The Smiths Aerospace and University of Florida robotic vehicle; navigational technology currently used on land to be tested 'unmanned' in the DARPA Grand Challenge. (Photo: Business Wire)

The Grand Challenge is an endurance race across the Mojave Desert in which unmanned, fully autonomous ground vehicles must drive themselves 175 miles through challenging terrain and natural and man-made obstacles. The team whose vehicle finishes the designated route most quickly and within a 10-hour timeframe wins a $2 million prize and the potential to help the U.S. government overhaul its combat fleet.

Smiths, title sponsor of Team CIMAR, is participating in the contest to further develop the navigational technologies it currently provides on the military's Sentinel, Avenger, Humvee and M1A2 manned vehicle platforms. The U.S. Army has said that by 2015, it expects at least 30 percent of the land vehicles it purchases to be fully autonomous.

"We believe that accurate, autonomous navigation and robotic technologies are vital to the future success of civil and military transport," said John Alber, vice president of engineering development at Smiths Aerospace. "With the practical experience we're gaining through DARPA's contest and a growing roster of customers coming to us for our navigational and UAV expertise, Smiths Aerospace is well-positioned to serve this emerging market."

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Starting from simple assemblies and linking units, larger and larger building blocks combine to form crystalline nanoporous materials with more surface area than zeolites. The Zeotype architecture of MIL-101 displays mesoporous cages with diameters of 29 Å (green) and 34 Å (red), featuring 12 Å pentagonal and 15 Å hexagonal openings. Credits: Science

Porous materials with large, regular, accessible cages and tunnels are increasingly in demand for many applications including chemical separation or purification, catalysis, molecular sensors, electronics and gas storage. Depending on their structure and pore size, these materials allow molecules of only certain shapes and sizes to enter the pores, a property known as shape selectivity. The environment within the pores can be very different to that outside, thus promoting chemical reactions that do not occur in the bulk material. Another prospective use is as templates for forming calibrated, monodisperse nanomaterials. In this respect, the larger the pores, the wider the range of reactants that can be manipulated or stored.

Férey and co-workers’ strategy combined three main ideas. First, discrete multi-atom building units were designed and generated in solution (Fig. 1). Second, with the aim of producing a compound with large pores, the building units were combined to produce larger units. For MIL-101 the key building unit is a supercluster of four smaller clusters linked by difunctional organic components to make a large tetrahedral assembly. The third idea involves being sure of what you’ve actually made, i.e. how to determine the structure of the new material. It is well known that it becomes increasingly difficult to grow highly diffracting single crystals as structures grow larger. When single crystals are unavailable, powder diffraction can provide sufficient information for structure solution. Based on their understanding of the ways the building units might combine, possible structural models were predicted and assessed via a computational strategy that calculated their relative stability. Favourable solutions were then compared with the high quality powder diffraction data collected from MIL-101 at ESRF. Once a good match between the predicted and measured powder patterns was seen, the researchers could be sure of the nature of their new material.

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Beneficiary or preserver: Humpback whales in polar waters. - Foto: Alfred-Wegener-Institut.

According to Professor Dr Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and Dr Stephen Nicol from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, the ability to predict changes in polar ecosystems within the context of global climate change requires a better understanding of the ecological role of whales and seals. In their contribution now published in the scientific journal Nature, the two researchers present the hypothesis that large marine mammals have a central and stabilising role in marine ecosystems and were once widely distributed across all oceans.

In analogy to the large fish stocks in African lakes being dependent on hippos, large mammals may also control their environment in the coldest oceans on earth. It is already clear that the notion of short food chains with few organisms represents an oversimplified view of polar ecosystems. in the productivity of the Arctic and Antarctic is comparable to temperate oceans. However, large differences exist between the Arctic and Antarctic with regard to nutrient availability and key species in the food chain. In the Antarctic, availability of iron is the primary growth-limiting factor in the system.

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