Sending Wikipedia to the Moon and Other Science Tech

Welcome to another day in our science and technology news mashup! We’ve got a nice set of future tech lined up for today. Let’s fire away.

Sending Wikipedia to the Moon

Mankind sent its first manned mission to the moon in 1969. Now, a team plans to send a curated version of Wikipedia to the Moon, just like the Voyager Golden Record placed aboard the Voyager missions, since they have around 20GB to spare.

The team, part of Google’s Lunar XPRIZE, call themselves Part-Time-Scientists and are sponsored by Audi to compete for over $30 million in prizes. The challenge is to create a rover and bring it to the Moon, drive 500 meters, and send back images to Earth.

“The Lunar challenge is mainly about pioneer spirit, curiosity, and visions for humanity. So, with the symbolic act of leaving a snapshot of human history on the surface of the Moon, we are thinking more about future generations than aliens. Our very special Wikipedia time capsule will be there, as a historical document. And it will be special, indeed, because historical messages to the future have never before been worked on by so many people, representing so many cultures and perspectives on knowledge.”

Sony’s Contact Lens Allows You to Record & Store Everything You See

Traditional contact lens are used either for fashion, or to improve vision. But why not a camera in a contact lens? In a patent titled ‘Contact Lens and Storage Medium’, Sony has patented a type of Smart Contact Lens technology that allows a user to record and store images and videos by blinking his/her eyes.

A special feature of the patented device is the fact that it knows when a user is blinking voluntarily or involuntarily. “It is known that a time period of usual blinking is usually 0.2 seconds to 0.4 seconds, and therefore it can be said that, in the case where the time period of blinking exceeds 0.5 seconds, the blinking is conscious blinking that is different from usual blinking (unconscious blinking),” the patent reads.

Controlling Drone Swarms with an Algorithm

To make drones more capable when operating in multiple numbers, MIT has devised a control algorithm that they say is more efficient and saves up on computing power.

“In a centralized algorithm a single entity has all the information and finds a solution. In a decentralized algorithm each [robot] entity has only partial information of the environment and the other robots. The robots need to communicate to pass information and coordinate,” says Javier Alonso-Mora, MIT researcher.

The researchers believe drone swarms hold immense potential due to the ever-rising popularity of drones in recent times. “The closest applications would be drone swarms navigating in formation, for example for surveillance of an area, mapping of an environment and mobile manipulators collaboratively carrying objects on the factory floor,” he adds.

Read more at www.bit.ly/q3newsblog. Q3 Technologies partners with global companies to develop complex software applications across different industry domains. We are focused on offshore software development in Gurgaon including technology consulting, application migration and modernization, end-to-end support & maintenance and IT/Infrastructure support services.