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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

  • Ethiopia quietly makes strides in robotics to improve lives

    by Admin / 273 Views

    The black-and-white robot stopped and its eyes suddenly lit up. Rotating 90 degrees, it recognised the blue plastic ball a few centimetres away, came forward and kicked it.

    "The robot is Chinese, but the processor is made in Ethiopia," Getnet Aseffa explains. "A student developed it, and within a few months we will organise the first national football competition between robots, in the same vein as the International RoboCup tournament."

    Welcome to the iCog Labs experiment room in the heart of Addis Ababa's university district. Getnet, 28, is one of the brains behind the operation.

    After graduating in computer science in 2012, he co-created iCog with the help of US researcher Ben Goertzel.

    It is the first Ethiopian research and development laboratory specialising in artificial intelligence.

    "Our programmers have the same skills as Chinese, Americans and Europeans," Getnet says. "The only difference is the economic gap and the daily challenges we face."

    Among them are lack of infrastructure, erratic internet access and frequent power cuts.

    Getnet is convinced cutting-edge technology can be a development tool for his country.

    Ethiopia has invested €87m in the technology park Ethio ICT Village and does not hide its ambition to become a centre of excellence for scientific and technological research.

    The government has even imposed quotas: 70 per cent of students are required to take a course in hard sciences. Some of them may be part of the first promotion of the master's degree in artificial intelligence that will soon open at the University of Addis Ababa.

    "Now my goal is to bring robotics to elementary school," Getnet says, giving a plastic ball to the robot.

    "To develop our country, it's necessary that children learn the basics of programming from an early age."

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  • NASA transports its Mars crew capsule in the belly of a really weird cargo plane

    by Admin / 318 Views

    NASA's Orion capsule — the spacecraft that could one day take humans to Mars — is going on an important flight today. Unfortunately it's not into space. Instead, the main structure of the vehicle is being transported from the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana, where the capsule was built, to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That's where it will live until it goes on its first uncrewed test flight on top of NASA's next big rocket, the Space Launch System.

    The Orion has a special ride to Kennedy called the Super Guppy. It's a giant transport plane NASA uses to lug around big cargo. Shaped like, well, a guppy, the plane is able to carry loads that weigh up to 26 tons in a cargo hold that has up to 39,000 cubic feet of usable space. NASA's Super Guppy was originally used to transport parts needed to form the International Space Space Station; the plane would carry the pieces to the sites they'd eventually launch from. Now, NASA keeps it on hand to carry oversized cargo, and the Orion definitely fits the bill, measuring about 10 feet tall and 16.5 feet in diameter.

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  • Ethiopian Geniuses who makes their own Terminators

    by Admin / 304 Views

    The black-and-white robot stopped and its eyes, two small red lights, suddenly lit up. Rotating 

    about 90 degrees, it recognized the blue plastic ball a few centimeters away, came forward and kicked it. "The robot is Chinese, but the processor is made in Ethiopia," Getnet Aseffa explains. "A student developed it, and within a few months we will organize the first national football competition between robots, in the same vein as the International RoboCup tournament!"  

    Welc
    ome to the iCog Labs experiment room in the heart of Addis Ababa's university district. Getnet Aseffa, 28, is one of the brains behind the operation. After graduating in computer science in 2012, this avid reader of futurist author Ray Kurzweil co-created iCog with the help of American researcher Ben Goertzel. It is the first Ethiopian research and development laboratory specializing in artificial intelligence.

    Read more »

  • NASA’s Solar Probe Plus to be launched in 2018, will fly ten times closer to the Sun’s corona

    by Admin / 320 Views

    NASA first discussed sending a suicide probe into the Sun itself nearly 60 years ago. Looks like the space agency is making good on a space probe that will travel nearly ten times closer to our star than the planet Mercury.

    Scientists at NASA and Johns Hopkins University are working on a space probe that will enter the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time, giving scientists invaluable data on the Sun’s corona. They also hope the space probe to provide new data about the Sun’s effects on everything from space weather to short term climate change.

    Named by the NASA as the “Solar Probe Plus“, it is currently being built by NASA with assistance from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and scientists from a variety of other universities and institutes. Built at a cost of $1.5 billion, Solar Probe Plus will carry an array of sensors into the sun’s corona, which will hopefully survive temperatures of over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft.

    According to Ralph McNutt of Johns Hopkins University, one of the probe’s team leads told FORBES that creating a spacecraft that can survive contact with the sun requires considerable scientific mastery. Solar Probe Plus will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun

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