If you have never heard about Starship Technologies, we won’t blame you. We didn’t either until a while ago. You may think it’s the name of an enterprise that’s trying to build a next generation space shuttle of sorts. But you’d be wrong. Because what Starship Technologies is building is a sort of roving robot that delivers stuff to you.

This hi-tech box on wheels is self-driving and battery-powered. It has undergone over 3,000 hours of testing in the form of delivery trials in Greenwich, and could soon be deployed in the streets of London.

Ahti Heinla and Allan Martinson (the founding engineers of Skype), the creators of the ‘Starship’, as it is affectionately called, aim to use this robot across suburban areas, to deliver medium-sized parcels or grocery bags.

It might seem weird to be walking on a pavement and to be suddenly accompanied by the Starship, not to mention the irresistible temptation for vandals to kick the box down the road. But worry not. The Starship will be equipped with cameras and a warning signal to ward off unsavoury characters, while calling the police.

This project is part of the €25 million EU Smart Cities project for testing new and unproven technologies to enhance our lifestyle. The on-board battery lasts for about two hours, and the robots can deliver parcels some 30 minutes away from their home base, guided by GPS and 3G signals.

They have a top speed of 4mph, can make it up and down curbs and small stairs, and are programmed with intelligent software to avoid obstacles, and we hope, people. When customers request a delivery, they can call the courier box up, see a live map to track the delivery, and receive an alert when the destination has been reached. As the payload is locked throughout the journey, only the recipient can unlock it via their smartphone. Not bad for such a cute box.

Starship hopes to sell its robots to major logistics companies. The cost of the robot is currently less than $2,000. Heinla said Starship robots would cost less than a dollar for each delivery and in the future when scaled, the service could be essentially free. The company says it hopes to replace the need for shopping trips, which is currently the purpose of one third of British car journeys.

Did you know…

• There is enough DNA in an average person’s body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back 17 times.

• It can take a photon 40,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to its surface, but only eight minutes to travel the rest of the way to Earth.

• The average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in a lifetime.

• An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

For more trivia: www.um.edu.mt/think

Sound bites

• A spectacular image of the Milky Way has been released to mark the completion of the Apex Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The telescope has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimeter wavelengths and in finer detail than space-based surveys. The telescope allows the study of the cold universe, a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160224070051.htm

• Half the world’s population (nearly five billion) will be short-sighted (myopic) by 2050, with up to one-fifth (one billion) at a significantly increased risk of blindness if current trends continue. The rapid increase in the prevalence of myopia globally is attributed to, “environmental factors (nurture), principally lifestyle changes resulting from a combination of decreased time outdoors and increased near work activities, among other factors,” according to the journal Ophthalmology.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160217113308.htm

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