TECHNOTALK

Military use of robots increases

Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis's Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Military wants to have army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020. Of course, they aren't envisioning robotic soldiers from movies like "Star Wars" and "I, Robot".

"When the military says 'robot' they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots," says Smart, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering. While movies display robots as intelligent beings, Smart and his colleagues aren't necessarily looking for intelligent decision-making in their robots. Instead, they are working to develop an improved, "intelligent" functioning of the robot.

Superfluid-superconductor relationship detailed

Scientists have studied superconductors and superfluids for decades. Now, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have drawn the first detailed picture of the way a superfluid influences the behaviour of a superconductor. In addition to describing previously unknown superconductor behaviour, these calculations could change scientists' understanding of the motion of neutron stars.

A neutron star, the high-density remnant of a former massive star, is thought to contain both a neutron superfluid and a proton superconductor at its core. Despite widespread agreement that neutron stars contain both materials, superfluid-superconductors have not been widely studied. "Not many people have thought seriously about the interactions between a superfluid and a superconductor that coexists like this," said Mark Alford, associate professor of physics, "they tended to treat the two components separately."

Source: The News