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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 30 2018, @05:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-it-autographed dept.

NASA tries to justify its existence yet again:

The 2018 edition of NASA's annual Spinoff publication, released Tuesday, features 49 technologies the agency helped create that are used in almost every facet of modern life. These include innovations that help find disaster survivors trapped under rubble, purify air and surfaces to stop the spread of germs, and test new materials for everything from airplanes to athletic shoes.

[...] In Spinoff 2018, you'll learn how:

  • Ultra-sensitive radar technology used to detect gravity fluctuations was repurposed to identify the vital signs of disaster survivors trapped under rubble;
  • A technique developed to preserve plants in a spacecraft led to devices that eliminate bacteria, viruses, molds and volatile organic compounds from air, surfaces and even laundry;
  • One company's work on high-speed stereo photogrammetry for space shuttle analysis now enables low-cost, highly-accurate materials testing to improve designs for everything from running shoes to jetliners.

[...] Other highlights include: artificial intelligence that helps drones avoid collisions and could one day enable self-driving cars; a business jet that is both the fastest and the most efficient in its class; and a computer program that, 50 years after its creation, is still used to design cars, buildings and much more.

[...] The book also features a Spinoffs of Tomorrow section that highlights 20 NASA technologies ripe for commercial application and available for licensing. These include an algae photobioreactor that cleans wastewater while producing biofuels, a revolutionary all-in-one gear and bearing, and the combined technologies of the highly dexterous humanoid robot Robonaut 2.

Spinoff 2018.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @05:23PM (#630475)

    "As much contamination as we can get away with" is the modus operandi in food production these days. You also have plausible deniability, that the ramifications in some cases like for instance with Roundup can hit many years later and can be hard to prove that it caused a health issue.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @05:43PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @05:43PM (#630486)

    As much contamination as we can get away with

    As long as those limits are set to the point where nobody is getting sick, I have no problem with that. Real-world contamination levels will never be zero, and if a person's bacterial food contamination level is zero for an extended period of time, that's a bigger problem in reality.

    I'd much rather have a computer-stored record of what the beef looked like before and while it was processed, instead of a training certificate on file for a contract worker who left the country three days after the suspected incident.

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