Russia sends its first humanoid robot Fedor into space

Yahoo – AFP, Maria ANTONOVA, 22 August 2019

Named Fedor, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia

Russia on Thursday launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 10 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station.

Named Fedor, short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia.

Fedor blasted off in a Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft at 6:38 am Moscow time (0338 GMT) from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz is set to dock with the space station on Saturday and stay till September 7.

Soyuz ships are normally manned on such trips, but on Thursday no humans are travelling in order to test a new emergency rescue system.

Instead of cosmonauts, Fedor, also known as Skybot F850, was strapped into a specially adapted pilot's seat, with a small Russian flag in hand.

"Let's go. Let's go," the robot was heard saying during launch, repeating the famous phrase used by first man in space Yuri Gagarin.

The silvery anthropomorphic robot stands 1.80 metres (5 foot 11 inches) tall and weighs 160 kilogrammes (353 pounds).

Fedor has Instagram and Twitter accounts with posts saying it is learning new skills such as opening a bottle of water. In the station, it will trial those manual skills in very low gravity.

"That's connecting and disconnecting electric cables (and) using standard items, from a screwdriver and a spanner to a fire extinguisher," the Russian space agency's director for prospective programmes and science, Alexander Bloshenko, said in televised comments ahead of the launch.

"The first stage of in-flight experiments went according to the flight plan," the robot tweeted after reaching orbit.

Fedor copies human movements, a key skill that allows it to remotely help astronauts or even people on Earth to carry out tasks while the humans are strapped into an exoskeleton.

Fedor has Instagram and Twitter accounts

Such robots will eventually carry out dangerous operations such as space walks, Bloshenko told the state news agency RIA Novosti.

On the website of one of the state backers of the project, the Foundation of Advanced Research Projects, Fedor is described as potentially useful on Earth for working in high radiation environments, demining and tricky rescue missions.

Though initially developed for the emergencies ministry, Fedor can also be seen shooting at targets from two handguns in a video posted by Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin.

On board, the robot will perform tasks supervised by Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, who joined the ISS in July and will wear an exoskeleton and augmented reality glasses in a series of experiments later this month.

Since Fedor is not trained to grab space station handles to move about in microgravity conditions, its legs will be immobilised on the space station, Bloshenko said.

Fedor not the first

Space agency chief Rogozin showed pictures of the robot to President Vladimir Putin this month, saying it will be "an assistant to the crew".

"In the future we plan that this machine will also help us conquer deep space," he added.

Russian media speculated that Fedor-like robots will be used in Russia's Moon programme.

Fedor is not the first robot to go into space.

In 2011, NASA sent up Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot developed with General Motors that had a similar aim of working in high-risk environments.

It was flown back to Earth in 2018 after experiencing technical problems.

In 2013, Japan sent up a small robot called Kirobo along with the ISS's first Japanese space commander. Developed with Toyota, it was able to hold conversations -- albeit only in Japanese.

Named Fedor, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia

Fedor has Instagram and Twitter accounts.

#UPDATE An unmanned spacecraft carrying Russia's first humanoid robot to be sent into orbit successfully docks @Space_Station following a failed attempt over the weekend https://t.co/7Ygb8MwMuf pic.twitter.com/V8t8YFnWd2

— AFP news agency (@AFP) 27 augustus 2019

One big step for man as astronaut controls robot from ISS

Yahoo – AFP, Jo Biddle, September 8, 2015

The blue-and-white Interact Centaur fibreglass robot, which cost less than 200,000
euros ($224,000) to build, has a camera on its head which allows the controller to
directly see the task it is performing (AFP Photo/Jo Biddle)

Noordwijk (Netherlands) (AFP) - European experts have pulled off a major advance that might one day help build new worlds in space after an astronaut in the International Space Station remotely guided a robot on Earth by feel.

Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the breath-taking experiment in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole on Monday under the careful control of the European Space Agency.

While orbiting some 400 kilometres (250 miles) above Earth, Mogensen took control of the Interact Centaur rover which has a pair of arms for delicate, high-precision work.

The blue-and-white fibreglass robot, which cost less than 200,000 euros ($224,000) to build, also has a camera on its head which allows the controller to directly see the task it is performing.

But sight is not the most important sense in this project. It is touch.

In real-time, thanks to super swift signals bouncing off a dedicated complex system of satellites working in synchronisation, the astronaut manoeuvered the robot into place.

He then very slowly lowered a metal pin held by the robot into a tight hole in a task board with less than a sixth of a millimetre of wriggle room.

Using a joystick

For the first time -- thanks to force-feedback technology -- when the pin was not aligned correctly Mogensen felt it hit the sides of the hole via the joystick he was operating on the space station.

Cheers erupted when after several long nail-biting minutes the rover -- which slightly resembles Disney's WALL.E cartoon character -- dropped the pin successfully into place.

Scientists and engineers believe applications of this kind of tactile technology are huge -- allowing humans to guide robots in delicate tasks by feeling their way.

The technology will allow people "to project a human-like presence into the robots, to do human-like tasks on the surface" of a planet, Andre Schiele, head of ESA's Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory, told AFP.

With space engineers hoping at some point to fly people to Mars, "we have to bring them back" which means before they first step foot on the planet "you would have to build an entire launch-platform on the planet."

Robots like the Centaur -- also affectionately dubbed the "blue bug" by some of its designers -- could be put in place first to do the building.

"There's going to be a need for a set-up, some building before a human even sets foot on the planet and for that we could send down robots and control them from a space station," said industrial designer Emiel den Exter.

The 18-month project was a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA)and students from Delft University of Technology.

"Even something like lacing your shoe is something you rely entirely on your tactile senses" for, Schiele told journalists gathered at the ESA headquarters in the Dutch town of Noordwijk.

Earthly uses

On Earth this cutting-edge technology known as haptics could also be used "everywhere where you basically don't want to send humans," said Schiele.

"Feeling" robots would have been useful to cap the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or help seal the reactors at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 2011 meltdown.

Professor Frans van der Helm, from Delft University's mechanical engineering unit, said one scheme was looking at using such robots to work in a massive nuclear fusion project in France.

Inside the costly, multipartner International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) -- if it is built -- "the heat will be about one million degrees," Van der Helm told AFP.

"So everything starts to deform" making it hard for robots to complete a task which they have been programmed for, he said.

In this case, telepresence technology would allow a human to feel their way through and fix a problem.

For 27-year-old Turkish student Doga Emirdag, who helped design the Centaur's exo-skeleton as part of his masters degree, Monday's demonstration was a big day.

"The robot as it is wouldn't go into space. But the technology being developed will go to space," he said with a broad smile.

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3D-printed components flown in British fighter jet

Google – AFP, 5 January 201

A designer looks at a 3D printer during an exhibition in London on April 23,

2013 (AFP/File, Adrian Dennis)

London — A Tornado fighter jet fitted with metal components created on a 3D printer undertook a successful test flight in Britain last month, defence company BAE Systems said Sunday.

The plane was equipped with a 3D-printed protective cover for the cockpit radio, a protective guard in the landing gear and support struts on the air intake door, the British firm said.

The announcement follows NASA's successful test of a 3D-printed rocket engine component in August last year, as aerospace companies seek cheaper and quicker ways to manufacture engineering parts.

"You are suddenly not fixed in terms of where you have to manufacture these things," said Mike Murray, Head of Airframe Integration at BAE Systems, announcing the successful test flight at the firm's airfield in Warton, northwest England.

"You can manufacture the products and whatever base you want, providing you can get a machine there, which means you can also start to support other platforms such as ships and aircraft carriers.

"And if it's feasible to get machines out on the front line, it also gives improved capability where we wouldn't traditionally have any manufacturing support."

BAE said some of the parts -- produced at a Royal Air Force base in eastern England -- cost less than £100 ($165, 120 euros) to manufacture, and had the potential to save hundreds of thousands of pounds every year, without giving details.

3D printing 'will change the world'

Google – AFP, Helen Rowe (AFP), 16 November 2013

Designer Susana Soares looks at a 3D printer during a photocall for Insects au

Gratin exhibition at The Wellcome Collection in London on April 23, 2013 (AFP/

File, Adrian Dennis)

Paris — From replacement kidneys to guns, cars, prosthetics and works of art, 3D printing is predicted to transform our lives in the coming decades as dramatically as the Internet did before it.

"I have no doubt it is going to change the world," researcher James Craddock told AFP at the two-day 3D Printshow in Paris which wraps up later on Saturday.

A member of the 3D Printing Research Group (3DPRG) at the UK's Nottingham University, Craddock nevertheless predicted that use of 3D printing would be limited.

Visitors look at a 3D printer printing an

object, during "Inside 3D Printing" conference

and exhibition in New York, April 22, 2013

(AFP/File, Emmanuel Dunand)

"You wouldn't want to make a cup from a 3D printer because it would probably fall apart, leak or poison you, but you would use it for high-value, beautiful items or replacement parts," he said.

"The real revolutionary factor is industrial use," he added.

Here is a selection of the potential future uses of 3D printing:

- Arms

This is one of the more eye-catching prospects and has attracted a lot of publicity.

Californian engineering company Solid Concepts said earlier this month it had produced a metal replica of a classic 1911 shotgun.

US entrepreneur and inventor Brook Drumm, however, warned that the process of printing a gun would be slow, expensive and potentially dangerous, requiring lasers at high temperatures, lots of power and hazardous materials.

Drumm set up his firm Printrbot to produce printers costing from $400 that print plastic items.

Metal printers can cost around $250,000 (185,000 euros) and "the particulates are so fine that your skin could absorb them through the pores. The materials are not safe", he said.

The gun itself -- unless made out of metal -- would also be unreliable.

"There's a lot of moving parts in a gun and they need to be precise," he said, adding that he tried to print a plastic gun but gave up because it took so long.

"Time-wise, if I was going to print a plastic gun and you were going to go and buy a metal one, even if it took you two weeks to get approval I probably still wouldn't have it working first," he said.

- Art

Fancy a replica of a Viking helmet or one of the Louvre's most famous sculptures on the mantelpiece?

American Cosmo Wenman has used thousands of photographs taken in some of the world's biggest museums to produce exact plastic copies.

Works he has produced include the ancient Greek statue Venus de Milo which is in the Louvre.

"If you look at the small print at museums in terms of taking photographs, they say that you cannot put them to commercial use," he said.

"But from a practical point of view that is not enforceable and for antiquities there is no intellectual property issue," he said.

- Cars

An "Urbee", an ecologic vehicle, is displayed

 during the "3D Print Show" exhibition in Paris

 on November 15, 2013 (AFP, Joel Saget)

Canadian Jim Kor's 3D Urbee car is made out of plastic and stainless steel.

The futuristic-looking three-wheeler is electric but uses petrol at higher speeds.

Production designer Kor says if a car company mass produced the vehicle it would be possible to keep the price down to around $16,000 (12,000 euros).

"We want it to be the Volkswagen Beetle for the next century, low cost and long-lasting too," he said.

"It should last 30-plus years. Our goal is that it should be 100 percent recyclable."

- Jewellery

Jewellery can made to ensure that each piece is slightly different, known as "mass customisation".

3D printing can also make the production process far less expensive and time consuming.

Dutch jewellery designer Yvonne van Zummeren produces a range of jewellery made out of lightweight nylon polyamide.

"All my designs are based on works of art," she said holding a bracelet that uses a Matisse motif.

"It enables me to be a jewellery designer much more easily. Otherwise I would have needed a factory in China and a minimum order of 20,000," she added.

"When you are producing something for the first time it means you can adapt and try again very easily until you get the result you want."

- Prosthetics

Prosthetics can be custom made to provide the perfect match.

Electronics could be built in allowing the recipient accurate control of the limb.

"It would all be printed out at the same time," said 3DPRG's Craddock.

- Replacement parts

One-off parts are needed by everyone from NASA to the person who loses an unusual jacket button.

Google and NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab

Google, 11 October 2013

A peek at the early days of the Quantum AI Lab: a partnership between NASA, Google, and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer.

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Quantum-entanglement

A history of Creation – part 1 - (CC channeled through Aisha North)

A history of Creation – part 2 - (CC channeled through Aisha North)
A history of Creation – part 3 - (CC channeled through Aisha North)

"THE NEXT 18 YEARS"–  Dec 2, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll)

(Subjects: You are looking at a Quantum event, clearing a filter - Portal pineal , Higher self to step forward and communicate to You, Still remains in 3D but exposure to multi dimensions, Evolution of humanity, Intent, Mayan Calendar, Midpoint on 21-12-2012, 26.000 Years, Milky Way, Nostradamus, 1987, Beginning to a New Time, Channellers/Teachers, Center of Galaxy – Black hole, Bridge of Swords, Pleiadians, Children, Inventions – The discoveries (e.g. : Airplanes - Medicines – Radio .. ): These new Discoveries were given all over the planet when Human consciousness was ready for it. New Inventions are coming, the timing depends on how the middle East problems are solved, Biology reaction of quantum energy; new radio of the future, seeing quantum energy, when it is revealed all science books will have to be rewritten, This will be an AHA moment – be possible to communicate with the rest of Galaxy, NASA, Church/Religion will be effected the most by these discoveries, The quantum discovery will see the grid, life, gardens and will redefine life, DNA (3 billion pieces) evolving piece DNA are chancing, Gaia/Humanity are linked, new instruments will start to reveal the DNA variance, Evolution revealed: Autistic children have born with the removal of their 3D structure in the brain, Gaia/Spirit are testing these quantum beings  (Evolved DNA), Universe central clock = Rifs,  Globally there will be only 5 currencies, Wars on earth will be declared barbaric, Middle East, Global Unity, .. etc.) 

US websites suspended after federal shutdown

BBC News, Tom Espiner, Technology reporter, Ellis Island, 1 Oct 2013

Federal websites and Twitter feeds, including for the Statue of Liberty, were
suspended after a partial US government shutdown.

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A number of US government websites and Twitter feeds have been suspended due to a partial US government shutdown.

Nasa's website was unavailable as non-essential services were closed, and the White House web page was not being updated, after a lapse in federal funding.

The US Department of Homeland Security was not responding to public emails submitted via its website.

US government employees affected by the shutdown were not able to access email.

Republican opposition to President Obama's healthcare reform law, the Affordable Care Act, lead to the the government shutdown on Tuesday.

The act, known also as Obamacare, has caused legislative deadlock. Congress failed to pass legislation to fund the government on Monday.

Workers' email access suspended

Thousands of federal workers who had been sent home on Tuesday were barred from accessing work emails as part of US government policy.

The same US law which gave the legal basis for the shutdown, the Antideficiency Act, also prohibited work "via mobile devices or remote computer connections" for employees who had been sent home.

Communications channels for members of the public were also affected by the shutdown.

US citizens can normally use federal websites and Twitter feeds to put queries to government institutions.

On Tuesday, email questions from the public were not being processed by US bodies including the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

"Due to the lapse in government funding, information on this website will not be routinely updated, the transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the department may not be able to respond to inquiries until funding has been restored," read a notice on the Department of Justice site.

People trying to reach Nasa's main website were redirected to a US government notice explaining that the page was not available.

Other federal websites such as the US Department of Agriculture and the US Census Bureau displayed holding pages.

Dozens of Twitter feeds, including tweets from the National Park Service for the Statue of Liberty, were stopped.

Smaller federal institutions such as the Smithsonian National Zoo were affected by the shutdown.

The zoo's webcams, which normally stream images of giant pandas, cheetahs, flamingos, and naked mole rats, were also down.

"None of our live animal cams will broadcast," said a notice on the Smithsonian National Zoo web page. "The cams require federal resources, primarily staff, to run and broadcast. They've been deemed non-essential during the shutdown."

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Nasa tests 3D-printed rocket engine fuel injector

BBC News, 15 July 2013

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Nasa says 3D printing could one day
 be used by astronauts to make
replacement parts

Nasa has announced it has successfully tested a 3D-printed rocket engine part.

The US space agency said that the injector component could be made more quickly and cheaply using the technique.

The part is used to deliver liquid oxygen and hydrogen gas to an engine's combustion chamber.

The news follows General Electric's revelation that it planned to use 3D printing technology to make fuel nozzles for its jet engines.

Nasa said that California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne had made the injector using a method called selective laser melting (SLM).

The technique involves turning a computer-designed object into a real-world part by controlling a high-powered laser beam which melts and fuses thin layers of metallic powders into the preordained shape.

The test part was smaller than would be used in a full-size rocket, but large enough to test it could withstand the heat and pressure involved.

Nasa said the component would normally have taken a year to make because of the exact measurements involved, but by using SLM the manufacturing time was cut to less than four months and the price reduced by more than 70%.

"Nasa recognises that on Earth and potentially in space, additive manufacturing can be game-changing for new mission opportunities, significantly reducing production time and cost by 'printing' tools, engine parts or even entire spacecraft," said Michael Gazarik, Nasa's associate administrator for space technology.

SLM is not the only unusual manufacturing technique being explored by Nasa.

The agency has also asked researchers at Washington State University to see whether it would be possible to 3D-print objects out of powder made from lunar rocks.

It is also testing a process called electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3) which uses a computer-controlled electron beam gun placed in a vacuum that welds metal wires into complex shapes and patterns.

It has suggested the process could be used by astronauts to make spare parts in space.

Design competition

Nasa's announcement comes a month after General Electric announced a competition for third-parties to create the best 3D-printable design for an aircraft engine bracket - the part used to support the engine when it needs to be serviced.

General Electric is using 3D-printed
 parts in a new range of turbofan engines

The firm will divide a $20,000 (£13,300) cash prize pool between the eight best performing designs after they are built and tested between August and November.

The US company has already used SLM to produce parts for its upcoming Leap (Leading Edge Aviation Propulsion) family of turbofan engines, made in conjunction with France's Snecma.

It has said the process allowed it to make a single widget rather than having to solder 15 to 20 parts together, helping cut its weight and boost the engine's fuel efficiency.

Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap?

Quantum mechanics research could hold the key to a new generation of super-fast computers

The Guardian, The Observer, John Naughton, 18 May 2013

The Large Hadron Collider was built in the pursuit of pure science, but research
 into quantum mechanics might soon yield enormous benefits for computing.
Photograph: Rex Features

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost," wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, "not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there." Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.

Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, that one particular subatomic particle, the neutrino, can pass right through the Earth without stopping. They believe that a subatomic particle can be in two different states at the same time. And that two particles can be "entangled" in such a way that they can co-ordinate their properties regardless of the distance in space and time that separates them (an idea that even Einstein found "spooky"). And that whenever we look at subatomic particles they are altered by the act of inspection so that, in a sense, we can never see them as they are.

For a long time, the world looked upon quantum physicists with a kind of bemused affection. Sure, they might be wacky, but boy, were they smart! And western governments stumped up large quantities of dosh to enable them to build the experimental kit they needed for their investigations. A huge underground doughnut was excavated in the suburbs of Geneva, for example, and filled with unconscionable amounts of heavy machinery in the hope that it would enable the quark-hunters to find the Higgs boson, or at any rate its shadowy tracks.

All of this was in furtherance of the purest of pure science – curiosity-driven research. The idea that this stuff might have any practical application seemed, well, preposterous to most of us. But here and there, there were people who thought otherwise (among them, as it happens, Richard Feynman). In particular, these visionaries wondered about the potential of harnessing the strange properties of subatomic particles for computational purposes. After all, if a particle can be in two different states at the same time (in contrast to a humdrum digital bit, which can only be a one or a zero), then maybe we could use that for speeded-up computing. And so on.

Thus was born the idea of the "quantum computer". At its heart is the idea of a quantum bit or qubit. The bits that conventional computers use are implemented by transistors that can either be on (1) or off (0). Qubits, in contrast, can be both on and off at the same time, which implies that they could be used to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, therefore, quantum computers should run much faster than conventional, silicon-based ones, at least in calculations where parallel processing is helpful.

For as long as I have been paying attention to this stuff, the academic literature has been full of arguments about quantum computing. Some people thought that while it might be possible in theory, in practice it would prove impracticable. But while these disputes raged, a Canadian company called D-Wave – whose backers include Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the "investment arm" of the CIA (I am not making this up) – was quietly getting on with building and marketing a quantum computer. In 2011, D-Wave sold its first machine – a 128-qubit computer – to military contractor Lockheed Martin. And last week it was announced that D-Wave had sold a more powerful machine to a consortium led by Google and Nasa and a number of leading US universities.

What's interesting about this is not so much its confirmation that the technology may indeed be a practical proposition, though that's significant in itself. More important is that it signals the possibility that we might be heading for a major step change in processing power. In one experiment, for example, it was found that the D-Wave machine was 3,600 times faster than a conventional computer in certain kinds of applications. Given that the increases in processing power enabled by Moore's law (which applies only to silicon and says that computing power doubles roughly every two years) are already causing us to revise our assumptions about what computers can and cannot do, we may have some more revisions to do. All of which goes to prove the truth of the adage: pure research is just research that hasn't yet been applied.

Related Article:

Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer

Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer

BBC News, Alex Mansfield, BBC Radio Science Unit, 16 May 2013

The machine does not fit the conventional concept of a quantum computer,
but makes use of quantum effects

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A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.

Is quantum computing possible?

Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.

Google wants to use the facility at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition.

University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA).

Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.

Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world.

Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects.

Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales.

Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing.

But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state.

"You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.

One gate opens...

Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities.

Geordie Rose believes others have taken
 the wrong approach to quantum computing

Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.

"The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme.

"And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea."

Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.

But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.

The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.

Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013.

US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.

Releated Article:

NASA Produces and Promotes New LENR Video: Nuclear Power Coming Soon To Your Home

NASA Produces and Promotes New LENR Video: Nuclear Power Coming Soon To Your Home

MNISPEL, By Dr. Mark D. Nispel, January 12, 2012

NASA is all in and claiming to “be working on another way of producing energy with efficient nuclear power.”  NASA as an organization apparently suddenly wants to be seen as in the forefront of this new thing they see coming.  Pretty cool actually.

NASA has produced and featured a video presenting LENR as a technology.  The video features Dr. Joseph Zawodny, Senior Research Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center.  The video highlights the potential of having a LENR nuclear power generation device in your home to provide all the power needs of your home as the “easiest” implementation, even though it could potentially be used even for transportation and infrastructure.  The technology is “clean” producing no ionizing radiation or waste.

See the video highlight on the right of the NASA technology gateway page here.

The video directly is here.

In the meantime, A. Rossi continues to move apace claiming he is working on putting his e-cat LENR  device into production.  He is working with National Instruments to complete his design.  He claims that the first small home units that generate electricity and can heat / cool the home will be in production by the end of 2012 for around $1500 and he plans on producing a million the first year after they get going.  See here and here.

Two interesting notes:

1. The NASA video avoids using the term “cold fusion.”

2. The NASA video interestingly right toward the end uses an image to represent LENR 
somewhat abstractly which it attributes to the US Navy SPAWAR within the video (see lower left).

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"Recalibration of Knowledge" – Jan 14, 2012 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: Channelling, God-Creator, Benevolent Design, New Energy, Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Reincarnation, Gaia, Old Energies (Africa,Terrorists, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela ... ), Weather, Rejuvenation, Akash, Nicolas Tesla / Einstein, Cold Fusion, Magnetics, Lemuria, Atomic Structure (Electrons, Particles, Polarity, Self Balancing, Magnetism), Entanglement, "Life is necessary for a Universe to exist and not the other way around", DNA, Humans (Baby getting ready, First Breath, Stem Cells, Embryonic Stem Cells, Rejuvenation), Global Unity, ... etc.) - New !