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Category: energy

If you’ve seen the dystopian nightmare fuel that is BBC’s Black Mirror, you might be getting the “No no nos” about Sony’s latest patent application — ‘smart’ contact lenses with a built-in camera that can record, play, and even store videos right before your eyes.

With Google and Samsung having already filed patents for contact lenses with tiny, built-in cameras, these things seem inevitable, and they have the potential to change everything about the way we interact with each other… for better or worse.

So yep, that means in the future we could all be playing back recordings of old conversations to our friends and family to win an argument, or, you know, watching a ‘greatest hits’ compilation while having sex with our significant other. But we have more faith in the good of mankind than that, right?

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Dirty water has a use.

New technology doesn’t always look great, but researchers at Binghamton University are aiming to prove that function and style don’t have to be at odds with a new bacteria-powered battery that takes its design cues from origami.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi, an assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering at Binghamton, and two of his students recently published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics a report on their invention of a microbial fuel cell that runs on nothing more than the bacteria found in just a few drops of dirty water.

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Luv this.

The University of Bristol’s Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC) is looking to recruit its first cohort of Enterprise Fellows that will be the next generation of quantum technology entrepreneurs.

Merging training in systems thinking, quantum engineering and entrepreneurship, QTEC will provide the necessary skills for budding innovators to develop their own business ideas and for them to branch out into the emerging field of quantum technologies.

The Centre, which is the first of its kind in the world, was funded as part of the UK’s £270 million investment into quantum technologies. These technologies exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to create practical and useful technologies that will outperform their classical rivals and that have the potential to transform artificial intelligence, healthcare, energy, finance, cyber security and the internet.

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Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly.

Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world.

Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units — used to stop Google’s self-built servers from overheating — by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

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For years, scientists and engineers have synthesized materials at the nanoscale level to take advantage of their mechanical, optical, and energy properties, but efforts to scale these materials to larger sizes have resulted in diminished performance and structural integrity.

Now, researchers led by Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech have published a study in the journal Nature Materials that describes a new process to create lightweight, strong and super elastic 3D printed metallic nanostructured with unprecedented scalability, a full seven orders of magnitude control of arbitrary 3D architectures.

Strikingly, these multiscale metallic materials have displayed super elasticity because of their designed hierarchical 3D architectural arrangement and nanoscale hollow tubes, resulting in more than a 400 percent increase of tensile elasticity over conventional lightweight metals and ceramic foams.

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Smartphones and tablets are being used more frequently in the battlefield, and that means that battery power is more important than ever. Soldiers often carry spare battery chargers in the 90-pound combat packs they carry into war zones, but the batteries are often lost or broken. BAE Systems wants to help lighten the load with its new system that lets soldiers plug electronics directly into their clothing.

The BAE Systems Broadsword Spine is a harness that can be sewn into a soldiers vest, jacket, or belt that carries a battery pack and hides charging wires. The harness places the battery pack on the small of a soldier’s back and includes eight conductive fabric conduits that can be used to connect to a USB port.

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Reaction Engines Ltd. announces today the signing of a €10m Development Contract with the European Space Agency, finalizing the UK Government’s £60m commitment.

Reaction Engines Ltd., today announces the signing of a €10m European Space Agency (ESA) contract which will enable the development of a ground based demonstrator of SABRE, a new class of aerospace engine which is highly scalable with multiple potential applications in hypersonic travel and space access.

SABRE is at heart a rocket engine designed to power aircraft directly into space (single-stage to orbit) to allow reliable, responsive and cost effective space access, and in a different configuration to allow aircraft to cruise at high speeds (five times the speed of sound) within the atmosphere.

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Enjoy this VFX Sci-Fi Short Film… 2046. A new energy source, created to solve the world’s energy crisis, is believed to have deadly side effects. When The Signal’s inventor chooses to help a girl warn the public, he gains an unlikely ally to save the world from his own creation. Starring Michael Ealy and Grace Phipps, Written and Directed by Marcus Stokes!

On the web — http://www.thesignalmovie.com

This live action short film was shot in downtown Los Angeles over a weekend. The post production and visual effects took considerably longer and were done by the writer/director Marcus Stokes and a few additional VFX artists.

Starring: michael ealy, grace phipps, doc duhame, casey adams, zack duhame, brian buccellato, ciera payton, and gonzalo escudero.

Writer/director/vfx supervisor: marcus stokes executive producer: tim story producer: chris harding cinematographer: larry blanford editor: melissa lawson sound editor: stephen hunter flick music producer: bear mccreary composer: michael beach, jonathan ortega stunt coordinator: casey adams

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