• The measure of: LXT88 superyacht concept

    According to Naval Yachts, the concept is based on two innovative elements that stand out from its segmented competitors: speed and dynamism. The designers plan to build the yacht in aluminium to ensure lightweight construction and faster speeds. They have carefully integrated aerodynamic engineering into the design to ensure the yacht maintains its performance while under way, with a top speed of 42 knots. Image credit: Cover Images One of the most distinctive features of the superyacht is a forward jacuzzi where guests can soak up the views on board. “It makes a great chill-out spot,” said Baris Dinc, co-owner of Naval Yachts. “It’s great to have a pool, even a small one, on board a yacht of this length.” The yacht offers accommodation in three cabins, with…

  • View from India: ISF facility boosts scientific and cultural landscape

    To put things in perspective, when Infosys turned 25 years old in 2006, its founder, Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy, began to think about contribution to science and engineering. Consequently, Murthy, along with some of the members of the Infosys Board, initiated ISF as a not-for-profit trust in 2009. ISF has instituted the Infosys Prize, an annual award, to honour outstanding achievements of researchers and scientists across six categories: Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematical Sciences, Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Humanities. The prize includes a 22-carat gold medal, a citation and a purse of US$100,000 (or its equivalent in Rupees). “As people interested in science, mathematics and engineering, we must think about how science, mathematics and engineering…

  • Complex thinking for a world of complexity

    On the cover, above the title ‘The Nexus’, there is a two-line slogan that reads: ‘Augmented thinking for a complex world.’ Below, there is a sub-title of similar length, positioning the book as an invitation into the arena of “the new convergence of art, technology, and science”. ‘The Nexus’ looks and feels more like a manifesto than a straightforward analysis of the locus where everything in the modern world meets. That’s part of the point, for ‘The Nexus’ is more than a book: it’s a literary artefact that brings together art and design, photography and typesetting, philosophy and history. To be fair, its author Julio Ottino and his visual collaborator Bruce Mau have warned us: “Today’s complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking.” There is no single elevator pitch for ‘The…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • Phobia sufferers could be cured with virtual-reality treatment

    The trial studied phobia patients using a headset and a smartphone app treatment programme which combined VR 360-degree video exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Participants suffering from the specific fears flying, needles, heights, spiders and dogs, downloaded a fully self-guided smartphone app called 'oVRcome', which was paired with a headset to immerse participants in virtual environments to help treat their phobia. The results from the trial, just published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, showed a 75 per cent reduction in phobia symptoms after six weeks of the treatment programme. “The improvements they reported suggests there’s great potential for the use of VR and mobile phone apps as a means of self-guided treatment for people struggling…

  • A tale of two islands – what to do with too much energy?

    Remote and rugged, a refuge from modern life – the cultural myths surrounding islands and their inhabitants have a fierce hold over our imaginations. Reality is often more prosaic, but could we learn how communities on islands – awash with wind, sunshine, wave and tidal energy – are pioneering use of natural resources? As the global energy supply tightens and the world grows ever hotter, the need to muster clean energy becomes acute.  We look at creative approaches of two award-winning islands: Ærø in Denmark, and Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. You can literally feel the energy in the Orkney Islands – apart from the few days a year the wind doesn’t blow. From his home desk on a blustery Orkney Mainland (the principal island in the archipelago), Neil Kermode, managing director…

  • Boris Johnson's resignation puts Online Safety Bill on hold

    The Online Safety Bill, one of the landmark pieces of legislation of Boris Johnson's government, has been placed on hold until a new Prime Minister is in place. The bill was making its way through Parliament and was scheduled to be passed over the next few weeks. However, its approval will now be postponed until September at the earliest, when the Conservative Party is expected to elect a new leader to replace Boris Johnson in the role of UK Prime Minister.  Hailed as groundbreaking regulation of the tech sector, the Online Safety Bill would force social media and other user-generated content-based sites to remove illegal material from their platforms, with a particular emphasis on protecting children from harmful content. The bill would also ensure the largest content platforms – such…

  • The environmental impact of deep-sea mining

    Last April, engineers on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean held their breath as a 25-tonne mining tractor lay stranded on the silty ocean floor, more than 4km below the surface. On the 13 th and final trial dive of a world-first experiment, a robot had broken free of its tether and lay in some of the darkest waters on Earth. “I’m not superstitious,” Kris De Bruyne, engineer and project manager with Belgium’s Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), told a science conference examining the impact of deep-sea mining. “But I will never name a dive ‘thirteen’ again.” A remote underwater vehicle helped engineers regain control within days as independent scientists watched on. But the incident galvanised public resistance to mining the deep seas. Having lain undisturbed for millennia, the murky…

  • Tory leadership accused of ‘fantasy economics’ over EV tax

    Last week outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the Commons Liaison Select Committee that it was “certainly the case that we will need a substitute for fuel duty”. However, he was forced to defend himself when Conservative MP and chair of the Transport Select Committee Huw Merriman accused No 10 of blocking the Treasury over the past three months from setting up a working body to investigate the issue.           No 10 would not comment on the allegations when approached by E&T. But Labour MP Ben Bradshaw told E&T that the delay was “typical of the fantasy economics that has been pedalled for the last two and a half years by Boris Johnson and has been reinforced by virtually all of the Tory leadership contenders”. “We are going to have a massive hole in the public finances due to…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • Data regulator to probe employers' use of AI for recruitment

    The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a commitment to safeguard the information rights of the most vulnerable people, including regulatory work around children’s privacy and AI-driven discrimination. In ICO25, a three-year plan setting out the body’s regulatory approach and priorities, it says it wants to consider the impact the use AI in recruitment could be having on neurodiverse people or ethnic minorities who weren’t part of the testing for this software. It also says it wants to ensure that the use of algorithms is not disadvantaging people within the benefits system and that the privacy of children remained protected. Speaking at the launch of the plan, UK Information Commissioner John Edwards said: “My most important objective is to safeguard and empower people, by upholding…

  • Fusion energy might power the grid by 2030s, sector survey says

    Funding for commercial fusion projects has more than doubled in the last 12 months, according to a recently published report by the Fusion Industry Association, The Global Fusion Industry in 2022 . In the past year, fusion companies have raised more than $2.83bn (£2.39bn) in funding, an increase of 139 per cent from the 2021 report. This figure has taken all-time investment into the technology to a record $4.8bn (£4bn).  The increase is explained by the fact that eight new fusion companies have entered the market in the last 12 months, each raising over $200m (£169m) in total, a sign of the industry’s rapid growth and investor confidence. "The last 12 months will be seen as the turning point when it became clear that fusion would move out of the laboratories and into the marketplace,…

  • The eccentric engineer: Koehler’s genius design of the depressing carriage

    In the early days of September 1782, the largest action of the whole of the American War of Independence was about to start. Despite the battle of Yorktown, which sealed US independence, being nearly a year before, the war was not quite over, and this revolutionary battle would have a number of unique features. Firstly, not a single American was taking part, and secondly, it was happening not in the New World, but around Gibraltar in the Mediterranean. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Americans had found themselves with some unexpected allies in the form of the ‘Bourbon Alliance’, a combination of French and Spanish powers whose interests had as much to do with containing the British as with freeing American colonists. So, with the fighting in America all but over, the biggest engagement…

  • Can car makers meet decarbonisation challenge ahead of schedule?

    Achieving net-zero emissions is a major challenge for process manufacturers across the board, but more so for those in the global automotive sector. This is largely due to their reliance on carbon-intensive processes and use of raw materials that may be difficult to extract or are only available in distant territories or regions of the world. Against the odds, however, some automotive manufacturers are succeeding in applying smart supply-chain thinking and advanced cost-modelling techniques to decarbonise their products and processes ahead of other industries. Among the key drivers in the push to decarbonise products and processes is growing stakeholder interest in environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance, which has led most global car makers and Tier One OEMs to strengthen…

  • Teardown: Nike ISPA Link trainers

    Fashion is often charged alongside technology as one of the main culprits when it comes to burgeoning landfill and stuttering progress on recycling. Within fashion, trainers are seen as a particular problem. How that market’s big brands are looking to address growing criticism may contain interesting pointers for other markets. According to a recent edition of Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’, the average Briton owns seven pairs of trainers, and of the 300 million shoes bought overall in the UK every year, about 90 per cent end up in landfill. Globally, 24 billion shoes are sold annually and trainers make up roughly a quarter. In environmental terms, all this translates into 1.4 per cent of carbon emissions, making footwear the world’s 17th biggest polluter by some estimates, ahead of aviation and…

  • Sponsored: The rise of digital transformation within industrial manufacturing

    Today, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Categorised by BCG “Industry 4.0 is a transformation that makes it possible to gather and analyse data across machines, enabling faster, more flexible, and more efficient processes to produce higher-quality goods at reduced costs.” This translates into truly automated, lights out environments where businesses can produce things at high-speed and on a massive scale. It is not just production, however, that’s driving transformation within industrial manufacturing, but efficiencies across the supply chain by harnessing technology to integrate different functions into the production process. Distributed IT in manufacturing environments Changes are far-reaching, affecting every aspect of the industrial process, and businesses must…

  • Astronomers detect ‘strange’ radio signal from faraway galaxy

    Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have detected a fast radio burst (FRB) coming from a distant galaxy that appears to be flashing with surprising regularity. These types of signals are usually short-lasting. However, this new signal persists for up to three seconds, about 1,000 times longer than the average FRB. Within this window, the MIT team detected bursts of radio waves that repeat every 0.2 seconds in a clear periodic pattern, similar to a beating heart. The new signal, labelled 'FRB 20191221A', is the longest-lasting FRB, with the clearest periodic pattern detected to date. The origin of the radio signal remains a mystery, although researchers have been able to trace it back to a galaxy located several billion light-years from Earth.  “There are not…

  • ‘The UK’s contribution to the global technology market is huge’: Jon Crowcroft

    Despite reeling under the effects of a stalled post-Covid rebound, post-Brexit uncertainty and the economic shocks of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, “the UK is in a really good place at the moment”, says Jon Crowcroft. This is “because we have this distinctive ability to do fundamental research”. More than that, says Crowcroft, who is professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge and co-founder of artificial intelligence company iKVA, “what we’re really good at in the UK is taking that research and actually going on to make the technology that’s based on the research”. Crowcroft is commenting on a statement from the UK’s Digital Economy Council claiming the UK tech industry is now valued at £1tn: “A milestone only achieved by China and the USA so far.” The headline has…

  • Book review: ‘The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything’

    The metaverse has very quickly found itself a topic of discussion by the world’s most influential newspapers, companies and governments. Facebook attracted headlines and derision in November 2021 when it rebranded as Meta, an acknowledgement of the centrality of metaverse services in its future. The only problem is that the metaverse does not yet exist, and no one is quite agreed about what it is. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball has been influential in shaping what we expect from the metaverse. He posits in the first part of ‘The Metaverse And How it Will Revolutionize Everything’ (WW Norton, £22, ISBN 9781324092032) that the metaverse is the next phase of the internet. Or, to be more precise: “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be…

  • Five countries’ carbon emissions caused $6tn in global losses, study finds

    Scientists have been able to calculate the economic impact of individual countries' carbon emissions on the global economy, in what they say could become a "game-changer" for climate litigation. The research by US-based Dartmouth College estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from only five countries between 1990 and 2014 resulted in global economic losses of up to $6tn (£5tn), with nations in the global south having been hit hardest. The study's conclusions, published in the journal Climatic Change , provide a basis for nations to make legal claims for economic losses tied to carbon emissions, according to the researchers. “Greenhouse gases emitted in one country cause warming in another, and that warming can depress economic growth,” said Justin Mankin , senior researcher of the…

  • Tepco executives held responsible for Fukushima disaster by Japanese court

    A Japanese court has found four former  executives from the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant responsible for the 2011 nuclear disaster.  The senior managers were sued by shareholders of the nuclear power plant that was hit by a tsunami in 2011, a natural disaster that caused the deaths of 18,000 people and wiped entire towns off the map. According to the shareholders, the disaster could have been prevented had Tepco bosses exercised due care and  carried out preventative measures such as placing an emergency power source on higher ground. The 2012 civil lawsuit demanded that five former Tepco executives pay the beleaguered company 22 trillion yen in compensation for ignoring warnings of a possible tsunami.  The case was decided yesterday (Tuesday July 12) by a Tokyo court, which…

  • How to capture biodiversity loss

    I am currently positioned at the edge of Tau Waterhole in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve. On the other side of the muddy pond, a lone bull elephant is flicking his tail. He stands gazing at the arid landscape beyond. Sadly, I haven’t been posted to South Africa to research this article but am sitting in my London kitchen watching a live stream of the pachyderm on Explore.org. The website broadcasts day and night from various wildlife hotspots worldwide, allowing anyone to drop in and watch nature. The stream at the Tau Waterhole is just one example of how technology is helping us get a better picture of life on Earth. And the need for this monitoring is greater today than ever. Scientists and campaigners have been alerting the world to the destruction of species for decades, yet their…

  • Plan to map UK’s marine carbon storage could bolster net-zero efforts

    There is currently limited information about how much carbon is stored in and sequestered by UK marine habitats such as saltmarsh, seagrass beds, kelp forest, biogenic reefs and marine sediments. Scientists will assess the carbon storage and sequestration potential of all UK seas, as well as within Marine Protected Areas. The Blue Carbon Mapping project builds on the blue carbon mapping that has already begun in Scotland, with a final report expected to be produced by the summer of 2023. The project aims to address this “scientific blind spot” by paving the way for better understanding and protection of the UK’s blue carbon habitats. With two-thirds of the UK underwater, the study could help the UK to achieve its net-zero commitments and to protect at least 30 per cent of UK seas for…

  • A tropical paradise both beautiful and smart

    Stunning coastlines and verdant mountain scenery make the Cook Islands a popular tourist destination. This tourism industry has contributed to a decade of economic growth, and in 2021 the government of this nation in the South Pacific introduced the SMART Economy Initiative to create ‘smart’ island networks. Around the world, the Internet of Things (IoT) is used for energy metering, road traffic management, street lighting operation and environmental controls. Not all IoT nodes need the fast data transfer of a 5G network, and in the Cook Islands, the tropical and mountainous terrain means installation is not practical. LoRaWAN (long-range wide area network) technology was selected for the Cook Islands’ Smart Island project. The low-power protocol uses the unlicensed industrial, scientific…

  • Heatwaves should be named as early warning system to save lives, Society says

    As the UK endures another heatwave and potentially record-breaking temperatures this week – and with climate change increasing the frequency of such events in the future – The Physiological Society is calling for heatwaves to be named in a similar way to storms. The Physiological Society is the largest group of physiologists in Europe and is focused on understanding how the body works, including how it copes in response to heat and extreme weather. Calls for improved early warning systems for heatwaves are included in a report The Society launched today (Wednesday 13 July) at an event in London regarding the health policy implications of climate change. The report highlights policy priorities for government in response to climate change’s impact on human health, as well as identifying areas…

  • Low-cost device takes 3D images to detect eye diseases

    The device captures 3D images of the retina, the back of the eye and cornea, and can be added at low cost to a slit lamp, a device commonly used by optometrists. Patients with conditions such as glaucoma, which is the third most common cause of visual impairment worldwide and affects an estimated 7.7 million people, are often diagnosed by highly trained specialists, who look at photos and give a subjective opinion on the 3D structure of the back of the eye. Although there are existing instruments for 3D imaging, including optical coherence tomography technology – the machines can cost up to £100,000, often making them too expensive for large-scale population use, especially in low-income countries. However, optometrists all over the world have access to slit lamps. The new technology…

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