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Lithium carbonate has gone from costing US$6,000 per metric tonne to US$14,000 in the last six months. These revelations from Breitbart News, who have investigated lithium prices since Tesla erected a US$5 billion factory in the Nevada desert causing markets to speculate on shares. The recent announcement of the Tesla model 3 also alerted the market that lithium is becoming important to consumers due to the 300,000 orders Tesla received on the back of the announcement.
Goldman Sachs has investigated lithium prices as well in their Emerging Market Radar report that makes the bold statement that: Lithium is the new Gasoline. The report states: "These unique properties [lithium as the lightest solid element on earth] ideally position it for portable energy storage applications that will be a key enabler of the electric car revolution and replace gasoline as the primary source of transportation fuel."
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, says the demand jump for the Tesla vehicles is staggering due to the spike in orders. Tesla only produced 50,000 cars last year, and now 300,00 orders for the Model 3 is piquing the interest of engineers everywhere. Musk says, "In order to produce a half million cars per year...we would basically need to absorb the entire world's lithium-ion production.
The Economist wrote about the "global scramble" that is hiking up the cost of lithium, proving that much like finding gold, lithium is on the top of industrial producers' lists of things to obtain.
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2015 was a landmark year for liquefied natural gas, industry groups confirmed this week. According to the Houston Chronicle's Fuel Fix, Australia, and Indonesia are behind the rise in sales due to the shipments to Europe and the Middle East.
LNG shipments reportedly grew by 2.5 percent to 245.2 million tons per year in 2015. The stats come from the International Group of Liquefied Natural Gas Importers (GIIGNL). However, 2016 is not reporting as strong numbers in the first quarter of the year, but GIIGNL does not seem detered by the figures and are ready to report even more imports than last year.
CNBC is reporting that prices have hit an 18-year-low in the LNG market.
Graeme Bethune, chief executive of consulting firm EnergyQuest, spoke to CNBC, saying, "Cleaner and greener are part of it; lower prices are part of it. The other important part of it is also energy security."
GIIGNL president, Domenico Dispenza, said: "In a global context of lower energy prices and sluggish economic growth, the LNG industry is holding its breath for the impact of an export wave from the United States."
However, through the slump, companies are confident that new customers are on their way. Chairman of the French Gas Association, Jerome Ferrier, said: "We are seeing countries with a long...tradition in consuming and producing coal moving to natural gas."
OilPrice.com is more grim about the situation, however. They led with a headline saying: Why LNG Markets Might Not Balance Before 2025 . The website says the worldwide interest in LNG liquefaction capacity is reminiscent of "gold rushes" of the past. Wim de Vriend, who wrote the article over at OilPrice says LNG markets are reporting that the first 100 million tonnes per annum of production happening right now is expected to be absorbed by 2020. However, De Vriend thinks that is an unrealistic goal and cannot be done until at least 2025.
Who to trust? Who is right? Who is wrong? Only time will tell in LNG markets as business both looks positive and negative.
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Australia continues to impress with their advanced stance on energy storage and how it will be factoring into the future of energy generation. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced two solar+storage projects for residential areas in Western Australia.
According to PV-Magazine, 170,000 households have rooftop photovoltaic energy solutions installed in Western Australia as of this year. In Perth, ARENA is once again backing energy storage by introducing a new energy storage solution to an entire suburb. A housing estate called Alkimos Beach will see 100 PV systems with a 1.1 MWh lithium-ion battery connected to their rooftops. The project cost ARENA AUD$3.3 million.
ARENA CEO Ivor Friscknecht told PV-Magazine: "Combining community-scale battery storage and rooftop solar presents a win-win for energy retailers, developers, and consumers and can provide households with the benefits of storage without on-site installation and maintenance. Solar will work alongside battery storage to lower Alkimos Beach's demand for electricity from the grid. This model has the potential to offer residents cheaper electricity bills and reduce grid connection costs for future new developments."
Australian company Redflow recently announced the ZCell battery which would be a competitor to the Tesla Powerwall in the country. However, it seems the order of the day for energy storage in Australia is not to completely jump off of the grid but rather to preserve energy on the grid that could see some protection for the power utilities in the country who are not working on energy storage solutions.
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Self-healing concrete might soon be a reality. In October, in 2015, researchers at Cardiff University were attempting to formulate the concrete in Wales. By November, the team was testing three different kinds of self-healing concrete formulas. The team intends to make a case for building with self-healing concrete around the world that could repair itself when damaged .
So...autonomous concrete?
Professor Bob Lark, the principal investigator for the project at Cardiff University's School of Engineering, said, "These self-healing materials and intelligent structures will significantly enhance durability, improve safety and reduce the extremely high maintenance costs that are spent each year. The major trial, the first of its kind in the UK, will provide us with important insights to help transfer the technologies from the lab into the real-world settings."
A year later, the idea of self-healing concrete is so appealing an idea, the University of Victoria in British Columbia is also trying their hand at creating it.At the steering wheel of the team is Professor Rishi Gupta. According to ConstructionDive, the team is looking at concrete that would heal the cracks in but is also trying to make a crack-free concrete that would last longer than the current standard.
Also speaking to PHYS, Oliver Teall, a civil engineer at Costain, said: "We are supporting this innovative research to unlock the many potential benefits of self-healing concrete for use within the infrastructure. From this trial, we should gain an insight into the feasibility of constructing a full-scale structure using these techniques and their early-stage effects on structural properties. We will be monitoring properties such as stiffness, permeability and the mechanical damage recovery of the trial walls in comparison with conventional reinforced concrete walls."
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The most sustainable building in the world has been crowned. Who decides these kinds of things, you ask? The Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREAAM) has said an office building in Haelen, in the Netherlands, has won the award and scored 99.94 percent on their rankings.
Now you can change your offices accordingly so that it might compete for the most sustainable building of all time.
According to Gizmodo, the building has a solar power system that produces 50 percent more energy than the building consumes. The building is made from wood and was designed to deliver the best "daylight infiltration and air quality".
Engineering and Technology Magazine said it has been made with the health of employees in mind. They spoke to Sander Geleen, managing director of Geleen Counterflow, she said, "So when we build a new office it only makes sense to respect these laws and limits of nature, too. This office another step on our journey to phase out fossil fuels. The next step is to develop a new generation of dryers that will use renewable energy only."
Timber is becoming quite the sought after material in terms of building office space. A wooden skyscraper has been presented to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. It would be 80 storeys and stretch 300 metres high. Dr Michael Ramage, director of Cambridge's Centre for Natural Material Innovation says, "The fundamental premise is that timber and other natural materials are vastly underused and we don't give them nearly enough credit." This on the back of revelations from the steel industry that is currently struggling in Britain. Does your office space line up with sustainable practices? If not, perhaps it will soon as the world moves towards sustainable workplaces.
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Another day, another concern for autonomous cars. At the end of the day, the policy makers of the world are the ones who are going to be allowing autonomous cars to take to the streets globally, and the fight is heating up.
Dr. Ian Noy, a policy maker in the Canadian government has expressed his distrust in autonomous cars. He said, "There's no factual basis for the claim that autonomous cars will prevent 90% of traffic accidents." According to Globes, Noy was a guest at the annual Or Yarok safety convention. Noy is also a civil engineer who focused on safety and transportation during his career.
The claim had originally been made back in 2015 that autonomous cars would equal fewer accidents on the world's road. The claim was made by the ENO Center for Transportation, that pointed out in June 2015, thirty-two thousand people had died in car crashes with driver error believed to be the main reason. Ryan Haggeman is a civil liberties policy analyst at the libertarian advocacy organization Niskanen Center and had advocated for self-driving technology in 2014. He said, "In theory if you have 100 percent fully autonomous vehicles on the road while you still might have accidents on the margin in rare situations, you're basically looking at anywhere from a 95 to 99.99 percent reduction in total fatalities and injuries on the road." (Source: TechTimes).
Noy has now rejected these notions in 2016, saying, "If only that were true. But the truth is 'human error' is the default explanation for every accident. It's what police officers and accident investigators write on their reports because they cannot prove the cause, not because facts show a misjudgement by the driver."
Noy has a point, due to the recent Google Volvo that caused a crash between itself and a bus, leading to an entire hearing in Congress as the option of self-driving cars is weighed in America as a whole.
Enter: Ford's self-driving, see-in-the-dark car.
In a project called Project: Nightonomy, Ford enters the gauntlet of companies trying to create the next self-driving, safe, vehicle. Jim Bride, Ford's technical leader for autonomous vehicles, says, "To do something as ambitious as making a car drive itself, you need lots of testing and lots of places so you can cover all the scenarios you might ever expect to see."
One of the more complex issues for self-driving cars was the ability to see in the dark and drive in the dark. It seems that Ford is nailing the ability to do that and could be saving people those risky night trips of driving in horribly dark areas, thereby making autonomous cars even safer - statistically - and making the case for cars that save lives.
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Researchers from the North Carolina State University and the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Center have developed something that sounds like it comes out of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. They allegedly built a "super-strong" foam that would protect anyone who wears it from bullets.
The layer of foam introduced by the researchers is said to be unheavy due and is possible through "composite metal structures" abbreviated as CMFs that ensures its light-weightedness. The video the researchers have released shows an armor-piercing bullet being fired at the foam and obliterating the bullet to nothing more than dust. The 'armor' is just an inch thick.
According to WashingtonNewsWire, the foam is composed of a "blend of fired strike confront, a center layer of CMF and a Kevlar backing."
The man behind the metal foam is Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at N.C. State and has spent quite a few years testing out the CMFs. He says, "We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters."
The research team says the CMF plating has many uses that would include space travel, transporting of nuclear waste and the obvious kevlar to protect people in the military. Allegedly, the CMFs can also function in high temperatures and block x-ray, gamma-ray, and neutron radiation, according to Discovery News.
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Digital transformation is a hot topic in companies right now. Companies are under the pressure of moving their entire operations into the industrie 4.0 and automating a lot of things that used to be done manually. At the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2016, the mood was no different than the industry's. Change is coming whether its agreed upon or not. Huawei's current CEO Eric Xu said that they would be moving into an "All Cloud" strategy that would be accommodating the latest industry trends.
The latest moves by telecommunications and data companies are to ensure that the end user is accounted for and everything runs smoothly for them twenty-four-seven. According to DQIndia, Huawei is, "committed to becoming an advocate, promoter, and leader of the full cloudification of productions and solutions," and implementing those additions to the company in the next two to three years.
"In the All IP era, we proposed our Single strategy, which effectively supported the development of operator customers. Nowadays, as we face the digital transformation of different industries, we advocate full cloudification to build efficient networks and agile competitiveness," Xu said, at the summit.
So companies should get more comfortable with the word 'cloudification' it seems. The ideology seems to be, "Adapt or die."
Darren Cunningham, Vice President of Marketing at SnapLogic, in an article he wrote for EnterpriseTech, said:
Some traditional IT organizations are eager to move apps to the cloud. Some younger companies have only used cloud-based apps and nothing else. And those who haven’t yet embraced a cloud solution are likely to find themselves with no choice but to move apps to the cloud, in order to take advantage of the same speed, simplicity, and flexibility that their competitors are enjoying.
Therefore, Huawei is moving the entire operations that the end-user experiences, into the cloud. Xu explains, saying, "This year we have introduced the "All Cloud" strategy, which focuses on delivering a ROADS (Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY and Social) experience. A ROADS experience cannot be achieved without support from services, networks, and operations systems."
The move to cloud-based apps and a full cloud experience means that companies can now build even more products and all of those products can interact with each other and create an entire 'ecosystem' of devices belonging to one carrier. All of this, in the same place. As 2016 progresses we should be seeing more and more companies jump on the bandwagon.
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Pyrotechnic engineering is an important job and also a risky one due to the health and safety measures that must be taken to ensure that pyrotechnics do not put humans at direct risk of being harmed. Mike Tockstein is a pyrotechnician with his M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He spoke to Payscale.com back in 2007 and said, "Pyrotechnicians are considered 'independent contractors' in most cases. So there is no set pyrotechnician salary." Tockstein also said, "I consider this a hobby that I would do for free in most cases, so getting paid is just a bonus."
That might be the problem with fireworks shows globally, after an incident in India left 110 people deceased. The voluntary work of engineers at events that could end in disaster. An accident occurred on Sunday in Kollam, India, involving an unauthorized pyrotechnic display, according to FireEngineering.com.
A police officer on the scene confirmed 110 had perished whereas 380 people had been injured. Witnesses confirmed that the blast caused a power outage and flames and debris flying down from the sky. They also said people were trapped as the crowd tried to disperse. The event was being held in a Hindu temple at the Puttingal Devi complex in Paravoor.
Krishna Das of Paravoor, said, "It was complete chaos. People were screaming in the dark. Ambulance sirens went off, and in the darkness, no one knew how to find their way out of the complex."
Allegedly, one of the blasts sent concrete slabs flying through the air that landed up to half a mile away, Jayashree Harikrishnan said.
The top official in the district, A. Shainamol, said, "They were clearly told that no permission would be given for any kinds of fireworks." Allegedly, the first round of fireworks exploded other fireworks that were in a building nearby to the festival and caused the devestation.
This, just another statistic in a long line of pyrotechnic disasters that should be investigated. Pyrotechnic engineers are important in cases like this one and only authorized shows should go forward.
Here is footage of the blasts that happened on the weekend:
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It was just the other day we reported on SpaceX's mission to deliver inflatable rooms to the International Space Station. The mission held, even more, significance because of SpaceX's constant mission to land a spacecraft after it had launched it. The Falcon 9 - the rocket in question - took off on April 8th, 2016 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and with it, the Dragon cargo spacecraft that had the supplies, experiment material and new hardware. The program that delivers supplies to the International Space Station is called the Commercial Resupply program.
SpaceX has been toying around with the idea of landing rockets back onto platforms after their mission objectives were met for some time now. According to ScientificAmerican, this was the "fifth attempt in 15 months by SpaceX". Unfortunately, the last attempted landings ended in a ball of flames, but this one was successful, except for one that did land on concrete in June 2015. This landing was done in the ocean, where the company had found little success in the past. An all-around win for aerospace engineering. The landing of the rocket on the barge opens a new chapter in aerospace engineering that could see the recycling and reusing of space-ready materials.
The cargo has already reached the International Space Station, to which Tim Peake, one of the astronauts on board, said, "It looks like we've caught a Dragon."
President Barack Obama tweeted: "Congrats SpaceX on landing a rocket at sea. It's because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space exploration."
The engineers over at SpaceX were initially cautious to call the landing a success, due to the amounts of checks they had to do on the rocket itself to conclusively say whether the rocket could be used again.
About the hypothetical successes of one day landing a rocket on a barge in the sea, Elon Musk said, "We'll be successful, ironically, when it becomes boring. When it's like, 'Oh, yeah, another landing. No news there.'"
Later this year, Musk and the team at SpaceX plan to launch the Falcon Heavy, which has three times the number of engines compared to the Falcon 9. According to WashingtonPost, Musks's intention is to eventually fly the rocket to Mars.
Watch the undoubtedly impressive footage of the Falcon 9's landing below:
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A company named Wohlers Associates Inc. that specialized in additive manufacturing/3D printing has published their 2016 Wohlers Report. The report is respected in the engineering industry as a clear picture of what is happening in the industry and how well it is performing. According to, 3Ders, Wohlers looked into 51 industrial system manufacturers, 98 service providers, 15 third-party material producers, various desktop 3D printer manufacturers, and 80 3D printing experts from 33 different countries.
The results were positive for companies currently working or thinking of working with 3D printing technology. The additive manufacturing industry grew by 35% in 2014 but has struggled to increase any more in 2015. Wohlers says that the market will reach $10 billion only by 2017. The official number is that the 3D printing industry has grown by a billion dollars for the second year in a row.
However, Wohlers did report that the industrial metal additive manufacturing and desktop 3D printing industries did see a bigger growth in popularity than other industries.
Desktop 3D printers rose a staggering 70% in 2015 which was explained due to the affordability of 3D printers as the years progress. It is becoming possible to buy a printer instead of having to rely on universities or schools to have one. Personal printers are becoming more and more of a reality.
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When you think of mushrooms and the most sought after ones, of course, you think about truffles. Pardue University isn't looking for truffles to eat, but rather a wild mushroom that could aid in the future of lithium-ion batteries for energy storage. Allegedly, the university is taking the carbon fibers from the wild mushroom and altered it with nanoparticles, which has resulted in interesting observations.
Vilas Pol, an associate professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and the School of Materials Engineering, says, "Current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries must be improved in both energy density and power output in order to meet the future energy storage demand in electric vehicles and grid energy storage technologies. So there is a dire need to develop new anode materials with superior performance."
The mushroom in question is the Tyromyces fissilis and will form electrodes for lithium-ion batteries according to the researchers.
"Both the carbon fibers and cobalt oxide particles are electrochemically active, so your capacity number goes higher because they both participate," Pol added. The team took the carbon fibers from the mushroom and attached it to cobalt oxide nanoparticles and created the battery that allegedly has 530 milliamp hours per gram.
Jialiang Tang, a student from Pardue University and assisting Pol on the project, said, "The methods now used to produce carbon fibers for batteries are often chemical heavy and expensive. I was curious about the structure [of the mushroom] so I cut it open and found that it has very interesting properties. IT's very rubbery and yet very tough at the same time. Most interestingly, when I cut it open it has a very fibrous network structure."
According to Power-EETimes, the network that runs within a fungus like a mushroom would ensure "faster electron transport" which would lead to faster battery charging if it could be implemented into an energy storage unit.
Read Pardue University's report: Wild Fungus Derived Carbon Fibers and Hybrids as Anodes for Lithium-Ion Batteries
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Copper prices have fallen, according to news agency Reuters, causing engineering and technology companies to reassess what's happening in the industry and attempt to rectify the situation. The annual World Copper Conference conference (named Cesco/CRU) that took place in Chile this week, found that copper prices will remain low for the next three to five years.
The price of copper is almost at a six-and-a-half-year low due to Chinese growth slowdown which is forcing the mining sector to retrench staff and limit output globally.
Hennie Faul, the head of Anglo American's copper sector said, "The downturn has really made us think differently. It had woken us up...We want our assets to be low cost."
Pertti Korhonen, chief executive of Finnish mining technology company Outotec, told Reuters this past week, "The focus for the industry over the next two years will be on productivity improvement, and all the mining companies trying to reduce their cash costs. There is a lot of opportunity in modern technology, including digitization and automation."
Juan Rayo, CEO of renowned Chilean engineering firm JRI, said, "All engineering companies have needed to adjust themselves in order to get through this rough time...we're anticipating a difficult market, with no more than 5 to 6 million man hours of engineering for mining during the year."
The current price of copper is US$4,650 a ton. This is compared to February 2011's results of US$10,000 a ton, Reuters points out. This would explain why cuts are being made and why jobs are being lost; they have lost more than half of the money in copper in a matter of years.
Korhonen has the solution, however. He says, "If you reduce your energy consumption, you reduce your water consumption, you improve your throughput, you can get immediate opex savings, you can get immediate advantages. So I think if the numbers talk for themselves, they will find the money."
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China is prioritizing their focus on smart buildings, smart homes and everything of the sort with their annual Smart Home and Intelligent Building Expo. The focus of automated components of homes and how they interact with each other and with the vehicles we drive and the cell phones we use is a particular interest of engineers from China.
Elsewhere in the world, the need to sufficiently prepare for the oncoming change of homes, offices and buildings a whole is being underlined. In Texas, Jim Sinopoli, architect, and founder of Smart Buildings says, "Building owners are having to adapt to technology that wasn't available just five years ago. And that's going to change the way we approach building. The question will be how design engineers and architects respond. Making buildings smart will be disruptive. But it's inevitable."
IDC Energy Insights, an industry analysis company reported that $5.5 billion (USD) was used on smart building improvements to buildings in 2012, but estimates but 2017 the amount spent will be $18.1 billion (USD).
According to DigitalSpy, retailers in the United Kingdom, John Lewis, are starting to have installations in their store that emulate a smart home and are starting to sell 'smart home' packages to people.
Johnathan Marsh, John Lewis's Buying Director for Electrics and Home Technology said, "We are seeking to demystify the latest, smart technology for our customers. In-store experiences are now key as we've seen customer demand for physical experiences before committing to purchase increase."
Sinpoli's stance - speaking to SCMP - also thinks about the human before anything else. He said, "while smart architecture is about making buildings cheaper and greener, it's important to recognise that it's also about making them better for their occupants." At the end of the day if it is not a smart home or smart building a regular person would be able to live in then there is no reason to keep building on this industry.
Betsey Dougherty, a co-founder of Dougherty+Dougherty Architects in California says, "Something as subtle as the colour of the walls, the acoustics, and reverberation, glare - all these affect the quality of life inside a building. A smart building should allow you to get better faster if it's a hospital, learn more if it's a school, be more creative if it's an office. Of course, buildings will get generally smarter as cell phones do - that's to be expected. But we have to raise the bar on the idea that a building is essentially a box."
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Very soon you could be sending your own satellite into space. Researchers at Arizona State University are, in their own words, "making the price of conducting a space mission radically cheaper." It sounds too good to be true right?
The work has been done in a lab called the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration Laboratory. Jeken Thanga, assistant professor and head of SpaceTREx said, "With a spacecraft this size, any university can do it, any lab can do it, any hobbyist can do it."
The satellite in question is called the SunCube FemtoSat . The team has worked for two years on the cube and measures 3cm by 3cm by 3cm. Thanga thinks that one day hundreds of these cubes could be sent into space and they could inspect damaged spacecraft.
There is only one catch. The price of launching these cubes into space. According to ASUNOW, the current cost of launching crafts into space lands $60,000-$70,000 per kilogram.
However, per cube, the team says it would cost $1,000 to take to the International Space Station or $3,000 to send into "low-Earth orbit."
Thanga says, "That was a critical price point we wanted to hit. That's part of our major goal -- space for everybody."
The researchers don't think the SunCube will be overly expensive and sees the price for one only reaching the hundreds.
"It's the prototype of a fully functioning spacecraft," Thanga says in the announcement video (as seen below). "On board you have cameras, you have power systems, you have computers and you have a fully functioning radio."
For more information check out: femtostat.asu.edu
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Software engineers are the mighty guardians of keeping Google up and running 24/7. In a report written on Wired, Google uses three words in explaining how it stays up: Site Reliability Engineering. According to the report and Google's own numbers, in 2015, Google's App Suite - which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive et al - were up 99.97 percent of the year.
The Vice President of Engineering at Google, Ben Treynor Sloss, said, "The result of our approach is that we end up with a team of people who will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand and have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work."
Site reliability engineers are up for more hires around the world due to site maintenance that exists in the world due to the chance of a site being a victim of cyber-crime or just general maintenance that keeps the website functioning with all of its bells and whistles.
One of the site reliability engineers at Google, Andrew Widdowson detailing what its like to be an SRE - as it is abbreviated - said, "Our work is like being a part of the world's most intense pit crew. We change the tires of a race car as it's going 100mph."
The team that works for Google has worked with a publisher to release a textbook that is now available for purchase named Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems.
Here's an application form to be a Software Engineer for Google.
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"I think robotics is a new manufacturing and it can help people to do some high-risk work and go to top of the mountain and deep ocean to realize our world adventure," said Scarlett Johansson.
Okay...maybe she didn't say it. However, an artificial intelligence replying to the question of what she thinks about the future did. An engineering student by the name of Ricky Ma decided to build his own humanoid from scratch and modeled it after Scarlett Johansson. According to Engineering.com, the robot cost $50,000 (USD) to build.
Using CAD, CAE and a 3D printer he built his robot, even printing out a torso and pelvic bones so the robot could stand upright and move its limbs. He is calling it 'Mark 1' and more than half of her is 3D printed.
The Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has a similar robot called 'Nadine'. The robot can have a conversation with you, change her facial expression and greets someone by name based on the last time they met. The woman behind the robot is the director of NTU's Insitute for Media Innovation, Nadia Thalmann, in an interview with Vice's Motherboard, said, "Nadine is using a 3D camera and can detect and recognize people due to a binary pattern algorithm. Then she has a short time memory linked to her language database. When we tell her something, she will analyse what is being said and link to the database, itself linked to the memory."
Check it out and then prepare for the robopocalypse:
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Construction is fluctuating globally if new reports are to be believed. Australian reports indicate that construction work has fallen to a 13-month low in the country, however, Germany is reporting a rise in construction activity. The Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) is a global survey that observes the construction activity over the world in a space of one month.
According to BusinessInsider, Australian residential, commercial and engineering industries have all experienced a slump in March compared to the figures calculated a month earlier in February.
Another company that investigated the slump in Australia's construction sector, the AI Group-HIA, published their findings. It shows that March's observations of construction engineering are under the 12-month average in 2015.
An economist at the HIA, Georgan Murray, says, "This is a concern because the ongoing contraction in mining-related work still has a way to go yet. It is unlikely that a pick-up in conditions in other sectors will fully offset the contraction in mining investment over the next years, but we need to give non-resource businesses the best possible chance. Bolstering business confidence is the key."
Business in the German construction sector reached new heights for the fourteenth month in a row, according to ConstructionIndex. Oliver Kolodseike, an economist at Markit, spoke to the website, saying, "Despite falling to a three-month low in March, the Germany Construction PMI signalled a sharp rise in building activity, thereby adding to hopes that the sector will contribute positively to economic growth in the opening quarter of the year. Moreover, capacity pressures continued to build, as companies reported an ongoing shortage of subcontractors, with the respective index falling to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years. The forward-looking indicators suggest that building firms should remain busy: employment levels rose strongly and companies scaled up their buying activity in anticipation of rising demand."
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The world's leading industrial showcase will be taking place on the 25th to the 29th of April, 2016. Hannover Messe is celebrated worldwide as a significant event that sees heads of state and top-level engineers make their way through the event. The event will also take a look at the latest trends in multiple engineering industries. According to their brochure, the event sees 200,000 visitors per year of which 30% of them are from abroad. Some of the talking points include industrial automation, energy, industrial supply, digital factory and research & technology. The theme this year is 'Integrated Industry - Discover Solutions'.
Dr. Jochen Kockler, a Member of the Board at Deutsche Messe, said, "Hannover has become the global hotspot for issues such as Industrie 4.0, energy efficiency and smart grids. Every year HANNOVER MESSE sets new trends - for example, smart services, 3D printing, collaborative robots."
Digitimes.com has reported that a Taiwanese company, NEXCOM, will be releasing a "blueprint for industry 4.0" in the upcoming event, as engineers try to make more sense of where the industry is leading and how to work along with the fourth industrial revolution. IoT automation solutions and the industrial 4.0 wireless factory, including industrial cloud and security are just some of the talking points of NEXCOM coming up at the event.
MIT has confirmed its attendance as well due to the United States as the partner company for the event. Carnegie Mellon University that invented the GPS systems NASA's mars rover used and is the self-professed home of artificial intelligence and will also be at the event.
Marc Siemering, senior vice president of Hannover Messe, said to media, "Carnegie Mellon and MIT are two of America's most storied research universities. Their participation further spotlights the innovative power of Partner Country USA at HANNOVER MESSE."
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An annual survey by MHI and Deloitte shows that 51% of 900 different supply chain companies agree that robotics and automation have changed the way their companies operate. The Wall Street Journal reports that the technologies have added new fields of network management, cloud computing, and sensors.
Deloitte - on their website - says that people sometimes confuse robots with walking, talking, Transformer-looking helper bots, but in actual fact the robots that supply chain managers now concern themselves with is the computer is "computer coded software, programmes that replace humans performing competitive rules-based tasks and cross-functional and cross-application macros."
Last year only 39% of companies were saying robotics was influencing the way they did things and now that number has escalated.
Gregg Goodner, past president of Hytrol Conveyor Co. told WSJ, "The customer today is demanding their suppliers be able to deliver their product faster. Customers demands are stronger and you've got to be able to meet them, or quite truthfully, you don't play the game."
35% of the companies surveyed say that their supply chains are almost fully robotics. The report indicates that in the next ten years that number will rise to 74%. The report went on to say, "While the vast majority of forwarders agree technology is the future of freight, they see any types of technology as over-hyped. Warehouse robotics are the only innovation that a majority consider will have a profound impact on the industry."
The MHI's report is indicating that automation is improving in terms of technology. They report that safety in design of automation machines and affordability of companies will mean more will be reporting that their supply chains are automated soon.
The MHI says, "In the past, safety barriers and sensors prohibited people from working too near machines - creating a time-consuming process if someone noticed. Now robots aren't just safer, but more sophisticated, with "3D vision and the ability to make the decisions necessary to handle different product types and sizes."
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Self-aware WiFi. You read that right. A WiFi system that instead of being searched for, does the searching and connecting to a WiFi enabled device.
That is the future of WiFi according to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They say that they have developed software called Chronos that, according to RoboticTrends.com, "enables a single WiFi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters." In their video, the researchers explain that this could lead to single room WiFi access, but shut out other users in one building.
The team also shows in their video that using the Decimeter-Level Localization with a Single WiFi Access Point could ensure that drones stay a safe distance away from humans because it can pinpoint exactly where a person is standing in relation to its vicinity.
"From developing drones that are safer for people to be around, to tracking where family members are in your house, Chronos could open up new avenues for using WiFi in robotics, home automation and more," said Deepak Vasisht, an author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at MIT. "Designing a system that enables one WiFi node to locate another is an important step for wireless technology."
The engineers say that the experiments they conducted in an apartment were able to accurately calculate in which room a person was in 94% of the time. A true indoor GPS. The team uses the "time-of-flight" that the data takes to travel from an access point, which was usually calculated with triangulation. Chronos, however, doesn't only calculate the triangulation but also "the actual distance from a user to an access point.
Vasisht says, "Knowing both the distance and the angle allows you to compute the user's position using just once access point. This is encouraging news for the many small businesses and consumers that don't have the luxury of owning several access points."
Another author of the research paper, Professor Dina Katabi, said, "Imagine having a system like this at home that can continuously adapt the heating and cooling depending on a number of people in the home and where they are. Eliminating the need for cooperation between WiFi routers opens up many exciting new applications for localization."
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Should self-driving cars get their own lane? That is the question left in everyone's minds after Volvo's CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, saw that one of their autonomous vehicles couldn't see the lane it was supposed to be driving in due to how shoddily the lanes looked due to wear and tear. Something that should interest civil engineers all over the world.
Kerssemakers was at the LA Auto Show with the mayor of Los Angeles. Things got heated when the car wouldn't drive to which Kerssemakers shouted, "It can't find the lane markings. You need to paint the bloody roads here."
According to Reuters, 65% of roads are in poor condition, which would render autonomous cars useless if they cannot read and calculate without lane markings. Autonomous vehicles already struggle in rainy weather conditions as well, in a long list of hurdles that need to be overcome before they make these vehicles commercially available.
Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, speaking to Reuters, said, "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose. But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails."
But what about at night when visibility is questionable even with headlights and lamposts? Will these cars still be able to function then?
Mercedes is quite confident they might have an answer in their new 2017 E Class. It utilizes what is called 'Driver Pilot' and consists of 23 sensors that would be able to make observations on the road that would detect guard rails, barriers, and cars. The kicker is that it doesn't require lane markings to stay in a lane.
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Engineers at Iowa State University have been hard at work at creating something that might pique the military's interest. It is a translucent material that would make whatever it covers invisible to radar. In a recent report published in Scientific Reports, the engineers said: "It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression."
According to TheEngineer.com
The cloaking device is formed of rows of split ring resonators filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that's liquid at room tempreature but less toxic than mercury. These rings, which have a radius of 2.5mm and a thickness of 0.5mm, are embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency.
In the paper, the team writes about doing tests with a frequency range of 8 to 10 gigahertz. They report that the fabric they invented suppressed the radar waves up to 75%. This number can only improve, which means soon in the future the fabric would be able to resonate with radar waves and appear invisible to them.
The group concluded their tests by saying:
Therefore, the meta-skin technology is different from traditional stealth technologies that often only reduce the backscattering, i.e., the power reflected back to a probing radar.
The engineers are confident that one day they will be able to cloak aircraft with the invention.
Liang Dong, an associate professor working on the project, said, "The long-term goal is to shrink the size of these devices. Then hopefully, we can do this higher-frequency electromagnetic waves such as visible or infrared light. While that would require advanced nanomanufacturing technologies and appropriate structural modifications, we think this study proves the concept of frequency tuning and broadening and multidirectional wave suppression with skin-type metamaterials."
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Weather forecasts seem to be a hot topic amongst engineers these days. Everyone is trying to invent the next weather measurement tool that will change the game. Hey, people love knowing what the weather is going to be, what can we say? Scientists over at Oklahoma State University are working with something vastly different to weather balloons. Drones.
Meteorologists who are working with the team say they are going to be able to produce forecasts more accurately with the new method of measuring weather patterns. The drones would source the information about the weather patterns by calculating information based on the earth's atmosphere.
Jamey Jacob, an aerospace engineer and professor of mechanical engineering at OSU is pioneering the Unmanned Systems Research Institute that is using the drones. The team claim the drones can fly for large stretches of times, recording data on several atmospheric levels.
"Oklahoma is a really good, good example, because even though we're already a very weather-dynamic state, Oklahoma only has two balloon launches a day -- one at dawn and one at dusk -- from a single location in the state, and that's where all the weather forecasting information comes from. So that data is really sparse, and it's difficult for meteorologists that are developing these forecasting models to get a very good idea about how that weather is changing from these very limited number of data points."
A professor of meteorology at OSU, Phillip Chilson thinks the drone program would be low-cost and will ensure that storms are understood better. Probably best to do it in Oklahoma since they are prone to tornadoes in their state.
Chilson told Voice of America, "Our real goal is to try to develop systems that really, I don't want to say replace but there may be that possibility of replacing weather balloons, but currently augmenting them -- so, increasing the capabilities."
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Are lightweight lithium-sulfur batteries the solution to the uncertainty that some associate with lithium batteries? Whether critics like it or not, lithium batteries are here to stay due to them being the operative force of current energy storage batteries like Tesla and Redflow's house powering cells and of course, in our cell phones and the driving force of the latest electric cars.
Now, the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is saying lightweight lithium-sulfur batteries might hold twice the amount of power than regular lithium batteries. Working out of DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory the researchers found that the liquid in lithium batteries and its salt content is important when it comes to how many times a battery can be used. According to Phys.org, a specific salt named LiTFSI that assists lithium atoms and sulfur on the electrode and then releases it in quick succession, which is good. Other lithium batteries with different liquids don't release off of the electrode at all and the battery is weaker as a result.
As lithium design becomes more popular, a more sustainable, longer lasting battery needs to be developed especially for cars that intend to run for long stretches of road.
The researchers experimented with LiTFSI and LiFSI and concluded that the first iteration they used was interwoven with sulfur more successfully and led to lithium sulfide that broke apart more easily which leads to a stronger battery.
Dr. Ji-Guang Zhang, who was at the helm of the project, said, "By conducting a macroscopic compositional analysis combined with simulations, we can see which bonds are easily broken and what will happen from there. This process let's us identify the electrolytes behavior, guides us to design a better electrolyte, and improve the cycle life of lithium-sulfur batteries."
You can read the official Effect of the Anion Activity on the Stability of Li Metal Anodes in Lithium-Sulfur Batteries on the Wiley Online Library.
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The United Arab Emirates cannot put up with the number of graduates looking for jobs, but the one industry they cannot seem to place anyone in is the engineering industry. The construction industry was the first one named in the report by GulfNews. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) say that those with degrees in architecture, civil engineering and post-graduate degrees in finance, international business, and real estate are among the more difficult qualifications to find jobs for in the UAE.
A managing partner at Morgan McKinley (a renowned placement agency especially for engineering careers), Michael Gilmore, says, "It is clear there is an oversupply of talent, however, clients have far more difficulty in the recruitment process as every hire into a construction firm is crucial in this market and a weak hire can prove critical. It is also evident that construction clients are looking for more specialists rather than supply, so becoming more niche in their choice of candidate. Candidates are also much more cautious about leaving their current company as there are few solid companies in the market and it becomes very difficult to predict the right move."
The UAE is experiencing the problem of their most skilled engineers hopping over into other countries that offer higher salaries and better working opportunities. "The lower packages are affecting the talent crunch also, as our neighbors Saudi Arabia benefit from the downturn, offering highly skilled workers higher increments to make the move, while Oman offer similar packages but much more cost-effective," Gilmore added.
The jobs the UAE are lacking skilled professionals in - in case you were thinking of immigrating - are:
...Development director, project director, director of planning and strategy and cost control professionals
- Michael Gilmore
It seems that engineering graduates need to go over and above what they have been studying in their degrees and get more competency certificates and becomes specialized in a field and will be scooped up by firms that require their skills.
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Engineering experts are delivering opinions on a flyover railway bridge that collapsed, killing fourteen, in Kolkata, India. Panduranga Rao, of the IVRCL Construction Company in charge of the flyover, said to media, "It is nothing but God's act. About 70% of the construction work was completed properly. The experts regularly monitored the progress of the project...It is a total act of God. This has never happened before, we are also in shock.
Details have emerged that say the tender was handed down in 2009 to IVRCL Construction. Since then the problems with planning and tender corruption led to the flyover's collapse, say engineering experts.
The project - which was pushed back substantially due to delays - is part of a 1.6 mile (2.5km) flyover that would minimize the amounts of traffic in Kolkata's Burrabazar area, according to Mid-Day.com.
At the Indian Institue of Technology-Kharagpur, Joy Sen of the architecture faculty said, "Phasing of construction and time and use of materials are interlocked. If these things are not done on time, then construction like these which are exposed to weather becomes very risky."
This will bring up many questions about the safety and security of construction sites in India. Sen added, "They have a time schedule and you cannot delay with these projects. You need proper planning and you can't play with human lives."
Tenderpreneurship gone wrong or an act of God, either way, an engineering feat has caused deaths and that is never a good thing.
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Nanoscale technology is quickly becoming the most fantasized answer to the future in the engineering world. The University of Alberta's mineral engineering researchers might have just saved the manufacturing processes of electronics industries some money. The researchers have been working with 'Atomic layer deposition' (ALD) which sees slim films covered in molecule materials like "zinc, silicon and nitrogen" which would assist with the manufacturing of electronic chips and how efficiently they are manufactured.
The Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering in the university are confident the new films they have developed will assist computers and electronic devices by altering the atomic layer deposition.
Ken Cadien, a materials engineering professor put the discovery into context, saying that zinc or silicon are a prerequisite to making thin film devices but are heavily overpriced. "Some of these are big molecules and in semiconductor manufacturing if you're a company producing 10,000 12-inch wafers a week -- small amounts of something add up to big amounts of something."
Triratna Muneshwar, a graduate with his doctorate from the University of Alberta told Phys.org, "My interest in this came about in conversation with Dr. Cadien and one of his colleagues who said that precursor costs are a challenge...There are more than 1,000 atomic layer deposition systems in the world but there's only a small handful of people asking why and how these things work, who are trying new things. When you're doing that, you can come up with breakthroughs like this."
The two confirm that since they have published their findings, leading players in the electronic manufacturing industry have purchased the journal to learn from the work they are doing.
Muneshwar published his findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.
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Singtel, a Singapore-based service provider is joining hands with Perth in Australia in the form of a subsea cable. The new link will ensure that customers growing want for bandwidth-heavy applications like unified communications, enterprise data exchange, internet and online gaming will be efficiently run. Along with Australia's Telstra and SubPartners, Singtel signed a Memorandum of Understanding on March 31st, 2016.
The cable goes by the name of APX-West and will measure in at 2,796 miles (4,500km) in length and will provide 10 Terabits of speed both ways between Singapore and Australia, according to AustralianNewsNetwork.
Ooi Seng Keat, vice president, Carrier Services and Group Enterprise at Singtel, said in a statement, "The APX-West cable will be a new data superhighway to expand data connectivity and capacity between Singapore and Australia, providing network redundancy and the lowest latency from Australia to South-East Asia, the Middle East and Europe."
The data superhighway is expected to be finished in 2018 and promises that engineers will be constantly making sure the project runs without fault in the next two years.
Bevan Slattery, SubPartners founder and chief executive, said, "This is a unique commercial model for the Perth-Singapore route that will satisfy the ongoing bandwidth requirements of both network operators and internet content hosts."
This project comes on the back of an announcement from Singtel that they would be working alongside Ericsson to improve Singapore's 4G capabilities for the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies they have been working on.
Tay Soo Meng, group CTO at Singtel told ZDNet, "IoT connectivity is an important part of Singapore's enterprises, and supports the Singapore government's Smart Nation initiative. We anticipate a growing demand to connect a multitude of sensors and devices in a cost-effective manner."
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Man-made earthquakes will now feature in the U.S. Geological Survey's (UGSG) seismic risk maps. This would assist civil engineers and design companies in their contemplation of where to build buildings and how strong those buildings should be.
The Daily Mail writes that these measurements will be included in the survey due to, "temblors linked to wastewater disposal wells used by the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma." The UGSG recently reported that 7 million people reside in zones that are directly in danger of experiencing man-made earthquakes due to oil and gas drilling
Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project delivered a statement wherein he said, "By including human-induced events, our assessment of earthquake hazards has significantly increased in parts of the U.S."
The states affected most by human-induced earthquakes are: Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and Arkansas.
"In the past five years, the UGSG has documented high shaking and damage in areas of these six states, mostly from induced earthquakes," Petersen continued.
Now that these areas are being measured and mapped out, there can be more pressure on civil engineers to minimize the amount of man-made earthquakes in densely populated areas. However, The American Society of Civil Engineers' 2016 report does not include the human-induced earthquake figures. Regardless, whether or not the new implementation of man-made seismic activity statistics in the UGSG reports will influence anything, the recent developments should leave people saying, "better safe than sorry."
For detailed seismic risk maps and further information visit: The USGS website
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Environmental scientists, engineers, and meteorologists have been working together to improve the efficiency of warnings for heat waves. This according to Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The new study from Harvard University in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has been researching sea surface temperature patterns that could enable meteorologists to give 50-day warnings, prior to the heat wave hitting land.
The team used data from the Eastern United States and observed weather trends from 1982 to 2015 to measure patterns of heat waves across 80 different weather stations.
A Harvard graduate and author of the study, Karen McKinnon told Harvard's official site, "We began the analysis by empirically exploring relationships between extremes in summer temperature and sea surface temperatures." They observed what is called the Pacific Extreme Pattern which involves warm and cold waters that span across the Pacific during the summer.Through the observations, they can cross-reference temperature behaviors, and according to their official study, provide "skillful prediction of hot weather [in the Eastern United States] as much as 50 days in advance."
The lack of rainfall was also looked at according to another co-author, Peter Huybers, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science and engineering. He said, "Lack of rainfall dries the land surface, making it difficult to remove heat by evaporation and primes the land for more extreme heat." As a result, they can measure what an oncoming heat wave might look like.
If the study progresses to the point of teaching other countries how to work towards discovering how to sufficiently warn a population of a large-scale heat wave it could mean the saving of lives, farmers' crops being prepared for the heat waves and the stocking up of water in case of shortages due to the crippling effect heat waves have on the mass population.
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What will factories look like in the near future? We've seen car production and assembly lines revolutionized by robotics in the last decade. Industrial production is changing as 'smart factory' devices become available to the world of industrial automation. New skills are needed for engineers to run these newly invented machines all over the world.
"In the factory of the future, all individual steps included in the production process will be fully connected and integrated." - RCRWireless.Com
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be featured in the factory of the future due to every single automated machine 'talking' to each other in the production line as they already do. In Korea's North Chungcheong Province, one of the top electric equipment producers has installed "integrated automation systems" into its manufacturing facilities, according to KoreaTimes.
The company, LSIS, is looking into the future of the 'smart' factory. Through what is called a PLC - or programmable logic controller - a factory can fully work by automated means with the assistance of a manufacturing execution system (MES).
An official from LSIS said, "The PLC is at the center of our smart factory system, serving as a brain to manage the whole process like central processing unit (CPU)."
LSIS hopes to develop more technology that will utilize IoT and make the process of manufacturing products that much faster in their smart factories.
The implementation of communications technology will enable smart factories to transfer huge amounts of data in real time and with minimum delays: connect a large number of personal devices with high data security standards
- RCRWireless.com
As we've reported, fiber-optic networks have been tested up to 57gbps and could streamline businesses and production lines so that the internet is fast and efficient so that the automated production lines and the employees of a smart factory can work at a fast rate.
In the fourth industrial revolution, the inter-connectivity of devices is imperative to running smart factories of the future. Not familiar with the term 'industry 4.0/ fourth industrial revolution'?
McKinsey.com defines it perfectly:
We define Industry 4.0 as the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks; the emergence of analystics and business-intelligence capabilites ; new forms of human-machine interaction
An added process that needs to occur in a smart factory is the surveillance and security of these vulnerable automated machines interconnected through what is essentially the internet. According to AutomationWorld.com, Siemens offers a system called Plant Security Services that will provide security and network monitoring. They have now opened Cyber Security Operation Centers (CSOC) in Portugal, Germany and the United States because they have seen the industrial security necessity gap in the market. Anything that can be connected to the internet can be hacked and that means security across networks is imperative.
Does your factory abide by some of these principles? If it doesn't, are you doing enough to ensure your factory becomes a smart factory of the future?
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The aerospace engineers over at SpaceX and NASA have been innovating again. Along with Bigelow Aerospace, on April 8th, 2016, a resupply mission along with a new module named The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be sent to the International Space Station. Once docked on to the space station it will create another room for the astronauts to use.
According to TechCrunch, the Dragon capsule - as it is being called - will be connected to Node 3 on the ISS in mid-April, and inflation will follow in the beginning of June. It will grow to ten times its volume at launch.
ArsTechnica says the module costs around $17.8 million, but won't have astronauts living in it just yet because NASA aren't convinced that inflatable living quarters are fully safe to live in yet.
Mike Gold is the director of Bigelow's DC operations and business growth. He said, "The major concern I hear is if it's a balloon, will it pop? Quite the opposite." He says the 'balloon' is a kevlar-like material and will be as protective as the aluminium hull that already resides on the ISS.
The payload will be sent up by the Falcon 9 rocket belonging to SpaceX and will also have 250 other scientific experiments that the astronauts will conduct whilst they are in space.
Jason Crusan, the director of Advanced Exploration Systems at NASA headquarters said, "We're fortunate to have the space station to demonstrate potential habitation capabilities like BEAM. The station provides us with a long-duration microgravity platform with constant crew access to evaluate systems and technologies we are considering for future missions farther into deep space."
The theory that is being drummed up as a result of Crusan saying they could use it on future missions is that one day we would be able to live in one of these inflatable habitats on Mars. Just imagine that.
Courtesy of NASA and TechCrunch
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A game of cyber security chess has been playing out in the United States between the FBI and Apple Inc. The FBI had the San Bernadino shooter's (Syed Farook) iPhone and asked for Apple's assistance to unlock it so that they could view the contents of the folders inside the phone. Engineers at Apple admitted that software would need to be invented to introduce the 'back door' that the FBI required, and that it would go against their values of privacy that they hold dear for every iPhone/Apple device user. So, they refused to build the software.
A battalion of other tech companies stood behind Apple in the case and tried to veto an oncoming court order that would render any argument against the FBI useless and Apple would be legally liable to unlock the phone.
Eventually, the FBI decided they wouldn't ask Apple for their assistance and would research methods of how to unlock the phone themselves. And it seems they have succeeded. According to the LATimes, the FBI announced, on Monday, that they had successfully unlocked the shooter's phone without Apple's help.
Now, Apple is concerned about the possible vulnerabilities of their devices if the claim by the FBI is true. The FBI subsequently dropped their case against Apple.
Melanie Newman, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said: "It remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security and public safety, either with cooperation from relevant parties or through the court system when cooperation fails. We will continue to pursue all available options for this mission, including seeking the cooperation of manufacturers and relying upon the creativity of both the public and private sectors."
Unsurprisingly, Apple now wants the FBI to inform them how they were able to unlock the iPhone, however, with their stance towards the FBI, it doesn't inspire confidence that they would tell them. Here is the official reply to the situation:
From the beginning, we objected to the FBI's demand that Apple build a backdoor into the IPhone because we believed it was wrong and would set a dangerous precedent. As a result of the government's dismissal, neither of these occured. This case should never have been brought.
Apple believes deeply that people in the United States and around the world deserve data protection, security and privacy. Sacrificing one for the other only puts people and countries at greater risk.
...this new method of accessing the phone raises questions about the government's apparent use of security vulnerabilities in iOS and whether it will inform Apple about these vulnerabilites.
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Printable magnets are the new buzz word around engineering circles when the topic of magnets is brought up. A group called Correlated Magnetics are conducting research on how magnets will continue to form part of our world in engineering. The end result of this research is an invention they call 'polymagnets'.
Jason Morgan, head of engineering at Correlated Magnetics has indicated that what they are trying to do is reprogram magnets from the normal north/south magnet to a magnet that can achieve more than just a standard magnet. He says, "What actually happens is that you have the north and south on one face of the magnet. Instead of a long field that wastes energy, you have a tight field that is tightly controlled and have the force focused near the magnet."
In the video (see below) the company shows how it 'cuts' magnets of all sorts in what looks to be 3-D printers. It uses a technology called a Magnetic shear force transfer device to cut magnet pixels into magnets that cause the magnets to have new magnetic fields assigned to them. The printer is now called a MagPrinter
Ron Jewell, the vice-president of sales & marketing at Correlated Magnetics says: "We've invented a way to make magnets better. We make them stronger than the conventional magnet, we make them safer, we can make them behave as springs, we can make them behave as latches." All of this done with hardware and software to create what they call polymagnets, says Jewell.
"Polymagnets can be engineered with the same level of detail and care that every other aspect of a product is engineered," said Stephen Straus,another vice president of marketing at Correlated Magnetics. Straus also states that with technology like the MagPrinter you can now print magnets that are compatible with devices that would usually be damaged by contact with magnets.
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Biomedical engineering scientists at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have observed the effects of microneedle technology in the assistance of immunotherapy for melanomas on human bodies. Dermatologists' ears should perk up at the new findings because it directly affects their practices. The new findings could mean more efficient methods of ridding a person of skin cancer in the future - perhaps even circumnavigating the need for cutting out melanomas.
According to HNGN, current cancer immunotherapy researchers have investigated using anti-PD-1 antibiotics to prevent cancer cells from "binding a receptor on T cells". This process eventually leads to the body confusing healthy cells with cancerous cells, and thereby the cancer is more difficult to battle.
However, the process of introducing anti-PD-1 is what the researchers over at NC State are interested in. Chao Wang, a co-author of the new study says, "First, the anti-PD-1 antibodies are usually injected into the bloodstream, so they cannot target the tumor site effectively. Second, the overdose of antibodies can cause side effects such as an autoimmune disease.
As a result, the team created a patch of needles that had tiny microneedles made from hyaluronic acid. This would deliver the antibodies to the skin tumor directly. "It is an efficient approach to enhanced retention of anti-PD-1 antibodies in the tumor microenvironment," Zeng Gu, an assistant professor at NC State said.
An animal test was set up to hopefully gain some insight into how this would eventually be used on humans. After the tests were completed, Yanqi Ye, a Ph.D. student at NC State, said: "After 40 days, 40 percent of the mice who were treated using the microneedle patch survived and had no detectable remaining melanoma - compared to a zero percent survival rate for the control groups."
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Two companies are bringing construction and drone technology together. 3D Robotics (3DR) has announced that they will work in tandem with Autodesk's Forge Platform. This would lead to the drones using cloud services, developed apps and SDKs with the Forge Platform, opening up the world of construction.
"Capturing site data today is costly, time-consuming, and often dangerous. Drones can easily go where it's inefficient or unsafe for field personnel, making it easier to accurately measure our world so we can better manage it," says Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3DR.
He further went on to celebrate the FORGE platform and ensure that this would "help business customers save time and money" as well as ensuring more on-site safety.
3DR would be utilizing certain APIs from FORGE such as their ReCap Photo web application that would allow drones to perform inspections, "surveys and scans of worksites". Something that would take human construction workers much longer to perform.
"The real value is that it is super easy to set up," Goerge Hatch, the senior technical specialist at Autodesk said, speaking of the flying of the drone to scan for existing conditions on a construction site.
The drone can fly on a path that is pre-drawn, pre-planned and executed from a tablet computer and then the drone does the rest. Downloading the data and exporting it to the Autodesk apps look easy enough for any construction worker to learn.
"Sometimes we want to build a model in the context of our surrounding," says George Hatch. He says that this is easier with the geo-reference data that drones can collect as they fly around. What takes hours or days is now a streamlined process with automated drones on construction sites.
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Stanford University, California, United States. The university is conducting research that would lead to more comfortable contact lenses, or so the researchers claim. This would come as welcoming news to people who genuinely struggle to either get the contact lenses in to start with or the ones who can't wear them for long.
Why on earth did this research suddenly pop up at Stanford University?
The culprit was a graduate student named Saad Bhamla. He said: "As a student, I had to stop wearing lenses due to the increased discomfort." Turns out, his eyes would dry up during the day leaving him with discomfort. He conducted the research in Gerald Fuller's chemical engineering laboratory, according to Stanford University's website. "Focusing my PhD thesis to understand this problem was both a personal and professional goal." How about that for writing about what you know?
In the States, it is claimed that 30 million people are wearing contact lenses and around half of them go back to their glasses because of levels of discomfort. So the idea was spawned to create a film that would work with a contact lens and make wearing them more comfortable. They did this by researching the lipid layer - the oily coating on the tear film - that protects the eye by retaining liquid and being strong enough to keep things out.
The researchers say the lipid layer of the eye also stops the tear film from evaporating due to the temperature human eyes achieve (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Sounds like a really important layer to have, right?
The researchers say that the answer to making comfortable contact lenses is engineering the lenses that don't interfere with the lipid layer and the job it is doing for the eye.
Bhamla along with the assistance of Gerald Fuller built a device called the Interfacial Dewetting and Drainage Optical Platform (i-DDrOP). This device will enable engineers to monitor and influence the tear film and perform different tasks upon it. This will - according to the researchers - lead to more comfortable contact lenses in the long run.
You can thank them later. First stop your dry, red eyes from occurring.
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Griffith University is taking one giant leap into the future of clean energy. According to EurekaAlert, the university is using carbon as a method of delivering energy using hydrogen. The specific team is Griffith's Queensland Micro and Nanotechnology Centre. They have produced hydrogen from water. This would replace platinum as an electrocatalyst of producing hydrogen from water. The team is venturing to say that this is the first proof that power can be generated at a low cost and at no harm to the earth. The results come from the Nature Communications Journal .
The senior author of the work, Xiangdong Yao said: "Hydrogen production through an electrochemical process is at the heart of key renewable energy technologies including water splitting and hydrogen fuel cells."
Yao further admits hydrogen has always been a "great challenge" and platinum has been the most stable electrocatalyst for the purpose
Explaining how exactly they are achieving their results, Yao said: "In our research, we synthesize a nickel-carob-based-catalyst, from carbonization of metal-organic frameworks, to replace currently best-known-platinum-based materials for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution."
Hydrogen is already being used in cars as a fuel medium but recently energy storage has become a focus as well. Will hydrogen and clean energy be the logical step in an industry that is utilizing lithium-ion? If it is a more natural process of creating clean energy, it might become the next logical norm.
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The Airlander 10 is here. It looks like a mix between something the Thunderbirds would operate and the futuristic looking blimp from the Golden Compass movie. The airship was built by an automotive engineering firm called Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV).
The ship is 302-feet long. That is 60-feet longer than a jumbo jet, says Gizmodo in their report. HAV has slapped a $35 million price on the vehicle and say that they have interested parties, wanting to purchase the ship. Standing at 26 metres high and weighing in at 20 tons, the hope is that the next strengthened, explode-proof Hindenberg is here. It will run on 1.3 millon cubic feet of helim and its max speed is 92 mph.
Chris Daniels, HAV's head of partnerships and communications said: "There's a number of militaries around the world [that are interested], but we can't say who."
Daniels further explained what they can use the massive blimp-like carrier for. In an interview with the BBC, he said: "We will not compete with a 747 flying across the Atlantic, but we can offer the ultimate flight experience for tourism and leisure purposes. It's perfect for sightseeing because we can have floor to ceiling clear panels, and we can open the windows because we are not flying as high or as fast as traditional planes, but we will not be offering a service to get from A to B as quickly as possible."
The company thinks it could be more useful for the transportation of sand, water, health materials and anything that can be delivered to places in need of assistance.
Daniels, speaking to Sky News, warned against calling it an airship. "It is not an airship, it's a mix between an aeroplane, an airship, with a bit of helicopter thrown in. It uses the absolute latest materials...It uses the latest avionics and the latest computer software."
How does it work? Here's a video:
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It's the stuff of science fiction, however, it is already here. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has purchased a '3-D printer' that would be able to theoretically print human organs. Biomedical engineering has been revolutionizing the medicine field in a big way in the last few years and it continues to be a field that is most influenced by automation.
The assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UTSA, Teja Guda, acquired the equipment and intends to put it to good use. Guda said, "There aren't many organ printers in the world. We wanted to explore this new space in regenerative medicine since so many at UTSA have those strengths."
According to UTSA's website the device will print cells and keep them from perishing as they have before in 3-D printers before this one. This is because it "operates without heating or high pressure."
"Essentially we're creating our own materials with embedded living cells," Guda stated. He further explained that they load the embedded living cells up in little syringes, "insert them into the machine", and then it prints an organ as a regular 3-D printer would - layer by layer.
"Transplantation of tissues is a huge challenge because they're not always successful and they're limited in supply. If we're able to make transplantation significantly more successful, that's huge," Guda confessed.
The aim of the project is to eventually print "replacement" organs for people who might need them. The engineers feel they are on the verge of something massive that might influence the future, and all of it done within the walls of a university.
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The fast food industry in America is becoming more automated year by year. The New American has reported that companies would be interested in automation hardware and software for the future of delivering food, due to heightened employee wages in the United States.
Eatsa, a restaurant in San Francisco, has a human kitchen staff that make the food but the process of ordering food is completely automated. There is no front-of-house liaison that takes the orders and delivers it to the kitchen staff, instead, the computer tells them what the order is.
Andy Puzder is the CEO of a restaurant chain in the States called 'Carl's Jr' and has been quoted by the media saying, "Millenials like not seeing people. I've been inside restaurants where we've installed ordering kiosks...and I've actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there's a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody."
There are critics of automation software at places like restaurants where a human face isn't seen but rather a computer. A Facebook comment on the New American's website read: "Are we raising a generation of antisocial, hermit, misanthropes?"
The Univeristy of Oxford published a study in 2013 named Combined Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Including Fast Food. They concluded that it was extremely likely - up to 92% certainty - that jobs in the fast food industry would be replaced due to automation.
Olo is a company that designs and builds mobile ordering technology for restaurants. The CEO, Noah Glass spoke to the media, saying: "I fully believe that it will seem crazy, even just two or three years from now, that we used to wait in long lines until we got our turn, and then told [a cashier] what we wanted, and had them punch it into a machine for us."
Puzder is the one on the forefront of undermining the minimum wage increases and stated that "its not rocket science" that automation would overtake actual labor. He said: "Machines are always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case."
Will fast food become even faster and cheaper thanks to automation? Only time will tell.
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It just seems that Australia has their priorities straight when it comes to engineering projects.
Australia is making 10 million Australian Dollars ($7.6 million) available to local councils to repurpose materials from construction and demolition waste, according to WasteManagementWorld.
These materials would assist in projects being conducted by civil engineers, such as the building of roads, drains and car parks. This would form part of a strategy called Creating the Right Environment that will see the removal of "75% of construction and demolition waste from landfill by 2020."
The State Governments Environment Minister, Albert Jacob, said: "Achieving the target for diverting waste from landfill is a shared responsibility and requires action from State and local governments, industry and the wider community."
Construction and demolition companies using recyclable materials would see funding making its way to the metropolitan councils that would assist them in their industry. Up to AU$8 million of the allocated money is set aside for these rewarding payments. It would bode well for them to stock up on materials that could be recycled.
Jacob further said: "Each year we generate 3 million tonnes of construction and demolition and Western Australia sends 2 million tonnes to landfill. This is a valuable resource that we could be using in everyday construction projects."
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The University of Michigan's engineers and biologists have been bird watching. They have been doing this with the intention of designing aircraft according to how birds fly, fantasizing about ditching the stiff-winged airplane.
The team was given $6 million from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to create what is being called the "most detailed analysis of bird flight ever" by Product Design & Development. The leader of the researchers is a gentleman named Daniel Inman. He is a professor of aerospace engineering at the university, who has recruited some UCLA students to assist with the endeavour.
Inman said: "With new materials, advanced sensing and control techniques, and inventive methods for observance birds in flight, our team will begin to bring avian efficiency and agility to aircraft."
Inman has shown off the new technology the researchers have been working on that would affect flight control in the future.
In the video (see below) Inman shows a bending material that curves upwards. He explains that "the thing that makes this contouring possible is a thing called macro fibre composite actuators."
To put it more plainly, Inman says the structure and the actuation device "are all one thing". As a result, the material is lighter and can do "unusual maneuvers like a bird can do."
According to the Daily Mail, the group are confident they could possibly 3-D print structures that reflect the bone structures in bird's wings. However, Inman believes due to the FAA, this kind of technology they are working on will take at least another decade to be put into aircraft.
Another team of researchers are in charge of installing certain software into the different areas of the aircraft that would process data that can be perused and learned from.
Yong Chen, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA said: "A biological network can process signals at a speed comparable to a supercomputer while weighing only one millionth as much and consuming one millionth the power."
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A junior in biomedical engineering, a graduate in biotechnology and a second-year biomedical sciences student are working on a project that would help people determine whether they are diabetic or not. Guarav Agrawal, Christlin Ponraj and Angelin Ponraj have created Integrated Latrine Technology for Early Diseases Detection according to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And it has something to do with...toilets.
The idea is that the water in the toilet bowl will change colour to suggest to a person that there is a likelihood that they have diabetes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that 18.8 million Americans were "diagnosed with diabetes in 2010."
Agrawal said, "Southern states have the highest percentage of diagnosed cases, making them essential targets for preventive and early detection diabetic care."
Giving a tidbit of information as to what they are building, Angelin Ponraj, said: "We hope that this affordable, easy-to-use device will also allow us to advocate for the benefits of preventative medicine."
How the device would work is yet to be defined but the students have every intention of spreading the word that soon you will be able to detect diabetes early on so treatment can be started as soon as possible.
However, in Singapore, two students from Singapore Polytechnic's Centre for Biomedical and Life Sciences, with help from the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology have designed a working prototype of a chip that would detect diseases such as Ebola, HIV and SARS, according to TodayOnline.
The biochip would perform the task the blood sample testing that big laboratories do. It is alleged that the chip is "pumped through a spiral in the chip" and then the cells are "separated by their sizes."
Perhaps the students over at UAB can learn a thing or two from the students in Singapore and vice versa. Nonetheless, disease detection is becoming easier and easier in the world of today. This means that people would get the treatment they need the minute they need it after detection.
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Limestone, CO2 and 3-D printing. Those are the ingredients that researchers at the University of California are using and reusing to create concrete cement that could be more environmentally friendly than current cement. The team says that this is a brand new method of creating building material and has the chance to minimize the amount of CO2 emissions in the world today.The team's findings were published in the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research journal. The title of the work is Direct Carbonation of Ca(OH)2 Using Liquid and Supercritical CO2: Implications for Carbon-Neutral Cementation
According to tcetoday.com cement production - as it has been done in the past - emits 5% of the world's C02 emissions. Currently, cement is made by heating limestone at 750 degrees centigrade which produces C02.
The new method involves taking the C02 that is released during the calcination of the concrete ingredients and then recombining it with calcium hydroxide, which in turns recreates limestone. They have called their new creation CO2NCRETE , printing out cones of the cement with a 3-D printer.
Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental engineering at UCLA, Gaurav Sant, said, "While cement production results in CO2, if we can utilize it to making a building material which would be a new kind of cement, that's an opportunity."
Sant further said that the challenge they are expecting to have is not just developing a building material, but also finding a process solution for an integrated technology that would take CO2 to a finished product.
They are calling the process: Carbon Upcycling.
J.R. DeShazo is a professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and part of an innovation team as well. He is throwing his weight behind the project and was quoted saying, "I decided to get involved in this project because it could be a game-changer for climate policy."
For more information and to see how all of it is done, check this out:
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The University of Washington's computer science and electrical engineering researchers are putting sonar into smartwatches and the likes in the latest attempt to improve smart device technology and how we interact with it. The researchers indicate that with the new sonar technology a person would be able to interact with mobile devices by "writing or gesturing on any nearby surface."
They have called it 'FingerIO'. The technology will track finger movements. They do this by turning the phone into a sonar system by utilizing the speakers and microphones within the device. A sound wave is emitted, followed by the signal 'bouncing off' the fingers of a user and then the speakers send data to the phone that calculates what the fingers are doing.
Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, a graduate from UW who specializes in computer science and engineering, said: "You can't type very easily onto a smartwatch display, so we wanted to transform a desk or any area around a device into an input surface."
Shyam Gollakota is a senior author and UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. He says that because every device has a speaker and microphones, FingerIO should make sense from a cost perspective and can be achieved without "any special hardware."
The team says the "margin of error" for right now is 8 millimeters in terms of the drawing functionality. According to the video (see below) you could use an entire table as a drawing surface and FingerIO will follow your fingers, but the margin of error currently makes shapes and anything else drawn illegible. This is due to the sonar echoes not being strong enough to track the finger at a reliable rate. However, it would obviously be improved and refined in the upcoming months and years. Adding microphones to devices would be the next step forward to refining finger movement tracking.
For the more technically inclined, the technical term for the tracking of finger movements is called ' Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing'.
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Like something out of Ant-Man, engineers from Stanford University have put their worker ant-robots to work. They have built six small robots that have mustered up the strength to pull a two-ton car.
In their paper, Let's All Pull Together: Principles for Sharing Large Loads in Microrobot Teams, the researchers debut the MicroTug robots.
The lab responsible for the bots is Stanford's Biometrics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory.
The engineers say the microrobots have the power of six humans pulling at the Eiffel Tower. A weird comparison but an interesting perspective as to how the Microtugs are able to pull a car and what they will be able to achieve in the future.
In a video released by Stanford University (check below) the engineers say that an adhesive inspired by gecko toes enable the robots to move things much heavier than their own weights. The video also shows that when the bots work together they can pull even heavier objects together - in the video, a line of microrobots pulls a two-ton car.
David Christensen, a researcher in the lab that is at the forefront of the project, says: "By considering the dynamics of the team, not just the individual, we are able to build a team of our 'microTug' robots that, like ants, are superstrong individually, but then also work together as a team."
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is about to give the thumbs up for releasing mosquitoes that have been genetically engineered. The intention behind this is to cause a reduction of the spread of the Zika virus.
According to Forbes, the mosquitoes will have a "specially inserted gene" that will kill their offspring and that this method has been successfully practiced in Brazil - a country where the Zika virus has been affecting populations the most.
The mosquito carrying the Zika virus is the Aedes Aegypti and also carries dengue fever. Usually, the review process would take longer over at the FDA but it seems they are hasty to get the mosquito out into the airs and seeing whether or not the mosquitoes can play a part in ending the Zika virus and preventing a breakout in the United States.
The genetically modified mosquito was engineered by an insect control company Oxitec and will call their modified insect the 'OX513A Aedes aegypti'.
A statement released by Oxitec's Chief Executive Officer, Hardyn Parry said: "We look forward to this proposed trial and the potential to protect people from Aedes aegypti and the disease it spreads."
If the idea of a modified mosquito scares you and you're not fond of the idea, you can submit your concern to the FDA at www.regulations.gov
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Biomedical and chemical engineers from the University of Cambridge have made progress in the search for the answer to the question of how a person gets Parkinson's disease. As a result, the engineers hope the research could lead to an eventual treatment of the disease.
The Parkinson's Disease foundation has indicated that 10 million people are living with Parkinson's in the world today. They also state that the amount of money spent on Parkinson's in the United States is $25 billion per year. The need for a treatment is high on the light of biomedical and chemical engineers.
A positive sign is that Cambridge claims to have used a "non-invasive method" to observe when proteins in the brain become toxic, which causes the killing of brain cells, ultimately leading to Parkinson's.
According to MedicalXpress, the researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology found that the "same protein can either cause or protect against, the toxic effects that lead to the death of brain cells."
The researchers used "super-resolution microscopy" to monitor the behaviour of alpha-synuclein - one of the lead proteins that are tied to Parkinson's - to document how the protein becomes toxic.
Dr Dorothea Pinotsi, who is working with the team at Cambridge, said: "What hasn't been clear is whether once alpha-synuclein fibrils have formed they are still toxic to the cell."
Using rats as test subjects, the engineers inserted multiple forms of alpha-synuclein into the animals. Pinotsi explains that they are investigating how proteins associated with neurodegenerative conditions grow over time, "and how these proteins come together and are passed on to neighbouring cells."
However, they saw something interesting in the results. Pinotsi says after adding a soluble form of alpha-synuclein to proteins that already included alpha-synuclein, it caused a toxic effect. According to MedicalExpress extra proteins are sometimes caused by ageing but also caution that trauma to the head could also produce extra soluble protein and lead to Parkinson's.
"These findings change the way we look at the disease because the damage to the neuron can happen when there is simply extra soluble protein present in the cell - it's the excess amount of this protein that appears to cause the toxic effect that leads to the death of brain cells," Pinotsi said.
The researchers are hoping with their new discoveries that they could try to develop a treatment for Parkinson's. However, the discoveries they have made in the meantime are revealing new, interesting perspectives on what could lead to a cure.