Carnegie Mellon researchers demonstrate one of the most advanced autonomous vehicles ever designed

Carnegie Mellon researchers demonstrate one of the most advanced autonomous vehicles ever designed This week in Washington, D.C., researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) marked a significant milestone, demonstrating one of the most advanced autonomous vehicles ever designed, capable of navigating on urban roads and highways without human intervention. Developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Transportation, DARPA and General Motors, the car is the result of more than a decade of research and development by scientists and engineers at CMU and elsewhere. Credit: NSF

Amtrak Looking To Boost Acela Express Capacity, Speeds

 

Amtrak’s Acela Express service may not be true high-speed rail, but as ridership hits new records and trains consistently packed, Amtrak is looking to prepare  for the future by replacing its current rolling stock.

On Wednesday afternoon, Amtrak said it has issued a request for proposal to “acquire new trainsets to supplement and eventually replace its aging Acela Express.” Acela Express, which runs exclusively along the Northeast Corridor (NEC), is currently operating near capacity and frequently sells out before and after major holidays.

The RFP seeks up to 28 next-generation high-speed trainsets capable of meeting or exceeding current Acela trip-times on the existing NEC infrastructure. Aside from faster trains, Amtrak is also looking to boost the passenger capacity of each trainset by 40 percent, or 120 passengers. Just how Amtrak plans to do this is unknown, however.

I wonder how much of the 40% increase in pax on new Acela train sets will come from 10 car sets vs current 8 car, or denser config? @Amtrak

— Edward Russell (@e_russell) July 2, 2014

“The Northeast Corridor needs more high-speed rail capacity to help move the American economy forward,” said President and CEO Joseph Boardman. “More and more people are choosing Amtrak for travel between Washington, New York and Boston. New equipment means more seats and more frequent departures to help meet that growing demand.”

If Amtrak is taking cues from the commercial aviation industry, a denser configuration could very well be in the cards. Acela currently offers a seat pitch (the distance from one point on a seat to the same point in the forward seat) of 42 inches. In the airline industry, seat pitch has generally been reduced to around 30″-31″ over the past decade, with 34″ being considered roomy. Amtrak could shave a few inches off the seat pitch and still maintain a comfortable ride, while boosting the capacity of each car.

Dimensions of the Amtrak Acela Business Class seat. (Courtesy: Amtrak)

Alternatively, Amtrak could be looking to squeeze another seat into every row. Seat width is currently 21″ in Business Class (the lowest level of service offered on Acela), which is wider than just about any airline economy seat. Adding an additional seat to each row would mirror the actions of many airlines operating the Boeing 777 and Airbus A330, but puts serious dent in passenger comfort. Given Amtrak’s marketing of Acela as being a more comfortable ride than regular NEC trains and airlines, this option seems unlikely.

English: Acela Express business class interior with some overhead bins open at the end of a Boston-to-Washington run. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, the simplest option may just be the most likely. Acela is configured in 8 car setup- two engines, four Business Class cars, one First Class car, and a cafe car. Amtrak could simply extend the trainsets to 10 cars and leave the passenger seating configuration as is. Adding two additional Business Class cars would boost the total passenger load of each trainset by 130, more than the 40 percent required. Also possible is the elimination of the First Class car, which only seats 44 passengers as opposed to 65 in Business Class, or the elimination the Cafe car.

An Amtrak spokesman tells Railway Age that responses to the RFP are due by October 1, 2014. Once the proposals are in, we should have a better idea of what the next generation of Acela will look like.

Concept rendering of a next generation Acela trainset (Source: Amtrak)

 

Forbes Tech

 

Doing something is better than doing nothing for most people, study shows

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Most people are just not comfortable in their own heads, according to a new psychological investigation. (stock image)

The investigation found that most would rather be doing something -- possibly even hurting themselves -- than doing nothing or sitting alone with their thoughts, said the researchers, whose findings will be published July 4 in the journal Science.

In a series of 11 studies, U.Va. psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues at U.Va. and Harvard University found that study participants from a range of ages generally did not enjoy spending even brief periods of time alone in a room with nothing to do but think, ponder or daydream. The participants, by and large, enjoyed much more doing external activities such as listening to music or using a smartphone. Some even preferred to give themselves mild electric shocks than to think.

"Those of us who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study surprising -- I certainly do -- but our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time," Wilson said.

The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

"That was surprising -- that even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking," Wilson said.

He does not necessarily attribute this to the fast pace of modern society, or the prevalence of readily available electronic devices, such as smartphones. Instead, he thinks the devices might be a response to people's desire to always have something to do. In his paper, Wilson notes that broad surveys have shown that people generally prefer not to disengage from the world, and, when they do, they do not particularly enjoy it. Based on these surveys, Americans spent their time watching television, socializing or reading, and actually spent little or no time "relaxing or thinking."

During several of Wilson's experiments, participants were asked to sit alone in an unadorned room at a laboratory with no cell phone, reading materials or writing implements, and to spend six to 15 minutes -- depending on the study -- entertaining themselves with their thoughts. Afterward, they answered questions about how much they enjoyed the experience and if they had difficulty concentrating, among other questions. Most reported they found it difficult to concentrate and that their minds wandered, though nothing was competing for their attention. On average the participants did not enjoy the experience. A similar result was found in further studies when the participants were allowed to spend time alone with their thoughts in their homes.

"We found that about a third admitted that they had 'cheated' at home by engaging in some activity, such as listening to music or using a cell phone, or leaving their chair," Wilson said. "And they didn't enjoy this experience any more at home than at the lab."

An additional experiment randomly assigned participants to spend time with their thoughts or the same amount of time doing an external activity, such as reading or listening to music, but not to communicate with others. Those who did the external activities reported that they enjoyed themselves much more than those asked to just think, that they found it easier to concentrate and that their minds wandered less. The researchers took their studies further. Because most people prefer having something to do rather than just thinking, they then asked, "Would they rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all?"

The results show that many would. Participants were given the same circumstances as most of the previous studies, with the added option of also administering a mild electric shock to themselves by pressing a button.

Twelve of 18 men in the study gave themselves at least one electric shock during the study's 15-minute "thinking" period. By comparison, six of 24 females shocked themselves. All of these participants had received a sample of the shock and reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again.

"What is striking," the investigators write, "is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid." Wilson and his team note that men tend to seek "sensations" more than women, which may explain why 67 percent of men self-administered shocks to the 25 percent of women who did.

Wilson said that he and his colleagues are still working on the exact reasons why people find it difficult to be alone with their own thoughts. Everyone enjoys daydreaming or fantasizing at times, he said, but these kinds of thinking may be most enjoyable when they happen spontaneously, and are more difficult to do on command.

"The mind is designed to engage with the world," he said. "Even when we are by ourselves, our focus usually is on the outside world. And without training in meditation or thought-control techniques, which still are difficult, most people would prefer to engage in external activities."

Discovery expands search for Earth-like planets: Newly spotted frozen world orbits in a binary star system

 

At twice the mass of Earth, the planet orbits one of the stars in the binary system at almost exactly the same distance from which Earth orbits the sun. However, because the planet's host star is much dimmer than the sun, the planet is much colder thanEarth -- a little colder, in fact, than Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Four international research teams, led by professor Andrew Gould of The Ohio State University, published their discovery in the July 4 issue of the journal Science.

The study provides the first evidence that terrestrial planets can form in orbits similar to Earth's, even in a binary star system where the stars are not very far apart. Although this planet itself is too cold to be habitable, the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in such a binary system would be in the so-called "habitable zone" -- the region where conditions might be right for life.

"This greatly expands the potential locations to discover habitable planets in the future," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. "Half the stars in the galaxy are in binary systems. We had no idea if Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits could even form in these systems. "

Very rarely, the gravity of a star focuses the light from a more distant star and magnifies it like a lens. Even more rarely, the signature of a planet appears within that magnified light signal. The technique astronomers use to find such planets is called gravitational microlensing, and computer modeling of these events is complicated enough when only one star and its planet are acting as the lens, much less two stars.

Searching for planets within binary systems is tricky for most techniques, because the light from the second star complicates the interpretation of the data. "But in gravitational microlensing," Gould explained, "we don't even look at the light from the star-planet system. We just observe how its gravity affects light from a more distant, unrelated, star. This gives us a new tool to search for planets in binary star systems."

When the astronomers succeeded in detecting this new planet, they were able to document that it produced two separate signatures -- the primary one, which they typically use to detect planets, and a secondary one that had previously been only hypothesized to exist.

The first was a brief dimming of light, as the planet's gravity disrupted one of the magnified images of the source star. But the second effect was an overall distortion of the light signal.

"Even if we hadn't seen the initial signature of the planet, we could still have detected it from the distortion alone," Gould said, pointing to a graph of the light signal. "The effect is not obvious. You can't see it by eye, but the signal is unmistakable in the computer modeling."

Gaudi explained the implications.

"Now we know that with gravitational microlensing, it's actually possible to infer the existence of a planet -- and to know its mass, and its distance from a star -- without directly detecting the dimming due to the planet," he said. "We thought we could do that in principle, but now that we have empirical evidence, we can use this method to find planets in the future."

The nature of these distortions is still somewhat of a mystery, he admitted.

"We don't have an intuitive understanding of why it works. We have some idea, but at this point, I think it would be fair to say that it's at the frontier of our theoretical work."

The planet, called OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LBb, first appeared as a "dip" in the line tracing the brightness data taken by the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope on April 11, 2013. The planet briefly disrupted one of the images formed by the star it orbits as the system crossed in front of a much more distant star 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

"Before the dip, this was just another microlensing event," Gould said. It was one of approximately 2,000 discovered every year by OGLE, with its new large-format camera that monitors 100 million stars many times per night searching for such events.

"It's really the new OGLE-IV survey that made this discovery possible," he added. "They got a half dozen measurements of that dip and really nailed it." From the form of the dip, whose "wings" were traced out in MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) data, they could see that the source was headed directly toward the central star.

Then, for two weeks, astronomers watched the magnified light continue to brighten from telescopes in Chile, New Zealand, Israel and Australia. The teams included OGLE, MOA, MicroFUN (the Microlensing Follow Up Network), and the Wise Observatory.

Even then, they still didn't know that the planet's host star had another companion -- a second star locked into orbit with it. But because they were already paying close attention to the signal, the astronomers noticed when the binary companion unexpectedly caused a huge eruption of light called a caustic crossing.

By the time they realized that the lens was not one star, but two, they had captured a considerable amount of data -- and made a surprising discovery: the distortion.

Weeks after all signs of the planet had faded, the light from the binary-lens caustic crossing became distorted, as if there were a kind of echo of the original planet signal.

Intensive computer analysis by professor Cheongho Han at Chungbuk National University in Korea revealed that the distortion contained information about the planet -- its mass, separation from its star, and orientation -- and that information matched perfectly with what astronomers saw during their direct observation of the dip due to the planet. So the same information can be captured from the distortion alone.

This detailed analysis showed that the planet is twice the mass of Earth, and orbits its star from an Earth-like distance, around 90 million miles. But its star is 400 times dimmer than our sun, so the planet is very cold -- around 60 Kelvin (-352 degrees Fahrenheit or -213 Celsius), which makes it a little colder than Jupiter's moon Europa. The second star in the star system is only as far from the first star as Saturn is from our sun. But this binary companion, too, is very dim.

Still, binary star systems composed of dim stars like these are the most common type of star system in our galaxy, the astronomers said. So this discovery suggests that there may be many more terrestrial planets out there -- some possibly warmer, and possibly harboring life.

Three other planets have been discovered in binary systems that have similar separations, but using a different technique. This is the first one close to Earth-like size that follows an Earth-like orbit, and its discovery within a binary system by gravitational microlensing was by chance.

"Normally, once we see that we have a binary, we stop observing. The only reason we took such intensive observations of this binary is that we already knew there was a planet," Gould said. "In the future we'll change our strategy."

In particular, Gould singled out the work of amateur astronomer and frequent collaborator Ian Porritt of Palmerston North, New Zealand, who watched for gaps in the clouds on the night of April 24 to get the first few critical measurements of the jump in the light signal that revealed that the planet was in a binary system. Six other amateurs from New Zealand and Australia contributed as well.

Other project collaborators hailed from Ohio State, Warsaw University Observatory, Chungbuk National University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, Universidad de Concepción, Auckland Observatory, Auckland University of Technology, University of Canterbury, Texas A&M University, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, Massey University, University of Auckland, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Osaka University, Nagano National College of Technology, Tokyo Metropolitan College of Aeronautics, Victoria University, Mt. John University Observatory, Kyoto Sangyo University, Tel-Aviv University and the University of British Columbia.

Funding came from the National Science Foundation, NASA (including a NASA Sagan Fellowship), European Research Council, Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, National Research Foundation of Korea, U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Marsden Fund from the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence.