NASA combats the conspiracy theorists: How Curiosity took a self-portrait on Mars

Back when NASA released Curiosity’s first self-portrait from the surface of Mars, there was asurprisingly large number of people who doubted the veracity of the image. Most of these doubts revolved around the 7-foot robotic arm that captured the photo, but which isn’t actually visible. As with the Moon landing photos, there were conspiracy theorists who claimed that the self-portrait was actually shot here on Earth. “It’s impossible to shoot a photo and not have your arm visible,” the tinfoil-hat-wearing fruitcakes decried. “A third party must’ve taken the photo… or it’s CGI!”

NASA, which is rightfully rather proud of its ability to land a one-ton rover on another planetafter a 352-million-mile journey, seemingly took these attacks to heart and has nowpublished information about how the self-portrait was taken.

As we originally reported, the self-portrait is a mosaic of 55 images captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which sits on the end of Curiosity’s 7-foot robotic arm. These 55 images were taken in such a way that the arm was mostly out of shot — and where that wasn’t possible, data from other images (other angles) was used to fill in the gaps.

As you can see in the animation above, the moves that MAHLI makes as it traverses Curiosity are very exact. According to National Geographic, these movements were planned out last year by none other than James Cameron, and Michael Malin and Michael Ravine of MSSS, the company that manufactured Curiosity’s cameras. “Actually, there weren’t that many images with the arm in them because of how we positioned the arm,” Ravine explains. “It’s like if you hold a camera out in front of you with your elbow crooked and shoot—what you’ll probably get is your face and top of your body including your shoulder, but most of your arm is out of the frame.”

The exact movements to shoot all 55 images were then programmed into NASA’s Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP), and then tested on the Curiosity’s stunt double — the Vehicle System Test Bed at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (pictured above). Before trying out new maneuvers, just as an extra precaution, NASA generally tests them on the VSTB first. Finally, to take the actual self-portrait on Mars, NASA simply presses “play” in RSVP, transmitting the commands to NASA’s Deep Space Network antennae, which squirts them across 200 million miles of deep space to the rover.

In other news, Curiosity has now reached the region of Glenelg, and is powering along to Yellowknife Bay, where the rover will hopefully try out its percussive hammer for the first time (by drilling into an interesting rock). The photo below was taken at Shaler, where Curiosity briefly stopped to take some photos and other scientific measurements. Curiosity will likely spend a few weeks/months in the Glenelg region before turning south to Mount Sharp — the final destination of the rover’s primary mission.

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MIT creates tiny, 22nm transistor without silicon

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Lab (MTL) have created the smallest transistor fashioned from indium gallium arsenide, a material that is being positioned as an eventual successor to silicon. MIT’s indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) transistor has a gate length of just 22nm — roughly the same size as the smallest features on Intel’s 22nm FinFET Ivy Bridge chips.

This tiny InGaAs transistor was mostly fashioned from normal semiconductor processes — molecular beam epitaxy, electron beam lithography, and so on. The breakthrough here is using an exotic, compound material, rather than straight-up silicon. In this case, the MIT researchers allow evaporated indium, gallium, and arsenic atoms to react, forming a very thin crystal of InGaAs that will become the transistor’s channel (the thin, lighter line at the tip of the inverted V). Molybdenum is then deposited at the source and drain, oxide is deposited at the gate (the inverted V) — and voila, a tiny, exotic transistor. MIT says it “performs well,” but its exact performance characteristics aren’t given.

It is fairly well understood at this point that silicon — the fundamental building block of almost every computer chip, and much of modern society — will eventually run out of steam. No one quite agrees when this will occur, but the general consensus is within 10-20 years. Basically, at some point in the future, as CMOS components continue to shrink, silicon simply won’t function as a semiconductor any more. When this happens, we’ll need to replace silicon with something else.

ITRS’s table for emerging silicon replacement technologies

As we’ve discussed before on ExtremeTech, the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) currently pegs III-V semiconductors such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) as one of the only short-term alternatives to silicon. “Short-term” is relative, though; we’re talking at least five to 10 years until GaAs (or MIT’s InGaAs) finds its way into commercial memory or logic chips. In MIT’s case, the researchers have managed to build a singleInGaAs transistor — scaling that up to the billions of transistors that will be in CPUs of the future will verge on the impossible.

The problem with GaAs, InGaAs, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and any number of exotic materials that we cover on ExtremeTech, is that they’re trying to replace the most advanced technology in the world. It is not hyperbolic to state that hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into CMOS R&D; maybe trillions. For these silicon replacements to even stand a chance, a similar investment will need to be made — and put simply, there is probably only one group in the world who has the requisite time or resources: Intel. We don’t even have definitive proof that the new materials will scale much further than silicon — so we’d be plowing billions of dollars into something that might only get us another few years of Moore’s law.

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IBM 3390: The world’s largest and most expensive hard drive teardown

If you lived through the ’70s or ’80s, you probably remember a time when technology was big. TVs, with their cathode ray tubes, were monstrous. Amplifiers and hi-fis were heavy, bulky, expensive things. And computers… computers were reallylarge. Case in point: The IBM hard drive pictured above, which weighs in at 38.5kg (85lbs) and stores a grand total of between 1 and 2 gigabytes.

This drive, which originates from around 1989, would’ve been teamed up with a number of other drives and slotted into a IBM 3390 Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) — a floor-to-ceiling server rack. One IBM 3390 model was capable of storing up to six drives, for a total capacity of 22.7GB. A complete IBM 3390 system had a data transfer rate of 4.2MB/sec, with an average seek time of 12.5 milliseconds. The platters probably span at around 2,500-3,000 RPM.

While it’s hard to put an exact price on a single drive, it would’ve cost somewhere in the region of $50,000 to $100,000 in 1989 — or about twice that, in today’s money. That’s around $50,000 per gigabyte — or one million times more expensive than today’s hard disk drives, which are currently priced at around five cents per gig.

With the background out of the way, I give you EEVblog’s teardown of the the hard drive. The video is rather long, so you might want to around the 8-minute mark for the case opening; the 15-minute mark for spindle motor; 20 minutes for the hard drive heads; and 33 minutes to see the head actuators in motion.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the IBM 3390 DASD was the pinnacle of reliable, online (as opposed to offline tapes) storage. EEVblog’s hard drive was sourced from a bank, where it would’ve stored recent transactions until they were backed up to tapes. In the ’80s and ’90s it would’ve been quite common to find systems like these in the vaults of banks, and large corporations and institutions.

The back of the IBM 3390 hard drive, showing a power and data connector

It’s worth noting that this drive isn’t big just because it’s old. In 1989, 2.5-, 3.5- and 5.25-inch hard drives already existed — but their capacities were measured in megabytes. The IBM 3390 had a large capacity, but it was primarily designed for reliability — and in the ’80s that meant going large (the platters are 11 inches across in this case). If you watch through the entire teardown, you will see that the hard drive’s only silicon chip is a tiny chip that acts as a signal amplifier. If you look closely, you’ll see a nozzle on the drive’s exterior that was used to pump the enclosure full of pressurized halon, increasing reliability. EEVblog says that these IBM drives were so reliable (and so expensive) that many institutions carried on using them well into the ’90s.

At this point, you should check out our history of computer storage. It’s amazing how hard drives were one of the most recent advances in non-volatile storage, and yet the fundamental technology has remained almost unchanged for 40 or 50 years. If you took the IBM 3390 drive and simply scaled it down a few hundred times, it would look virtually identical to a modern hard drive.

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Toyota and Microsoft working on driver gesture recognition (no, not those gestures)

Raise your hand, palm up, and the radio volume in your car goes up. Toyota sees gesture recognition as one way to reduce the complexity of cars. Not for steering and braking, but to deal with the secondary controls such as infotainment, navigation, or your cellphone. So says Jim Lentz, head of Toyota in the US. The goal is to reduce driver distraction.

Toyota’s Board of Awesomeness (seriously) research team is working with Microsoft, a company that has spent years trying to reduce crashes. Their research vehicle is an electric skateboard with a Windows 8 tablet and Kinect motion sensing software (pictured below). In this case, raising or lowering the rider’s hand changes the speed. So, probably, does falling off.

This is all theoretical research right now while Toyota and Lexus soldier ahead in production cars with touchscreens, voice recognition, the Entune/Enform infotainment interface, and Remote Touch, the haptic feedback joystick-like device on some Lexuses that controls the LCD display. “Imagine a dashboard where there are no buttons to push… no screens to tap… and your eyes can remain focused on the road. That’s exactly what Toyota is working on,” Lentz said in a speech at the recent Los Angeles Auto Show.

“This could potentially work in conjunction with voice recognition which sometimes can be hindered by accents or mispronunciations. Hand gestures are pretty universal,” Lentz added. “I’ll wait for a few seconds while you insert your own punch line.”

Separately, Lentz said Toyota in Japan is prototyping the Smart Insect (pictured right), a single-passenger electric vehicle with cameras facing inside and outside the car, gesture and voice recognition, motion sensors, and behavior predictions. For instance: Walk up to the car and it recognizes the driver’s face, blinks the headlamps, and unlocks and opens the doors. Sit down and the car says “Hello” or whatever the driver desires. Think custom ringtones-plus. Gesture recognition and the Smart Insect, Lentz says, “are just a few examples of the many types of mobility automakers are creating for a better tomorrow.”

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DoE calls for a chemical battery with 5x capacity, within 5 years – can it be done?

The Department of Energy wants batteries with five times the energy storage of those we have today. They want them to be five times cheaper and to be ready in five years. Earlier this year the Department’s solicitation for proposals was announced, and now five universities have been chosen for the job along with several national labs and private companies. According to US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a “Manhattan Project-like atmosphere” is to be fostered. With a funding level of only $120 million and no visible enemy at the border, what are the prospects for success?

By most estimates the Manhattan Project — a research program that led to the first atomic bomb — was funded to the tune of $2 billion, which today would be around $20 billion. TheBattery and Energy Storage Hub, as the new project is called, barely scratches the surface of that. Today’s chemical battery technology is fairly mature, and a serious competitor that would be viable on this projected timescale has yet to emerge. Exotic materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes are being explored as anode materials, and seemingly far-out concepts like using viruses to self assemble electrodes have been studied, but these concepts have yet to be proved. To achieve the kind of numbers that the DoE expects, we can only guess at what these folks might may have hiding up their sleeves.

One alternative to Li-ion batteries that has been proposed is an aluminum-ion (Al-ion) battery. Al-ion would have a potential energy density of 1kW-hr/kg compared with 0.4 kW-hr/kg for Li-ion. Aluminum has the advantage of possessing three valence electrons compared to lithium’s single available valence electron. The result is that battery charge/discharge reactions involving aluminum can transfer three times as many electrons and hence triple the current per chemical unit.

Metal-ion batteries still have the drawback that they cannot be discharged to zero. One might have thought that the Tesla roadster would have been designed so that this could never happen, however Murphy’s law recently provided for dramatic headlines as severalowners were rumored to have gotten stuck with huge tabs for replacement batteries. Another sore point for metal-ion batteries was highlighted by a recent Chevy Volt crash test report. Three weeks after a rollover test impacted the battery, it caught fire.

Overcoming gasoline

At 13kW-hr/kg, gasoline is still a far more attractive option so long as cities have greater troubles to tend to than the associated noise and smog it brings. To really compete today,metal-air batteries (such as Li-air) producing electricity from reaction with atmospheric oxygen are needed. Like a jet engine, they do not need to internally store oxidizer. Their effective energy density is therefore much higher, comparable in fact to gasoline. The major trade-off is the lack of ability to easily recharge electrically. While cities are thinking more critically about electrifying the transportation sector with charging stations and underground wireless induction coils at traffic lights, the battery sector is already moving on — hence the urgency of the new battery mandate.

One challenge to recharging a Li-air battery lies in keeping it protected from the environment. The cathode needs oxygen but it is degraded by humidity. The cathode also needs a huge surface area, which makes designing a compact battery more difficult. This also means that while energy density is high, the power density is typically low, equating to hard limits on the rate at which power can be put in or drawn off the battery. For electric vehicles looking to be quick off the mark, a supplementary supercapacitorcharging itself in the background from the battery could be used for those times when the motor needs a lot of current.

Al-air batteries are an attractive technology that has already seen use in military vehicles. Aluminum is a familiar metal, more abundant and less strategic than lithium. As primary cells — i.e. non-rechargeable — the aluminium anode is slowly consumed by its reaction with atmospheric oxygen at the cathode. The cathode, immersed in a water-based electrolyte, converts the aluminum into hydrated aluminum oxide at which point the battery will no longer produce electricity. Physically recycling the aluminum anode from hydrated aluminum oxide is possible but not a process that is envisioned to happen on board a vehicle. Designers also need keep in mind that since metal-ion batteries gain oxygen during their operation, they would be expected to acquire mass as they are depleted.

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Digital dashboard: Why your car’s next instrument panel will be one big LCD

LCD instrument panels are coming, trickling down from a handful of expensive cars today to affordable cars. You need an LCD display in front of you to process all the information you’re getting from the car and connected devices. Any car instrument panel tells you how fast you’re going and how much fuel remains. When you also want to see navigation instructions, song info, hybrid battery efficiency, and the name of an incoming caller, it’s time for a big-screen LCD instrument panel. They’re on a dozen premium car models today. Affordable cars are getting hybrid displays in the instrument panel: The speedometer, tachometer, and fuel gauge are traditional mechanical devices; inset among them or in a bottom strip is an LCD display that can show all the other information.

The car instrument panel is following the lead of the center stack in going to LCDs. Theinstrument cluster or instrument panel is what’s on the far side of the steering wheel. Thecenter stack is where the radio/head unit and climate control knobs live. Within five years (by 2017), nearly two thirds of cars sold in North America will have a center stack with adisplay radio, or head unit with an LCD of at least 4.5 inches rather than a dumb, one- or two-line text display, according to IHS Automotive, a Minnesota consulting group. Try scrolling a thousand-song smartphone list on a text display for quick proof of why you want an LCD display. As for the instrument panel, 85% of cars will have at least a partial LCD and more than 10% will be full LCDs. “Infotainment is the main driver for most display radios,” says Mark Boyadjis, an IHS senior analyst. “Safety is the main driver for LCD displays in the instrument cluster or small displays in the head unit.” The US is requiring all cars built by September 2014 to have a rear camera and display in the cockpit. An LCD backup (reversing) camera display embedded in the inside mirror is acceptable, too, though they’re small and can be affected by sunlight.

The industry hasn’t yet settled on a term for an instrument panel that uses an LCD or brighter OLED, so you’ll hear digital dashboard, virtual instrument cluster, reconfigurable instrument cluster, glass cockpit (borrowed from the aviation industry), and digital instrument cluster display (ICD) used to describe the instrument panel of the near future. Information presented in the instrument panel is easier to see at a glance because the driver just looks down, not over and down as with center stack displays. A head-up display is even better, but the cost is around $1,000 and some drivers find them distracting even when they show a pared-down subset of info (speed, cruise-control speed, next turn).

The full monty: 12-inch, all-glass instrument panel

Full digital ICDs have been on a handful of cars for 3-4 years. Jaguar and Land Rover were early pioneers in full digital ICDs with the Jaguar XJ and Land Rover’s Range Rover (pictured above). Both use 12.3-inch LCD panels.

At the very least, a full digital instrument panel usually lets the driver switch between a digital and analog speedometer, or even have the digital readout set inside the analog speedometer gauge. Switching from miles to kilometers is a snap when you drive in Canada or Mexico. It could allow the over-40 driver to increase the font size of information. For old farts who maybe shouldn’t be driving at all, the text could be really big. For the forty-something driver who needs reading glasses and isn’t wearing them, or who has sunglasses ground only for distance vision, larger fonts would make make the make the cockpit information more legible. So far, automakers haven’t rushed to implement sizable fonts, even though they talk a good game about being sensitive to the boomer population.

Cadillac XTS: Move apps from center stack to instrument panel

The most recent car to make a splash with a full LCD instrument cluster is the full-sizeCadillac XTS (pictured at the top of the story), announced in the spring, and followed by the compact Cadillac ATS sport sedan, with a partial digital ICD. It, too, has a 12.3-inch, 1280×480 panel.

The Cadillac XTS display is highly but not infinitely configurable. First, you can set four themes for the instrument anel display, called Simple, Enhanced, Balanced (photo), and Performance, with less or more information. Then you can tinker with the display elements. The 3-inch center of the speedometer (middle gauge) can be a digital speed readout or a moving map. This is part of the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) infotainment package that also includes an 8-inch capacitive touch center stack LCD. The XTS driver can swipe or flick windows of information from the center stack over to the instrument panel LCD.

But you can’t make the map any bigger in the instrument panel or move it to the seemingly underused gauge on the right. Boy racers believe the tachometer (left gauge) redline should point straight up in a properly sporting car run at the track, but that is something you can’t do, a Cadillac marketing manager said with a bit more NFW emphasis than I thought the question called for. It goes without saying that you can’t download an instrument panel template and roll your own interface. Yet. Hackers, take your marks…

Partially customizable LCDs

Some automakers started their trek to the glass cockpit with partial digital ICDs such as this 2010 BMW 7 Series. The small and large gauges on top are mechanical and that trademark look hasn’t changed much since the seventies. The strip at the bottom is a wide LCD that you can customize a bit by deciding what elements you’d like to see. BMW has since expanded to a full digital ICD, 12 inches across, for the 7 Series and 5 Series. The Cadillac ATS, a compact sports sedan, also has a partial digital ICD.

The eco-friendly partial LCD instrument panel

If you build a hybrid, the owner gets, free of charge, all manner of positive reinforcement telling you what great job you’re doing. Ford calls this attaboy LCD SmartGauge, a pair of 4.5-inch LCDs flanking the speedometer. If you’re a conservative driver, you collect green leaves, as on the Ford Fusion Hybrid (pictured above). The driver can customize what the gauges show, including a small navigation screen, phone info, infotainment (artist, track, album), or efficiency on the right. The left-side information can be made more or less complex as well. Ford offers the SmartGauge on a wide line of cars, not just hybrids, that have the MyFord Touch and Ford Sync infotainment system.

Small MID adds information at low cost

A multi-information display (MID) has been in the center of car instrument panels for years and has been upgraded from a text-only display, good for showing the outside temperature or miles to empty, to a small color LCD that can show navigation arrows, MP3 album art, or an icon of the car with information such the four tires’ pressures. The Chevrolet Malibu Eco (above) is typical of the current genre of smallish LCDs that provide a lot of information for just a few dollars of manufacturing cost.

The future: LCD instrument panels, two center stack LCDs

Can you have too much of a good thing? Concept cars and soon production cars may have high and low LCD displays in the center stack with dual 7- or 8-inch displays. While some higher-end cars have 10-inch displays, IHS’ Boyadjis says prices are falling most for 8-inch LCDs. A higher panel is better for quickly seeing information. Low is better for touching and swiping with your finger. The Infiniti LE concept car incorporates two center stack panels in addition to to a full digital instrument panel.

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High-tech historic racecars help build smarter cars for our future

Historic car races might seem like the last place you’d find modern technology. The cars are lovingly restored to their full, authentic racing glory, and care is taken not to allow modern tweaks to improve their performance. Surprisingly, though, both the pits and the cars are crammed with modern technology to help drivers improve their performance. Long-term benefits from tech at the race track isn’t confined to racers, though. Researchers are hoping to use what they find by monitoring drivers’ bodies and brains, along with the cars, to build better and safer cars for all of us.

Using the ultimate GPS to coach drivers

Unlike modern race cars, historic cars don’t come with arrays of sensors. That doesn’t stop teams from fully instrumenting their cars and learning from the results. One of the most powerful tools at their disposal is a simple, high-performance GPS device. By recording the exact position of the car as it laps the track, drivers can look back at how they performed and get coached on improvements. Some current units use dual antennas to not only track vehicle position within one inch, but pitch and slip to within a fraction of a degree by using both GPS and the Russian GLONASS systems. By reviewing the results from practice laps, drivers can see how close they are coming to the car’s limits of performance, and whether they can improve at race time.

An even more effective technique is to have a pro driver “coach” run the same track and compare results. By lining up the two logs, it’s possible to see what improvements can be made. A common example is that seasoned pros will brake later and more aggressively than less experienced drivers — yielding faster times around the track.

GoPro goes wild at the track

You can’t go more than a few feet at a historic car race without seeing a poster or banner promoting GoPro. That’s with good reason. Nearly every team uses these tiny, relatively low-tech, cameras to record not just every moment, but every angle, of a race. While monitoring devices are not allowed during many races, cameras are. By placing one camera near the driver’s feet, and another looking at the course, teams can evaluate the driver’s actions after the race.

This is a huge breakthrough for auto racing. Unlike most other sports, it isn’t possible to watch every part of an auto race at the same time — and in many courses large sections can’t be seen at all from the pits. This makes coaching especially difficult, as the only record of on-track situations and drivers’ responses may be the driver’s adrenaline-fogged memory.

By equipping the GoPro units with WiFi dongles, and giving the driver a remote to activate them, the cameras can be turned on and their video synchronized automatically. After the race, a quick edit in Final Cut or Premiere allows side-by-side videos of the race and the driver to be created. The result is the ultimate coaching tool: a “tell no lies” log of everything the driver did, and didn’t do, to react to situations on the track. The technique is as portable as the race car, so it can be used at any track, like Laguna Seca where this Lotus is racing in the world-famous Monterey Motorsports Reunion.

The video shows front, driver, and back views as pro driver Mikel Miller carves up the field at Laguna Seca in a historic Lotus 23B. The GoPro WiFi cameras synchronize automatically, so its possible to relate steering corrections and pedal actions to action on the track. This is not only a great training tool, but it enables the research of groups like the Revs program at Stanford, who are using data from race car drivers to build the self-driving cars of the future.

Making old cars safer to race

Even though most historic race cars don’t reach the same speeds as their more modern counterparts, they can be a lot more dangerous to drive. Modern safety features are missing, and mechanical failures are common. Fortunately there are some safety upgrades to the cars and to the drivers’ equipment that make them safer to drive than they were in their prime.

Most obvious are the drivers’ outfits. Full-face helmets with neck support replace the leather caps and goggles, and later open-faced “hat-only” helmets, common for many decades of auto racing. The helmets are only the most visible piece of updated clothing. Multi-layered, fire-resistant, Nomex suits and gloves give the drivers much better odds of surviving crashes and car fires, with the inner layer helping to wick away moisture. These outfits don’t come without a cost. A helmet, suit and gloves retail for nearly $5,000, although historic car racing is in the same “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” class as yacht racing, so it’s a small price to pay to protect the owner/drivers.

One safety technology you won’t find in all the cars at a historic race like the one at Laguna Seca is seatbelts. While most of the cars have rollbars and serious safety harnesses for the drivers, some of them don’t have any roll protection and drivers would just as soon be thrown clear of the vehicle in the event it goes head over heels. Clearly this kind of racing is not for the faint of heart.

Monitoring drivers’ brains: Thinking less to go faster

While competing teams are limited in what they can measure on the track, a unique project being run by Stanford’s Revs program in conjunction with the Collier racing team, is actively recording not just car data, but biometric data about the drivers themselves. The project is hoping to learn enough about both cars and their drivers to help create technology that will assist car manufacturers in adding assisted-driving solutions to street cars.

This 390 horsepower Ford GT40 was no ordinary car even before Revs got to it. Having raced at Daytona and Sebring in 1967, it was part of the famous generation of cars that brought Ford to the world stage in racing.

Stanford Professor Chris Gerdes, Director of the Center for Automotive Research and Dynamic Design Lab, explained to me that while the data the team had been collecting would be used in improving the group’s autonomous race car, Shelley — which recently topped 120mph in a test run at Thunderhill race track — the primary goal was creating solutions that could be used in more traditional applications like helping everyday drivers to be better and safer on the road. For example, while pro drivers follow a path around the track very similar to Shelley’s, they are still smoother, and therefore faster, than their robotic competitor. Someday these findings may help provide drivers with robotic co-pilots that can help them improve their driving, and have fun while doing it.

By recording drivers’ brain activity along with body temperature and heart rate, and synchronizing the recordings with vehicle position and performance, Gerdes related that the team could start to make conclusions about which driving activities were instinctive and which ones required conscious thought. As you might expect, he said that after a pro driver like the team’s Brian Redman had a few laps in a car, simple actions like shifting and braking didn’t require much high-level brain activity — they were instinctive.

Surprisingly, though, recovering from a skid also took little conscious effort. In fact, there was actually slightly less high-level brain activity in those crisis moments than for most of the rest of a race. Gerdes speculated that once a driver is comfortable with their car and the course, conscious thought is focused on race strategy and tactics, rather than vehicle handling. To help verify his hypothesis, the team has placed front and rear cameras on their cars this year, so they can correlate brain activity with action on the track.

Gerdes also explained that the project hasn’t proceeded without some hiccups. In its first year at the track — 2011 — they monitored the drivers’ skin to determine stress levels through galvanic skin response. Unfortunately most of what they found is that drivers’ hands sweat a lot inside fireproof gloves while racing on a hot day. Measuring brainwaves has certainly been more work, but is yielding a lot more useful data for them.

Whether or not you ever plan to own, let alone race, a historic car, technology is helping turn this spectator sport into an incubator and proving ground for new products that will one day make driving safer and more fun for all of us.

[Image Credits: David Cardinal, special thanks to the team at Big Fork Holdings and to theStanford Revs program]

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Chevrolet GoGo Link marries cellphone navigation and dashboard LCD for $50

Chevrolet GoGo Link represents the beginning of the end for overpriced embedded car navigation systems. This $50 option lets you replicate your smartphone’s navigation display on the center stack LCD display of sub-$20,000 Chevys starting this fall. It works initially with iPhones and Android phones. You have to have the Chevrolet MyLink touchscreen LCD and infotainment option plus the GoGo Link option. And a smartphone, which you probably have lying around.

GoGo Link projects the GoGo smartphone navigation app onto the car’s color LCD touchscreen. Drivers can control the nav system with the touchscreen. Voice instructions play through the car speakers. It’s on the entry Chevrolet Spark and compact Chevrolet Sonic. You can’t use just any app: You have to use the GoGo navigation app on your phone.

Chevrolet says it did extensive focus group testing before bringing the GoGo Link offering to market. Actually, Chevy managers could have done a quick happy hour session at TGI Fridays and gotten the same result asking three questions over the first round of drinks: “Will anybody in their right mind spend $1,500 for navigation in a $15,000 car when they’ve got navigation on their smartphones?” (No.) “What about if we, say, dropped the price to $795 for embedded SD card navigation?” (Probably not.) “What about if we sold a $50 smartphone connection that opens up access to the touchscreen?” (Where do I sign up?)

Chevrolet says it hasn’t yet determined if it’ll expand GoGo Link to other Chevrolet and GM vehicles. Translation: They haven’t determined how soon they’ll have to offer GoGo Link on $20,000, $25,000, then $30,000 vehicles. The die has been cast. GoGo Link has the potential to drive customers to GM as Sync did for Ford starting in 2008: When you’ve got an iPod or other smartphone with music and navigation, why should you pay the automaker for a dated, unlikely-to-be-updated CD player or navigation system?

South Korea’s EnGIS Technologies supplies the GoGo Link software.

We test-drove the Chevrolet Sonic a year ago and called Chevrolet “clueless on tech” because the essentials of a modern car — Bluetooth, USB jack — weren’t offered on the entry model and came standard only on the costliest Sonic trim line. Navigation couldn’t be had at any price. GoGo Link helps fill in some of the blanks from a year ago. It’s unclear what the actual cost is because you must have MyLink — the touchscreen LCD display — and to get MyLink you have to jump to a higher trim level with a cost more than $2,000 higher the one just below. Chevrolet isn’t saying how much of that is associated with MyLink. (The two lowest Sonic trim lines are supposed to offer MyLink as a standalone option but GM hasn’t yet shown pricing or the option on its site.)

Others are trying to bring smartphone navigation connections to the car dashboard as well. Sony just announced replacement MirrorLink radios. They only work with the handful of cars and SUVs that have replaceable radios with double DIN (7×4 inches) slots in the center stack. Sony uses compatibility software promoted by the Car Connectivity Consortium.

Read more at GM

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Scientists develop lithium-ion battery that charges 120 times faster than normal

A group of Korean scientists, working at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), have developed a fast-charge lithium-ion battery that can be recharged 30 to 120 times faster than conventional li-ion batteries. The team believes it can build a battery pack for electric vehicles that can be fully charged inless than a minute.

One of the main issues with rechargeable batteries is that they take longer to recharge as their physical volume grows. When you recharge a battery, it charges from the outside in — so the fatter the battery, the longer it takes. You can somewhat avoid this by breaking larger batteries into smaller individual cells, but that technique only gets you so far.

The Korean method takes the cathode material — standard lithium manganese oxide (LMO) in this case — and soaks it in a solution containing graphite. Then, by carbonizing the graphite-soaked LMO, the graphite turns into a dense network of conductive traces that run throughout the cathode. This new cathode is then packaged normally, with an electrolyte and graphite anode, to create the fast-charging li-ion battery. Other factors, such as the battery’s energy density and cycle life seem to remain unchanged.

These networks of carbonized graphite effectively act like blood vessels, allowing every part of the battery to recharge at the same time — thus speeding up recharge by 30 to 120 times.

Now, for all intents and purposes, this is a standard lithium-ion battery that could be used in smartphones and laptops — but the network of conductive traces does increase the overall size of the battery, so it’s probably better suited for use in electric vehicles (EVs). Obviously, an EV that can be recharged in under a minute is pretty crazy — though it still only brings them in-line with their gas-guzzling cousins. Being able to charge quickly is convenient, but it doesn’t get around the fact that li-ion battery packs are incredibly expensive — and the Korean carbonized LMO battery certainly won’t be cheap.

I could see fast-charge batteries as being a nice option for smartphone and laptop users, though: You could have a normal battery and a fast-charge battery, and switch in whichever one makes most sense for your daily routine. Fast-charge batteries could be convenient in wireless mice and keyboards, and other gizmos, too.

Finally, just thinking out loud: The battery in a Tesla Roadster stores 56 kWh of electric energy. To recharge that in under a minute would require an awful lot of power and some very thick cables, right?

Read: We are slaves of electricity, and IBM’s light-weight, breathing lithium-air battery

Research paper: DOI: 10.1002/anie.201203581 [paywalled]

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MirrorLink phone-to-dashboard screen mirroring gets rolling with 2 Sony car radios

Want a phone that reliably connects to your car and mirrors on-dash what’s on your phone, even navigation apps? MirrorLink may be the solution. The MirrorLink protocol is off and rolling, slowly, as Sony today reveals its first MirrorLink-ready replacement car AV receivers. MirrorLink is the brainchild of the Car Connectivity Consortium. Once a phone is connected by a cable, the radio and steering wheel buttons can control the phone. Sound or music from the phone plays through the car speakers. If the car head unit has an LCD display, the phone’s display replicates on the head unit, even — especially — navigation. Just about the whole auto industry and cellphone industry belongs to CCC, with the exception of rugged-individualist Apple.

What Sony is doing represents a sliver of what CCC and MirrorLink hope to be, which is ubiquitous and meaningful in new cars. The replacement audio market is just about on on life-support. For those with older cars with an in-dash slot called DIN (7×2 inches) or double DIN (7×4 inches), life is good. The Sony XAV-601HD ($550) and XAV-701HD ($700) are double-DIN in-dash receivers with WVGA (800×480) 6.1- and 7-inch screens, USB jacks, and Bluetooth. Taka Noguchi, Sony’s mobile electronics business manager, cites data from industry analyst NPD calculating the market for double DIN replacement radios and head units at about 375,000 units a year (113,000 units with navigation, 262,000 without). This in a nation of 250 million vehicles.

The core attribute of MirrorLink is compatability between phone and car with MirrorLink as the common middle layer phone makers, automakers, and audio makers can write to. Currently, a customer satisfaction complaint involves hassles connecting phones to cars and being able to access all the phone’s features. That’s because each automaker (working with specalist subcontractors) has to repeat much of the same work the other automakers do. The MirrorLink features that owners will like are more visible: the ability to reliably control the phone using steering wheel buttons and radio controls, and the ability to mirror your phone’s screen on the car’s in-dash LCD display. Having an LCD display standard in the center stack calls for an attitude change from automakers whose current mindset is slowly evolving from, “If we can’t sell you navigation for $1,500, why should we put an LCD display in our car?” The answer is turning out to be that the customer will gravitate toward the small but increasing number of automakers who do have LCD displays standard. In other words: Move forward or die.

As for usefulness and safety: Navigation and music displays are replicated on the car LCD display — while videos and Angry Birds are not, at least not while the car is rolling. The MirrorLink spec calls for texts to be read aloud. Some owners will want to see texts on-screen as well, and some automakers, working outside MirrorLink, are providing that functionality in the belief that a little distraction (a text or the truncated start of an email message displayed onscreen) is safer than a lot of distraction (reading the text on your cellphone while moving). Without MirrorLink, says Mika Rytkonen, CCC chairman and president, motorists suffer an ”asynchronous, jarring and disorganized connected driving experience.”

Before you cast your fate with CCC, you should know the standard is still early in its life. For now, Sony acknowledges, the sum total of CCC compatible phones is the Nokia line and, once there’s a firmware revision, the Samsung Galaxy S3. That’s it. But the numbers can only grow. Every mainstream automaker, except Nissan, is part of CCC. The same holds for phone makers except Apple, and replacement car audio vendors led by Sony.

Chevrolet is about to launch a similar technology, GoGo Link, in the subcompact Chevrolet Spark and compact Chevrolet Sonic. GoGo Link also allows you to bring your smartphone into the car, connect it, and replicate the phone’s navigation and other apps on the integrated Chevy color LCD display. GoGo Link and MirrorLink make the most sense on entry-level cars since there’s about zero percent chance someone would add $1,500 factory navigation onto a $15,000 car. The other automaker solution is to embed navigation and price it realistically. Ford and GM are down to $795 for SD card navigation on some cars and Nissan charges just $595 for navigation on the 2013 Nissan Altima.

Read more at Sony, or the CCC