Rosenberg's Cold War

As the Cold War congealed in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the United States of America found itself ensnared in an atmosphere of fearful suspicion and paranoia. The Red Scare, which peaked during the roughly seven years between 1947 and 1954, came to dictate the mindset of Americans during the early stages of Cold War. Marked by such unsettling events as the Alger Hiss Trial of 1948, the passage of the McCarren Internal Security Act and the rise of red-seeing Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare raged across the country, fueled by fear of the harmful doctrines of the rapidly advancing Soviet Union. It was on the pinnacle of this paranoia and distrust that the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg came to dominate the American headlines.

Following the first successful nuclear tests by the Soviets in 1949, America quickly began to fear the scientific strides of their eastern-hemisphere rival, and its citizens began to suspiciously eye those around them, believing that Soviet spies must have been responsible for passing the nuclear technology from the United States to Russia. On July 17, 1950, Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer and employee for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was arrested for allegedly passing atomic secrets to Russia. One month later, on August 11, Julius’ wife, Ethel, was also arrested, charged with assisting her husband with his illicit activities. The Rosenbergs, former members of the American Communist Party, were implicated by Ethel’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass and a Philadelphia chemist, Harry Gold, who, after admitting to their own espionage activities, served as the primary witnesses in the trial. Despite the existence of only flimsy, circumstantial evidence (which included conflicting stories by Gold and Greenglass, a series of vague sketches that Greenglass presented as being identical to the secrets passed by Julius to the Soviets and government secrecy with its own evidence), Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917. Even after their conviction, the couple continued to assert their innocence from inside Sing-Sing Prison in New York, attempting to appeal to the Supreme Court seven times although failing to receive a hearing each time.

 Amid a mounting worldwide campaign for clemency, the Rosenbergs were executed by the electric chair after two years of prison on June 19, 1953. Prior to the execution, both President Truman and President Eisenhower had disregarded cynical public opinion (which overwhelmingly believed that the evidence used to convict the couple was weak and ethereal at best) by refusing to pardon Julius and Ethel. The death of such a sympathetic pair of individuals — many felt an affinity for the pitiable couple and their two young sons — spurred protest through the next decades and marked the beginning of the end of the Red Scare. Although such events as the McCarthy hearings of 1951-1954 would continue for some time, the Red Scare began to lose steam as Americans were jolted with sensibility by the electric shock that killed the Rosenbergs.

However, with the end of the Cold War and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence in the 1990’s, new, stronger information confirming the espionage activities of Julius Rosenberg was released (although the role of his wife still remains dubious). It is now clear that Julius, an avid communist, had for some time been disclosing U.S. military secrets to the U.S.S.R. from his post in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. David Greenglass, who himself had worked on the Manhattan Project, disclosed nuclear secrets to Julius, who in turn passed the information to Harry Gold — a courier for the espionage ring — who in turn passed it to Anatoly Yakovlev — the Soviet vice-consul in New York City. Soon after Gold was arrested in May 1950 for giving U.S. and British atomic secrets to Russia, Greenglass and Rosenberg were detained on the basis of their association with Gold. By cooperating with federal agents in proving the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Greenglass and Gold were given lighter sentences (Greenglass received 15 years in prison in a separate trial and Gold received 30 years in prison). The courts also made clear that if either of the Rosenbergs would admit to their espionage, they too could avoid execution, but the couple, loyal to their cause and riding a wave of public support, continued to adamantly state their innocence until their death on the day of June 19, 1953.

Philadelphia Experiment was based on the Unified Theory..duh !

Almost everyone has heard of the Philadelphia Experiment, although the number of people who actually have any idea as to what it was all about are nowhere near as numerous. The Experiment seems to fall into the same realm as the Kennedy Assassination; clouded by rumor and supposition, the exact truth of either incident will probably never be known. Both events are also plagued by a mass of incorrect or inaccurate information. Conspiracy buffs are more than happy to create wild, intricate plots involving virtually anyone and everyone on the planet (and in the case of the Philadelphia Experiment, off the planet).

---

On August 12, 1943 (or October 28, 1943 - accounts differ) the US Navy conducted a test of some sort on the USS Eldridge (DE [Destroyer Escort] 173) at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The exact nature of this test is open to speculation. Possible tests include experiments in magnetic invisibility, radar invisibility, optical invisibility or degaussing (rendering the ship immune to magnetic mines). The test (or tests) were conducted, only to produce undesirable results. Afterwards, the project (supposedly called 'Project Rainbow') was canceled.

U.S.S. Eldridge at sea in 1944

As one can easily see, the actual facts are scanty. The Navy denies that any sort of experiment ever took place, and the ship's logs show that the USS Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia at the time the test was supposed to take place. Of course, logs can be faked, and the government and military has lied before about certain events in the interests of secrecy and national security (witness the Manhattan Project). On the other hand, research has shown no evidence of a "Project Rainbow", although there was a code name "Rainbow"; it was used to designate the Allied plans to combat the Axis in World War II and had nothing to do with any form of experimental technology. As a final note, it should be pointed out that even some basic research (the World Wide Web is loaded with relevant sites) will show that the entire 'experiment' may in fact be a massive hoax, a modern urban legend that has grown to fantastic proportions over time. Such sensationalistic writing has been successful in creating such similar epic myths before, with the "Bermuda Triangle" a prime example.

 True Story

According to certain accounts, the actual results of the experiment involve occurrences far stranger than anyone could possibly imagine. The tests being conducted were an attempt to render a ship invisible to enemy radar. This was to be accomplished by wrapping an electromagnetic 'bottle' around the ship in question, absorbing or deflecting radar waves. The bottle was created by two (or four - accounts differ) massive Tesla coils which acted as electromagnetic generators; one was mounted forward and one was mounted aft. Other accounts state that a series of magnetic generators, called degaussers, were used. When activated, the electromagnetic field would extend out from the ship and divert radar waves around the ship, making the Eldridge invisible to radar receivers.

U.S.S. Eldridge at sea April 25th, 1944

When the actual test was put into motion, a number of unexpected and bizarre side effects occurred. As the electromagnetic field increased in strength, it began to extend as far as 100 yards out from the ship in all directions, forming a large sphere. Within this field, the ship became fuzzy and indistinct, and a greenish haze formed around the vessel, obscuring it from view. Eventually, the only visible object was the outline of the hull of the Eldridge where it entered the water. Then, to the amazement of onlookers, the entire ship vanished from view.

It was at this point (the vanishing of the Eldridge) that the true power of the electromagnetic field that had been created was revealed. The Eldridge had not only vanished from the view of observers in Philadelphia, it had vanished from Philadelphia all together! The ship had been instantly transported several hundred miles - from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia. After a few minutes, the ship once again vanished, to return to Philadelphia.

• 

To the Navy, the test had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Not only had they rendered a ship invisible to radar, they had made it optically invisible as well, not to mention causing the vessel to teleport hundreds of miles in a matter of minutes. For the crew, however, the trip had been a nightmare.

The test had managed to render the entire ship 'out of phase' with the surrounding universe, which is why it was able to travel from Philadelphia to Norfolk instantly. This phasing effect had drastic effects on the crew members. During the experiment, crew members found they could walk through solid objects, and when the field was shut off, men were found embedded in the bulkheads, decks and railings of the ship. The results were gruesome enough that some men went mad. Afterwards, several crew members simply vanished. A few disappeared into thin air; one, eating dinner with his family, rose, walked through a wall and was never seen again. Some men entered into what was called the 'Freeze'. This is where a man faded from view; unable to move, speak or otherwise affect his surroundings. Initially, the Freeze effect lasted only a few minutes to a few hours. Interestingly enough, invisible crewmen were still visible to other sailors who had survived the original experiment. After a while, the Freeze effect lasted for days or months, and became known as the 'Deep Freeze' (other terms include 'Caught in the Flow', 'Caught in the Push', 'Get Stuck', 'Go Blank', 'Hell Incorporated' or 'Stuck in Molasses'). The Deep Freeze could drive a man insane in very short order, and was only able to be counteracted if other crewmen performed a 'Laying on of Hands' technique to give the victim strength and allow him to recover from his affliction. Unfortunately, two men burst into flames while Laying on of Hands, burning for 18 days despite all attempts to quench the fire.

Seeing the horrible after effects of the experiment, the Navy discontinued all further research into radar and optical invisibility. The surviving crewmen were discharged as mentally unfit for duty and many were placed in insane asylums. However, science was not quite done conducting research on electromagnetic fields or radar and its affects on the human mind. Project Rainbow may have been disbanded, but the Phoenix Project was just getting started.

It's an issue to be looked into, slowing the Earth down by 0.06microseconds

Post by ScienceAlert.

Archimedes "Eureka" gone too far: devising relations b/w every complex movement

Yes, you heard it correct "Eureka" is one most absolutistic software that is capable of deriving relation between all natural complex movements associated to any organism or anything.

Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths.

The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York have already pointed the machine at baffling problems in biology and plan to use it to tackle questions in cosmology and social behaviour.

The work marks a turning point in the way science is done. Eureka moments, which supposedly began in Archimedes' bath more than 2,000 years ago, might soon be happening not in the minds of geniuses, but through the warm hum of electronic circuitry.

"We've reached a point in science where there's a lot of data to deal with. It's not Newton looking at an apple, or Galileo looking at heavenly bodies any more, it's more complex than that," said Hod Lipson, the computer engineer who led the project.

"This takes the grunt out of science by sifting through data and looking for the laws that govern how something behaves."

Details of the machine are described in the US journal Science. The study appears alongside a report from scientists at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge describing the first discovery of new scientific knowledge by a laboratory robot.

The robot, called Adam, devised and performed experiments to investigate the genetics of bakers' yeast. When scientists did their own experiments, they came to the same conclusions. Ross's team is already working on a second robot called Eve.

Together, the papers raise the question of how the role of scientists will change over the coming decades. For now, scientists believe the new technology will work alongside them rather than relegate them to technicians who tap in data and perform maintenance tasks, but leave the real thinking to the machines.

The Cornell machine uses a computer program that can search through huge amounts of data and look for underlying patterns. For example, a falling apple will abide by Newton's second law, which is often stated as F=ma, where F is the force acting on an object, m is its mass, and a is its acceleration. When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls, the machine would be able to work out the equation.

Lipson tested the machine by giving it information from basic lab experiments, such as swinging pendulums and tiny cars that moved up and down tracks on a cushion of air. After crunching through the data, the machine pinged and displayed several laws of motion and conservation of momentum.

The system runs its own checks to decide whether the laws it has found are likely to be interesting. In the pendulum test, for example, the tip of the pendulum is always the same distance from the pivot, but this does not shed any light on the underlying physics.

After proving that the machine worked, Lipson's team set it to work on the complex problem of metabolism in biological cells. The computer produced some equations, which the scientists are still trying to make sense of.

"It's like going to an oracle and asking what's going on. You are given an equation, but you need to work out what it means before you can understand what's really going on," said Lipson.

The team say they also plan to look at problems in cosmology and even social behaviour, which could reveal the underlying laws at play when people form social networks on the internet.

"The real test now is whether it can discover new laws of nature and I believe it will. There's no way forward in a lot of sciences without tools like this," Lipson said.

Source:Cornell University

Slit of hope for 14 billion years calculation: lightning fast method for transfer of data using 'Quantum droplet'

JILA physicists used an ultrafast laser and help from German theorists to discover a new semiconductor quasiparticle -- a handful of smaller particles that briefly condense into a liquid-like droplet.

Quasiparticles are composites of smaller particles that can be created inside solid materials and act together in a predictable way. A simple example is the exciton, a pairing, due to electrostatic forces, of an electron and a so-called "hole," a place in the material's energy structure where an electron could be, but isn't.

The new quasiparticle, described in the Feb. 27, 2014, issue of Nature and featured on the journal's cover, is a microscopic complex of electrons and holes in a new, unpaired arrangement. The researchers call this a "quantum droplet" because it has quantum characteristics such as well-ordered energy levels, but also has some of the characteristics of a liquid. It can have ripples, for example. It differs from a familiar liquid like water because the quantum droplet has a finite size, beyond which the association between electrons and holes disappears.

Although its lifetime is only a fleeting 25 picoseconds (trillionths of a second), the quantum droplet is stable enough for research on how light interacts with specialized forms of matter.

"Electron-hole droplets are known in semiconductors, but they usually contain thousands to millions of electrons and holes," says JILA physicist Steven Cundiff, who studies the properties of cutting-edge lasers and what they reveal about matter. "Here we are talking about droplets with around five electrons and five holes.

"Regarding practical benefits, nobody is going to build a quantum droplet widget. But this does have indirect benefits in terms of improving our understanding of how electrons interact in various situations, including in optoelectronic devices."

The JILA team created the new quasiparticle by exciting a gallium-arsenide semiconductor with an ultrafast red laser emitting about 100 million pulses per second. The pulses initially form excitons, which are known to travel around in semiconductors. As laser pulse intensity increases, more electron-hole pairs are created, with quantum droplets developing when the exciton density reaches a certain level. At that point, the pairing disappears and a few electrons take up positions relative to a given hole. The negatively charged electrons and positively charged holes create a neutral droplet. The droplets are like bubbles held together briefly by pressure from the surrounding plasma.

JILA's experimental data on energy levels of individual droplet rings agreed with theoretical calculations by co-authors at the University of Marburg in Germany. JILA researchers found they could tap into each energy level by tailoring the quantum properties of the laser pulses to match the particle correlations within the droplets. The droplets seem stable enough for future systematic studies on interactions between light and highly correlated states of matter. In addition, quasiparticles, in general, can have exotic properties not found in their constituent parts, and thus, can play a role in controlling the behavior of larger systems and devices.

JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder. Cundiff is a NIST physicist. The JILA research is supported by the National Science Foundation, NIST and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Source :National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

You no-more need to help an unworthy person: it's out now, machine reads a "plastic expressions" better

A joint study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Toronto has found that a computer system spots real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can.

The work, titled "Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions," is published in the latest issue of Current Biology.

"The computer system managed to detect distinctive dynamic features of facial expressions that people missed," said Marian Bartlett, research professor at UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation and lead author of the study. "Human observers just aren't very good at telling real from faked expressions of pain."

Senior author Kang Lee, professor at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, said "humans can simulate facial expressions and fake emotions well enough to deceive most observers. The computer's pattern-recognition abilities prove better at telling whether pain is real or faked."

The research team found that humans could not discriminate real from faked expressions of pain better than random chance -- and, even after training, only improved accuracy to a modest 55 percent. The computer system attains an 85 percent accuracy.

"In highly social species such as humans," said Lee, "faces have evolved to convey rich information, including expressions of emotion and pain. And, because of the way our brains are built, people can simulate emotions they're not actually experiencing -- so successfully that they fool other people. The computer is much better at spotting the subtle differences between involuntary and voluntary facial movements."

"By revealing the dynamics of facial action through machine vision systems," said Bartlett, "our approach has the potential to elucidate 'behavioral fingerprints' of the neural-control systems involved in emotional signaling."

The single most predictive feature of falsified expressions, the study shows, is the mouth, and how and when it opens. Fakers' mouths open with less variation and too regularly.

"Further investigations," said the researchers, "will explore whether over-regularity is a general feature of fake expressions."

In addition to detecting pain malingering, the computer-vision system might be used to detect other real-world deceptive actions in the realms of homeland security, psychopathology, job screening, medicine, and law, said Bartlett.

"As with causes of pain, these scenarios also generate strong emotions, along with attempts to minimize, mask, and fake such emotions, which may involve 'dual control' of the face," she said. "In addition, our computer-vision system can be applied to detect states in which the human face may provide important clues as to health, physiology, emotion, or thought, such as drivers' expressions of sleepiness, students' expressions of attention and comprehension of lectures, or responses to treatment of affective disorders."

Source: University of California - San Diego

How small can it be: Existence of particles smaller than Higgs particles

Nobody has seen them yet; particles that are smaller than the Higgs particle. However theories predict their existence, and now the most important of these theories have been critically tested. The result: The existence of the yet unseen particles is now more likely than ever.

Now it is more likely than ever: There must be particles out there smaller than Higgs particle.

Nobody has seen them yet; particles that are smaller than the Higgs particle. However theories predict their existence, and now the most important of these theories have been critically tested. The result: The existence of the yet unseen particles is now more likely than ever.

"I gave them a very critical review ," says Thomas Ryttov, particle physicist and associate professor at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ -- Origins), University of Southern Denmark.

He refers to the theories, that over the last app. five years have been put forward ​​for the existence of particles in the universe that are smaller than the Higgs particle. Having given these theories a critical review, he finds no new signs of weakness in them:

"There seems to be no new or unseen weaknessess. My review just leaves them just stronger," he says.

Over the past 5-8 years, a handful of theories have drawn particular interest from particle physicists. They all predict that there must be one or more types of particles that are even smaller than the Higgs particle. So far it has however not been possible to prove their existence.

"Here at CP ³ -- Origins, we are interested in the pursuit of such as yet unknown particles. We know that there must be a force that binds them together so that they together can create something bigger than themselves, something composite; a Higgs particle. It must happen similarly to quarks binding together to form protons and neutrons. If we can understand this force, we can explain and predict new physical phenomena like new particles," explains Thomas Ryttov.

The strong force

This force is called the strong force. It cannot be compared to gravity, which also has the ability to keep two objects close together. The effect of gravity depends on the fact that the two objects are not too far from each other, and the closer they are to each other the stronger the force of gravity will be. The strong force has the opposite effect: It is weak when two particles are close to each other, but strong -- extremely strong -- if you try to pull them apart.

Thomas Ryttov and his colleagues at CP ³ -- Origins believe that the so-called techni-quarks can be the yet unseen particles, smaller than the Higgs particle. If techni-quarks exist they will form a natural exention of the Standard Model which includes three generations of quarks and leptons. These particles together with the fundamental forces form the basis of the observed matter in the universe.

Source: University of Southern Denmark

Fierce Solar Wind from the "fusion ball" threatened earth in the 2012....Almighty's grace

Earth dodged a huge magnetic bullet from the sun on July 23, 2012.

According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections -- the most intense eruptions on the sun -- sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth's orbit. Had the eruption come nine days earlier, it would have hit Earth, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives.

The solar bursts would have enveloped Earth in magnetic fireworks matching the largest magnetic storm ever reported on Earth, the so-called Carrington event of 1859. The dominant mode of communication at that time, the telegraph system, was knocked out across the United States, literally shocking telegraph operators. Meanwhile, the Northern Lights lit up the night sky as far south as Hawaii.

In a paper appearing today (Tuesday, March 18) in the journal Nature Communications, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and research physicist Ying D. Liu, now a professor at China's State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, UC Berkeley research physicist Janet G. Luhmann and their colleagues report their analysis of the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA's STEREO A spacecraft.

"Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous," said Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

A study last year estimated that the cost of a solar storm like the Carrington Event could reach $2.6 trillion worldwide. A considerably smaller event on March 13, 1989, led to the collapse of Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid and a resulting loss of electricity to six million people for up to nine hours.

"An extreme space weather storm -- a solar superstorm -- is a low-probability, high-consequence event that poses severe threats to critical infrastructures of the modern society," warned Liu, who is with the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. "The cost of an extreme space weather event, if it hits Earth, could reach trillions of dollars with a potential recovery time of 4-10 years. Therefore, it is paramount to the security and economic interest of the modern society to understand solar superstorms."

Based on their analysis of the 2012 event, Liu, Luhmann and their STEREO colleagues concluded that a huge outburst on the sun on July 22 propelled a magnetic cloud through the solar wind at a peak speed of more than 2,000 kilometers per second -- four times the typical speed of a magnetic storm. It tore through Earth's orbit but, luckily, Earth and the other planets were on the other side of the sun at the time. Any planets in the line of sight would have suffered severe magnetic storms as the magnetic field of the outburst tangled with the planets' own magnetic fields.

The researchers determined that the huge outburst resulted from at least two nearly simultaneous coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which typically release energies equivalent to that of about a billion hydrogen bombs. The speed with which the magnetic cloud plowed through the solar wind was so high, they concluded, because another mass ejection four days earlier had cleared the path of material that would have slowed it down.

"The authors believe this extreme event was due to the interaction of two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes," said Joe Gurman, the project scientist for STEREO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

One reason the event was potentially so dangerous, aside from its high speed, is that it produced a very long-duration, southward-oriented magnetic field, Luhmann said. This orientation drives the largest magnetic storms when they hit Earth because the southward field merges violently with Earth's northward field in a process called reconnection. Storms that normally might dump their energy only at the poles instead dump it into the radiation belts, ionosphere and upper atmosphere and create auroras down to the tropics.

"These gnarly, twisty ropes of magnetic field from coronal mass ejections come blasting from the sun through the ambient solar system, piling up material in front of them, and when this double whammy hits Earth, it skews the Earth's magnetic field to odd directions, dumping energy all around the planet," she said. "Some of us wish Earth had been in the way; what an experiment that would have been."

"People keep saying that these are rare natural hazards, but they are happening in the solar system even though we don't always see them," she added. "It's like with earthquakes -- it is hard to impress upon people the importance of preparing unless you suffer a magnitude 9 earthquake."

All this activity would have been missed if STEREO A -- the STEREO spacecraft ahead of us in Earth's orbit and the twin to STEREO B, which trails in our orbit -- had not been there to record the blast.

The goal of STEREO and other satellites probing the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth is to understand how and why the sun sends out these large solar storms and to be able to predict them during the sun's 11-year solar cycle. This event was particularly unusual because it happened during a very calm solar period.

"Observations of solar superstorms have been extremely lacking and limited, and our current understanding of solar superstorms is very poor," Liu said. "Questions fundamental to solar physics and space weather, such as how extreme events form and evolve and how severe it can be at the Earth, are not addressed because of the extreme lack of observations."

Source: University of California - Berkeley

Cyborg Drummer : Robotics and Artificial Intelligence level up in the field of music

Professor Gil Weinberg has already built a band of robotic musicians in his Georgia Tech lab. Now he's created a robot that can be attached to amputees, allowing its technology to be embedded into humans. The robotic drumming prosthesis has motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians' arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The other stick "listens" to the music being played and improvises.

"The second drumstick has a mind of its own," said Weinberg, founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. "The drummer essentially becomes a cyborg. It's interesting to see him playing and improvising with part of his arm that he doesn't totally control."

The prosthesis was created for Jason Barnes, a drummer who was electrocuted two years ago and lost his right arm below the elbow. The Atlanta Institute of Music and Media student built his own prosthetic device shortly after the accident. It wasn't very flexible. He could bang the drums by moving his elbow up and down, but couldn't control the speed or bounce of the stick without a wrist or fingers. That's when Weinberg stepped in to create a single-stick device with sensors that responds to Barnes' bicep muscles.

"Now I can flex and send signals to a computer that tightens or loosens the stick and controls the rebound," said Barnes.

Weinberg, who has already built a robotic percussionist and marimba player that use computer algorithms to improvise with human musicians, took the prosthesis a step further. He added the second stick and gave it a "musical brain."

"Jason can pull the robotic stick away from the drum when he wants to be fully in control," says Weinberg. "Or he can allow it to play on its own and be surprised and inspired by his own arm responding to his drumming."

Regardless of how he uses the extra stick, the new prosthetic has already given Barnes capabilities he hasn't had since before the amputation. It's only the beginning for Weinberg. He's using a National Science Foundation grant (IIS- 1345006) to expand the technology.

"Music is very time sensitive. You can hear the difference between two strokes, even if they are a few milliseconds apart," said Weinberg. "If we are able to use machine learning from Jason's muscles (and in future steps, from his brain activity) to determine when he intends to drum and have the stick hit at that moment, both arms can be synchronized."

Weinberg says such robotic synchronization technology could potentially be used in the future by fully abled humans to control an embedded, mechanical third arm during time-sensitive operations. For example, Weinberg's anticipation algorithms could be used to help astronauts or surgeons perform complex, physical tasks in synchronization with robotic devices.

For Barnes, it's all about the music. Because an embedded chip can control the speed of the drumsticks, the prosthesis can be programmed to play two sticks at a different rhythm. It can also move the sticks faster than humanly possible.

"I'll bet a lot of metal drummers might be jealous of what I can do now," he said. "Speed is good. Faster is always better."

Barnes will play with the device for the first time publicly on March 22 at the Robotic Musicianship Demonstration and Concert at Kennesaw State University's Bailey Performance Center.


Source: Georgia Institute of Technology