#Financial services ripe for disruptive innovation Technology is having a profound impact on so many sectors, creating opportunities,
#IBM creates a solar magnifying glass that could power the Earth IBM, the American multinational technology and consulting corporation are renowned the world over for being technology leaders
and build a smarter planet. Their latest creation is being considered as one of their best projects yet.
which is capable of concentrating the sun rays into a stream 2000x more powerful. The process of trapping sunlight also produces water that can be used to produce potable water and other modern day amenities such as air conditioning.
Scientists are predicting that the HCPVT could provide sustainable energy and fresh water to communities all around the world.
which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun. Such system can be applied profitably in sunny regions where sustainable energy,
With the high concentration of the sun rays and a low cost design the team believe they charge $250 per square meter which is three times lower than normal systems.
The burgeoning revolution has not been confined to the Lone star State. Apparently, when it comes to higher-education reform,
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.
Google not Facebook is buying Titan Aerospace, and Facebook has acquired a different U k.-based solar-powered drones startup called Ascenta.
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,
With the FAA and other civil aviation authorities moving toward policies that allow for the commercial operation of drones in civilian airspace,
#Google buys Titan Aerospace, a solar-powered drone company Solar-powered drone This week, Google announced the acquisition of Titan Aerospace for an undisclosed sum in a move that sees the technology
Following Facebook s $20 million purchase of U k.-based aerospace company Ascenta which has been working on the development of unmanned,
solar-powered aerial drones for the past few years Google acted fast to usurp an expected bid by Facebook to also acquire Titan Aerospace.
and reach across the most remote corners of earth. Although the total purchase sum was undisclosed,
a source close to Google said that the company offered to top any offer from Facebook for Titan Aerospace.
Google s technical experts will work with Titan Aerospace to advance the material design for the drones wings,
The intention is to collect real-time, high-resolution images of the earth, and to bring greater depth
but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems,
Solar s influence Titan Aerospace caught Google s attention thanks to its innovative dragonfly-shaped drones that are powered by its wing-mounted solar panels
At night you are not collecting energy from the sun and it takes a lot of power to broadcast internet signals.
However, a source close to Facebook has revealed that the social media giants had been reviewing Titan Aerospace s solar-powered drones some six months ago,
and when it senses that it over white space, it turns around and follows the line back the way it came i
The Fairfield, CT-headquartered conglomerate has been pushing hard in the 3d printing and the next-generation manufacturing space.
the turbine helium-inflated housing is durable enough for deployment in either the blazing sun or freezing snow.
even if your previous system involved a sun dial and carrier pigeons. The things even have a cool name:
The Ultrasonic Cover for its Galaxy Core Advance smartphone helps owners sense the presence of people and objects up to two meters away.
or Western union apparently fail to meet the requirements to be discussed in virtually every central bank on the planet,
and became a good of such universal value it slowly became the de facto means of exchange (along with silver) across much of the planet,
and Amazon that are are currently active in the space. At the very least, the ever-growing success of bitcoin thus far candidly illustrates that there is indeed a massive demand for anonymity online,
or concert halls any space where you need to control the acoustics. If you had to put a beam somewhere for structural reasons that was going to mess up the sound,
#Discovery of water-containing gem points to vast oceans beneath the Earth The Earth transition zone is the part of the Earth that exists between the upper and lower mantle.
there is water, possibly massive oceans of it, deep beneath the Earth surface. The tiny gem was an accidental find
a mineral we have seen only previously in meteorites, and not On earth. Fortunately, as with many scientific discoveries, this accident was a happy find.
exists deep within the Earth, at least 300 miles beneath its surface, in the transition zone.
Geologists believe that volcanic activity pushed this particular rock up to Earth surface. Having a piece of the Earth transition zone available,
geologists spent several years testing it. Their final results showed that the gem contained 1. 5 percent of its weight in water.
This discovery proves the theory that the Earth transition zone not only contains water but might also contain more water than every surface ocean combined.
Because it so difficult to dig a hole deep enough to reach even the upper mantle of the Earth
what we know about Earth and its composition o
#Controversy brews over use of autonomous killer robots in war People are promised their quality of life will improve with the advances of technology,
when the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down. The end goal for Tesla is that cheap batteries could help Tesla deliver its $35, 000 third generation electric car.
and recorded across hundreds of servers at all corners of the earth. Consultant Andreas M. Antonopoulos, echoing a 2012 white paper by software developer J. R. Willett,
#New 3d printed materials lighter than water and as strong as steel A Nanoscribe 3d printer can print models of the Empire state building in a space the width of a human hair using precision lasers.
A rocket s skin, for example, needs to contain a column of super-pressurized fuel and at the same time weigh as little as possible.
Like arches in the Roman Coliseum, the shape of all those tiny spaces maximizes strength
That information is combined with multi-spectral images of fields taken by advanced camera systems from satellites and airplanes.
The system then combines the field data with a diversity of public data from the National oceanic and atmospheric administration the National aeronautics and space administration and the U s. Geological Survey and private data from companies like Earth Networks.
and generates a four-dimensional mathematical model derived from the physics of the atmosphere. With high accuracy Deep Thunder can deliver hyper-localized weather conditions up to three days in advance with calculations as fine as a single mile and as granular as every 10 minutes.
otherwise recycle CO2 back into the atmosphere through the surface waters. But when they get eaten close to the seafloor by animals that never come to the surface all of the carbon these roving fish were packing gets locked down at the bottom of the ocean Trueman explained.
However the amount of carbon that deep-sea fish trap is compared miniscule with the emissions released into the atmosphere by humans.
U k. emissions from fossil fuel burning in 2010 were 494 million tons of CO2 said Pieter Tans of the U s. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory
With more people sharing our mutual responsibility to reduce carbon footprints by shifting to plant-based meals we have reason to be hopeful for our planet's future.
and disappear back into Earth s environment. But bug parts break down in only a year or two.
The plant is set to be built by Abengoa SA (ABG) a Spanish company that offers global renewable energy solutions. his project will help prove the economic operation of concentrated solar power technology in the Earth sunbelt,
designed to create an mbrellaeffect to seal dust clouds in with spray, causing the particles to fall out of the air.
Among other things, MEMS devices are able to measure acceleration, gravity, chemicals, the indicators of disease or the presence of explosives.
Powered by Landmark's Decisionspace next-generation earth modeling solution the workflow is unique to the industry in that it is capable of updating dynamically
Bruker now serves applications from QA/QC in automotive, aerospace and other industries, to geological surveys for natural resources, to art and conservation.
"I believe there's a tremendous potential to use these methods to build machines for situations where you need deployability, for example space exploration,
But before these tiny bots travel into space or other harsh environments, the researchers will need to experiment with stiffer and more-durable materials.
#World's first man-made photosynthetic'leaf'could produce oxygen for astronauts To say that an invention has the potential to change the world is often an overstatement,
As the only organisms capable of converting sunlight into food, plants are the powerhouses that produce all of the sustenance On earth.
and helps to regulate the planet's climate. Melchiorri's invention can potentially duplicate many of these benefits with a man-made material.
by allowing our astronauts to travel longer distances in space and possibly even colonize new planets."
"Plants don't grow in zero gravity, "explained Melchiorri.""NASA is researching different ways to produce oxygen for long-distance space journeys to let us live in space.
This material could allow us to explore space much further than we can now.""The man-made leaf,
which was developed as part of the Royal College of Art's Innovation Design Engineering course in collaboration with Tufts University silk lab,
is made from chloroplasts that are suspended in a silk protein matrix. The chloroplasts are derived from plant cells,
Like the leaves of a plant, the material requires only exposure to sunlight and a small amount of water to produce oxygen."
Aside from producing oxygen for astronauts, the Silk Leaf could also be used as building material to produce clean air for buildings.
non-ionizing solar radiation. They convert it by luminescence and operate on the principle of collecting radiation over a large area.
small organic molecules to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight.""We can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near infrared wavelengths that then'glow'at another wavelength in the infrared,
even if the two particles exist at opposite ends of the universe as if they are one.
#'Astroskin'smart shirt monitors astronauts'health in Antarctica Remember that pivotal scene in the movie"Apollo 13"in which crewmembers rip the biomedical sensors off their bodies?
scientists with the Canadian space agency say. Astroskin, a prototype device to monitor astronaut health, is a garment that fits over a person's upper body
and is embedded with wireless sensors. From the ground, doctors can see an astronaut's vital signs,
as well as how well the spacefarers are sleeping and how they are moving. Before sending Canadian company Carré Technologies'smart shirt on a ride to orbit,
however, a lot of testing must be done to make sure it works as well as the Canadian space agency (CSA) hopes it will.
That's why a Canadian team exploring Antarctica this month is toting Astroskin with it The Human body in Space:
6 Weird Facts Crewmembers of the the XPANTARCTIK expedition, while spending 45 days in a previously unexplored region of the continent, are beaming their medical information back to civilization while wearing Astroskin graphicastroskin.
and will share the data with the CSA for possible use on future space missions and other applications.
when Astroskin could fly in space, but says it could be used on the International space station during future missions.
The orbiting complex is expected to last until at least 2024. Other organizations are also developing advanced garments for use in space.
Scientists with the European space agency and other institutions, for example, are working on a tight-fitting"skinsuit"that could help astronauts combat the back problems that are a common consequence of long-term spaceflight l
#High-tech Exosuit gives divers access to unexplored ocean canyons Michael Lombardi the dive safety officer for the American Museum of Natural history trains in the Exosuit.
Jim Clark/AMNH) Remember that scene in Aliens where Sigourney weaver's Ellen Ripley dons a Power Loader exoskeleton to do battle with the evil alien queen?
and navigate around obstacles in tight spaces lead researcher Ali Javey of Berkeley Lab's Materials sciences Division said in a news release.
To dive, submarines fill the space between the two shells with water, changing the ship's density
#How the world's largest satellite network will deliver global Internet access With a majority of the world still without access to the Internet (roughly 60 percent as of 2014) private companies are announcing ambitious plans to close the gap.
and now Richard Branson and Virgin galactic are pursuing microsatellite clusters. Earlier this week the 64-year-old billionaire announced a partnership with satellite-system designers Oneweb to use Virgin galactic's Launcherone rocket to create a massive satellite constellation in space.
The project would deploy a fleet of 648 microsatellites capable of providing low-latency high-speed Internet access directly to small user-based terminals all around the world.
In addition to providing access via current standards (Wifi LTE 3g or 2g connections) the Oneweb network would also give much-needed global emergency and first responder access for natural disasters refugee camps and other humanitarian needs.
We're excited for the opportunity for Virgin galactic's Launcherone programme to help make it possible through low cost reliable and frequent satellite launches.
The Launcherone rocket while still in the design and testing phase hopes to eventually deliver payloads from 250 pounds to 500 pounds into space for less than $10 million per flight.
Satellite launches are expected to begin in 2017 According to Spacenews Oneweb will overcome the engineering challenge of interference from broadcast satellites already in space with a technique called progressive pitch
which slightly turns the microsatellites to avoid interference. The cluster which would be the world's largest satellite network will then talk to receivers on the ground measuring a tiny 36 centimeters by 16 centimeters
and capable of delivering 50 megabits per second Internet access. As a comparison the average global broadband speed currently is only 21.9 Mbps. Oneweb is expected to cost between $1. 5 billion to $2 billion a relative bargain compared to
Wikipedia) But there are other costs involved with anything we do the social and environmental costs the effect on people and the planet as well as the profit.
what have traditionally been considered intangible benefits such as air pollution property values and recreational space. It plugs right in to the Autocad that many civil engineers use.
or hard drives reliant on electrons'intrinsic spin are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set:
But now, researchers at Stanford university in Palo alto, California, have used another feature of the electron its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces.
"says graduate student Chris Moon, one of the authors of the work published in Nature Nanotechnology1.
Pushing the limit The researchers have built on a tradition of inscribing information in small spaces that began
when researchers at IBM manipulated individual xenon atoms on a nickel plate to spell out the letters'IBM'across a space just a dozen nanometres wide2.
But Moon and his colleagues saw a way to go smaller by using a quantum analogy to the conventional hologram.
And a concentration of electrons in space is, in essence, a wire. That led study co-author Hari Manoharan to think about using the holograms as stackable quantum circuits
until the same space is covered with many fewer, but much larger trees. For this reason, they only looked at plots where the forest was more than 200 years old parts of the forest spared from the axe
What the work means for the carbon balance of the Earth is also not as obvious as it may seem.
or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere, and then replanting with species that are suited slightly more to the changing climate."
which in 1980 became the first disease to be officially wiped out from the planet. The global polio initiative, a mammoth programme involving the vaccination of billions of children,
and corals will produce less calcium carbonate as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rises,
and adds even more bulk to the internal space. Pruessmann, although aware of the commercial interest for clinical MRI, sees wider applications for the new technique."
whether the Earth's skies are dimming or brightening, how this affects the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface and what that means for climate change.
Two studies published in Science in 2005 concluded that a global dimming trend that began in the 1950s has been replaced since 1990 by global brightening1,
2. The likely effect of all that extra solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface would be faster global warming.
which help to reflect the Sun's rays back into space and so cool the planet.
Aerosols can also reduce cloudiness, however, as probably happens in northern China, meaning that the net effect of aerosol pollution on global temperatures is worryingly uncertain.
tends to absorb sunlight rather than scattering it back into space. This means that it warms the troposphere in much the same way as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
which measured incoming solar radiation rather than visibility, concluded that the skies have brightened over most land areas,
some bacteria not only survive in the upper atmosphere but might affect weather and climate, according to a study published on 28 january in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
researchers analysed air samples from a six-week hurricane-research mission by NASA in 2010.
bacteria accounted for around 20%of all particles#biological and non-biological#a higher proportion than in the near-Earth atmosphere."
Genetic analysis revealed that some microbes in the upper atmosphere are thought related to bacteria to catalyse ice-crystal formation and cloud condensation2.
especially in the upper atmosphere where dust is relatively rare, could influence weather and climate3, says study co-author Athanasios Nenes, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of technology."
Samples collected by the NASA mission before, during, and after two hurricanes also allowed researchers to study the effects of extreme weather on the atmospheric microbiome.
#Solar magnetism twists braids of superheated gas Geoff Brumfiel hears from researcher Jonathan Cirtain why the Sun s atmosphere is hotter than its surface.
For decades, researchers have suspected that powerful magnetic fields are heating the corona. The Sun's atmosphere is just jam-packed full of magnetic field,
says Cirtain. As the lines of those fields cross and twirl, the theory went, they push and pull the charged gas in the corona, giving it the energy that heats it up.
The problem is that nobody has been able to see the magnetic fields in close up until now. Cirtain and his team have developed the High-resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C
a camera capable of taking pictures of the Sun's corona in fine detail. The imager was placed on board a research rocket at the White sands Missile Range in New mexico
and flown to the edge of space. It took several minutes to fall to Earth, during which time it took a series of pictures of the Sun (see video).
A team member started analysing the data on the drive back from the missile range, and immediately saw evidence of braids in the twists of coronal gas.
We slammed on the brakes and swerved off to the side of the road, says Cirtain.
The group now hopes to put the Hi-C on a next-generation spacecraft that will monitor the Sun for longer periods of time e
) Meanwhile, the Japanese space agency JAXA will get#22.9#billion to refurbish its facilities and to speed up development of ALOS-2,
a satellite that will monitor natural disasters and measure atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The extra cash will keep it on schedule for launch before April next year.
when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible,
Gisele Azimi and Adam T. Paxsona thin film made of a water-repelling ceramic material#here a rare-earth oxide#can help you stay dry.
Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
and phosphorus that absorbs much of the light from the sun (a property known as its band gap).
At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.
Such multijunction cells have converted more than 43 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity#currently
but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.
Or maybe it s a devious scheme predicated on boring a hole into the depths of the planet with the world s hardest drill bit.
"We still need really superhard materials to explore deeper and deeper into Earth s interior,
Had one of these started running at the Big bang and continued up to the present, it would have lost
#Nearby star is almost as old as the Universe Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars#a denizen of the Solar system's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big bang."
"We believe this star is known the oldest in the Universe with a well determined age,
says Howard Bond, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State university in University Park, who announced the finding on 10 january at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long beach, California1.
The venerable star, dubbed HD 140283, lies at a comparatively short distance of 190 light years from the Solar system
and has been studied by astronomers for more than a century. Researchers have known long that the object consists almost entirely of hydrogen
and helium#a hallmark of having formed early in the history of the Universe, before successive generations of stars had a chance to forge heavier elements.
But no one knew exactly how old it was. Determining the star s age required several steps.
First, Bond and his team made a new and more accurate determination of the star s distance from the Solar system,
using 11 sets of observations recorded between 2003 and 2011 using the Hubble space telescope s Fine Guidance Sensors,
which measure the position of target stars relative to reference stars. The astronomers also measured the brightness of the star as it appears in the sky,
and were then able to calculate its intrinsic luminosity. The team then exploited the fact that HD 140283 is in a phase of its life cycle in
which it is exhausting the hydrogen at its core. In this phase, the star's slowly dimming luminosity is a highly sensitive indicator of its age,
says Bond. His team calculates that the star is 13.9 billion years old, give or take 700 million years.
Taking into account that experimental error, the age does not conflict with the age of the Universe, 13.77 billion years.
The star's age is therefore at least 13.2 billion years #which was estimated the age of another known Methuselah2#and possibly older.
Its age is known with considerably better confidence than that of the previous Methuselah says Bond.
The discovery places constraints on early star formation, says Volker Bromm, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.
The very first generation of stars coalesced from primordial gas, which did not contain appreciable amounts of elements heavier than helium,
but non-zero abundance of heavy elements#shows that the star must have formed after the first stellar generation.
Conditions for making the second generation of stars, then, "must have been in place very early, says Bromm.
The very first stars are thought usually to have coalesced a few hundred million years after the Big bang,
But before the second generation of stars could form, that gas had to cool down. The early age of the second-generation star HD 140283 hints that the cooling time,
#Meteorite carries ancient water from Mars It may just look like your average rock, but in fact it's an extra-special delivery from the red planet.
Laboratory analysis has revealed that a specimen bought from a Moroccan meteorite dealer in 2011 is the first sample of Martian origin that is similar to the water-rich rocks examined by NASA s rovers.
The meteorite, dubbed Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, contains a concentration of water by weight about ten times higher than in any of the other 100
or so known Martian meteorites#those rare rocks that get ejected from the Martian surface into space when an asteroid hits the planet,
and eventually find their way to Earth. It s also the only known Martian sample On earth that hails from a critical period, about 2 billion years ago,
when Mars is thought to have become colder and drier than it was originally. Carl Agee of the University of New mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues report their findings from samples of the meteorite in Science online today1."
"Agee and his collaborators have thrown open the door to a whole new part of Mars, says planetary scientist Munir Humayun at Florida State university in Tallahassee,
who was involved not in the study. The meteorite, he adds, is"the first of a new class of Martian meteorites that provides more direct clues to the surface history of Mars. Moreover,
Humayun says, NWA 7034 may provide the only direct corroboration for the rovers observations for some time to come,
as the fate of a long-delayed mission to bring samples of Mars back to Earth is still uncertain.
Carl Ageethe rock found in the Sahara desert, has a higher water content than any Martian meteorite previously analysed.
The elemental composition of the meteorite strongly resembles that of rocks examined in 2005 by NASA s Spirit rover at Gusev Crater2.
Those rocks showed evidence of chemical alteration by interactions with liquid water, notes Agee. The composition of NWA 7034 also matches that of rocks studied by Curiosity, NASA s newest rover,
as described in preliminary reports from members of that mission. Dating from 2. 1 billion years ago,
NWA 7034 is the second-oldest Martian meteorite, and provides a missing link in the planet s geological record,
according to Agee. The oldest prospective Martian meteorite, ALH 84001, is 4. 5 billion years old,
whereas all other Martian meteorites are 1. 3 billion years old or younger.)Several lines of evidence indicate that parts of Mars were warmer and wetter,
and therefore a possible haven for carbon-based life, some 4 billion years ago. The relatively high water content of NWA 7034,
which could be as much as 0. 6%by weight, suggests that"crustal or surface processes involving water may have lasted well beyond the 4-billion-year mark,
Agee adds. That is not a surprise, given the map of hydrogen (a stand-in for water) generated by an instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft and the presence of small amounts of water in younger Martian meteorites
notes Harry Mcsween at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The meteorite is made of volcanic rock,
and the presence of water in it suggests that crustal rocks on Mars interacted with surface water that was delivered by volcanic activity,
near-surface reservoirs or by impacting comets, Agee says. But Jeffrey Taylor of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu says that
whether that water content truly reveals an abundance of surface water on Mars 2. 1 billion years ago awaits further study u
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