• View from Brussels: The best offence is a good defence

    Ever since 2017, the EU’s member countries have been able to band together under one scheme known as PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation), in a bid to upgrade and improve their respective military might. Europe’s armed forces still march under their national banners, but they regularly go on manoeuvres together and, if crunch time were ever to arrive, would have to team up to counter attacks. Compatibility issues have affected some of these joint missions in the past, including ammunition that does not work with all weapons, transport vehicle spare parts not fitting properly and so on. PESCO was designed to correct those errors and help plug the gaps in Europe’s military capabilities. In November, the list of defence projects eligible for funding grew, as EU countries agreed to add…

  • Bizarre Tech: Airshot game, Polaroid Candy Pen and Sloth back massager

    Hovering Ball Shooting Game Shoot your hovering shot. This looks pretty fun – I’m not sure how long the novelty will last, though. But for only £20, it’s not bad for a bit of shooting practice. The Airshot Hovering Ball Shooting Game set comes with two handguns, so you can compete with a buddy. You pop the five supplied Styrofoam balls on the wee Airshot chambers, which keep them in the air, hovering away. With the loaded handguns (six foam darts come with the game), you pew pew at the balls to get them off their blowy pedestal. According to the makers, the game is quite difficult as you must really focus to aim. In my opinion, unless the accuracy of the handgun is a bit off, it can’t be that difficult. Unless you’ve had some festive tipple and think you’re the king of the world. Then…

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    E+T Magazine

  • After All: The ‘merry men’ who used windmills to polish shoes

    Even Paris ends somewhere, or so they say in France... Year 2021, which is now on its last Covid-affected legs, felt endless due to the lockdowns. But here we are, nearing Christmas, and here I am – triple, or, if to count the annual flu injection, quadruple – jabbed, and travelling again! Yes, I spent the second half of 2021 searching for a ... Utopia. Not any kind of Utopia, but – conveniently for the time when foreign travel was all but banned – a domestic, read: British, one, for that is what my next book is going to be about – the Utopian, i.e. (in my own definition) both idealistic and ideal, settlements of Britain. In a specially acquired second-hand campervan, I’ve managed to trace down and/or to visit about 50 of the above, with the most revealing discovery made last November…

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    E+T Magazine

  • Womb in your living room

    A romantic comedy starts production in Hollywood next year that promises to start a popular debate that has been going on for a few years now in the world of bioethicists. Starring actors Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor and set in New York in the not-too-distant future, ‘The Pod Generation’ tells the story of a young couple who decide to cement their love by having a baby. However, instead of doing it the natural way, they choose to share the burden of pregnancy using a new technology of a detachable womb. The prospect of extra-corporal human gestation has long been the subject of dystopian fiction and film. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic ‘Brave New World’ opens in a ‘hatchery’, where designer humans are grown in bottles to create a new caste-based society. In the science-fiction classic…

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    E+T Magazine

  • View from Washington: Timnit Gebru isn't going away any time soon

    Former Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru has unveiled an interdisciplinary research group that aims to highlight some of the key data-reliability challenges facing artificial intelligence and how they are treated in the design process. The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) launched yesterday (2 December) with a goal to “encourage a research process that analyses [AI research’s] end goal and potential risks and harms from the start”. Gebru has become one of the main voices warning about bias embedded in datasets, particularly those claimed to be so big that they dilute the risk. ' On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? ', a paper she co-authored and which prompted her controversial departure from Google, provided evidence to suggest that the reverse…

  • View from India: Going forward with the economy

    As per media reports, the fiscal deficit is estimated at 6.8 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) for the current financial year ending on 31 March 2022. Official data from the government indicates that India's GDP growth stood at 8.4 per cent in Q2 of 2021-22; this could point to the fact that the economy has gained momentum and even surpassed the pre-Covid level. The GDP numbers look encouraging and many factors could be responsible for it. Perhaps it could be attributed to the large community of citizens (117 crore, or 1.17 billion) who have been vaccinated. Infrastructure investments may also have contributed: the government has rolled out the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme to boost the manufacturing industry. PLI schemes are also a means of promoting the government…

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  • ‘With 5G the whole of society is the main stakeholder’: Alain Mourad

    Checking the digital cartography app on my smartphone just outside London’s Old Street tube station, I can see that my device is flicking intermittently between 3G and 4G. This is not particularly helpful in getting Google Maps to help me navigate on foot around Old Street’s notoriously complex pedestrian junction. It’s also embarrassing, because I’m running late for my appointment with one of the world’s leading experts on mobile cellular technology network standards, InterDigital’s Head of Future Wireless Dr Alain Mourad. Thought leader, inventor and holder of more than 50 patents in this technology space, he’s making time to bring me up to speed on the fifth generation (‘5G’) of the standard, 6G and maybe beyond. With my smartphone barely able to make a phone call, it’s not a good omen…

  • Coastal life finds a way in ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’

    Gyres of ocean plastic accumulate when surface currents drive floating plastic pollution from coasts towards regions of the ocean, rotate and trap the floating objects. There are at least five plastic-infested gyres, the largest of which is the 79,000-tonne North Pacific Subtropical Gyre between California and Hawai’i, commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. This contains microplastics and floating debris such as nets, bottles, and buoys – and now coastal species. “The issues of plastic go beyond just ingestion and entanglement,” said Dr Linsey Haram, lead author of the Nature Communications study on the adaptive coastal species. “It’s creating opportunities for coastal species’ biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible.” Haram and her colleagues…

  • UK railways are getting more innovative, survey of experts finds

    The survey of 321 rail experts, conducted by the Railway Industry Association (RIA), revealed that 62 per cent of respondents in 2021 believed rail is ‘extremely, very or quite innovative’, a 12 per cent increase from 2019. For the current five-yearly funding cycle, Network Rail has allocated £245m for research and development projects. The money is being spent on various efforts including digitising the railways as demand for services continues to rise, creating algorithms to improve safety and “intelligent” infrastructure that can detect problems with passing trains. But while the survey showed that confidence in rail innovation is on the rise, the sector was seen as less innovative than the automotive, transport, finance and defence sectors, even though it had seen the largest swing…

  • What can government do to give engineering a post-Covid boost?

    The UK engineering sector has been through a torrid time in the past 18 months. From project cancellations to a growing skills gap, the industry is in need of government support, but the Autumn Budget brought mixed news for the sector. Some skills funding was announced, but critical R&D spending was postponed. How can the government best support engineering businesses? First, the industry has a pressing skills gap that means it is experiencing the second-highest rate of vacancies behind the IT/computing sector, highlighting how vital it is to address this shortage sooner rather than later. The announcement of an additional £3.8 billion in funding to improve apprenticeships and T Levels is welcome news because many engineering qualifications fall into vocational education. However, EngineeringUK…

  • Airbus and Boeing to embrace hydrogen from mid-2030s

    Aviation is a notoriously hard-to-abate sector, with many environmental campaigners and experts arguing that there is no choice but to reduce flying in order to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Most efforts to reduce emissions at present are focused on increasing the fraction of fuel sourced sustainably, although sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) remains relatively inaccessible and expensive. Airbus has sought to lead in the transition to greener aviation, demonstrating zero-emission aircraft concepts last year (eschewing batteries in favour of hydrogen) which it said could enter service by 2035. For its part, Boeing has been more cautious in its public statements regarding the long-term switch to battery and hydrogen-powered aircraft. The latter has said that it is too early to think…

  • Lunar rover prototype jointly developed between Nissan and JAXA

    The JAXA Space Exploration Innovation Hub Center is conducting research on lunar rovers – a key technology for space exploration. Nissan has been working with JAXA on driving controllability of the rovers since January 2020. A lunar rover must be able to traverse the Moon's powdery, rocky and undulating terrain and be energy efficient. Furthermore, energy sources for operating vehicles in space are limited. Nissan has brought its all-wheel EV precision control technology to bear on boosting the rover’s surface driving performance. Image credit: , Nissan's research applies the motor control technology it has developed through its production of mass-market electric vehicles, such as the Leaf car, as well as the e-4ORCE all-wheel control technology featured on its…

  • Autonomous robot detects when people are breaking Covid distancing rules

    Previous research has shown that staying at least two metres apart from others can reduce the spread of Covid-19. Technology-based methods – such as strategies using WiFi and Bluetooth – hold promise to help detect and discourage lapses in social distancing. However, many such approaches require participation from individuals or existing infrastructure, so robots have emerged as a potential tool for addressing social distancing in crowds. The new autonomous mobile robot does not require participation and is able to detect breaches and navigate to them using its own Red Green Blue-Depth (RGB-D) camera and 2D lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor. The robot is capable of detecting when people in a crowd are too close to each other Image credit: SATHYAMOORTHY…

  • Gadgets: Aqua Optima Aurora, Grundig FiberCatcher, AKG Ara mic and more

    Aqua Optima Aurora Does your home office need a water cooler moment? This dispenses chilled, filtered water at the touch of a button and boiling water for a near-instant brew. It filters out impurities including microplastics and saves you from boiling too much in the kettle. £199.99 aqua-optima.com Read Caramel’s hands-on review of the Aqua Optima Aurora. Grundig FiberCatcher The world’s first washing machine that catches microfibres, keeping them out of the oceans and food chain. During synthetic wash cycles, it captures up to 90 per cent of synthetic microfibres in an integrated filter; when full, it’s returned to Grundig for specialist recycling. From £499 grundig.co.uk AKG Ara ...

  • Parrot-inspired robot flies, grabs, and perches

    The ability of birds to grasp onto branches of almost any size, shape, and texture should not be taken for granted. It was this ability that fascinated teams of Stanford University engineers who had previously developed technologies inspired by animal abilities. “It’s not easy to mimic how birds fly and perch,” said Dr William Roderick, who was a PhD student at Stanford. “After millions of years of evolution, they make take-off and landing look so easy, even among all of the complexity and variability of the tree branches you would find in a forest.” However, years of study on biomimetic robots in Stanford labs has enabled the construction of a perching robot. When attached to a quadcopter drone, this “stereotyped nature-inspired aerial grasper” (SNAG) forms a flying, catching and carrying…

  • Hands-on gadget review: Aqua Optima Aurora

    Working from home is great. I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years, not just since Covid. But one of the things I still miss is ‘water cooler moments’. Not just to chat with co-workers, but to grab a drink instantly. At the touch of a button, the Aqua Optima Aurora dispenses refreshing cold water and also near-instant steaming hot water for cuppas. Both are filtered. It’s like a worktop version of the boiling/chilled water taps you can have installed at the kitchen sink. And there are pros and cons to this alternative. The cons are that it takes up worktop space: it’s about the size of a coffee machine (336mm x 221mm x404mm HxWxD). And you need to refill its reservoir regularly, whereas boiling water taps are plumbed into the mains. The pros are that it’s cheaper than a boiling…

  • Apple cuts iPhone 13 manufacturing targets due to slowing demand

    Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the news organisation said that Apple had told its suppliers not to expect a surge in demand early next year, and that it may not reach the kind of “blockbuster” sales targets originally envisioned. Apple had already been forced to cut production on the iPhone 13 , which was revealed in September, due to the global chip shortage. It reportedly reduced the number of devices it planned to manufacture by 10 million, down from an original target of 90 million. The chip shortage is expected to create a bottleneck for manufacturers lasting through at least 2022 and possibly beyond. As well as consumer technology, it has also impacted automakers like Toyota, which was forced to slash vehicle production by 40 per cent in September . Even with supplies…

  • Letters to the editor: volume 16, issue 12

    Climate challenge is too urgent to ignore hydrogen The main objective to have emerged from the recent COP26 United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow is to ensure that global temperature rise is limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. The temperature is already 1.1°C above and we see disastrous floods, droughts, fires, ice-melts in polar regions, disappearing permafrosts and immensely powerful storms. So at 1.5°C all these effects will be increased – a frightening prospect. Although some countries have made promises to reduce coal extraction, burning methane and deforesting by 2030, they have generally been quiet about oil extraction. It is so urgent that fossil fuels are left in the ground. Hot and sunny countries like Saudi Arabia and India should surely be producing…

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    E+T Magazine

  • Neolithic settlement opens virtually to public via digital model

    The digital model of Skara Brae was created through a process of laser scanning, using ultra-fast, high-resolution laser scanners which capture 3D spatial data in the form of a point cloud. To capture a photorealistic model, hundreds of overlapping images of the site were combined with the spatial data (photogrammetry). The model - which is available now for anyone to view on Sketchfab - allows visitors to explore the Neolithic site, including the opportunity to gain virtual access to 'House Seven', the best-preserved house at Skara Brae and one not normally accessible to the public. Skara Brae is over 5,000 years old. It was first uncovered by a storm in 1850. It is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe, with preserved details including furniture inside the houses.…

  • 2021 has been a record year for renewable energy growth, IEA report finds

    Despite rising costs for key materials used to make solar panels and wind turbines, new renewable power capacity is forecast to rise to 290 gigawatts (GW) this year, surpassing the previous all-time high set last year. By 2026, global renewable electricity capacity is forecast to rise more than 60 per cent from 2020 levels to over 4,800GW – equivalent to the current total global power capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear combined. Furthermore, the IEA anticipates that renewables will account for almost 95 per cent of the increase in global power capacity through to 2026, with solar PV alone providing more than half. The amount of renewable capacity added over the period of 2021 to 2026 is expected to be 50 per cent higher than from 2015 to 2020, largely driven by stronger support from…

  • Book review: ‘Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change’

    As I write these lines, one of the main news items in the British media is the spate of forest fires in Yakutia, also known as the Republic of Sakha. Ironically, this vast ‘autonomous’ territory in the far east of Russia is home to one of the world’s coldest permanently inhabited human settlements – the town of Oymyakon, where in winter temperatures routinely plunge below -60°C. Alas, this kind of sad irony is typical of many things Russian. In mid-August 2021, when I was reading an advance review copy of 'Klimat…', the fires had already torn through more than 4.2 million hectares of forest in Yakutia, sending enormous plumes of smoke as far as the North Pole and producing a record amount of carbon emissions, according to the European Union's Copernicus satellite monitoring unit. The Guardian…

  • ‘Fundamental’ changes needed to lower UK electricity carbon footprint, think-tank says

    The study from Tony Blair’s think-tank Institute for Global Change anticipates a “hugely expanded” role for the electricity sector in the coming years as it becomes the energy source for much of our transport and heating – replacing fossil fuels such as diesel and natural gas. However, the current electricity market is “not well placed to deliver these changes”, the study says, as it has been designed around fossil-fuel technologies. Current attempts to integrate new technologies involve “shoehorning” them into a market that is not designed for them. The report - Powering Ahead: The Need to Reform UK Energy Markets, authored by industry experts Tim Lord and Phil McNally - recommends more incentives for consumers to invest in decarbonisation or alter their energy usage patterns to fit the…

  • VR project set to simulate impact of explosions on structures

    The project, funded by the US Army Corps, will show military decision-makers how bombs, bullets and rockets impact structures, so they can reinforce buildings or build sturdier structures to withstand combat operations and protect people. As part of the study, Colorado State University engineer Dr Hussam Mahmoud will first visualise them falling apart. He will then work alongside the Army Corps of Engineers to simulate these impacts in VR, with the aim to present these findings to army officials and those within the construction industry. “Understanding the material properties, how these buildings were built and the type of load they can take without collapsing, is really important to develop good strategies for combat operations,” said Mahmoud, an associate professor in the Department…

  • Sponsored: Putting “energy efficiency first” into practice

    In September 2021, the European Commission published new guidance aimed at moving its “energy efficiency first” concept from principle into practice. An immediate possibility is to use variable speed drives (VSDs) to control industrial electric motors. In typical applications this can cut energy consumption by 25%. Furthermore, if the drives feature the latest ultra-low harmonic (ULH) technology they can improve power factor for further gains in energy efficiency. Things gets even better when drives are paired with one of the latest IE5 (ultra-premium efficiency rated) synchronous reluctance (SynRM) motors. Equipment using electric motors consumes around 45% of the world’s electricity, and accounts for about 70% of industry’s consumption, so the opportunity for positive change is huge. Far…

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