From driverless cars to earthquake prediction, a quarterly review of research at the California Institute of Technology.
Caltech Car: No CD Player, No Seats, No Driver
Making an off-road journey across the Mojave Desert is a tough drive. Tougher still without a driver. But that's what a group of Caltech undergraduates will soon be doing. The team of 23 students is competing for a $1 million prize in the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous ground vehicle race, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This will not be a remote-controlled vehicle driven by a student wielding a laptop at a distance, but a completely autonomous car that will drive and navigate itself at speeds as fast as 55 mph; to win, says project manager David van Gogh, the car will need to average between 25 and 30 mph. "It's an historic opportunity," he says, "similar to the crossing of the Atlantic by Lindbergh."
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12416.html
Helping to Implement Federal Election Reform in California; and the Department of Defense
Political science professor Michael Alvarez is a member of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) California State Plan Advisory Committee. The purpose of the committee is to seek public input and provide policy guidance to assist the secretary of state of California in drafting the state's initial plan for compliance with federal mandates contained in HAVA.
The HAVA will fundamentally alter the way elections are conducted in California and across the nation. The committee is creating a new federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to serve as a national clearinghouse on election information and to provide federal standards for voting systems.
In addition, Alvarez also received a contract for $1.8 million from the Department of Defense to study the viability of Internet voting for military personnel and overseas civilians. He will co-chair the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) evaluation project which will study the effectiveness of Internet voter registration and voting, the costs of the system, and its security.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12397.html
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12411.html
A "Modest Proposal" for Sending a Probe to Earth's Core
Dave Stevenson has a modest proposal--he wants to send a probe all the way to the Earth's core by combining several proven technologies with a few well-grounded scientific assumptions about the workings of the planet. The probe would sink straight to the core in an envelope of molten iron, sending temperature readings, compositional information, and other data along the way.
"We've spent more than $10 billion in unmanned missions to the planets," says Stevenson, "but we've only been down about 10 kilometers into our own planet." The benefits to science would be significant, he says, because so little has been directly observed about the inner workings of the planet.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12393.html
Hydrogen Economy Might Impact Earth's Stratosphere; and New Findings on the Natural Hydrogen Cycle
According to conventional wisdom, hydrogen-fueled cars are environmentally friendly because they emit only water vapor -- a naturally abundant atmospheric gas. But leakage of the hydrogen gas that can fuel such cars could cause problems for the upper atmosphere, new research shows.
Caltech researchers report that the leaked hydrogen gas that would inevitably result from a hydrogen economy, if it accumulates, could indirectly cause as much as a 10-percent decrease in atmospheric ozone. If hydrogen were to replace fossil fuel entirely, the researchers estimate that 60 to 120 trillion grams of hydrogen would be released each year into the atmosphere, assuming a 10-to-20-percent loss rate due to leakage. This is four to eight times as much hydrogen as is currently released into the atmosphere by human activity, and would result in doubling or tripling of inputs to the atmosphere from all sources, natural or human.
Two months after this pivotal study, further evidence is emerging on what would happen to new quantities of hydrogen released into the atmosphere through human activity.
In a separate study, another group of Caltech researchers, along with other institutions, reports that most of the hydrogen eliminated from the atmosphere goes into the ground, and therefore the scientific community will need to turn its focus toward soil destruction of hydrogen in order to accurately predict whether human emissions will accumulate in the air.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12405.html
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12421.html
New Insight Into How Flies Fly
How does a fly fly and why should we care? To the first, says Caltech bioengineer Michael Dickinson, the short answer is different from what we have thought, and he used a dynamically scaled flapping robot (aka Robofly), a free flight arena (aka Fly-O-Rama), and a 3-D infrared visual flight simulator (Fly-O-Vision) to prove it. He shows how tiny insects use their wings to generate enough torque to overcome inertia, and not--as conventional wisdom has held--friction.
And we should care, he says, because the simple motion of a flying fly links a series of fundamental and complex processes within both the physical and biological sciences. Studying a fly may eventually lead to a model that will provide insight into the behavior of complex systems in general, and, for roboticists, may help them in the design of flying robots that mimic nature.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12371.html
Gravity Variations Predict Earthquake Behavior
In trying to predict where earthquakes will occur, few people would think to look at Earth's gravity field. What does the force that causes objects to fall to the ground and the moon to orbit around the earth have to do with the unpredictable ground trembling of an earthquake?
Now, Caltech researchers have found that within subduction zones, the regions where one of the earth's plates slips below another, areas where the attraction due to gravity is relatively high are less likely to experience large earthquakes than areas where the gravitational force is relatively low.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12418.html
Why Fearful Animals Flee--or Freeze
In most old-fashioned black-and-white horror flicks, it always seems there's some hapless hero or heroine who gets caught up in a life-threatening situation. Instead of making the obvious choice--to run like hell--he/she freezes in place. That decision, alas, leads to their ultimate demise.
While their fate was determined by bad scriptwriting, scientists in real life did not understand what neural circuits determine defensive behaviors. Now Caltech researchers have developed an experimental model using mice that can map and manipulate the neural circuits involved in fear. They found that flight and freezing are negatively correlated, suggesting that a kind of competition exists between alternative defensive motor responses. They've also begun to map the potential circuitry in the brain that controls this competition.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12386.html
Einstein Archives Available Online
More than 900 scientific and nonscientific documents of one of the most influential intellects in the modern era, Albert Einstein, are, for the first time, available online. The Einstein Archives Online website, at http://www.alberteinstein.info, is also accompanied by an extensive database of archival information.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12394.html
Astronomers "Weigh" Pulsar's Planets
For the first time, the planets orbiting a pulsar have been "weighed" by measuring precisely variations in the time it takes them to complete an orbit, according to a team of astronomers from Caltech.
The researchers report that masses of two of the three known planets orbiting a rapidly spinning pulsar 1,500 light-years away have been successfully measured. The planets are 4.3 and 3.0 times the mass of Earth, with an error of 5 percent. These results provide compelling evidence that the planets must have evolved from a disk of matter surrounding the pulsar, in a manner similar to that envisioned for planets around sun-like stars.
The three pulsar planets comprise a planetary system that is astonishingly similar in appearance to the inner solar system. They are clearly the precursors to any Earth-like planets that might be discovered around nearby sun-like stars by future space interferometers.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12402.html
New Long-Range Speed Record Set with Internet Protocol
Scientists at Caltech and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have set a new Internet2 land speed record using the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6. The team sustained a single stream TCP rate of 983 megabits per second for more than one hour between the CERN facility in Geneva and Chicago, a distance of more than 7,000 kilometers. This is equivalent to transferring a full CD in 5.6 seconds.
This major step towards demonstrating how effectively IPv6 can be used should encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to deploy the next-generation Internet protocol, the researchers say.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12410.html
Scientists Propose Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise
With over 40 million people worldwide currently living with HIV/AIDS and millions more becoming infected each year, a group of scientists that includes Caltech president David Baltimore is calling for a coordinated global HIV vaccine enterprise to speed up the development and testing of promising candidates.
The researchers emphasized the urgent need for an HIV vaccine, and outlined a plan to accelerate research. Without a vaccine, if current trends continue, 45 million new people will become infected by 2010 and 70 million people will die by 2020, the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS predict. The group of scientists proposes a new network of about six to ten coordinated vaccine development centers, each devoted to a particular vaccine approach. These centers should increase the pace of development, decrease overlap between laboratories, and get more candidate vaccines into clinical trials.
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12409.html
Dark Matter Map Reveals How Cosmic Structures Formed
Astrophysicists have had an exceedingly difficult time charting the mysterious stuff called dark matter that permeates the universe because it's--well--dark. Now, a unique "mass map" of a cluster of galaxies shows in unprecedented detail how dark matter is distributed with respect to the shining galaxies. The new comparison gives a convincing indication of how dark matter figures into the grand scheme of the cosmos.
Using a technique based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, an international group of researchers led by Caltech astronomers mapped the mass distribution of a gigantic cluster of galaxies about 4.5 billion light-years from Earth. They did this by studying the way the cluster bends the light from other galaxies behind it. This technique, known as gravitational lensing, allowed the researchers to infer the mass contribution of the dark matter, even though it is otherwise invisible.
