Astronaut uses space internet to control robot on Earth

The interplanetary internet has been used by an astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) to send commands to a robot on Earth.

The experimental technology, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, could be a future way to communicate with astronauts on Mars.

Currently, if there is a problem when data is sent between Earth and Mars rovers, information can be lost.

The DTN could offer a more robust way to send data over the vast distances.

The European Space Agency (Esa) and Nasa conducted the experiment in late October.

ISS Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams used a laptop with DTN software to control a rover in Germany.

The DTN is similar to the internet on Earth, but is much more tolerant to the delays and disruptions that are likely to occur when data is shuttling between planets, satellites, space stations and distant spacecraft.

The delays can be due to solar storms or when spacecraft are behind a planet.

"It's all about communicating over large distances, because the 'normal' internet doesn't expect that it may take minutes before something is sent for it to arrive," Kim Nergaard from Esa told the BBC.

The work on the DTN was first proposed a decade ago by Vint Cerf - one of the creators of the internet on Earth.

The technology was first tested in November 2008, when Nasa successfully transmitted images to and from a spacecraft 20 million miles away with a communications system based on the net.

Space network
The system uses a network of nodes - connection points - to cope with delays. If there is a disruption, the data gets stored at one of the nodes until the communication is available again to send it further.

This "store and forward" mechanism ensures data is not lost and gradually works its way towards its destination.

"With the internet on Earth, if something is disconnected, the source has to retransmit everything, or you lose your data," said Mr Nergaard.

"But the DTN has this disruption tolerance, and that's the difference - it has to be much more robust over the kind of distances and the kind of networks we're talking about."

Currently, to communicate with Curiosity, the latest rover that landed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet on 6 August, Nasa and Esa use what is called "point-to-point communication".

"Normally, the rover on the surface of Mars is commanded directly from Earth, or in some cases using spacecraft orbiting Mars as data relay satellites - but it's still considered single point-to-point communication," said Mr Nergaard.

"It's not built-up as a network. There are several rovers on the surface of Mars, many spacecraft orbiting Mars, but they are all seen as individual items.

"But the idea is that in the future rovers on Mars and spacecraft orbiting it will be treated as a network, so that you can send things to the network just as you send things using the internet on Earth.

"It will still be via radio waves, but over different frequencies, to allow you higher data rate communication than the ones used today."

Nasa's Badri Younes said that the test was a success, and it demonstrated "the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20270833

How Does Internet Porn Affect Teens?

Before the Internet, that is pre-1995s, hardcore pornography was difficult for teens to obtain. Today, with a few clicks, millions of photos and videos are available for free to anyone. This change has triggered great anguish among social conservatives, who wring their hands that the current generation of teens is coming of age in a world awash in X-rated imagery that's sweeping them down a sewer of filth.


Comparing the early 1990s and today, rates of teen intercourse and sexual assault have declined considerably, while teen condom use has increased. These changes don't prove that porn causes no social harm, but they show that social conservatives are mistaken when they argue that exposure to porn causes rape and teen sexual irresponsibility. That's simply not the case.


But broad social indices don't get inside young people's heads and tell us what teens think of pornography. That's why I was delighted to read a recent study in the Journal of Sex Research that explored how 73 middle-class Swedish teens, age 14 to 20, actually felt about pornography. I find the results reassuring. The researchers conclude: "Most participants had acquired the skills to navigate the pornographic landscape in a sensible manner. Most had the ability to distinguish between pornographic fantasies on the one hand, and real sexual interactions and relationships on the other."

Previous studies have shown that 92 percent of Swedish teens admit having viewed Internet porn. Girls often stumble on it accidentally. Boys are much more likely to seek it out. No surprise there.

Boys generally enjoy porn as pure sexual entertainment. They also consider it a source of sex education. As one boy remarked, porn teaches "other ways to have sex."

Girls feel more ambivalent. The majority called porn repulsive, but one-third called it interesting and exciting. Those who found it exciting did not broadcast that opinion, especially to boys for fear of winding up with a bad reputation. Most girls embraced what the researchers called "the love ideology," the idea that love legitimates sex. Girls' disapproved of porn because it represents sex without emotional involvement, without love. Girls said they might be open to viewing porn, but only with a boy they loved.

In the study, both boys and girls understood that porn indulges men's sexual fantasies, that the men in porn have only one thing on their minds, and that the women are there solely to satisfy the men's needs-even when their own needs are ignored. Boys accepted this more or less uncritically, but girls disapproved of porn's lack of interest in women's sexual pleasure.

Girls also admitted that they compared their own bodies to those of the women in porn. They expressed insecurity about their bodies, and worried that boys would find them not sexy enough to be adequate sex partners.

Boys expressed some surprise about this-and with good reason. Today, there's porn involving every female body type: thin, plump, fat, small breasts, big breasts, natural breasts, surgically augmented breasts, natural pubic hair, trimmed hair, partly shaved, and fully shaved.

Girls feared that boys wanted to do everything they saw in porn, notably anal play. Boys "fervently denied" this. "They asserted that sex in real life is something completely different from sex in porn," and insisted that they can distinguish between the two, just as they can differentiate cartoon violence from real violence.

Girls and boys agreed that porn's easy availability means that it affects everyone to some degree, but they also agreed that "the majority [of their peers] managed to avoid becoming psychologically harmed by it."

Both girls and boys understood that porn is like the chase scenes in action movies-exciting to watch, but not the way to drive. Far from being carried away by porn, the teens in this study viewed it critically and had successfully integrated it into healthy emotional lives.


Lofgren-Martenson, L. and S. S.A. Mansson. "Lust, Love, and Life: A Qualitative Study of Swedish Adolescents' Perceptions and Experiences with Pornography," Journal of Sex Research (2010) 47:568.