Stubborn-turtle-blog

US government plans to use drones to fire vaccine-laced M&Ms at ferrets

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has a plan to save the endangered black-footed ferret, and it involves candy. The agency has proposed delivering vaccines to a ferret colony in Montana...

We promise we did not use Mad-Libs to write this headline.

Barack Obama: America will take the giant leap to Mars

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space," writes the President, "sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth."

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space," writes the President, "sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth."

Let’s go next Space Race

The Secret to Small Drone Obstacle Avoidance Is to Just Crash Into Stuff

Small drones bumble through obstacles just like bees

Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It’s a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you’ve got small platforms that move fast and don’t have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less?

At the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, where they’ve been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. Seriously, it’ll be fine!

This kind of “it’ll be fine” philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don’t worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going. Or, if you’re a roboticist, you might say something like, “The penalty due to collisions is small at these scales and sensors and controllers are not precise enough to guarantee collision free trajectories,” so stop trying to solve the collision problem, and just focus on not completely trashing yourself when you hit something. (Swiss startup Flyability was among the first to demonstrate the benefits of collision robustness by equipping a regular-size drone with a gimballed protective cage and flying through forests and ice caves.)

science news: another incredibly smart and driven woman who discovered really important things just died without receiving recognition in her lifetime for any of her groundbreaking crucial work after decades of brutally unfair sexism click through for even more in depth accounts of the monstrous amount of sexist bullshit she had to put up with every single day of her goddamn life

science news: girls today are hesitant to go into STEM fields for some reason

A great visualization of where the stratosphere is thanks to Mt. Etna.

Photo: Aftermath of a lightning strike on a golf practice green.

One of the Huffington Post's article on the GOP convention included this at the end.

Watch: President Obama redefines black excellence in Congressional Black Caucus event speech