying 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) stacks of books, electronics and toys.  

The robots navigate on a grid system made of bar-code stickers stuck to the warehouse floor. The bots know which products to gather by scanning the bar codes as they roll along. The flat robots can slip under shelves full of products, lift them up and transport them back to employees, who then sort out the individual orders. The robots can lift shelves that weigh up to 750 lbs. (340 kilograms), according to the company's website.

While many shoppers rushed out to stores on Black Friday, some waited until Cyber Monday to take advantage of online deals. Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year, which means companies like Amazon have a huge number of orders to pack and ship.

In order to uphold its reputation for fast deliveries, Amazon hired 80,000 seasonal workers in anticipation of Cyber Monday and the holiday shopping season, according to a report released by the company. Last year, Amazon sold about 426 items per second on Cyber Monday, and the online retailer expects to sell even more this year.

Amazon bought the robot-building company Kiva Systems back in 2012 and now has about 15,000 of Kiva Systems' packing robots operating in its shipping centers. The robots are part of a larger packing and shipping system designed to improve efficiency. The system also includes huge robotic arms that can lift large bundles of products, and a sophisticated computer system for sorting items. This year, 10 of Amazon's 109 shipping centers are using robots to pick items and deliver them to employees for packing. 

Dave Clark, Amazon's senior vice president for operations, told the Associated Press that the robots will cut the Tracy, California, shipping center's operating cost by 20 percent. The robots aren't expected to cut any jobs — people are still needed to do more complex tasks, like packing the orders and searching for any damaged products, Clark told the Associated Press.

Amazon's next tech goals go beyond using robots to pack the orders — the company wants to use them for deliveries, too. The eventual goal of the program, called Prime Air, is to have drones drop off packages in customers' yards. However, the FAA has currently banned commercial drone use until regulations are in place in 2015. The FAA would need to grant Amazon an exemption from these rules before the company can continue developing its drone delivery system.

NASA's 1st Deep-Space Capsule in 40 Years Ready for Launch Debut.

A spaceship built to carry humans is about to venture into deep space for the first time in more than four decades.

NASA's Orion space capsule is scheduled to blast off on its first test flight Thursday. The unmanned mission, called Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), will send Orion zooming about 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from Earth, before rocketing back to the planet at high speeds to test out the capsule's heat shield, avionics and a variety of other systems.

No human-spaceflight vehicle has traveled so far since 1972, when the last of NASA's Apollo moon missions came back to Earth. Indeed, in all that time, no craft designed to carry crews has made it beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO), just a few hundred miles from the planet.

If all goes according to plan, Orion will eventually fly farther than any Apollo capsule ever did, taking astronauts to near-Earth asteroids and — by the mid-2030s — the ultimate destination, Mars.

"I gotta tell you, this is special," Bob Cabana, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said about EFT-1 during a press briefing last month. "This is our first step on that journey to Mars."

The challenges of deep space

Getting people safely to and from destinations in deep space poses challenges that the engineers of NASA's last crewed spaceship, the now-retired space shuttle, never had to consider. (No space shuttle ever traveled beyond Earth orbit.)

For example, if a problem develops aboard a spaceship in LEO, astronauts can theoretically be on the ground in less than an hour. But it would take days for a vehicle out by the moon or beyond to get home, said NASA Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer.

"So you've gotta have highly reliable systems, and you've gotta have capabilities to protect the crew in case of a contingency," he said.

One such capabilitiy will allow crewmembers aboard Orion to survive in their spacesuits for up to six days if the capsule gets depressurized, Geyer added.

"So if we have a totally depressed cabin, they can be in their suits and we can get them home," he said.

Deep-space vehicles are also exposed to higher radiation levels than vessels that stay in Earth orbit, where they are protected by the planet's magnetic field. So the shielding on Orion must be ample to safeguard the capsule's electronic equipment, Geyer said.

(Orion is designed to support astronauts for just 21 days at a time, so the need to protect crewmembers from radiation is not a big design driver. On longer missions — to Mars, for example — astronauts will spend most of their transit time in a deep-space habitat attached to Orion; the capsule's chief job is to get astronauts into space and back home again.)

Astronauts on deep-space missions will also return to Earth at much higher speeds than do crews that never venture beyond orbit.

"So the heat shield has to be different — different materials, different thicknesses," Geyer said. "And, actually, the physics of entry changes when you come back at those higher speeds."

The need to deal with those high re-entry speeds explains why Orion is a capsule, just like the spaceships that took astronauts to the moon and back during the Apollo program.

"The shape is the best shape for coming in from that high speed," said Mike Hawes, Orion program manager at the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin, which built the capsule for NASA.

Different than Apollo

But Orion is far from a carbon copy of the Apollo command module. For starters, it's bigger. Orion, which is designed to carry up to six astronauts, stands 10.8 feet tall (3.3 meters) and measures 16.5 feet (5 m) across the base. The three-person Apollo capsule was 10.6 feet tall by 12.8 feet wide (3.2 by 3.9 m). Orion contains 316 cubic feet (8.9 cubic m) of habitable volume, compared to 218 cubic feet (6.2 cubic m) for Apollo.

Technology has also advanced a great deal since the Apollo command module was put together.

"The Avcoat material, which we're using on the [Orion] heat shield, is similar to the Avcoat used on Apollo, although we have had to make some changes due to materials changes," Hawes said. "But the technology of just about everything else that we used to put in Orion and to build Orion have changed dramatically in that time.

"You think of 50 years of manufacturing changes — it's a totally different world," he added. "And in fact, we do have additive-manufactured [3D-printed] parts on Orion today."

The huge Saturn V rocket that blasted Apollo toward the moon was retired long ago, so Orion will rely on a different launch vehicle as well. EFT-1 will use a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket, but future Orion missions will ride atop NASA's Space Launch System megarocket (SLS), which is currently in development.

SLS and Orion are scheduled to fly together for the first time in 2017 or 2018, on the capsule's second unmanned test flight; the duo's first manned mission should come in 2021.

3D Printing Can Improve Face Transplants.

Surgeons are using new, highly accurate 3D printers to guide face transplantation operations, making the procedures faster and improving outcomes, according to a new report.

The face replicas made on these printers take into account bone grafts, metal plates and the underlying bone structure of the skull. They improve surgical planning, which ultimately makes the surgery much shorter, the report authors said.

The new technique has already been used in several patients, including two high-profile face transplant patients — Carmen Tarleton, who was maimed by her husband and received a face transplant in 2013, and Dallas Wiens, who was the first person in the U.S. to receive a full face transplant, in 2011.

The surgeries have dramatically improved the lives of the patients, the researchers said.

"They went from having no face and no features at all, to being able to talk and eat and breathe properly," said Dr. Frank Rybicki, a radiologist and the director of the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who presented the findings today (Dec. 1) at the meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Custom fit

For the patients, face transplantation is often the end of a long journey.

"Typically, by the time they come to us, they've had 20 or 30 surgeries already, just to save their lives," Rybicki told

That means that patients may have plates, screws, bone grafts and dozens of other small modifications in their faces, and the new face has to fit perfectly around these. 3D printing allows the team to see exactly where these elements are, making the surgery — which can take up to 25 hours — go more quickly and smoothly, Rybicki said.

Soft tissue

The team printed out the soft tissue for Tarleton, whose estranged husband threw industrial-strength lye (a strong chemical used in soap making) on her face, according to the report.

The lye "literally burned off all the skin and all the squishy stuff in the face, and just left the bone," which was covered by a paper-thin flap of tissue, Rybicki said.

Printing soft tissue requires a sophisticated technique, but it was tremendously helpful because, without 3D printing, it's very difficult to visualize that tissue, Rybicki said.

Since her face transplantation procedure in 2011, Tarleton has done amazingly well, and her facial features have truly become her own, Rybicki said. The tissue has undergone dramatic remodeling, and the face no longer resembles neither her original face nor the donor's face. Now, three years after her operation, it is hard to tell that she was the recipient of a face transplant, Rybicki said.

Images of Tarleton's face will be revealed at the meeting later today.

The team also created 3D-printed versions of the new soft-tissue structure at Tarleton's follow-up appointments. As a result, they can document some of the facial remodeling that Tarleton has undergone, Rybicki said.

New innovations

Having a better understanding of the facial anatomy can also improve outcomes in less dramatic types of facial reconstruction, said Dr. Edward Caterson, a plastic surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital who is part of the same face transplant team.

For example, when someone's jaw is destroyed, doctors typically harvest a piece of rib or leg bone to replace the missing jaw. Because the tibia, or leg bone, is quite straight, it's tricky to cut it for a perfect fit. 3D printing allows that cut to be done more precisely, Caterson said.

"We're also getting an opportunity to innovate surgically, due to the fact we can do this planning preoperatively," Caterson told.

Recently, 3D printing enabled Caterson to harvest bone from a completely new location — the femur, or thigh bone. Though doctors often use rib grafts to replace jawbone, ribs don't have their own blood supply, so they typically collapse after a few years.

3D modeling allowed Caterson to use a portion of the femur that has its own blood supply, which should last much longer, he said.

Invisible Dark Matter May Show Up in GPS Signals.

GPS satellites are crucial for navigation, but now researchers think this technology could be used for an unexpected purpose: finding traces of enigmatic dark matter that is thought to lurk throughout the universe.

Physicists estimate there is nearly six times as much dark matter in the universe as there is visible matter. But despite a decades-long search, scientists have yet to find direct evidence of invisible dark matter, and its existence is inferred based on its gravitational pull on galaxies and other celestial bodies. Without the extra force of gravity from dark matter, researchers say, galaxies wouldn't be able to hold themselves together.

Physicists don't know what dark matter is made of, but some think it's composed of particles that barely interact with the visible world, which is why dark matter is invisible and has been difficult to detect.

However, Andrei Derevianko, a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, have proposed that dark matter isn't made of particles at all. The researchers think dark matter may be a topological defect — a kind of tear in the fabric of space-time that can't be repaired. They think these patches of dark matter drifting by could interrupt GPS satellites and atomic clock systems.

To search for the theoretical patches of dark matter, the team is using GPS data from the Geodetic Lab, in Reno, that pulls in data from more than 12,000 GPS stations around the world. In particular, the researchers are focusing on GPS satellites that use atomic clocks for navigation.

GPS satellites orbiting above Earth and their ground-based networks have synchronized clocks, and Derevianko and Pospelov think when clumps of dark matter drift by, they could cause interference between the two.

"The idea is, where the atomic clocks go out of synchronization, we would know that dark matter, the topological defect, has passed by," Derevianko said in a statement. "In fact, we envision using the GPS constellation as the largest human-built dark-matter detector."

It shouldn't take much to detect dark matter blowing by, the researchers said. It would only need to desynchronize the clocks by slightly more than a billionth of a second. The researchers also think these theoretical dark matter clumps travel at different speeds than other phenomena that could similarly desynchronize atomic clocks, such as solar flares. The different speeds would have different effects on the atomic clocks, the scientists said.

Glenn Starkman, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved with the research, said it makes sense to first search for dark matter within the limits of the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics that outlines how the universe should behave. This means looking for dark matter particles, not clumps, Starkman told Live Science. But, researchers working at underground particle detectors and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest atom smasher, where the once-elusive Higgs boson was discovered, have so far failed to find any dark matter particles.

An unusual idea like this one could help spark some alternative ideas for what makes up dark matter, said Dan Hooper, a researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois, who was also not involved with the study. That is, Hooper said, if physicists don't spot dark matter particles in the next couple of years.

New Artificial Intelligence Challenge Could Be the Next Turing Test.

A recently released biopic of Alan Turing ("The Imitation Game") tells the story of the British mathematician and cryptographer who built a machine to crack the German Enigma code during World War II. But Turing is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence.

In 1950, Turing introduced a landmark test of artificial intelligence. In the so-called Turing test, a person engages in simultaneous conversations with both a human and a computer, and tries to determine which is which. If the computer can convince the person it is human, Turing would consider it artificially intelligent.

The Turing test has been a helpful gauge of progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), but it is more than 60 years old, and researchers are developing a successor that they say is better adapted to the field of AI today. 

The Winograd Schema Challenge consists of a set of multiple-choice questions that require common sense reasoning, which is easy for a human, but surprisingly difficult for a machine. The prize for the annual competition, sponsored by the Burlington, Massachusetts-based software company Nuance Communications, is $25,000.

"Really the only approach to measuring artificial intelligence is the idea of the Turing test," said Charlie Ortiz, senior principal manager of AI at Nuance. "But the problem is, it encourages the development of programs that can talk but don't necessarily understand."

The Turing test also encourages trickery, Ortiz told Live Science. Like politicians, instead of giving a direct answer, machines can change the subject or give a stock answer. "The Turing test is a good test for a future in politics," he said.

Earlier this year, a computer conversation program, or "chatbot," named Eugene Goostman was said to have passed the Turing test at a competition organized by the University of Reading, in England. But experts say the bot gamed the system by claiming to speak English as a second language, and by assuming the persona of a 13-year-old boy, who would dodge questions and give unpredictable answers.

In contrast to the Turing test, the Winograd Schema Challenge doesn't allow participants to change the subject or talk their way around questions — they must answer the questions asked. For example, a typical question might be, "Paul tried to call George on the phone, but he wasn't successful. Who was not successful?" The correct answer is Paul, but the response requires common sense reasoning.

"What this test tries to do is require the test taker to do some thinking to understand what's being said," Ortiz said, adding, "The winning program wouldn't be able to just guess."

Although the Winograd Schema Challenge has some advantages over the Turing test, it doesn't test every ability that a truly intelligent entity should possess. For example, Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University, has promoted the concept of a visual Turing test, in which a machine would watch videos and answer questions about them.