View From The Couch - 13/Mar/2016

Robotics' Horizon of Death

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a kind of fiction to do with robots which pre-dated the fiction to do with androids. It was the kind of fiction that predated notions of 'the uncanny valley' and went straight to positioning robots as heroic. If you think 'Astroboy', then you're certainly there. Instead of an anxiety about a technological Frankenstein, the fiction to do with robots had us thinking of them going into situations where robots would tread where humans fear. The hope was robots could accomplish things human couldn't.

In that light, I bring depressing news with the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. The radiation leak in Fukushima is so bad it's killing robots sent in to repair it.

Five years after Fukushima, the exclusion zone is in better shape, but still a mess. The area around its once functional nuclear reactors are by far the most inhospitable. So much so that the radiation even managed to kill robots that had been sent in to help clean up.

Five robots that have gone into the reactor in order to help remove spent fuel rods have failed to return, reports Reuters. The issue? The radiation levels are so high that the robot's internals just melt. We've seen this happen before.

Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning, explained the difficulties the company faces in an interview. Not only do the robots tend to fail do to the failure of their wiring, but it's also not easy to get replacements. These aren't just off-the-shelf bots; they have to be designed specifically for the challenges of the particular building they enter, and that takes about two years of design.

If you go to the link on "we've seen this happen before", you'll see another article showing what one of the earlier robots saw before it went down.

It's a terrible thing that the Fukushima plants still in the state that it is, but moreover it is terrible that the limits of robotics got shown in the high radiation environment.

When You're This Bad At Remembering Things

The Hillary Clinton campaign is slightly gaffe prone. Earlier in the week she praised Nancy Reagan for raising AIDS awareness - which was not the way I remember the 1980s and the AIDS crisis. By 1983, everybody on the planet was freaking about AIDS except the White House.

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, California, told MSNBC.

“And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan — in particular, Mrs. Reagan — we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it,” she said. 

The former Secretary of State said she appreciated Mrs. Reagan’s “low-key advocacy” on HIV/AIDS, saying “it penetrated the public conscience, and people began to say, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this.’ “ 

Her comments prompted major backlash online, where gay men and LGBT groups were quick to point out that the Reagans kept quiet on the AIDS crisis for most of their administration, despite desperate pleas for help and thousands of deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first identified the disease in 1981, but former President Ronald Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the disease until 1985 and he didn’t give a speech about the crisis until 1987.

Just about anybody with a memory could remember this turn of events. So of course this ended up with Hillary Clinton offering an apology.

“While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS,” she said in a statement about two hours after her interview had been shown on MSNBC. “For that, I’m sorry.”

The worse gaffe this week was her claim that she didn't know where Bernie Sanders was back in '93 and '94 when she tried to put a Health Care plan through.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Surely she would have remembered the Senator helping her with her bill. Which leads me to wonder just what in the world is going on inside the Clinton campaign office.

Moments In Science

Robot Scientist Makes Discovery On Its Own

That line reads like a 1950sscience fiction movie title, but we've actually arrived at the day where a robot has done the scientific process of hypothesising and testing all on it own.

A robot programmed to study genomics has for the first time independently discovered new scientific knowledge, according to a report in the journal Science.
Researchers at the Aberystwyth University in Wales and the University of Cambridge, England, created Adam, a robot scientist that conducted experiments on yeast metabolism and also reasoned on the results, according to an online press release.
Using artificial intelligence, the prototype robot carried out each stage of the scientific process on its own, with researchers using separate manual experiments to confirm its hypotheses, it said.

The finding, to be published today, may pave the way for automating tedious laboratory tasks, according to the researchers.
"Ultimately we hope to have teams of humans and robot scientists working together in laboratories," Professor Ross King, who led the research at Aberystwyth University, was cited as saying in the statement.
Adam discovered "simple but new" scientific knowledge about the genomics of the baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism used to model more complex life systems, the statement said. He also came up with a follow-up experiment.

Pretty wild.

H2B Rocket Engine Test Fire Is Successful

Some of you may know that some years ago I was involved with a Discovery Channel program about the Japanese Space Exploration Agency. We went out to Tanegashima Island where they launch their rockets and covered the H2A rocket launch No.9.

At the time, they said they were developing a new rocket to follow the H2A which would have a higher capacity payload, and that was the H2B. Today we find the H2B has had a successful test firing of its engine. Here's an English article.

Japan's new H-2B rocket rolled to its oceanfront launch pad this week and briefly fired its two main engines Thursday, concluding the heavy-lift booster's first practice countdown after a six-day delay due to faulty ground equipment.

The orange and white rocket, stripped of its payload shroud and four solid rocket boosters, was driven atop a mobile platform overnight Tuesday to Launch Pad No. 2 at Tanegashima space center's Yoshinobu launch complex.

It was the second trip to the pad for the H-2B. Two previous attempted countdowns ended with scrubs on March 27 and again Wednesday.

Engineers began loading cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket Thursday morning.

Clocks counted down to zero at 2 p.m. local time, or 0500 GMT Thursday, when the first stage's two LE-7A main engines ignited for a 10-second burn.

Early results indicate the engines performed well during the test, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.

Thursday's exercise included the real first and second stages that will be used on the rocket's maiden flight later this year. The test was designed to validate the H-2B rocket's first stage propulsion system and the launcher's connections with the newly renovated launch pad, according to JAXA.

The H2B rocket will get its first launch in September this year. I kind of wish Discovery Channel would want to do a follow up program, just so I can go see another rocket launch in Tanegashima. :)