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 to beige
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.
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 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.
If you re using Firechat its nearby chat room lets you exchange messages with other users within 100 feet without sending data via your cellular provider.
He hopes to enable many more Internet-optional apps with the upcoming release of software tools that will help developers build Firechat-style apps for iphone or for Android Mac and Windows devices.
The methods developed to create the designer genomic structure could help synthetic biologists better use the single-celled fungi as biological factories for chemicals like biofuels and drugs.
creating living factories for medicines, biofuels, and more (see icrobes Can Mass-produce Malaria Drugand iofuel Plant Opens in Brazil.
or perhaps be better factories for useful molecules like fuels and drugs. Already the researchers have shown that inducing mutation in yeast using the designer sites led to some cells that grow more slowly,
A half dozen boutique R&d houses, like Italy Hacking Team, develop computer vulnerabilities and openly market them to government attackers.
such as an image, movie, video clip, game, web page or any other application window, so that camera-equipped devices can fetch the data by turning their cameras to the screen.
The process of creating erythromycin begins with three basic building blocks called metabolic precursors chemical compounds that are combined
The process of creating erythromycin begins with three basic building blocks called metabolic precursors chemical compounds that are combined
and bronze and even doorknobs or handrails with such surfaces could help kill off the virus
In modern times, copper use in kitchens and food keeping has fallen as stainless steel or even synthetic materials have become available e
#Amsterdam to get 3d printed bridge LONDON: Will you dare to cross a deep canal on a"printed"bridge?
You may get a chance to try that soon. A 3d printing company based in Amsterdam has developed a revolutionary robotic 3d printer that can'draw'structures in the air.
"The bridge will be designed by artist and designer Joris Laarman, who helped develop the robotic 3d printer that combined the MX3D-Resin with a welder to be able to"draw"fast-setting metal structures.
and the same is used to print the bridge out of steel. By printing multiple lines, the printer will be able to create a strong,
The construction of the bridge is scheduled to begin in September this year. ians LONDON: Will you dare to cross a deep canal on a"printed"bridge?
You may get a chance to try that soon. A 3d printing company based in Amsterdam has developed a revolutionary robotic 3d printer that can'draw'structures in the air.
"The bridge will be designed by artist and designer Joris Laarman, who helped develop the robotic 3d printer that combined the MX3D-Resin with a welder to be able to"draw"fast-setting metal structures.
and the same is used to print the bridge out of steel. By printing multiple lines, the printer will be able to create a strong,
The construction of the bridge is scheduled to begin in September this year. ian n
#Scientists use graphene to create the world's smallest light bulb Scientists have created the world's smallest light bulb from a one atom-thick layer of graphene,
the miracle material that promises to transform everything from smartphones and computers to cars, buildings and satellites.
the miracle material that promises to transform everything from smartphones and computers to cars, buildings and satellites.
electricity in refugee camps generally comes from heavy, polluting generators that require expensive fuel oil. The supply chains for such oil can be broken, making procurement unpredictable.
The electrolyser uses nine litres of water plus the solar energy collected, coupled with the batteries inside the housing, to produce the gas needed to inflate Zephyr in half a day.
'The balloon can be used for homes in remote areas where the roof cannot take the weight of traditional solar panels,
At the moment, electricity in refugee camps generally comes from heavy, polluting generators that require expensive fuel oil.
The electrolyser uses nine litres of water plus the solar energy collected, coupled with the batteries inside the housing, to produce the gas needed to inflate Zephyr in half a day.
'The balloon can be used for homes in remote areas where the roof cannot take the weight of traditional solar panels,
#A robot that builds a house in 2 days An Australian engineer has built a robot that can build a house in two hours,
and work every day to build houses for people. While, humans need four to six weeks to put a house together,
besides availing weekends and holidays, the robot can work much faster without breaks. Mark Pivac said the reason behind its creation is due to the lack of available workers-the average age of the industry is getting much higher,
"People have been laying bricks for about 6, 000 years, and ever since the industrial revolution they have tried to automate the bricklaying process,
Hadrian works by laying 1, 000 bricks an hour, letting it put up 150 houses a year.
It takes a design of the house and then works out where all of the bricks need to go,
before cutting and laying each of them. It has a 28-foot arm, which is used to set
and mortar the brick, thus it doesn't need to move during the laying. Pivac will now work to commercialize the robot, one of its first kinds globally.`
An Australian engineer has built a robot that can build a house in two hours, and work every day to build houses for people.
While, humans need four to six weeks to put a house together, besides availing weekends and holidays,
the robot can work much faster without breaks. Mark Pivac said the reason behind its creation is due to the lack of available workers-the average age of the industry is getting much higher,
"People have been laying bricks for about 6, 000 years, and ever since the industrial revolution they have tried to automate the bricklaying process,
Hadrian works by laying 1, 000 bricks an hour, letting it put up 150 houses a year.
It takes a design of the house and then works out where all of the bricks need to go,
before cutting and laying each of them. It has a 28-foot arm, which is used to set
and mortar the brick, thus it doesn't need to move during the laying. Pivac will now work to commercialize the robot, one of its first kinds globally.`
The new technique grows graphene in an industrial cold wall CVD system, a state-of-the-art piece of equipment recently developed by UK graphene company Moorfield.
when there's a big disaster in an urban environment, hundreds of houses collapsed, and there's only a certain number of trained dogs,
when there's a big disaster in an urban environment, hundreds of houses collapsed, and there's only a certain number of trained dogs,
The devices is developed by the Nagpur-based National Environmental engineering Research Institute (NEERI) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) of the Department
Samsung SSD will work with both Windows and Mac computers. With dynamic thermal guard feature, Samsung T1 will automatically turn off during extreme temperatures.
#Design Lab Workshop merges 3d printing with solar energy for glowing architecture As more architects look into ways of using additive manufacturing as a way of constructing their buildings,
wee been seeing new ways of creating modular structures to even large-scale 3d printers that are capable of printing an entire house (or multiples) within a day.
Among other work in their portfolio the architects have done everything from creating 3d printed ceramic bricks that use a variety of different infills for various structural and aesthetic qualities to 3d printed vertices that connect multiple wooden rods
The pavilion served as a shading device during the day and a beacon at night along the lakefront during Ingenuity Fest in Cleveland, Ohio in September of 2014.
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