It easy to produce, easy to warehouse and inexpensive to ship. But if you want to produce large consumer goods
Henry ford led the second Industrial revolution in the 20th century with large assembly-line factories being built on a mass economy of scale.
and manufacture products faster than traditional factory processes. This means less space and materials are required to manufacture products, resulting in a significant reduction in capital costs.
Izak believes that there is plenty of room for educational technology startups to help improve education for children with learning
but the people in Crimea who have otherwise been trying to tap into the rush for engineering talent from Eastern europe by building their own fledgling tech ecosystem
and even then those images were stuck mostly on the walls within their homes. This new technology meant portraits displaying a person current emotion were immediate
to warn when perishables in warehouses might be going bad; that tell you when a piece of equipment is about to fail;
or cool our houses or office buildings; track school busses and use cases we probably haven even imagined.
or the other side of a wall) or being able to use existing lighting infrastructure think LED street lamps to double up as Lifi access points.
or potentially an entire building, while being connected u
#Xiaomi Buys 3%Of Chinese Games And Software Giant Kingsoft For $68m Xiaomi became the world third largest smartphone company based on sales last year
which have silos of data derive benefit from each other as well. m
#Signal Keeps Your iphone Calls And Texts Safe From Government Spies Don want someone else handing your text messages, pictures, video or phone conversations over to the government?
Construction companies are not always first movers when it comes to new technology, but when it comes to drones,
which recently made a deal with Japan Komatsu to enable driverless bulldozers to take instructions from unmanned drones.
The promise of personal drones is one where youl jump into some kind of craft from your rooftop,
Among them, perhaps Flat 6 Labs is known the best. It gave birth to the startup Instabug a platform for in-app feedback for mobile apps,
and instead consist of individual window or wall-mounted units that use an IR-based remote control to vary air temperature and fan speed.
Sensibo is a startup that wants to make the approximately 1 billion climate control devices that aren smart to smart with a little more Nest-like.
and additional units are $80 apiece to let you expand your system to cover multiple rooms.
At the same time, sharing your car can take 10 cars off the streets, which counteracts the increasingly crowded roads, traffic and pollution.
or stated publicly, was that to get this balance there would be a joint committee set up between both houses to consider how to redo RIPA.
a bill already passed in the House that would reform National security agency (NSA), in a rare Sunday session.
It will likely take until the middle of the week for the Senate to pass the House bill,
Passage of the bill would mark the first time lawmakers have reined in the surveillance powers of the intelligence community in the two years since Snowden first revealed the controversial intelligence gathering programs.
but when it passed the House, it said significant changes should be made to strengthen privacy rights. he Senate should not make the same mistake
including Room for indoor monitoring, Weather for outdoor stats, Door & Window for checking open/closed status of those entry points,
and Energy for checking what drawing power and switching them on and off remotely. Using Homekit, ios device users with 8. 1 or above can check on all the stats gathered by the Eve from their devices,
Sensors are sold individually at $79. 99 for Eve Room, $49. 95 for Eve Weather, $49. 95 for Eve Energy and $39. 95 for Eve Door & Window,
which is designed for houses that have multiple rooms in need of climate control. Remote sensors help it monitor temperature in multiple rooms at the same time,
letting you save energy and maximize comfort in every area. With Homekit ecobee3 owners can group actions together for control via Siri,
The Caséta Smart Bridge is a wireless lighting hub that makes up a core part of the Caséta Wireless Lighting Starter Kit from the company.
or off in specific areas of the house you might not be able to see at any given moment.
you can control specific rooms or groups of lights separately, or turn everything off with voice commands.
Lutron Homekit-enabled Caséta Smart Bridge is part of the Lighting Starter Kit that also includes two dimmers
two remotes and two pedestals to hold them. It available at Apple Stores starting today, with a retail price of $229. 95.
including LED bulbs, plug-in lamps, thermostats, wall outlets, cameras, door locks and more. And in addition to its full range of first-party products,
and to allow for two to work in a standard wall outlet at the same time, or to keep one outlet free.
During a recent visit to Thync beautiful offices (theye renovated an old opera hall), I got to strap the startup mood-altering wave generator to the olnoggin.
A kidnapper grabs a person on the street and begins to drive away. A diner at a restaurant starts choking on their food and enters cardiac arrest.
since physical location can no longer be derived from the network topology of the landline PSTN network.
If their warehouse is overflowing with product or they need to meet a sales count quota,
or a meatspace brick-and-mortar glasses shop. Opternative is now the only approved online eye exam.
A $2 million bridge led by Pritzker Group, Jump Capital, and previous investors pushed it through clinical trials.
Opternative Results Ie been finding distant street signs and airport gate numbers a bit blurry, so I took Opternative test myself.
It also building out a touch screen kiosk that could fit inside physical eyewear stores. Seeing clearly can help people learn,
so they and their local governments can see pollution on their own streets. Independent scientific analysis confirmed that the mobile sensor system worked for collecting street-by-street data
and could improve upon the regional network of sensors operated by the Environmental protection agency. Herzl says e hope that one day this information is as accessible as the weather.
He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his company wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per second.
Many U s. providers are currently scrambling to install fiber to replace the copper cables that still link up around half of all cellular towers,
AOPTIX technology takes the form of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser peering out of a small window on the front,
The Mexican telecommunications company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans to use to link up cellular towers
and got another half billion from the U s. government in the form of a loan to build a large factory to prove its technology.
At Semprius pilot factory in Henderson, North carolina, that technology can be found inside two glass-enclosed devices, each not much bigger than an office copier.
conventional silicon solar panels still have room to become significantly cheaper and more efficient. New ways of manufacturing silicon wafers, the most expensive part of a solar cell, could cut wafer costs in half
The apex of the device houses a slot for dipping a credit card and there s a built-in receipt printer that will spit out paper from an opening below the customer touch screen.
but##What information do you have in the house that s useful to you that you d like access to when you re not home?
Using the app you can give a battery a name (like living room or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi
and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm. Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;
greatly expanding what machines can do in factories. Grabit, a spinoff of SRI International, has developed a simple and cheap robotic hand that makes use of electrostatic attraction.
but still stand up to the wear and tear of factory use, says company CTO Harsha Prahlad. The flexible surface of the grabber lets it support more weight
The display technology used in most devices can show only flat, 2-D images. Headsets like the Oculus Rift trick your brain into perceiving depth by showing different images to each eye,
Twenty minutes away in San jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungleeputed to be the largest in the countryas taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe
Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing.
Even some of the area biggest technology boosters are appalled. ou have people begging in the street on University avenue Palo alto main street,
Building on research conducted with his colleagues Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
stomping around, banging off the walls. Still, as Piketty lengthy analysis suggests, the explanation for the rise in inequality is not a simple one.
This relatively small but prosperous group is driving up the cost of housing, transportation, and other living expenses.
A handful of new two-story concrete buildings surround a courtyard holding a smattering of enthusiastic administrators and a few teachers.
It a relatively modest facility but, by all descriptions, a huge improvement over the cramped building the 13-year-old charter school occupied before.
His first prostheses were temporary ones with plaster sockets and he was instructed not to walk without crutches or another support:
the plaster would shatter under his full weight. Later he got permanent prostheses made of wood rubber
The obvious career path he might have taken working in his father's house-building business was no longer an option for him
which made advances in building legged robots that could walk and run. The lab was led by then Gill Pratt 83 SM 87 Phd 90 (its founder Marc Raibert had already left to work full time at the company he founded Boston Dynamics.
which fills half of a large open room on the Media Lab's second floor may come to see the future of bionics
Extending Human Capabilityalong one wall of the Biomechatronics Group lab wheeled shelves known as the dessert cart hold an array of prototypes of current and past projects:
When you unplug it suddenly you feel like your feet are blocks of concrete says Mooney.
constructing buildings that can float or at least withstand inundation; and creating new escape routes in case the worst happens (see Saving Holland.
and this requires action said Efi Foufoula-Georgiou a professor in the Department of Civil engineering and former director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics at the University of Minnesota in an interview after the conference.
#Norwegian Factory Aims to Solve Cement s Carbon Problem A Norwegian cement factory has shown that it s able to capture much of its own carbon dioxide.
since cement production is responsible for more than 5 percent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The Norcem Brevik cement works tucked into a scenic harbor south of Oslo has used waste heat to drive a process called amine scrubbing that at test scales removed between 30 and 40 percent of the total emissions
from the plant s flue gases. We think we are the first project that is testing technology in real cement-plant conditions said Liv-Margrethe Bjerge project manager for the test at Norcem which owns the Brevik plant.
It s the only cement project doing post-combustion capture. Bjerge spoke in Austin Texas at the largest international conference on carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
The plant expects to begin full-scale operation with carbon capture next summer. It could serve as a model for many plants in Europe
While these carbon-capture processes have previously been tested in power plants cement plants differ because their emissions include much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide plus more dust and other contaminants.
Some more far-out ideas for capturing carbon from cement making include using concentrated sunlight to drive the production process (see New Cement-Making Method Could Slash Carbon emissions.
Green Concrete. In the United states a startup called Skyonic is running a pilot plant at a cement mill to reuse carbon dioxide in sodium bicarbonate or baking soda a
#An Industrial-Size Generator That Runs on Waste Heat, Using No Fuel Power plants waste huge amounts of energy as heat about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn.
Other options for making use of waste heat include heating (and even cooling) nearby buildings in cities s
and can be laminated to walls or ceilings. The sheets will contain organic LEDS, or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones.
The factory will be able to produce a million 15-centimeter-wide panels per month. Even with such advances, it will take years to bring costs low enough to make OLED lighting widely used.
In this way, complex structures can be created by combining building blocks under natural circumstances. This kind of self-assembly mechanism dominates at the molecular scale,
One recent idea is to use colloids rather than molecules as the building blocks for even more advanced structures.
But as the building blocks become bigger, it takes longer for Brownian motion to jiggle the blocks into the appropriate locations.
when the walls of the chamber are relatively close together but stops when the walls are moved further away. e propose here that the physical origin of the phenomenon is linked to the presence of the top and bottom walls of the self-assembly channel,
they say. In other words the walls must be close to enough to interact with the droplets, slowing them down.
This creates local changes in pressure in the fluid around the droplets that causes them to coalesce and tumble.
but the team says there is considerable room for improvement. For example, they hope to significantly increase the flow speeds through the self-assembly chambers
One scientist this month tweeted a picture of the sequencer on his dining room table decoding DNA.
Stumbling on the stairs. Having accidents that are easy to dismiss everyone trips now and then. But it inevitably gets worse.
or take control of some features of Windows. Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console
Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012 and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013
#A Super-Strong and Lightweight New Material A new type of material made up of nanoscale struts crisscrossed like the struts of a tiny Eiffel Tower is one of the strongest and lightest substances ever made.
Greer s lab showed that by changing the thickness of the tube walls it s possible to control how the material fails.
When the walls are thick the ceramic shatters under pressure as expected. But trusses with thinner walls just 10 nanometers thick buckle
when compressed and then recover their shape. You don t expect these materials to recover##you expect them to be brittle
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research specifically for recording vaccinations but the patient-identifying system has broader applications says Anil Jain a distinguished professor at Michigan State university s Computer science and Engineering Department and coauthor of the paper.
and built some of the largest most error-free systems of qubits the basic building blocks that encode information in a quantum computer.
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
The electrolyzer projects under construction in Germany typically consist of a few buildings each the size of a shipping container that consume excess renewable energy on sunny and windy days by turning it into an electric current that powers the water-splitting reaction.
but it had no room for physical expansion. So port officials explored ways to become more efficient in their existing space.
#Furniture Shopping with Augmented Reality In a darkened room in the back of a small furniture store just south of San francisco International airport, the couch in front of me keeps changing colors and patterns, from red to blue
whose cofounders imagine a future where brick -and-mortar stores could be replaced by smaller, cheaper, simpler spaces
whose expensive physical inventory is replaced by virtual designs that can be projected onto just a few floor models.
or the walls of a room. hey can still touch the swatches, so there is no shortcoming of the tactile feeling side of it,
he says. t acts as a little more than a small window into the virtual place. Conventional augmented reality glasses use lenses, beam splitters, waveguides, reflectors,
and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month. Luth Research, a San diego company
is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
which refers to the kind of radiation emitted from a cell tower). The key Poon says is that instead of using a coil of wire they use a flat plate adorned with a specially designed four-line pattern of conductive material.
When they send current through the plate that pattern produces a magnetic field capable of propagating through biological material without decaying over a short distance.
Further, Chinese shale tends to have more clay in it, which is an obstacle to extraction (see hina Has Plenty of Shale gas,
if our phones capture the contours of everything from street corners to the arrangement of your living room,
The Microsoft team says it wanted to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room.
since it has so many implications for navigating Xbox and Windows environments, but Kohli points out that the machine learning techniques could transfer anywhere. he only limitation is
a layer of liquid crystal material in each pixel switches from one state to another to block the passage of specific colors of light.
which barely spans a small table, let alone a single room in a house. Gollakota says that in recent, still unpublished experiments,
and the large amount of steel and concrete needed to keep the apparatus steady makes the approach expensive.
it because you don have room, says James Tour, a professor of materials science at Rice university who led the work.
and Illumina rival BGI (see nside China Genome Factory. At the time, the average cost of completing a genome was about $3, 000 to $4, 000.
A mouse uses a flat two-dimensional surface as a proxy for a computer screen. Any movements of the mouse over the surface are translated then into movements on the screen.
or mostly flat with some curvature and featured some text.)Capture a few seconds of a song,
#Elon musk Needs a Very Big Factory for His New Solar technology The Tesla founder and private space entrepreneur Elon musk announced yesterday that Solar City,
And with typical bravado, he also said that the company plans to build a huge factory to produce Silevo high-efficiency solar panels,
with by far the largest factory in the U s. The acquisition makes sense given that Silevo technology has the potential to reduce the cost of installing solar panels,
But the decision to build a huge factory in the U s. seems daringspecially given the recent failures of other U s.-based solar manufacturers in the face of competition from Asia.
if it can scale up from its current production capacity of 32 megawatts to the factory Musk has planned,
The factory plan mirrors an idea Musk introduced at one of his other companies, Tesla motors,
The proposed plant would have more lithium-ion battery capacity than all current factories combined (see oes Musk Gigafactory Make sense?
and esla Plans to Start Building Its Gigafactory Next Month. One key difference, says Travis Bradford,
and Sharpave already built one-gigawatt factories. Still, the plant would be much larger than any now in the U s. By no means is it certain that Silevo will achieve the cost reductions it hoping for without sacrificing quality.
But subsidies from the state of New york, where Solar City plans to build its factory near Buffalo
New york is putting in $225 million in infrastructure for the factory, which might help offset the damage to U s. solar manufacturers that the U s. government says have been inflicted by subsidies in places like China.
if building huge factories to produce advanced solar panels can bring down costs, the market for solar panels could still grow exponentially l
Rather, its research effort is aimed at developing a reliable version of the qubit, the key building block of a quantum computer.
The lab goal is truly to design technology around people, not the other way around from smart personal devices to smart cities.
but also to serve as a local information kiosk. The Electronic Guimard, as it is known, keeps alive the key notion of an interactive urban artifact that reinforces social interaction.
What might a home look like with digital technologies that encourage social interaction between the house and its inhabitants, other dwellings and residents,
The house efficiency-related technologies function as a kind of personal trainer to encourage efficiency and thus sustainability and the technology relationship between the house and its inhabitants can be extended to a wider world.
Human connections are foundational to both the smart city and its smart inhabitants, uniting with technology to enable coordinated, efficient,
and sustainable urban policies across neighborhoods, institutions, and indeed the entire social fabric of an urban area.
and then taking advantage of the interactions between two strands of DNA to bring the chemical building blocks together to create new ones.
DNA-templated synthesis allows researchers without a lot of expensive equipment to more quickly evaluate all the potential small molecule interactions that could occur from a library of building blocks. single student with only minimal equipment
and a plug dangling from it is plugged into the wall. Holmes picks up an ipad running a Wattup app that shows the two devices that are enabled for chargingine,
theye going to plug it into a wall. The most common wireless-charging technology currently available is magnetic induction,
Currently, the Wattup system charges a device in twice the time it takes a wall charger to do the same job,
about 20 percent of the power siphoned from a wall outlet is delivered to gadgets. If the end result is wasting energy,
making you feel like there a sharp edge on a flat surface. The new product from 3d Systems is part of a trend toward far cheaper tools to allow for 3-D imaging, modeling,
Where his predecessor Steve Ballmer clutched the fading Windows operating system like a frayed security blankethe ios version of Office appeared four years after the iphone debutadella has acknowledged the company need to move on,
This shift is altering the dynamics of labor in many factories and workshops, allowing humans
making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance,
Big companies like General electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms. Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because t the easiest to use, says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford motor.
Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has modified now equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside.
Wong-Foy robotic workers have already proved capable of building towers 30 centimeters long from carbon rods,
Yet Elon musk, CEO of Tesla motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United states three years from
but already four states are negotiating with Tesla in the hope of becoming the factory home.
Second, battery companies normally announce factories only after theye funded and a site is selected. And they typically scale up gradually.
Why announce plans to build such an enormous factory specially when electric car sales so far come nowhere close to justifying it?
The project seems more puzzling in light of the hard times at other electric car battery factories in the United states. In 2009,
To keep the factory humming he will have to sell more than 10 times as many electric vehicles in a year as Nissan managed last year
He seems to be betting that a huge factory will significantly reduce the cost of making batteries,
Yet it not clear that a huge factory would deliver the needed cost reductions. According to a presentation to investors, it would lower costs by 30 percent.
and even incremental improvements at conventional factories could reduce costs by 15 percent by 2020,
and the cells are assembled into complete battery packsith cooling systems and electronic controlsn yet another factory.
Musk plans to bring almost all of this under one roof. Raw materials, processed into electrodes, electrolytes,
The factory will also be able to take old batteries apart to recycle the materials,
and wind to help power the factory. Brett Smith, codirector for manufacturing, engineering, and technology at the Center for Automotive Research, says having control over every part of the process could indeed help reduce costs.
The factory would cost $5 billion, with $2 billion coming from Tesla. If Tesla can sell as many cars as it hopes,
and whatever the final factory looks like, the way Musk has been promoting it may prove to be a savvy business move.
Announcing the factory at an early stage, and with an ambitious size, could be good for negotiations with states,
especially given the proposed size of the factory. Some states are even reconsidering laws that restrict how Tesla can sell cars in their state,
a factory to supply 100,000 cars. anasonic can afford to lose the business, says Anderman.
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