#Volvo testing self-driving cars on public roads in Sweden Volvo Car Group rive Meproject featuring 100 self-driving Volvos on public roads in everyday driving conditions is moving forward rapidly,
with the first test cars now driving around the Swedish city of Gothenburg. he test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption,
and merging traffic all by themselves, says Erik Coelingh, Technical Specialist at Volvo Car Group. his is an important step towards our aim that the final rive Mecars will be able to drive the whole test route in highly autonomous mode.
The technology which will be called Autopilot, enables the driver to hand over the driving to the vehicle,
which takes care of all driving functions. All key players involved What makes the rive Meproject unique is that it nvolves all the key players:
legislators, transport authorities, a major city, a vehicle manufacturer, and real customers. The customers will drive the 100 cars in everyday driving conditions on approximately 50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg.
These roads are typical commuter arteries, including motorway conditions and frequent queues. rive Me self-driving cars for sustainable mobilityis a joint initiative between Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City
of Gothenburg. The Swedish Government is endorsing the project. Volvo Cars will play a leading role in the world first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project in
which 100 self-driving Volvo cars will use public roads in everyday driving conditions around the Swedish city of Gothenburg.
The ground-breaking project rive Me Self-driving cars for sustainable mobilityis a joint initiative between Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park
and the City of Gothenburg. The rive Meproject is endorsed by the Swedish Government. The aim is to pinpoint the societal benefits of autonomous driving and position Sweden and Volvo Cars as leaders in the development of future mobility e
#Cree LED tubes will make fluorescent lights seem old fashioned In the scramble to replace traditional forms of illumination with greener LED sources,
Cree has announced just the release of a new type of tube light designed to tackle one of the biggest energy hogs in Corporate America:
fluorescent overhead lights. The new Cree T8 bulb looks very much like the traditional T-8 fluorescent tube wee been using since the 1970s.
Except, however, that the new Cree uses LED rather than inert gas which allows it to turn on instantly (regardless of how cold the weather is) without flickering as well as operate at a 30 percent energy savings over the traditional method.
The Cree T8 outputs 2100 lumens at 21 watts with a CRI (color rendering index) of 90.
That very good, even the best current generation of fluorescent bulbs top out around 10 points lower.
What more the Cree are rated to 50,000 hours of operation (just north of 17 years
if run for 8 hours a day, 365 days a year) and are designed to fit into existing ballasts so, unlike other LED fluorescent replacements,
you won have to get up into the ceiling and rewire anything, just plug the LED tube in the same way the older fluorescents do.
The new LEDS are a bit pricey upfront (as all LED systems currently are) with an MSRP of $30 each.
However, these bulbs are rated DLC compliant (the business version of the Energy star program) which means that installing them could earn you a hefty rebate (anywhere from $5-15 per lamp) off your company monthly utility bill in addition to the inherent energy savings v
#Scientists confirm existence of the periodic table s 117th element The discovery of the periodic table 117th element has been confirmed after four years of painstaking research.
Element 117, otherwise known as ununseptium, was discovered originally back in 2010 by a group of American and Russian physicists with the Joint Institute for Nuclear research (JINR).
However, it has taken years for the discovery to be replicated by another independent team, which the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) requires.
Now the element, with the approval of the IUPAC, can be named and added to the periodic table,
Like the team at the JINR, the group managed to create the element by firing Calcium isotopes at radioactive Berkelium
Professor David Hinde of the Australian National University told I Fucking Love Science. As with other transuranium elements, ununseptium is highly unstable,
The use of animal testing for medical research than for cosmetics testing is much easier to defend.
Even as medical researchers produce rgans on a chipto help with drug testing, developing human skin for cosmetics testing has remained elusive.
Researchers at King College London and the San francisco Veteran Affairs Medical center report they have cleared those hurdles. ur new method can be used to grow much greater quantities of lab-grown human epidermal equivalents,
Making the skin from stem cells means that particular diseases could be produced intentionally for study,
including common skin ailments like dermatitis in which a defective skin barrier means that toxins cannot be repelled handily
Admittedly, these diseases are neither life-threatening nor medically exciting, but they are a big nuisance for those who suffer from them.
Some, like atopic dermatitis, remain poorly understood. he ability to obtain an unlimited number of genetically identical units can be used to study a range of conditions where the skin barrier is defective due to mutations in genes involved in skin barrier formation.
how the barrier is impaired in different diseases and how we can stimulate its repair and recovery,
both to study disease behavior and to test drugs, is a rapidly growing market. In many cases its benefits are so hypothetical eliminating negative outcomes that would,
#$150 smartphone spectrometer can tell the number of calories in your food If you wanted to look up the calorie content of a specific food you are eating you could take it to a lab and run it through a spectrometer.
But accurate spectrometers are huge, expensive machines that are owned often only by institutions and require training to use.
A new startup, however, wants to make it easy as running an app and pairing a bluetooth dongle.
The SCIO is a handheld device that pairs with a smartphone through Bluetooth LE being developed by Consumer Physics
an Israel-based startup funded by Kholsa Ventures. It based on near-infrared spectroscopy, which means it reflects light onto an object,
The Kickstarter launched Tuesday morning with several funding levels: a fully operational SCIO starts at $149,
but Kickstarter backers pledging over $300 will receive two years of guaranteed app upgrades. While scientists and researchers use near-infrared spectroscopy on a regular basis,
or figuring out whether the fruit at the farmer market is ripe. Consumer Physics will offer both Android and iphone apps,
and also hopes to develop a platform upon which third parties can build their own apps.
In a few seconds, the associated smartphone app will take the spectrometer reading, send it to SCIO servers,
analyze it and compare it to a database of known spectral signatures, and display the information in an easy-to-understand manner.
In turn, the readings provided by users will make the spectral signature database more complete. Consumer Physics has developed three different applications for identifying food, medicines, and plants.
During a short demo, I saw the module return the percentage of fat and number of calories per 100 grams of cheese.
The SCIO was also able to identify a number of different over-the-counter drugs and could distinguish between a Tylenol and a Tylenol PM.
It closer to the size of a smartphone camera module, and could one day be included in a variety of forms,
Developer kits available through the Kickstarter for $200 offer barebones SCIO modules and come with CAD designs for 3d printers.
in addition to developing the hardware, is also populating the first databases and apps that work with the SCIO,
hopefully other companies will build their own apps, using the developer kit available from Kickstarter.
Spectography is used often to identify gems, and CEO Dror Oren adds, f someone wants to offer an application for diamonds that costs $1, 000,
that the kind of platform we want to build. Other companies working in the portable spectrometer space have used also the technology to track calories eaten and nutritional intake through a user sweat.
The first SCIO prototypes will ship in October and the Kickstarter is live now i
The technique could help scientists develop treatments for patients with some brain diseases as it could allow problematic parts of the brain to be switched off
#Fewer high school graduates enroll in college after graduation The proportion of high school students in the U s. who go on to college rose regularly for decades
Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college,
when 70.1 percent of new graduates had gone on to college. alling college enrollment indicates that upward mobility may become more difficult for working-class and disadvantaged high school graduates,
an economist with the Economic policy Institute in Washington. t another part of the long-term scarring process of the Great Recession that has been hidden partly.
She said that might reflect poorer employment prospects for parents and students who would have worked their way through college a few years ago,
and added that many parents in the past paid for college by refinancing mortgages, an alternative no longer available to many families.
At the same time, there were some encouraging signs in the report, which is released annually. The bureau reported that 51 percent of the high school graduates who did not go on to college had jobs by October
and that 74 percent were in the labor force, meaning they either were employed or were looking for work.
Those figures may not sound high, but they are up from the last couple of years,
On the other hand, only 43 percent of new high school dropouts were part of the labor force in October, a figure that was the lowest for the last 20 years, the period for
But there was an increase in the proportion of new high school dropouts who had jobs to 31 percent from 24 percent in 2012,
which could be another indication of an improving economy. The figures are volatile from year to year,
which 60,000 households are asked each month about the employment status of all members of the household who are 16 years of age or older.
The bureau said the estimated 65.9 percent figure for high school graduates who went on to college could be off by as much as 2. 4 percentage points in either direction.
Still, there seems to be little doubt that the long-term trend of more and more high school graduates going to college has halted, if not reversed.
3d printed biological tissue 3d printing capabilities are limited rather despite the excitement that 3-D printing has generated.
It can be used to make complex shapes, but most commonly only out of plastics. Even manufacturers using an advanced version of the technology known as additive manufacturing typically have expanded the material palette only to a few types of metal alloys.
But what if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing
and matching the nkswith precision? Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at Harvard university, is developing the chemistry
and machines to make that possible. She prints intricately shaped objects from he ground up, precisely adding materials that are useful for their mechanical properties, electrical conductivity,
or optical traits. This means 3-D printing technology could make objects that sense and respond to their environment. ntegrating form and function,
she says, s the next big thing that needs to happen in 3-D printing. A group at Princeton university has printed a bionic ear, combining biological tissue and electronics,
while a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has printed retinal cells to form complex eye tissue.
But even among these impressive efforts to extend the possibilities of 3-D printing Lewis lab stands out for the range of materials
and types of objects it can print. Last year, Lewis and her students showed they could print the microscopic electrodes
and other components needed for tiny lithium-ion batteries. Other projects include printed sensors fabricated on plastic patches that athletes could one day wear to detect concussions and measure violent impacts.
Most recently, her group printed biological tissue interwoven with a complex network of blood vessels. To do this, the researchers had to make inks out of various types of cells
and the materials that form the matrix supporting them. The work addresses one of the lingering challenges in creating artificial organs for drug testing or
someday, for use as replacement parts: how to create a vascular system to keep the cells alive.
In a basement lab a few hundred yards from Lewis office, her group has jury-rigged a 3-D printer, equipped with a microscope,
that can precisely print structures with features as small as one micrometer (a human red blood cell is around 10 micrometers in diameter).
Another, larger 3-D printer, using printing nozzles with multiple outlets to print multiple inks simultaneously,
can fabricate a meter-sized sample with a desired microstructure in minutes. The secret to Lewis creations lies in inks with properties that allow them to be printed during the same fabrication process.
Each ink is a different material, but they all can be printed at room temperature. The various types of materials present different challenges;
cells, for example, are delicate and easily destroyed as they are forced through the printing nozzle. In all cases,
though, the inks must be formulated to flow out of the nozzle under pressure but retain their form once in placehink of toothpaste,
Before coming to Harvard from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year, Lewis had spent more than a decade developing 3-D printing techniques using ceramics, metal nanoparticles, polymers,
and began working with biological cells and tissues for the first time, she hoped to treat them the same way as materials composed of synthetic particles.
Printing blood vessels was an encouraging step toward artificial tissues capable of the complex biological functions found in organs.
Most of us on our small team are musicians who are tired of being stuck behind computer screens, keyboards, faders
lightweight and self-contained system requiring little more than a laptop to function fully. The gloves capture the movements and postures of your hands.
Our software allows this information to be mapped to musical control messages which can then be routed easily to your favourite music software.
Specifically, the gloves track the following: The orientation of your hand The lexof your fingers Your current hand posture (e g. fist, open hand,
backwards) of your hand Sharp movements such as drum hits This information is transmitted wirelessly to your computer, over Wifi (via the x-OSC board on the wrist).
we have developed software allowing you to apglove data to musical control signals (e g. MIDI and OSC.
The software also allows you to combine glove inputs to make complex controls. For example, the software would allow you to program the following:
f I am making a fist with my right hand, and pointing downwards with my left hand,
map the ollof my right wrist to MIDI control change message 60 on channel 2 These mappings can then be used to control third party software such as Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic pro or Max
This ability of the software to combine postures and gestures for mapping, combined with other innovative technological advances,
-more than most MIDI controllers on the market all without having to even look at a screen during performance.
Finally, you can use the software to listen out for other inputs, as well, further increasing the richness of control and expressive mappability with your favourite music software.
The gloves are the product of years of research and development, building upon original research at University of the West of England.
Some details about the evolution of the project over the last few years can be seen on our Glove Project Blog.
hardware and software and we have arrived finally at a point where we can make them available to others through this Kickstarter.
Gestural data interface have been around for decades and have been used for many different applications (see our review of other glove systems).
Getting from here to there will take quite a bit of work, but wee already made great progress
Braille, however, does require some training to understand, and even now, most books, magazines, and newspapers are unavailable in braille format.
and use to follow a line of text in a book or on a screen.
Fingerreader software recognizes that and offers haptic feedback, even knowing when it reaches the end of a line.
It works with both printed text and anything in electronic format, opening up a world of reading to those who have vision problems.
It could also be used as a learning tool to teach the illiterate to read d
#Mayo Clinic s Better turns your smartphone into a personal health concierge The Mayo Clinic is offering unlimited access to the famed hospital nurses through a smartphone app for about $50 a month.
The Mayo Clinic partnered with Better, a California-based health technology startup, to launch the new subscription-based app.
The app is covered not by insurance but offers real-time, 24/7 health care assistance. Think of it as a mobile Webmd.
Along with real-time video chats with Mayo Clinic nurses, the new service also includes personally-tailored health information culled from Mayo Clinic databases
a ymptom checkerthat incorporate individual user health histories, and access to a personal medical concierge who can provide more information or schedule patientsdoctor appointments.
The app costs $49. 95 a month per household and is compliant with federal health privacy regulations. ur culture of learning, innovation,
said Paul Limburg of Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions in a press release. eople consistently tell us they want more convenient access to Mayo Clinic knowledge.
and invested in Better to create a powerful way for people to connect with Mayo Clinic in their homes and communities,
Concierge medicine could also be a potential new revenue stream for the Mayo Clinic. Fast Company has covered previously New york-based medical concierge service Sherpaa and Oscar, a new health insurer which tailors its products for web and mobile use.
Because apps and subscription services are largely outside of the scope of FDA regulations, they are a potential moneymaker for health-minded businesses and entrepreneurs,
or smartphone application is far less than a comparable standalone product, which requires far greater fees for the FDA process.
Better founder Geoffrey Clapp was previously an executive at telemedicine pioneerhealth Hero Network; his new company was launched with $5 million from venture capital fund The Social+Capital Partnership and the Mayo Clinic itself.
The Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions wing has been actively building partnerships with everything from benefits providers to a variety of software developers.
The Mayo Clinic is entering a crowded market of smartphone-based concierge medicine firms. Beyond Sherpaa, there also Grand Rounds, Stat Doctors, Doctor on Demand,
and even a free app for Canadians, Medeo, which offers subsidized concierge medicine services via smartphones for residents of British columbia.
For Better, the Mayo Clinic, and other concierge medicine providers, the real (and unanswered) question is just how much of a market for their services really exists via smartphone apps s
#3d printed Osteoid cast with built-in ultrasound helps bones heal faster Osteoid cast Old-fashioned casts for broken bones can smell
and cause itching. But 3d printed casts can take care of those issues. Deniz Karasahin has designed the next step:
a custom cast with an ultrasound device to speed up bone healing. Karasahin Osteoid is, obviously, just a design concept,
winner of the 2014 Golden Aesign Award in the 3d printed forms and product design category.
The therapy has been tricky to administer, because it requires placing ultrasound leads on the skin directly over the bone injury.
That impossible with an old-school plaster castut not with a 3d printed cast of the future.
Since this is a design concept, you probably won find it in your emergency room anytime soon.
#The impossible $10k degree marches on in Texas Governor Perry wants public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10, 000 in tuition, fees, and books.
Perry challenged Texas public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10 000 in tuition, fees,
and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.
000 college degrees preposterous, adding that obody in higher education believes that is even possible. Peter Hugill, a Texas A&m professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors,
posed the rhetorical question: o you really want a stripped-down, barebones degree? Hugill went on to declare that 10,000 seems to
the public reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers.
finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently.
Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost.
Seventy-five percent of respondents declared college simply unaffordable. But would Perry plan meet the public need One year after the governor challenge,
announcing a bachelor degree in information technology costing students just under $10, 000 in tuition and fees.
Florida governor Rick Scott recently asked his state public universities to craft $10, 000 degrees of their own.
In May of 2013, Georgia Tech announced an online master degree in computer science for $7
Additionally, in the last year, legislators in Oklahoma and Oregon have begun work to introduce $10, 000 degrees in their states.
Moreover, they point out, a number of the new offerings charge students $10, 000 but do not actually reduce their schoolscost of instruction and materials.
These otherwise valid critiques ignore the fact that Perry requested only that 10 percent of public undergraduate degrees meet the $10, 000 standard,
More important, the $10, 000 degree programs that reduced the price charged to the student but not the cost incurred by the school did not employ the means Perry specified online learning and competency-based exams.
That changing. Three higher-education partners Texas A&m University-Commerce, South Texas College, and the Texas Higher education Coordinating Board (THECB) just launched the ffordable Baccalaureate Program, the state first public university bachelor degree combining online learning and competency-based standards.
Developed by community-college and university faculty, with an eye to meeting the needs identified by community and business leaders,
a new degree in organizational leadership can cost as little as $750 per term and allows students to receive credit for as many competencies
and courses as they can master each term. According to THECB website, students arriving ith no prior college credits should be able to complete the degree program in three years at a total cost of $13, 000 to $15, 000.
Students who enter having already satisfied their general education requirements can complete the degree in two years,
while those entering with 0 credit hours and no credentialcan complete the degree n one year for $4,
500 to $6, 000. Will this latest salvo strike the decisive blow in the revolution?
It is too early to tell. But a few facts we know too well. One study finds that average tuition
Attempting to pay for these historic price increases, students and their parents have taken on historic student-loan debt.
Total student-loan debt has risen to $1. 2 trillion, for the first time ever exceeding total national credit-card debt.
In the past, the debate over the college tuition and debt crisis has produced calls to action on two fronts
both fiscally unsustainable: First, federal taxpayers have been asked to pay more through subsidizing student loans so that students can borrow more to pay inflated tuitions.
Second, state taxpayers have been asked to pay more in order to increase state subsidies for education. But today, with the $10, 000 degree, universities themselves are beginning to lower the tuition
and fees they charge students, parents, and taxpayers. Finally, the ground is beginning to shift.
The impossible may be starting to look inevitable
#Facebook and Google are drooling over drone companies Last month it seemed as if Facebook would acquire the long-range solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace
and use its technology to deliver Internet to remote areas of the world. It was ostensibly a hedge against Google balloon-driven Project Loon and the possibility that Google,
rather than Facebook, would connect the ext billioninternet users. Today that picture is opaque at best.
Google not Facebook is buying Titan Aerospace, and Facebook has acquired a different U k.-based solar-powered drones startup called Ascenta.
And an answer to the question of how exactly the two Silicon valley giants will leverage their new technology?
Still elusive. What is clear is that while delivering connectivity to far-flung parts of the globe is advantageous for both Facebook and Google,
the race to acquire unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, technology is about much more. Exactly what, well, that more difficult to discern. ou definitely have to look at it as part of a broader business strategy,
says Mark Bünger, research director at Lux Research. he two of them are shooting for the strategic high ground here Amazon is obviously doing this, too.
I think they have a lot of ideas for what it going to be important for, but I think right now anyone would have a hard time accurately saying what that going to be.
In other words, they don know exactly what it going to be for, they just know that it important that theye there.
For Facebook, the incentive is simple: catch up. Rival Google has been developing a means to provide Internet connectivity to remote regions of the world for years now through Project Loon,
which uses Internet hubs suspended from high-flying balloons to provide bandwidth to areas of New zealand that are wired off the grid.
Facebook isn breaking new ground by getting into commercialized drone technology, Bünger says, just keeping up. oogle has been working on the autonomous vehicles, the Nest acquisition,
and a bunch of other stuff that surprising if you think of them as a search engine company which hopefully nobody does anymore,
Bünger says. Facebook knows that if it wants to remain a major presence in the emerging Internet of things,
it will need to extend beyond software and into hardware. Drones are one means of doing so.
UAS are also a means of bypassing mobile carriers, which have given Facebook some trouble in parts of the developing world,
particularly where the company has attempted to negotiate ero-ratedeals that allow customers to use some of Facebook offerings without it counting against their data plans.
If Facebook does follow through with its ambitious plans to connect the next billion people through Facebook-owned Internet drones
Facebook can not only bypass mobile carriers that don want to play ball, but also push those new users toward Facebook offerings like its recently acquired messaging app Whatapp.
But one oft-overlooked area where UAS technology could really be a boon for Facebook is in data moving the other direction.
Right now, Facebook owns mountains of data on its users, but relatively little on the parts of the world that aren connected already to Facebook.
Comparatively, Google acquisitions and exclusive deals with third parties provide it with everything from the rich trove of geospatial data that powers Google maps to the energy use
and living habits of those using its Nest smart home technology, providing a far more robust picture of the world
and a wider range of services it can provide. With a fleet of UAS in the sky, Facebook could begin gathering its own proprietary geospatial data, aerial imagery, traffic data,
meteorological data information that it could then integrate into new products or sell to companies that need it,
much like Google does and other companies threaten to do, at least with regard to drones. or Facebook and Google and those guys,
they know they need a toehold in this space, Bünger says. here are a hundred other areas like that where theye having to compete now to get a toehold in the technology,
and they can really know right now what theye going to use it for. Nobody really knows.
At $20 million, Facebook found its way into the drone space for a third of
what it was reportedly going to pay to acquire Titan. The terms of Google purchase of Titan haven yet been disclosed,
but whatever the final figure, it will likely be worth it. The acquisitions certainly have the attention of the rest of the drone industry,
which now largely consists of small, privately held companies sitting on various competing technologies that are waiting to see how customers
or perhaps future corporate overlords will put them to work. With the FAA and other civil aviation authorities moving toward policies that allow for the commercial operation of drones in civilian airspace,
it seems a foregone conclusion at this point that more drone technology acquisitions are in the offing,
Bünger says. Theye not just vanity projects, but necessary pieces of a competitive technology portfolio. or these companies these are placed very well strategic bets,
Bünger says of the recent acquisitions. don know why in the world Whatsapp was valued the way it was,
I can even imagine. But these things Oculus Rift; both of these drone acquisitions by Facebook and Google;
a lot of this technology that has to do with wearables; autonomous robotic systems on land, sea, and air;
technologies that have to do with crunching all the data that you get from all these things those are the weapons you need to have with you going into the next competitive battles
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