Samantha Payne’s Startup Open Bionics Allows Anyone In The World To Download And 3D Print Their Own

It's only coming out in German this weekend, but wow this looks cool.

Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance

Vote down ballot - the presidency isn't the only office of importance!

Time for another political essay. If you’re not an American citizen or able to vote in this upcoming election, my apologies.

I make no secret that I fucking despise Donald Trump. I actually like Hillary Clinton, which seems to be a weird rarity considering the amount of good work she’s done and the fact that all of the bad press about her is the result of the Republicans trying (and failing) to tear her and her husband down for thirty years.

Trump is now trailing far behind Clinton, which I consider a cause for celebration. But it is NOT a cause for complacency.

The biggest landslide election in US history was the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920, when Harding won with about 60% of the vote to his opponent’s 34.2%.

Some polls are reporting Trump with as little as 35% of the popular vote right now.

If turnout is large enough and loud enough, we can make Donald Trump the least supported major candidate in US history. Since the recording of him bragging about sexual assault came out, he has turned to dragging the whole election into the mud by striking back at Bill Clinton’s affairs; the usual goal of that kind of tactic is to drive down voter turnout. Trump’s band of Redcaps is pretty much guaranteed to vote, so they figure if they reduce turnout enough, they’ll win.

I want their plan to fail. I want their plan to fail so fucking spectacularly that NO ONE will dare to run for President on a platform of thinly-veiled fascism again.

The Republicans thought the House of Representatives was safe this year. In 2010, they gerrymandered the shit out of district lines to keep the House safe for them for at least ten years. But there’s a problem with gerrymandering: if the demographics shift unexpectedly between censuses, then suddenly a lot of districts wind up flipping against the party that the gerrymandering was meant to support. And Donald Trump is driving away the Republicans’ most secure core of voters, the evangelicals. And as I’ve said before: Congress is MORE important than the presidency.

If turnout is strong enough, and if people vote down ballot, the possibility exists for a massive upset. A Democratic presidency, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate. They’re within our grasp. All you need to do, voters, is show up.

Motherfuckers don’t want you to vote. Young people, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks–they want you to be scared away, or to be convinced that voting doesn’t matter. They want your voice silenced. Don’t give the fuckers the satisfaction of letting it happen.

GO VOTE. VOTE DOWN-BALLOT. MAKE TRUMP THE BIGGEST LOSER IN US HISTORY.

IF YOU CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO VOTE OUT OF CONVICTION, THEN DO IT OUT OF SPITE.

Postcards that were anti-women-voting, circa 1900s through 1920

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.)

I second wanting prints of these

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

My question is, is the IDA going to be a standard for spacecraft? Do we have standard ports already?

Spacewalk Friday: Installing a New "Parking Spot" on Station

This Friday, Aug. 19, two U.S. astronauts will install a new gateway for American commercial crew spacecraft at the International Space Station. 

Commercial crew flights from Florida’s Space Coast to the International Space Station will restore America’s human spaceflight launch capability and increase the time U.S. crews can dedicate to scientific research.

The adapter being installed (imaged below) was launched on a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft and arrived on orbit July 20. This ring is known as an International Docking Adapter, or IDA, and its main purpose is to provide a port for spacecraft bringing astronauts to the station in the future. Outfitted with a host of sensors and systems, the adapter is built so spacecraft systems can automatically perform all the steps of arrival and docking with the station without input from the astronauts. 

NASA astronauts Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins will perform the spacewalk to install the equipment this Friday, Aug. 19. This will be the fourth spacewalk in Williams’ career and the first for Rubins.

Four previous spacewalks…like the one below…helped set the stage for installation of this docking adapter. During those previous spacewalks, other crew members laid hundreds of feet of power and data cables outside the space station. 

On Wednesday, the robotics team using the Canadarm2 and its attached “Dextre” manipulator, will reach into the SpaceX Dragon trunk and pull out the docking adapter and position it for Friday’s spacewalk activities.

The morning of the spacewalk, while the astronauts are getting suited up, the robotic arm will position the docking adaptor near the port so that it will be ready for installation.

The two astronauts will venture outside the space station to install the first International Docking Adapter (IDA). This new adapter port will provide a parking space for U.S. Commercial Crew vehicles.

Watch LIVE!

Coverage of the spacewalk begins at 6:30 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 19; with the spacewalk scheduled to begin at 8:05 a.m. EDT. Stream live online HERE. 

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