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(Phys.org) —Conversations about advancements in driverless cars on the road eventually have to pull over to discuss what happens when the cars need to be parked. Interactions with pedestrians and other moving objects are among the self-parking challenges confronting automobile R&D. Volvo is eager to ignite interest in its efforts thus far. They have developed the driverless car that, with the assistance of a smartphone, parks itself in a suitably vacant space. Here's their concept. The driver drops the vehicle off at a designated drop off zone at the parking lot. The driver uses a mobile phone application to activate "Autonomous Parking." Pressing a button on that mobile device institutes the command to the vehicle to go park itself; the driver walks away from the car. The vehicle deploys its sensors to navigate to a free parking space. The sensors and cameras scan for pedestrians and vehicles. Once a parking space is found, the vehicle parks there and automatically sends the driver notification that the Volvo has parked safely.
03b, network started as a visionary idea six years ago in the jungles of Rwanda, to solve the challenge of limited affordable international connectivity. It has now become a state-of-the-art satellite network that will soon provide billions of people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific access to fast and affordable internet for the first time. The name "O3b" stands for "[The] Other 3 Billion", referring to the population of the world where broadband Internet is not currently available without help. The company has backing from high profile names including Google and HSBC.
The first four O3b satellites have been built, tested and are now poised on top of a Soyuz rocket, waiting to be launched into orbit. O3b's ground systems around the world are in place ready to communicate with and operate these newly delivered satellites, which are due to be launched tomorrow at 18:54 UTC from the Guiana Space Centre. A live webcast will be available at ArianeSpace.tv.
EADS' E-Fan is an all-electric, zero-emission aircraft. It can carry 550kg of weight with a cruising speed of 110kmph and maximum speed of 160kmph. But its range is fairly limited compared to conventionally fueled aircraft: it can fly only about 45 minutes to an hour.
At the Paris Air Show here, a handful of companies tried out their own version of a change sweeping the automotive industry: electric power. There are abundant challenges to the approach, but some believe that the technology will catch on at least in some circumstances.
Early electric cars were small and light, and electric aircraft are following suit for the same reason: having less mass to push around means a vehicle can get farther on a limited amount of energy. Thus, you shouldn't expect a 250-passenger electric jet any time soon, but perhaps in a decade an all-electric six-seater Elektra E6 will carry you and a couple friends on a shorter flight.
We’ve seen clothing that doubles as something else a few times before, such as the drone-evading stealth hoodie revealed back in January, and the GPS-trackable line of wearables announced way back in 2006. The latest to surface comes from a team composed of students, a creative agency, and a fashion designer, all of whom worked together to assemble a wardrobe called Wearable Solar.
Wearable Solar is a line of clothing that harbors embedded solar panels wired to allow for personal device charging. As such, one can plug their smartphone in and allow it to charge while they walk around the park or do their daily shopping. Thus far there are two prototypes, one being a dress and the other being a coat.
A3SM: A True Game Changer for Submarine Self Defence against Threats from the Sky
As part of the Paris Air Show Navy Recognition was invited by DCNS to visit their factory located near Angoulême in southwestern France. The 260 year old site used to manufacture guns for the "French Royal Navy". It now specializes in the production of submarine equipment such as torpedo tubes and torpedo handling systems. It is also the place where the FREMM frigates' vertical launch systems are produced. The focus of the visit however was the A3SM, a new anti-air defence weapon system for submarine currently under development by DCNS and MBDA.
A3SM stands for Arme Anti-Aérienne pour Sous Marins (literally Anti-Air Weapon for Submarines). The project was first unveiled during Euronaval 2012 and it actually consists in two versions: a Mast version and an Underwater Vehicle version.
A3SM: What needs does it fulfill?
Today, submarines have no way to defend themselves against air threats. Submarine forces worldwide have an increasing need to operate close to shores in shallow waters. (As an example during the campaign in Libya, submarines were conducting intelligence missions close to shores). In such situation submarines are an easy target for helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft (MPA). When detected in shallow waters, there is no possibility for the submarine to escape, contrary to deep sea where they can employ various tactics and disappear. Up until now, submarines were harmless against air threats, while significantly cheaper and less complex naval platform like small Fast Attack Craft (FAC) may be fitted with a SAM solution.
It is this gap that DCNS and MBDA are looking to fill. The doctrine of use is not for the
Hot on the heels of Clip-Air, the train-meets-airplane mass transit system, a second, similar design has surfaced. If you've seen the images of Clip-Air, you'll note the tell-tale flying wing shape right off the bat. Here too are the passenger cars, carried upon the massive airliner's underbelly. And yes, the cars detach and become part of a transit system upon arrival at your destination. Just like Clip-Air.
But if you look closer, the similarities between the two projects start to fade. For instance, The Horizon System is entirely electric. No fossil fuels are needed to keep the massive flying wing aloft — and aloft is where it aims to stay.
The comic-book hero Superman uses his X-ray vision to spot bad guys lurking behind walls and other objects. Now we could all have X-ray vision, thanks to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Researchers have long attempted to build a device capable of seeing people through walls. However, previous efforts to develop such a system have involved the use of expensive and bulky radar technology that uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum only available to the military.
Currently, roughly 20 percent of humanity's caloric intake comes from wheat. Agricultural strains, specialized for bread or pasta production, have been bred for high productivity and resistance to many agricultural pests. But over the past few years, one of those pests, a fungus called wheat stem rust, has evolved the ability to overcome wheat's defenses. Dangerous strains of wheat stem rust were first spotted in Uganda, but are now present elsewhere in Africa, in Yemen, and in some areas of Iran. That's set off an international scramble to find ways of generating a resistant wheat before the rust spreads any further.
By working with uncultivated relatives of agricultural wheat, two teams of scientists have identified a pair of genes, each of which provides partial resistance to the new strain of stem rust. Although each gene can be bred back into commercial wheat strains, the combination of the two is likely to be even more potent, so the researchers are considering putting them on a single DNA construct and then engineering that into various agricultural strains.
(Phys.org) —A new material that can store large amounts of energy with very little energy loss has been developed by researchers at the Australian National University.
The material has practical applications in renewable energy storage, electric cars and defence and space technologies.
"Dielectric materials are used to make fundamental electrical components called capacitors, which store energy," said Associate Professor Yun Liu of the ANU Research School of Chemistry, co-author of the paper detailing the new material.
The new metal oxide dielectric material outperforms current capacitors in many aspects, storing large amounts of energy and working reliably from -190°C to 180°C, and is cheaper to manufacture than current components.
"Our material performs significantly better than existing high dielectric constant materials so it has huge potential. With further development, the material could be used in 'supercapacitors' which store enormous amounts of energy, removing current energy storage limitations and throwing the door wide open for innovation in the areas of renewable energy, electric cars, even space and defence technologies," said Associate Professor Liu.
20,000 leagues under the sea you'll find all sorts of massive cephalopods. And in the near future they just might be joined by a submarine straight out of Jules Verne.
When spooked, an octopus can propel itself by taking sea water into its body and then shooting it out again as a high powered jet. The octopus can also steer the jet of water coming out of its body in order to accurately direct itself through the sea.
All this simplicity and precision got researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA thinking. They surmised that a system based upon an octopus would not only offer a new choice in submarine silent engines, but also be adaptable for all manner of small craft. Anything from small boats to jet skis and surfboards could soon be propelled by small octopus-like engines — with a few less suction cups.
Art Lebedev Studio isn't new to designing traffic lights. In fact, we wrote about a square traffic signal prototype unveiled by the design studio back in 2008. It really is curious that traffic lights haven't had much of a makeover when you consider all of the innovative things folks have been doing with lighting lately.
One progressive city in Turkey is turning this around, though. The municipality of Kayseri, Turkey asked Art Lebedev Studio to design a contemporary traffic signal that fits in better with the city's urban vibe. It's smaller, much easier to move around and it clearly displays the words "stop," "go," and "caution" in addition to the color indicators to give drivers a little extra help.
If you don't care about authenticity, the New Century Global Center has everything you could want, including an artificial Mediterranean village.
The international tallest building arms race has been dominated by Dubai, with its Burj Khalifa, for several years, but China has upped the ante by unveiling what it calls the world's largest building.
The New Century Global Center building opened recently in Chengu, a city of more than 14 million people in southwest China's Sichuan province. It's described as "the world's largest standalone structure" by Chinese officials and is 328 feet high, 1,640 feet long, and 1,312 feet wide.
DNP Navy awards electromagnetic railgun manufacturing contract, proves we're living in the future
Just over 18 months after making its video debut, the Navy's electromagnetic railgun has a manufacturer. BAE Systems -- known for e-ink-powered tank camouflage, autonomous spiderbots and machine-gun-mounted lasers -- won the government contract and hopes to have phase-two prototypes ready "as early as next year." While the current design is capable of firing one shot, the Office of Navy Research hopes for six to ten shots per minute. If that doesn't scare you, consider this: The pulse-driven projectiles travel at Mach 6 and can hit targets over 100 nautical miles away. Don't worry, it's not too late to rethink that career of sailing the high seas as a pirate and get to work on that accounting degree instead.
Patrick Priebe, the German laser weapons hobbyist who previously brought us such creations as the Iron Man Gauntlet and the Plasma Cutter, has gone and made something else. This time around, he’s built a proof-of-concept Laser Gatling Gun.
The Laser Gatling Gun shoots a ring of laser light
The turret speed can be controlled using a knob on the underside of the gun, while four ba...
The motor and aiming laser are powered by eight AA batteries, and the six blue lasers run ...
The aluminum-bodied gun’s spinning turret features six blue 1.4-watt Class 4 lasers, supplied by Wicked Lasers. While these won’t stop a marauding robot, they will at least pop a balloon ... as long as the turret isn’t turning too fast. A 100-mW green laser is mounted to one side, to assist in aiming.
The turret speed can be controlled using a knob on the underside of the gun, while four ball bearings keep that turret spinning relatively smoothly. The motor and aiming laser are powered by eight AA batteries, and the six blue lasers run off four parallel 18650 lithium-ions.
July 5, 2013 — Researchers of MESA+, the research institute for nanotechnology of the University of Twente, in cooperation with researchers of the University of Strasbourg and Eindhoven University of Technology, are the first to successfully create perfect one-dimensional molecular wires of which the electrical conductivity can almost entirely be suppressed by a weak magnetic field at room temperature. The underlying mechanism is possibly closely related to the biological compass used by some migratory birds to find their bearings in the geomagnetic field. This spectacular discovery may lead to radically new magnetic field sensors, for smartphones for example.
There are always two stages in the development of any new technology: inventing it, and making it useful. The first computer was the size of a room, and slower than a first-grader counting on his fingers. The first telephone transmitted noises so garbled they could barely be understood even when you knew what was being said. We’ve had abilities in nanoscale writing, or “lithography,” for some time, but it was too expensive, too slow, too limited, to be of use in many contexts. Researchers often despaired at using the technique outside of very specific uses, or with huge grants, and many ended up using it simply to write their names as a proof of concept. Now, Boston University researchers say they’ve taken nanoscale lithography to the a new level of usefulness, creating a machine that can lay down previously impossible patterns at the atomic scale, and do it without crippling hassle or expense.
Ocean currents have a big impact on weather and climate. Without the Gulf Stream, the climate of Northern and Western Europe would be cooler. Scientists at ETH Zurich now uncovered that also relatively small swirling motions in the ocean, so called eddies, impact weather. A large number of such eddies exists in all oceans at any time, featuring diameters of about one hundred kilometers.
Eddies arise because ocean currents are generally turbulent, affected for instance by the topography of the ocean bottom, explains Ivy Frenger, a postdoc in the group of ETH-professor Nicolas Gruber at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics. "An analogy to this topographic effect are the swirls that occur downstream of a rock in a creek", says Frenger. In the ocean, eddies can be carried along by large-scale currents over vast distances, and also move around independently.
(Phys.org) —With the goal of understanding the relation between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, physicists have recently been investigating the fundamental limits of the smallest possible quantum refrigerator. As a refrigerator, the device must be able to transfer heat from one reservoir to another. In a new study, physicists have proposed a quantum refrigerator consisting of just four quantum dots, each in contact with a thermal reservoir. They theoretically show that this system can extract heat from the coldest reservoir and cool the nearby quantum dot, making it one of the smallest quantum refrigerators proposed to date.
