European Extremely Large Telescope given go-ahead

The E-ELT would take advantage of the very arid conditions in Chile's Atacama desert

Construction of world's biggest optical telescope has been approved.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will have a primary mirror some 40m in diameter, and will be built on top of a mountain in Chile.

Member states of the European Southern Observatory (Eso) organisation declared their support for the project on Monday at a meeting in Garching, Germany.

They have not yet, however, put all of the 1bn euros (£0.8bn) of financing in place.

That may be possible by December, at the organisation's next council meeting.

By then, Brazil should also have become the 15th full member of Eso, further spreading the E-ELT's cost and making it more affordable for all nations.

The telescope should be ready for use by about 2022, and will be one of the key astronomical facilities of 21st Century, complementing other huge observatories that will view the sky at different wavelengths of light.

Voting positions

The E-ELT will detect objects in the visible and near-infrared. Its 39.3m main mirror will be more than four times the width of today's best optical telescopes (antennas for radio telescopes are still very much bigger).

Its sensitivity and resolution should make it possible to image directly rocky planets beyond our Solar System.

The observatory should also be able to provide major insights into the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, the mysterious "dark matter" that pervades the Universe, and the even more mysterious "dark energy" which appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.

At the Garching meeting, six nations (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland) were in a position to declare their full support to proceed with the project; four nations (Belgium, Finland, Italy, and the United Kingdom) declared their support pending approval from their governments; and the remaining four (Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain) said they continued to work towards full approval.

The commitments from two-thirds of the members are sufficient at this stage to permit Eso to proceed with the project.

Prof Isobel Hook is the UK E-ELT project scientist from the University of Oxford. She said Monday's decision was hugely exciting.

"We've all been working towards this moment for a long time, and this decision means we're now just a few years away from using this telescope," she told BBC News.

"The E-ELT's great size will give us much sharper images, provided we can correct for atmospheric turbulence [which makes stars twinkle], and that will be part of the telescope's design. The E-ELT will also have a much larger collecting area than any telescope we have now. That combination of sharpness and collecting area is what will make it so powerful."

Eso member states took the historic decision at their council meeting in Garching, Germany

The telescope will be sited on Cerro Armazones, a mountain that is just 20km from Cerro Paranal where Eso currently operates its Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility - a suite of interconnected optical telescopes that includes four units with primary mirrors measuring 8.2m.

Like Paranal, Armazones will enjoy near-perfect observing conditions - at least 320 nights a year when the sky is cloudless.

The famous aridity found in Chile's Atacama desert means the amount of water vapour in the skies above the observatory will be very limited, reducing further the perturbation starlight experiences as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere.

One of the first tasks will be to remove the top of the mountain to make a flat base for the telescope and its housing, which will be the size of a football stadium.

Even before that work is undertaken, a road will need to be constructed on the slopes of Cerro Armazones to get heavy earth-moving equipment on site.

The funding for the road and some design work on the E-ELT's Number Four mirror was approved at last December's council meeting.

Europe at the front

Eso's principles require 90% of the funding to be in place before spending goes beyond the initial civil works.

The total cost of the venture is currently projected to be 1,083 million euros (at 2012 prices).

Prof Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge University played a key role in the early definition phases of the E-ELT, bringing together various competing ideas into a single project.

He told the BBC: "We all know the grand questions we want to ask - 'What is time? What is existence? What is reality? Is there life out there?'. And we know that we need technology to answer those questions. So, to see this technology being brought together in the E-ELT, with European leadership, is simply wonderful."

Source: bbc

Kinsight uses Kinect sensor to find lost keys and wallets

The team used their system to track a range of objects around a home

Forgetful geeks need never lose keys, phones or even cutlery at home again.

Two computer science researchers have developed a depth-camera based system that keeps track of household objects as they are moved around a building.

The project - dubbed Kinsight - relies on several of Microsoft's Kinect sensors attached to a computer running the team's software.

Although the project is still at an experimental stage, it has been shown to work in a "real-world scenario".

Details of the system were recently outlined at a conference in China and were subsequently reported by New Scientist.

"Imagine if we had a system that could keep account of all the objects that we interact with in our daily lives," the researchers said.

"By keeping track of the locations of the objects, we could build a smart search engine for our home that could answer queries like - where are my eye glasses, or my TV-remote, or my wallet?"

Although alternative solutions, such as the use of radio-frequency identification chips already exists, the men said their system was many times cheaper due to the high cost of RFID readers.

What goes where

The researchers noted that running a computer program that simultaneously tracked all the owner's objects in real-time would be too processor-intensive.

So they based their design around the principle that objects only change locations when humans move them.

As a result the system focuses on tracking human figures and then looking for objects that have changed position in their vicinity.

Although the Kinect sensor's capabilities are limited - it only sees objects up to 11 feet (3.4m) away and only provides "skeleton data" at 15 frames/second - the Kinsight program has commonsense notions built into it to improve accuracy: so it knows that a coffee cup is most likely to be found at a study desk, or kitchen sink, but not inside a bath.

"This means that, when in doubt, an object recognition algorithm can use this knowledge to identify an object by analysing the likelihood of it being at some location, or looking for the candidate objects in their other locations," the researchers said.

On the move

Algorithms were also created to help the computer learn the appearance of objects and the context they were likely to be used in by analysing the data gathered.

To prove the system worked the two scientists labelled 48 objects - including knives, forks, keys and a Rubik's cube - and identified 80 possible locations around a house.

They then asked volunteers to move the items around according to randomly generated patterns.

The results suggested room for improvement - errors were more likely if the objects were very small, far away, transparent or placed too closely together - but the team said these problems should be addressed by using more sensors per room and adopting more sensitive depth-cameras.

In the meantime, they say that even when the program does lose track of possessions, it can still say were they were last seen which may still prove helpful.

Source: bbc

Hybrid "ultrabooks" blur line between tablets, laptops

An Acer 11-inch ultrabook Aspire S7 with Microsoft Windows 8 operation system is displayed during a news conference as part of the preview of the 2012 Computex exhibition at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taipei June 4, 2012.

Slide it, flip it or snap it on and off. The way keyboards are connected to touch screens on the latest generation of computing devices is making it tough to differentiate a tablet from notebook or an ultrabook.

Microsoft Corp, which has long been the dominant force in PCs but has fallen far behind in the tablet race, is set to unveil its Windows 8 operating system later this year, designed to run on super-thin laptops called ultrabooks and tablets powered by Intel Corp's chips.

The impending launch has prompted PC vendors to come up with a rash of hybrid designs, featuring touch screens and myriad configurations of moving or detachable keyboards.

"In future, it'll be a blur in the definition of an ultrabook and a tablet because of convertibles with either detachable or sliding keyboards," said Tracy Tsai, a Taipei-based analyst at research firm Gartner.

At Computex Taipei, the world's second largest computer show, visitors flocked to the booths trying out every twist and turn that converts an ultrabook into a tablet.

Lenovo Group Ltd's IdeaPad Yoga and Asustek Computer Inc's Taichi have screens that bend all the way back. Samsung Electronics' Hybrid becomes an ultrabook when the tablet clips onto a keyboard with magnetic hinges.

One tablet-ultrabook convertible that garnered attention was Asustek's Taichi, whose dual-sided screens can run different applications at the same time.

"There's a lot of use cases on tablets and tablet convertibles that people might approach with lots of fun, content consumption type of activity, but want to pop into it and use a productivity application and a desktop mode," said Chris Walker, Intel's director of microprocessor product marketing.

"The great thing is people don't have to make that choice."

BUT WILL THEY FLY?

Despite all the fanfare surrounding these hybrids from Microsoft, Intel and PC vendors banking on these gadgets to make up for lost time in the tablet sector, there remains some nervousness in the industry and uncertainty among consumers about whether they will take off in a big way.

"Most of us have a laptop for work and an Android or Apple tablet now, so whether I'll buy one of these hybrids will depend on the performance and price," said one Computex attendee in his 30s.

Prices for these touch-based ultrabook convertibles will not be announced until Windows 8 is formally released, widely expected to be in the fourth quarter.

But the hybrids are already prompting some analysts to ponder whether they should be classified as tablets or laptop PCs.

"A way to settle the argument is by the size of the gadget. Anything that is 10 inches or smaller should be categorized as a tablet, while those that are 11 inches or bigger should be called an ultrabook," said Ricky Liu, an analyst with KGI Securities.

Intel executives said they saw ultrabooks and its convertibles as laptops, while some PC vendors grouped such hybrids under tablets.

"Anything with a detachable keyboard is a tablet," said an Asustek executive as she clicked the Transformer screen back onto the keyboard at the company's booth at Computex.

Source: Reuters