NASA wants your help to get to Mars in the next 25 years

The idea of a manned mission to Mars got in the public consciousness in a big way over the last few years thanks in large part to Andy Weir’s novel The Martian and its excellent big-screen adaptation. I’ll admit that I haven’t always been fascinated by space travel, but the book and movie captured my imagination in a way I didn’t expect and made the SXSW panel “Surviving the Red Planet” a must-see. The panel reinforced the fact that a true mission to Mars remains a long way off, but it also had a big focus on recruiting the talent out there to help NASA get there — even if you’re not a rocket scientist, or a scientist of any kind.

Collaboration has come up in nearly every SXSW panel I’ve attended this week, and this was no exception. Monsi Roman is the program manager for NASA’s Centennial Challenges, a group of ongoing competitions to engage the public and have inventors contribute to various initiatives, and she spent much of her time on the panel discussing the current challenges and how they’ll help us get to Mars. Current challenges include designing a Mars ascent vehicle, 3D-printing a deep space habitat, and building an autonomous robot that can correctly identify and collect samples on other planets.

Obviously, no one individual is going to be able to do this on their own, but NASA is offering millions of dollars as part of these Centennial Challenges to get groups together to work these problems. “This is the challenge for surviving on the red planet,” Roman said. “It’s going to take people like all of you to get there, scientists and engineers but also people from all backgrounds. This is a vehicle for citizens to come join us.”

Jason Crusan, director for NASA’s Advanced Exploration Division, echoed those remarks while detailing how we might get to Mars. “We’re using everybody to help solves the problem [of getting to Mars] — that’s the underlying theme here, Crusan said. “Going to Mars is a very, very hard thing to do.” Detailing those challenges, Crusan noted that right now NASA can get an astronaut off the International Space Station to a US hospital within 17 hours in an emergency. “I challenge you to get from here to Australia in 17 hours,” he joked. But current technology means it’ll take 1,100 days or so to get to Mars and back, and there’s obviously a host of issues there to be sorted out.

But Crusan believes that we’ll have the capabilities of getting a craft out to Mars range in not much over a decade. “By the end of the 2020s, NASA’s desire is to have a deep space spaceship in orbit around the Moon that’ll allow us to go in 1,000-day class missions,” he said. “It doesn’t give us the landers, the power systems we need to get to the suface, but in a little over a decade we can get out to Mars class distances.” And perhaps Mars won’t be the first destination — Crusan noted that the Mars moon Phobos is estimated to be about 20 percent water, an important potential resource. “Follow the water is one of our themes,” he said.

The panel also had a member of a team competing for a prize much like NASA’s Centennial Challenges — the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize challenge to land a privately funded robot on the moon. Robert Böhme from the Mission to the Moon team brought along an early prototype of the rover being worked on (pictured above) and talked a bit about why going back to the moon made sense. It turns out one of the first places they want to visit on the moon is the Apollo 17 site to see what’s happened to the materials in a lunar roving vehicle over the last 43 years. “This vehicle has been exposed to space for over 43 years,” Böhme said. “It’s really interesting to see how [its materials] decayed and to what level.”

Lest the panel be too serious, there was also talk of sci-fi’s influence on NASA and vice versa, much of it coming from illustrator Rick Sternbach. He’s been drawing sci-fi artwork for decades and was part of the production team on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager. “WhenI design real space hardware, I love to go to the source, “Sternbach said. “I get inspired by things that NASA has done, that the Russian space agency has done, all the different engineering styles. I absorb it all, and I love talking to the engineers and scientists.” For NASA’s part, Crusan called out C3PO as a humanoid robot design the agency definitely thought could be useful. “”We’re gonna be building in deep space — when there aren’t humans, we’re going to need robots to do mundane tasks, both humanoid and free form.”

Like much of what I’ve see at SXSW, this panel seemed to be less about finding answers and solutions and more about talking through problems as well as imploring the community to get involved — even if it takes a lot longer than these optimistic estimates to get to Mars. Crusan said he doesn’t even really care where we go, as long as we’re going somewhere, because that means we’re exploring further and further out into space. “It’s more about the journey and committing to [space travel] as a society,” he said, rather than saying we have to get to Mars at all costs. After all, “at some point we want to go everywhere.”

US bill would train law enforcement to fight online harassment

People weren’t just talking about how to deal with online harassment at SXSW — they were also taking steps to put anti-harassment laws on the books. Representative Katherine Clark has unveiled a federal bill, the Cybercrime Enforcement Training Assistance Act, that would provide $20 million per year to law enforcement (including dispatchers, police and prosecutors) to equip it for tackling harassment and other internet crimes. An extra $4 million would go toward a national set of resources that would teach cops how to investigate these crimes and deal with their repercussions for women, the LGBT community and other groups.

Clark tells The Verge that officials would have to submit to a competitive grant process to get money. She’d ideally like to see every police department have at least one internet crime specialist.

The bill faces the usual gauntlets in both the House of Representatives and Congress at large, and there are no guarantees that it’ll ever become law. However, it’s notable for directly addressing one of the most common complaints of victims: that law enforcement often doesn’t understand how serious harassment can be. While there are tools to report activity to police, officers frequently have simplistic answers (such as “don’t go online”) or wait until there are physical dangers like bomb threats and stalkers. A law like CETAA could have police taking action against credible threats before they become all too real.

Source: Mass Live, The Verge

UC Browser partners with Twitter and Bing for cricket content aggregation

UC Browser, an Alibaba product, has joined hands with Twitter and Bing to provide a mobile gateway to all things cricket with the debut of a revamped UC Cricket.

UC Cricket was first introduced in 2013 and offered news and updates about cricket matches. It has now evolved to provide complete cricket content such as live score, news, videos, live tweets, photo, stats, previews, commentaries, etc., making it a comprehensive platform for cricket fans.

As part of the partnership, Twitter will provide live, public, and conversational content related to cricket matches on UC Cricket such as trending Tweets of cricketers, and exclusive Twitter-only content from official cricket team accounts such as native videos, Periscopes, Vines, and photos. The India vs Pakistan match at the ICC World Cup 2015 for example, generated close to 1.7 million Tweets in a single day.

Bing will provide predictions to upcoming games via Bing Predicts. Last year, 83% of the predictions made by Bing Predicts for the ICC World Cup 2015 matches were accurate.

UC Cricket also comes with a series of new features, including a floating widget called UC Express which allows user to access cricket content immediately, and customizable notification which enables users to subscribe the upcoming game for push notification update when the game starts.

According to a report by Ernst & Young, India has a huge appetite for digital content, with nearly 50% of all content consumed expected to be on the small screen in less than 5 years. Platforms like UC Cricket are part of UCWeb’s broader plan to ride on the digital content trend and shape how content will be consumed on mobile Internet.

Download UC Browser from Google Play Store

AC editors’ apps of the week: Lip Swap, Habitica, DIRAC and more

Our weekly app picks

It’s Appday Sunday and that means we’re back with more of our favorites to share. Every week we bring a handful of great apps to the table and share them with everyone. Sometimes they are new apps, sometimes old standards, but every time they are apps we love to use.

Give these a look and then take a minute to tell us all about the apps you are using and love so we can give them a try. We all find some of our favorites right in the comments on these posts!

Jen Karner — Habitica

Habitica gives me a combination of two things that need to be a part of my life, gaming and organization. Gaming, I’m already good at, organization…less so. I’ve tried white boards, countless apps, and paper planners all in an effort to try and remember everything on my to-do list. Habitica however rewards me when I remember to knock things off my list, and does it in a really fun way.

The initial setup is the only real pesky part with this app, since you’ll need to set up your daily tasks, habits, projects and rewards. Once that’s done things get fun. Each time you finish a task you’ll get gold and xp for an avatar. You can then armor and grab them up, leveling up as you go. It makes staying on top of things fun, and helps to make real life more of a game. Which is almost always a good thing.

Download: Habitica (Free)

Ara Wagoner — Wear Hydrate Me

I’ve recommended Hydrate Me before when I first discovered the app. You can set this wear app to buzz your wrist on a set interval during specific hours of the day to remind you to drink while you’re out and about, something I tend to forget. But there was a problem: a bug could cause the app to turn off those reminders, and days could (and did) pass before I realized I was missing them.

Well, those bugs were fixed a few weeks ago, and I have been happily using the app since to remind me to drink. This was especially important last weekend — where I spent most of my time talking to any co-worker who would tolerate me. Is it a unitasker? Absolutely. But it’s a free app and it’s finally working again, so I’m gonna use it and try to stay hydrated.

Download: Wear Hydrate Me (Free)

Russell Holly — Vysor

The Android N Developer Preview dropping on us in such a surprise fashion this week meant lots of scrambling to flash things quickly. For someone like me, that meant quickly checking to see how things behaved across devices, which meant switching back and forth between phones and tablets as fast as I can. While some of this had to be done on the physical hardware, most of this process could be done side by side on my PC through Vysor.

Vysor draws the UI for the phone or tablet on your PC or Mac, so you can use your mouse and keyboard to quickly check on things without picking up the phone. It’s especially useful when you’re testing the same thing on multiple devices, but even if you’re keeping your phone UI on your PC so you don’t have to look away it’s a handy tool to have.

Download: Vysor (Free Chrome App)

Jerry Hildenbrand — DIRAC

The app description for DIRAC really made me want to try it. Dialog that sounds like it’s straight out of some late-night science-fiction movie on one of those channels on UHF will reel me in. Go read it for yourself.

But anyhoo, after I instantly sprung the $1.99 to try it, I was hooked. It’s dark, it has cool music and it’s easy to play while being addictive as hell. It’s like connect the dots for schizophrenics. Suitably medicate yourself and check this one out.

Protip: Headphones, a tablet and a dark room.

Download: DIRAC ($1.99)

Andrew Martonik — Enpass Password Manager

It’s been a long time since I talked about Enpass as my password manager of choice, and it’s been updated considerably since I last did. The app has received a pretty large Material Design visual refresh (which was also matched in the desktop apps), added Marshmallow fingerprint support, added a new keyboard for auto-filling passwords and quickly fixed bugs for the Marshmallow release on Samsung’s phones.

All of these updates show one of the best features of Enpass: the developer is extremely responsive and quick to add new features or fix problems in the app. After well over a year using Enpass the app has never gotten stale or been stuck behind the latest features or design. Add that to the already great base of password management features like strong encryption, cross-platform support, personal cloud sync and a password generator — it’s really been worth the $10 full-featured upgrade.

Download: Enpass Password Manager (Free, $9.99 upgrade)

Phil Nickinson — Lip Swap

I’m being all “old man” when it comes to Snapchat, but I’m very much into the Android Experiments program at the moment. So bear with me. (That’ll make sense in the following sentence.) Lip Swap swaps lips. So you can take a picture of Jerry and make it say whatever you want.

It’s a tad janky (thus “experiment”) and works best with pics actually taken on phones. (At the moment you can’t adjust for crop or aspect ratio or anything. This one’s really more about showing off the shaders. And it’s open source, which is always a good thing. Have fun. Make Jerry say stuff.

More: Lip Swap at Android Experiments

Inside the mind-reading dream factory that is Chaotic Moon

For two weeks every March, Austin, TX, transforms into the media playground known as SXSW. Everyone from brands like McDonalds and Budweiser, to indie app developers descend on the city to share ideas big and small, serious and irreverent. Tucked away above a restaurant just off of 5th street, however, is a place where there dreaming never stops. That place is the HQ of Chaotic Moon — a digital idea factory that seems to exist for one simple reason: “What can we try next?” Naturally, when SXSW sets up around the team, it’s the perfect chance to show off their latest ideas, and we got to see what they’ve been cooking up (and, for once, it’s not BBQ).

A good a place as any to get an idea for the sort of work Chaotic Moon does is a project called Mockzy AI. It’s a web tool that takes texts, speeches and written records of famous figures from the past, and bundles it all into a search engine interface that generates conversations between any two characters. So, if you ever wanted to see (and hear) James Brown and Queen Victoria talking about how to grow carrots, or Ghandi discussing the merits of Hip hop versus Trap with Dickens then this is the tool for you.

Mockzy AI uses publicly available records of texts from each famous figure (the people featured were chosen due to the wealth of matierial), and feeds them to IBM’s Watson, via its Bluemix platform. When you ask it a question or search term, responses are matched and ranked against the available prose. Mockzy then attempts to turn them into a conversation. The end result will depend on what you ask it. I’m fairly sure Ghandi never spoke about the iPhone, so terms like that are likely to be skipped in favour of the rest of the language. But, as an exercise in making machine learning and AI relatable to (living) humans, it’s a fun way to do it.

What about something a little more intriguing? That would be another project called Larí. The napkin pitch is this: when we are about to speak, our brains send an electrical signal to the larynx. This is apparently also true if we just think about speaking (called subvocalization). It’s a phenomena that NASA was looking into over 10 years ago, but not much has happened on the topic since. The Larí project is exploring the idea that that signal can be captured using and ECG, with pads attached around the larynx. It’s not quite mind-reading, but it has similar applications.

While the project is in early stages, and more a proof of concept, Chaotic Moon thinks that if it’s possible to remove the signals produced by the heart, and any other interference, it could be possible to capture the “digital signature” for words, build a library of these from multiple test subjects, and — theoretically — turn that into a system for translating thoughts into data that could be sent to machines. A basic use case would be for people who are unable to speak (assuming the brain-larynx signals are still there) using this to convert thoughts into words. Chaotic Moon has another sensory project called Sentiri, which is a headband covered in infrared sensors that gives directional haptic feedback that alerts to obstacles, allowing sightless navigation through a maze.

While these projects mix fun with some serious potential use cases, Chaotic Moon sometimes just likes to let it all hang out, or not, as it were. For fun, the team also were demonstrating Notifly. A gadget that sends a message to your phone when you’re flying low. It’s silly, but, well, we’ve all had a time when that would have been handy, right? Using an Intel Curie board and some basic circuit connections at the top of the zipper, it knows when you’ve done your top button up, and if 8 seconds later the zipper isn’t at the top, you’ll get a shame-saving message.

Chaotic Moon has plenty more projects on the go, including a VR game that mixes puzzle solving, with dragon slaying (naturally). Initially, this might seem like a generally fun thing to do in VR, but as with most of the projects here, there’s a serious application also. The puzzle element puts you under stress, requiring you to solve a problem with a cool head, which if you don’t achieve, results in serious consequences. This is basically the same conditions first responders have to deal with, so it’s not hard to imagine this being adapted as an engaging tool either for training, or to keep skills sharp. For now though, we’re looking forward to what the team imagines up for next year.

Mallory Johns contributed to this report.

Dubai will host the World Future Sports Games in 2017

Apparently, the World Drone Prix was just the tip of the robotic sports iceberg. Dubai has announced that it’s holding the World Future Sports Games, a broader competition, in late December 2017. The tech-focused event will include drone races as well as “robotic swimming, running, wrestling and car racing” — basically, it’s the Olympics for automatons. If it’s successful, the plan is to hold the Games every two years after that.

It’s an ambitious plan for a city that hasn’t even finished hosting the World Drone Prix, whose first-day winner was 15-year-old British pilot Luke Bannister — there’s a long way to go before this is as big a deal as human-powered competition. However, it might not be as outlandish as it sounds. This is a long-term bet that robotic sports tech will improve to the point where you’ll want to watch machines duke it out. There’s no guarantee that the Games will be successful even if the technology is ready, but Dubai’s extravagant wealth could at least give the competition a fighting chance.

Source: AP (Yahoo)

Life after death: How will you handle your digital legacy?

You’re dead.

It’s the hypothetical scenario Megan Yip, an estate-planning attorney, gives her clients when they show up at her office in the Bay Area. She makes them think about what they would want to do with their belongings before asking them to create a catalog of everything they own. It’s a standard step in the making of a last will. But Yip adds another layer to the process. She asks for a digital inventory that details their online existence.

At a recent SXSW panel about death and digital legacy, Yip recounted the way she deals with her clients to make the crowd in the room at the Austin Convention Center think about the complexities of a digital life after death. She points out that digital inventories aren’t a norm just yet. But as the lines between the online and physical worlds continue to blur, estate laws need to start accommodating virtual assets.

Preserving people’s legacies is not a legal matter alone. Social media companies that host billions of lives should build the tools that can help both individuals and lawyers honor the wishes of those who have passed away. One such offering is Facebook’s memorialization of accounts. When a family member or friend fills out a form to let the company know about the death of an account holder, the profile gets a special status. With the word “remembering” added in front of the name of the person, it becomes a commemorative page that keeps the settings, existing posts, photos and updates intact. It also becomes an ad-free zone, unlike the rest of Facebook where un-shopped items continue to stalk users.

Facebook has been memorializing accounts for almost a decade now. But panelist John Troyer, director of the center for death and society at the University of Bath in England, pointed out that memorialization dates back to the 19th century and the invention of the telegraph, which was widely used as a tool to inform people of someone’s death. From telegrams to answering machine tapes and voice mails, people have always found a way to preserve memories through communication technologies.

Now with the advent of social media, the intensely personal process of grieving has also taken on a new online dimension. “It’s very common that when a person dies [people] establish what’s called a continuing bond with the individual,” he said. “Just because you have a bond with them, it’s not abnormal. I think the digital tools we’ve developed over the last 20 years have significantly pushed those boundaries.”

According to Vanessa Callison-Burch, product manager for Facebook’s memorialization feature, coping with a personal loss on social media is a natural extension of our lives. “After someone dies, we start telling stories, we start remembering and we want to be together with people who also loved that person,” she told Engadget. “That happens offline in our physical world and communities. It also happens online now. Sometimes there’s the benefit that you get to hear from a whole range of people who cared about that person that you might not have otherwise known. Friends from other parts of their lives can share stories and it gives you this beautiful context on someone.”

Memorialization is Facebook’s way of creating a space for people to mourn. But it’s also a tool that respects the last wishes — or last settings, in this case — of the user. So the account becomes inaccessible to those who might wish to interact with it as part of their grieving process. During the panel discussion, Callison-Burch relayed an incident about a man who didn’t have a Facebook account but after his son passed away he wanted access to the stories and tributes his son’s friends were sharing on his timeline. He made an account and asked the company to add him as a friend to his son’s account. But the social media company had to stick with the son’s account settings. They had no way of knowing if he would have wanted his father to see his timeline.

In response to similar, overwhelming requests from grieving families, the company had to find a way for users to indicate their own preferences. Callison-Burch launched a legacy contact tool early last year to put the onus on the users. They could designate someone to take care of their digital afterlife or choose to have their account deleted upon death.

“We heard from people that they wanted to do more,” said Callison-Burch. “Listening to that community of people who had experienced loss on Facebook led us to introducing the legacy contact.” The tool doesn’t allow access to your private messages or allow the designated contact to log in as you, but they can change your profile and cover photos to commemorate your life or respond to new friend requests. So in the case of the father hoping to friend his son after his death, the legacy contact could make the final decision instead of the company that’s bound by user settings.

Facebook is said to have millions of deceased users. But the idea of memorialization or handing over a virtual legacy is not as widely known as it should be. “The biggest challenge is that not everyone knows that the setting exists,” said Callison-Burch. “We still hear those stories coming in to our community operations team — ‘hey could you add this account’ or let the family in. If there’s no legacy contact, we’re back in the position of needing to say we’re not able to do that because Facebook doesn’t make decisions on the behalf of the account holder. So the next phase is to raise awareness for people to know they have this option.”

Operation Zombie D Unlimited is an all-too-simple side-scrolling shooter (review)

Overview Picture a zombie game. Simple, right? I bet you’re thinking of being armed with several weapons, trying to make your way through a devastated landscape, hacking and blasting your

The pulsing ‘Hotline Miami’ soundtrack gets physical

Hotline Miami and its sequel Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number have two of the best soundtracks in all of gaming. But for whatever reason, until now there hasn’t been a way to get a physical version of the first game’s pulsing, futuristic score. As of this writing though, over a thousand people have pledged $75,033 on Kickstarter to change that.

And even though the record label and funding method are entirely different from Wrong Number, the prequel’s soundtrack package looks every bit as, ahem, killer. You’re going to need to act fast if you want a copy: there are only 5,000 copies of the first, collector’s edition pressing. Like Wrong Number before it, this score encompasses a trio of 180-gram LPs, and the Kickstarter page says that all 22 original tracks have been remastered. What’s more, there are a quartet of additional songs from El Huervo, Jasper Byrne, M|O|O|N and Perturbator.

The early bird special is already sold out, but you can still get your hands on the $50 standard backing tier. If you want to get really crazy and act fast enough there’s still one of three $1,420 test-pressings of the soundtrack that comes with signed posters and a personalized plaque with your name on it.

Why Kickstarter? Laced Records writes on the pledge page that it was using the crowdfunding platform to gauge interest and build some support from the game’s rabid fanbase. Considering that each of the sequel’s three pressings sold out incredibly quickly and it has a median price of $160 on Discogs (several eBay listings are for over $300), time is definitely of the essence here. Run both ways unless you want to listen via the Soundcloud channel embedded below for the foreseeable future!

Source: Kickstarter

Ben Heck’s design workflow

Have you ever wondered how The Ben Heck Show team tackles your suggestions and problems? Why use perfboard instead of a manufactured PCB or a breadboard? Is a 3D printer the best way to go, or should you use a CNC mill ? Which is better, CNC or a laser cutter? Karen and Ben help answer these questions for your design workflow when creating your project or hacking hardware. If you have any suggestions or questions about the show or want to see what we couldn’t fit in this week, engage with team on the element14 Community page: There you’ll find past episodes and the project files along with fellow hobbyists, makers and engineers.