Posts Tagged ‘south korea’
Giant Floating Crane Searching For Clues to Korean Maritime Disaster
Pumps and valves regulated the amount of water in the cranes’ ballast tanks to keep the cranes stable during operation, while tugboats maneuvered the cranes into position and held them steady during the recovery. The investigators found a torpedo propeller among the scattered debris that led them to blame a North Korean submarine attack.
To Thwart Predators, South Korea Is Issuing GPS Devices to Schoolchildren
Starting in October, about 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive matchbox-sized GPS-embedded beepers. The devices can notify authorities of the kids' location and activate surveillance cameras.
The move comes a month after a 44-year-old habitual sex offender was arrested and accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. That case, as well as other crimes against children, shocked the country and mobilized the government to declare war on child molesters.
The 8-year-old girl was abducted from her school, and officials have stepped up school security in response. After a trial run, the government might expand the GPS devices to the rest of the country, AFP says.
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South Korea Deploys Deadly Sentry Bots to Keep Watchful Eyes, Serious Weapons Trained on the Demilitarized Zone
The robots are fitted with surveillance equipment, tracking and voice recognition systems, and heat and motion detectors that can identify threats approaching from the other side. If they prove successful they could be deployed along the entire DMZ, augmenting South Korea's strong military presence already in place.
Upon sensing a threat, the robots alert a command center where a human operator uses the 'bot's audio and visual detectors to try to identify the nature of the threat. The operator can then give the robot the order to either stand down or unleash its arsenal.
Pyongyang, as you may have heard, is quite proud of its military image and maintains a standing army of more than a million soldiers, whereas South Korea has a force of just 655,000. As such, South Korea plans to bring more robots into its arsenal in coming years, including robots armed with sophisticated sensors and weapons that could bolster its numbers on the battlefield.
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South Korea’s Second Attempt at Satellite Launch Explodes Shortly After Liftoff
Cameras on the ground followed a white speck in the sky as it plummeted from an altitude of 44 miles into the sea. The loss of the $400 million rocket and its satellite payload could be a major setback for South Korea’s space ambitions, as this is it’s second space failure in a row. In August of last year the nation reached orbital altitudes but failed to put the satellite it was carrying into the proper orbit. For a nation racing to get into the commercial space game, its record appears less than reliable at this point.
The 108-foot KSLV-1 rocket was assembled partly in Russia and partly in South Korea, and at first glance appears to have suffered a malfunction during first stage ignition according to South Korea’s science minister.
There’s no word yet on how this might alter South Korea’s long-range rocketry plans, but it’s unlikely that the nation will give up on its efforts, at least as long as its not-so-friendly neighbor to the north continues to test long-range ballistic missiles – sorry, we mean scientific space rockets – every so often. North Korea naturally bristles every time South Korea makes another technological stride in rocket science, so no doubt if there’s anyone smiling over today’s launch failure it’s someone in Pyongyang (of course, you’d be smiling too if you’d just ).
Check out RussiaToday's video footage of the launch below, and of the rocket's demise below that.
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South Korea Developing Underwater Search-and-Rescue Robot Crawlers
Underwater swimmers and crawlers could speed up rescue efforts for incidents such as the recent sinking of a South Korean Navy frigate
The government announced today that it would spend about $18 million (20 billion won) over the next five years to create its creepy-crawly robot. That represents a doubling of the project's budget following the sinking of the South Korean Navy frigate Cheonan late last month, which killed dozens of sailors.
Such six-legged devices would walk at speeds of 98 feet per second and swim at up to 59 feet per second. The design specs call for it to patrol the seabed at depths of about 3.7 miles.
A shallow-sea version would come online by 2012, with a deep-sea prototype slated for 2015. The robots would also carry sonar equipment, according to .
The South Korean ministry believes that having such a drone might have sped up search and rescue efforts for the Cheonan sinking incident, which took place in the West Sea with strong tidal currents and poor visibility.
Other nations have already deployed small swarms of for scientific research, and a U.S. robotic glider completed the first of the Atlantic late last year. A Canadian robot also became the first around the same time.
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South Korean Scientists Transmit Broadband Signals Through Human Arm
The experiment transmitted 10 Mbps through a person
The finding may lead to a new generation of medical devices that can monitor blood sugar or electrical activity in the heart. Such devices cut energy needs for a monitoring network by about 90 percent compared to wireless devices running on batteries.
South Korean researchers placed electrodes about 12 inches (30 centimeters) apart on a person's arm, and found that the low-frequency electromagnetic waves travel easily through the skin without any outside interference.
The South Korean study improved on past attempts by using tiny metal electrodes coated with a silicon-rich polymer, which allowed the device to bend at a 90-degree angle 700,000 times without incident. Each electrode was just about the width of three human hairs.
This may not seem all that surprising coming from South Korea, known as perhaps one of the most for Internet. But we can't help but wonder if the researchers hadn't been watching some goodness, given the tendency for a certain Cylon (played by Grace Park) to plug data cables into her arm for a bit of computer-on-computer consultation -- not that we're talking about brains communicating just yet.
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