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5 January 2013 | NewScientist | 17

sphere even made it through the glacier’s drainage channel and popped out at the mouth.

The team is developing a more robust cryo-egg, a 12-centimetre sphere made of tough thermoplastic, with greater battery power for a more powerful radio transmitter. “We’d like to deploy these larger cryo-egg sensors under much thicker ice, for example, in Antarctica,” says Bagshaw.

There are other pressing concerns in the Arctic when it comes to climate change. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than climate models predict. One region that influences this process is the marginal ice zone (MIZ), the boundary between the open and frozen oceans. “It’s important to understand the physics behind what forms the MIZ, how energy is transmitted within it, and how that impacts the break-up of the sea ice,” says Craig Lee at the University of Washington in Seattle. Easier said than done.

Lee and colleagues have developed an autonomous “sea glider” that roves under the ice, outfitted with various sensors to study the conditions. The 2-metre-long cylindrical hull has an external bladder that can be pumped with oil to increase the overall volume, boosting

buoyancy, or deflated, causing the vessel to sink. Inside, small electric motors move the heavy battery from fore to aft, and from side to side. This allows the glider to move forwards as it sinks or rises, and to turn. The glider is now being used to survey the underside of the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica.

Yet another polar concern, back in the Arctic again, is methane that is burping out of thawing permafrost. Understanding the source of this powerful greenhouse

gas is key to predicting just how much of it will end up in the atmosphere. A team from NASA has built a rover that can crawl on the underside of ice in the frozen lakes in Alaska (see “Upside-down explorer”, below). The aim is to equip the rover with tools to sample the methane seeps.

Chris Shuman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says we need such autonomous polar exploration technologies. “Ultimately, it’s about having information that can tell us how to prepare for the future.” n

“Instrument-laden devices can be scattered from a helicopter hovering a few metres above the ice”

A rover that today explores the underside of frozen lakes in Alaska might one day do the same on icy moons in our solar system – not to study climate change, but to find signs of alien life. “One thing we know about life on Earth is that everywhere we have liquid water, we find life, pretty much without exception,” says Dan Berisford of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Berisford and his team have built a buoyant rover that, when dropped into an ice-covered lake, floats up and sticks to the ice from below. Its cog-like wheels than crunch their way along the ice. The tethered rover

transmits data from its cameras to a base station, which broadcasts the signal wirelessly to a researcher wearing video goggles who can see what the rover is seeing in real-time and steer it accordingly. The team tested the rover in Barrow, Alaska, home to more than 10,000 shallow permafrost lakes.

It is the first step towards designing something that could one day be sent to icy moons like Jupiter’s Enceladus, says Berisford. “If there was a place to look for life in a system like that, the ice-water interface will probably be the most interesting place to start,” he says.

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upside-down explorer

Pinch-n-paste for groovy designs

Wonder what your living room would look like with a tiger-print shagpile carpet? An augmented reality app could help you find out: you simply “pinch” a texture from an image on a touchscreen and paste it onto a photo of the room. Kiyoshi Kiyokawa at Osaka University in Japan demonstrated “pinch-n-paste” at a virtual reality conference in Toronto, Canada, last month. The system works out how a chosen texture wraps around the shape of the target 3D surface in a realistic way. “A user could grab a texture from a real chair in a room and paste it to an image of a sofa to see how the newly covered sofa suits the room,” Kiyokawa says.

Roll, bank and dive in your flying chairFull-motion flight simulators are brilliant for making you feel like you’re truly flying. They’re also prohibitively expensive. So Fabien Danieau of Technicolor in Rennes, France, has come up with a way of rigging up a normal chair with three special games controllers that are designed to make it feel like the headrest and two armrests move independently. They then wrote software that moves the armrests up slightly to make you feel you are dropping – and vice versa – at the right moments in the game.

Apple’s patent knock-backAt least two of the touchscreen patents that Apple used to win $1 billion in damages from Samsung are now likely to be ruled invalid, say red-faced examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office. They granted the patents but had been asked to reconsider. Both are likely to fail on the grounds that they are either not new or are obvious. The move has given Samsung ammunition in its ongoing appeal against the massive fine. One patent covers the sensing of simultaneous touches to allow touch-typing and pinch-to-zoom functions. The other covered “rubber-banding” – a bounce-back effect when a page is scrolled beyond its edge. Further patents are now under review.

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