• Four key lessons the mobile industry can learn from Africa

    Africa has been behind the technology adoption curve, but it’s a continent bursting with innovation the global mobile industry should be paying attention to. The advent of cheap mobile devices has allowed Africans to transition straight into a mobile-first economy. Mobile infrastructure is far easier to set up than the traditional infrastructure of wired landlines and fibre-optic broadband. With a basic smartphone and a 3G signal, these resources then become the technological infrastructure. And Africans have been taking advantage of its benefits. Here are a few lessons the rest of us should take on board. Don’t be bound by traditional thinking In Kenya, ATMs are relatively rare: they require wired networking, restocking and security. But with mobile wallets and internet banking, someone…

  • Teardown: Samsung foldable smartphones

    The foldable phone has been trying to make a comeback for nearly four years. There are new clamshell designs that recall the classic Motorola Razr but now fold out to offer the size of touchscreen seen as standard today. And there are book designs that open out to offer a small tablet – or ‘phablet’ – experience, while retaining a standard screen on the outside. The segment’s unquestioned leader is Samsung. Its latest entries are the Galaxy Z Flip 4 (clamshell) and Z Fold 4 (phablet). At £999 and £1,649 respectively, these are premium-priced handsets, although they come with aggressive bargain options. Samsung will accept any smartphone as a minimum £250 trade-in against the Flip 4 and trade-ins of up to £580 against the Fold 4. You can also get a year’s worth of Disney+ streaming. The…

  • ‘Complete transformation’ of global energy industry needed, says WMO

    Climate change risks undermining global energy security unless the use of renewables is dramatically scaled up, the UN has warned, also suggesting that the ripple effect of the conflict in Ukraine could speed up the green transition. In its 2022 State of Climate Services , the WMO has warned that increasingly intense extreme weather events, droughts, floods and sea-level rise are already making the energy supply less reliable.  It also stressed that  in order to limit the global temperature rise which is undermining energy security, electricity tapped from clean energy sources must double over the next eight years. “Net zero by 2050 is the aim," said WMO chief Petteri Taalas. "But we will only get there if we double the supply of low-emissions electricity within the next eight years”…

  • Ban on domestic flights with fast rail routes could halve aviation emissions

    According to the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) think tank, almost a third of journeys are as fast or faster by train as they are by aeroplane, with almost two-thirds taking less than 30 minutes extra by train. A similar policy was implemented in France in April which saw the government banning short-haul flights where a train or bus alternative of two and a half hours or less exists. Domestic aviation was responsible for emitting 2.7 megatonnes of CO 2 and CO 2 equivalents in 2019. However, almost two-thirds (62 per cent) of CO 2 emissions from UK domestic flights in 2019 were between cities linked by the rail network, and are potentially replaceable by rail travel. Some inter-city travel across England, Wales and Scotland is actually faster by train. For example, the report found…

  • Global floating offshore wind pipeline doubles in 2022

    Amid a looming energy crisis, the floating offshore wind industry continues to grow, with the latest analysis showing that the global pipeline for the sector has more than doubled in the past 12 months from 91GW to 185GW. The report, published by RenewableUK, tracks all offshore floating wind farm projects at all stages of development from early planning through to fully operational.  According to the analysis, the UK continues to lead the offshore wind market, with over 33GW of projects in the pipeline, and a handful of demonstration projects already operational. Overall, the UK's pipeline has increased from 23GW a year ago to over 33GW, and from 29 projects to 51, which are being developed in the North Sea (Scottish and English waters), the Celtic Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. …

  • Cap on low-carbon energy profits could deter investment, bosses warn

    The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) introduced its Energy Prices Bill yesterday (Wednesday October 11), which is designed to support households and businesses with energy costs this winter. It includes powers to stop the recent volatile and high gas prices dictating the cost of electricity produced by much cheaper renewables. A new ‘Cost-Plus Revenue Limit’ will be implemented to cap the prices of energy generated by renewables and nuclear which are not volatile by nature. The new Bill follows a rejection of proposed windfall taxes on oil and gas firms under Liz Truss, who said such taxes would deter investment in North Sea oil production. Dhara Vyas, Energy UK’s director of advocacy, said the Bill risks “the very investment the UK needs to ensure long-term…

  • IFS Cloud 22R2 platform promises advanced digital capabilities

    The company’s October release of IFS Cloud 22R2 is designed to support end-to-end process automation and provide organisations with advanced analytics capabilities. The release apparently includes over 340 new features and advancements to speed up IFS’ customers’ journey to digitalisation. “With each successive evolution of IFS Cloud, we are continuously looking to develop the solution to ensure it is fully aligned to how customers buy and use technology,” said Christian Pederson, chief product officer at IFS. “Today, our customers are telling us they are looking to speed up automation and attain intelligent insights faster.” According to IFS, the release’s heightened automation will continue to help “organisations transform operations, work efficiently and liberate staff”. IFS Cloud…

  • Goods beyond earth: cheaper manufacturing in space

    “In the zero gravity of space, we could manufacture in 30 days lifesaving medicines it would take 30 years to make on Earth. We can make crystals of exceptional purity to produce supercomputers, creating jobs, technologies and medical breakthroughs beyond anything we ever thought possible.” It is an exciting proposition. But these ambitious words were not spoken recently. They were part of Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union speech. At that point, Nasa had already spent over a decade conducting experiments to see if large-scale manufacturing plants could operate in space. “The idea was that the weightlessness of space could be used to make medicines in quantities and with purities that cannot be achieved with Earth’s gravity,” explains astronaut Charlie Walker, who joined the McDonnell…

  • E&T Innovation Awards 2022 finalists announced

    Last year’s E&T Innovation Awards were the first to incorporate the great societal challenges, E&T’s Critical Targets, with topics such as climate change, diversity, ethics and healthcare woven into the categories. It created an awards programme that was truly representative of the great objectives being faced and overcome by our most inspiring engineers and technologists, as reflected in the judges’ comments: “The winner was chosen for their pioneering healthcare technology, specifically for their innovative processing of data from a number of digital sources in order to offer a wide societal impact.” “A timely innovation with immense potential for positive, sustainable impact.” “An excellent example of new technology to lever quality, productivity, cost reduction, customer satisfaction…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • Sensors able to detect phone vibrations to ‘eavesdrop remotely’

    Using an off-the-shelf automotive radar sensor and a novel processing approach, a team of scientists has been able to "eavesdrop remotely" on other people's phone conversations.  The scientists demonstrated their technology in the 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security and Privacy, with a view to warning against this possible security flaw. “As technology becomes more reliable and robust over time, the misuse of such sensing technologies by adversaries becomes probable,” doctoral candidate Suryoday Basak said. “Our demonstration of this kind of exploitation contributes to the pool of scientific literature that broadly says, ‘Hey! Automotive radars can be used to eavesdrop audio. We need to do something about this.’” In the ‘mmSpy’ demonstration…

  • Energy bill relief is welcome, but sustainable factories are still needed

    For UK businesses, the government’s announcement of the Energy Bill Relief Scheme provides a glimmer of hope that the coming winter may not be as bleak as many expected. Wholesale energy prices for all businesses will be cut by more than 50 per cent, in a bid by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to prevent insolvencies and protect jobs. The news comes not a moment too soon for UK manufacturing. Faced with soaring energy bills, almost one in six manufacturers described these costs as “business-threatening” in a survey released earlier in the month  by industry body Make UK. Many were already taking action, with some 13 per cent of respondents saying that their business had reduced production for short periods, or was avoiding producing altogether during periods…

  • Book review: ‘Wild Maps’by Mike Higgins

    The result of a quick Amazon search for ‘Atlas’ pops up with… more than 60,000 titles! Among them are countless atlases of the world and world history; railway and road atlases, school atlases etc., as well as less conventional ones, like ‘The Atlas of the Heart’, ‘The Phantom Atlas’ (myths, lies and blunders on maps), ‘The Sky Atlas’ and even ‘The Atlas of Tolkien’s Middle Earth’. Despite the constantly growing complexity of the atlas genre, its essence remains simple: a book with maps and charts. In this respect Mike Higgins' ‘Wild Maps’ (Granta, £20, ISBN 9781783787104) can pass for a classic specimen of the family: it contains dozens of colourful maps and charts which cannot fail to evoke interest among a very wide readership – from knowledge-hungry school kids to scientists and engineers…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • UK and US seek to undermine China's growing technological influence

    China is looking to use new and important technologies such as digital currencies and satellite systems to control its own population and increase its influence globally, the GCHQ has warned, following the US decision to limit its own technological exports to the Asian giant.  In a RUSI Security Lecture, t he head of the GCHQ, Sir Jeremy Fleming, is expected to say that while countries such as the UK seek to use new technology to enable prosperity, the Chinese government sees them as a “tool to gain advantage through control of their markets, of those in their sphere of influence and of their own citizens”. Fleming has already spoken against the security implications of relying on Chinese economic support, which it described as having "a lot of strings attached", such as the need to adopt…

  • Heathrow reclaims title of busiest airport in Europe

    Close to 5.8m passengers travelled through the West London airport during September. While this is still 15 per cent below 2019 levels, Heathrow recorded the busiest summer out of any European hub airport. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of flights taken worldwide during 2020 fell to levels not seen in decades. Heathrow reported a 72.2 per cent fall in passengers during the year compared to 2019. Passenger service levels, which had been higher than any European hub between January and June this year, dipped at the beginning of July as passenger demand started to exceed the aviation sector's overall capacity. This improved significantly after Heathrow introduced a departing passenger cap, which kept supply and demand in balance. But despite this year’s recovery, the airport…

  • Metrication: a matter of national identity

    It was not all that long ago that a unit of grain could differ almost from one village to the next. This worked in a smaller, pre-industrial world, or at least it worked well enough. In a world of cross-border trade and empirical scientific practice, it was no longer tenable. The Scientific Revolution brought about a new approach to science based on increasingly quantitative observations. An epistemological debate emerged about how we could measure nature, and hence comprehend it. There were many questions that needed answering – such as how to measure previously unmeasured quantities like heat – but perhaps the most important was the question of standardisation. The Scottish engineer James Watt proposed a standard decimal measurement system in 1783 in the hope of removing barriers to collaboration…

  • View from Washington: TSMC joins tech stock fall as markets mull Biden’s China tech crunch

    The share price of the world’s largest chipmaker, TSMC, dropped 6 per cent in early Taiwanese trading today (October 11) following last week’s release of the Biden administration’s latest and much broader restrictions on semiconductor exports to China, as markets reflected mounting concern over their potential impact on Sino-US technology trade. The new rules set sweeping prohibitions on the sale of both devices and fab tools for logic processes below 14nm, DRAM below 18nm and NAND memories with 128 or more layers. They specifically target military research, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence but export licences for other uses will be subject to a “presumption of denial.” That may make them almost impossible to get. One short-term exception – from now until April 2023 – covers…

  • UK manufacturing sector shrinks by nearly 10 per cent

    The number of manufacturing businesses in the United Kingdom fell from 270,000 at the start of 2021 to 244,140 a year on, contributing to concerns regarding the country's future financial stability.   The decrease in the number of companies in the sector can be attributed to the decreasing number of orders,  with output falling for the third month in a row in September 2022, and orders declining for a fourth consecutive month, according to an analysis from S&P Global.  In 2022, turnover in the sector fell by 9.2 per cent, decreasing from £636bn to £577bn, while the number of people employed in manufacturing dropped by 1.7 per cent compared to the previous year, official figures show.  In comparison, business numbers in the UK overall fell by 1.5 per cent over the same period, as rates…

  • Drivers of semi-automated vehicles regularly ignore safety guidance, US study finds

    The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is an industry-funded group in the United States that aims to pressure carmakers to improve safety standards. In a new study, the IIHS found that regular users of Cadillac Super Cruise, Nissan/Infiniti ProPILOT Assist and Tesla Autopilot said they were more likely to perform non-driving-related activities like eating or texting while using their partial automation systems than while driving unassisted. In a survey of 600 active users, 53 per cent of Super Cruise users, 42 per cent of Autopilot users and 12 per cent of ProPILOT Assist users said that they were comfortable treating their vehicles as fully self-driving despite the fact that the features are not designed as such. Last year, two men being transported in a Tesla who were relying…

  • Five young women engineers shortlisted for national awards final

    These prestigious engineering industry awards celebrate women working in modern engineering – and aim to help change the perception that engineering is predominantly a career for men,   banishing the outdated engineering stereotypes of hard hats and dirty overalls. Pictured below, the five finalists are (L-R) are Lauren Smith (22), Ama Frimpong (32), Constance Rudman (22), Eneni Bambara-Abban (29) and Veena Kumari (27).   Image credit: IET   In more detail, the five professional young engineers are: Lauren Smith, a trainee medical engineer at United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust. Smith is part of a team that ensures the proper function of medical devices within the healthcare setting and works to support the needs of clinical staff by repairing and managing…

  • Reversal of fortune in the electronics supply chain

    The supply-chain crunch of the past year quickly became so bad that some firms even bought other companies’ appliances to strip them for the specialised semiconductor components they contained. It was a situation the industry had not experienced in a quarter of a century. The years of sluggish economic growth since the 2008 crisis lured many into the false sense of security that the chipmaking sector could pretty much make whatever customers wanted. But, on the way out of the sudden Covid-lockdown slump, buyers were surprised that the industry was not in a position to fill gaps in their inventories. For long-term observers of the market, the supply crunch was not unprecedented but the resumption of normal behaviour. “Semiconductors was, is and will be a cyclical industry. At the same time…

  • How do we stop renewables failing us again?

    In recent weeks the UK government under new prime minister Liz Truss has confirmed that it will endeavour to urgently address energy continuity challenges both within the UK and across Europe. In doing so, it will be required to embrace critical issues that are rarely highlighted which face any long-term strategy to ensure security of supply across the UK; this all concurrent with achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The latest government policy embraces the objectives of having 24GWe of nuclear generation by 2050 (by 2030 we can expect to have only the existing Sizewell B at 1.2GWe and the new Hinkley Point C at 3.2GWe) under a new nuclear directive body; quickly granting around a hundred new licences for extraction of gas and oil in the North Sea, and removing the current moratorium…

  • Biden signs order to implement EU-US data transfer framework

    The Privacy Shield is a European Union-United States data transfer framework that aims to ease European concerns regarding US surveillance practices.  The framework is expected to end the limbo in which thousands of companies found themselves after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the two previous pacts over doubts regarding the safety of EU citizens' data that tech companies store in the US. The agreement is set to soften  the friction between the European Union's stringent data privacy rules and the comparatively lax regime in the US, which lacks a federal privacy law. The White House said "transatlantic data flows are critical to enabling the $7.1tn (£6.4tn) EU-US economic relationship" and the framework "will restore an important legal basis for transatlantic…

  • After All: Crashing out on the island of happy shipwrecks

    I am often asked what my favourite place in the world is; not an easy question for someone who has travelled in over 70 countries. The fact is that I have not one but a handful of favourite destinations, from Alaska and the Falklands to Tasmania and Montreuil-sur-Mer, a beautiful old town in the north of France. I am happy to say the recent expedition to the Scottish islands on MV Greg Mortimer - some aspects of which I have described in recent columns - added one more place to my favourites list: Fair Isle (population 60), situated roughly halfway between Shetland and the Orkneys. Nicknamed ‘the jewel in the ocean’, it is officially Britain’s most isolated island. One of the aims of my MV Greg Mortimer voyage was gathering material for my next book on Britain’s utopian (meaning ‘ideal…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • Energy blackouts this winter ‘extremely unlikely’, says Zahawi

    Speaking to Sky News yesterday, former chancellor of the exchequor Nadhim Zahawi said that while it is “only right that we plan for every scenario”, he did not expect the emergency plans to be put in motion. Last week, the National Grid ESO admitted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will likely see the UK facing a “challenging winter” with regards to its energy supplies. It raised the possibility of planned three-hour electricity blackouts that would see supplies cut off at peak times in order to ensure the grid does not collapse. These would be the UK’s first planned blackouts since the 1970s, when such emergency measures were instituted in response to the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 and the OPEC oil crisis of 1973. Despite plans to close all of the UK’s unabated coal power by…

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