• Certain Covid changes here to stay, says Bank of England

    Andrew Bailey, the Bank's governer, said he believes that people are “adaptive creatures”, so many changes that have come about because of the Covid-19 pandemic are unlikely to go away any time soon. “We do see already evidence of a shift to labour-saving use of digital technology, which in itself raises measured productivity growth,” Bailey told the audience at an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference. “Probably the best example, certainly in the UK, of that is retailing. We saw a 10 percentage point increase in the share of online retailing last year,” he added, also noting that the previous 10-point increase had taken seven years. “Investment in intellectual property products, things like software and research and development, (is) holding up better than…

  • Summer STEM Challenge: Whack-a-Rat and the Rat-O-Matic

    The summer holidays are fast approaching. And while restrictions in the UK will be lifted in the weeks to come, there’s no reason why all those engineering families out there should stop engaging in interesting and fun DIY projects to do in the comfort of their own homes. So, continuing the challenges we set over the lockdowns, we present the Summer STEM Challenge to further encourage creative and practical thought in the summer (and hopefully warmer) months. This week, Lockdown Challenge’ s Neil Downie turns physics into what looks like magic with just a tube and a brush, with googly eyes. STEM Challenge #47: Whack-a-Rat and the Rat-O-Matic A magician puts a rat-shaped brush into the bottom of a drainpipe, and then, holding the pipe near the top, hits the top industriously with a hammer…

    IET EngX
    IET EngX

  • View from India: 5G on its way to India as smartphones remain popular

    The smartphone market has shown resilience during the pandemic and declined by just 4 per cent last year. Though the sales have decreased, the market has undergone a transition in the period from April 2020 to March 2021. “Snapshots of the wireless industry indicate that the total broadband subscribers in India are 778.09 million as of March 2021. The data consumption per subscriber per month is 13.5GB as of December 2020. This makes India the world’s highest data consumer,” said Vikram Tiwathia, deputy director general, Cellular Operator Association of India, speaking at ‘5G in India: Levelling Up Experiences and Accessibility,’ realme’s India 5G Webinar in partnership with Counterpoint Research. There is a pattern in the consumption of mobile phones. The average Indian user has used two…

  • Public needs to be engaged on net zero goals including lifestyle changes, MPs say

    The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee, a cross-party group of MPs, has made a series of recommendations in a new report. It states that the Government’s public engagement initiatives have been insufficient, a finding backed up by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Public Accounts Committee. The report also endorses the CCC’s call for the Government to publish a net zero Public Engagement Strategy, and to do so alongside the Net Zero Review. This should include detailed plans for education and engagement as well as greater opportunities for citizens' assemblies, citizens' juries and other methods, the body said. Climate Assembly UK (CAUK), a body composed of Britons from different areas and demographics, was created last year to make climate recommendations…

  • Most UK cars only driven for one hour a day leaving ample time for EV charging

    For the rest of the time the car or van is either parked at home (73 per cent) or parked elsewhere (23 per cent), for example at work, the body found. The analysis was revealed in its Standing Still report, which looks at data provided by net-zero analytics consultancy Field Dynamics and the Ordnance Survey, as well as government statistics. Steve Gooding, RAC Foundation director, said: “The average car is driven just one hour out of every 24, a proportion that is almost the same as it was back in 1995.” The report also found that around 18 million (65 per cent) of Britain’s 27.6 million households have the potential for off-street parking for at least one car or van, which gives significant opportunity for charging electric vehicles at home. Gooding continued: “This lack of use does…

  • UK ranks sixth globally for share of power generated by wind and solar

    Independent climate and energy think tank Ember conducted the assessment, which revealed the top 15 wind and solar power countries. It found that Denmark is leading the way, generating 61 per cent of its electricity from the two renewable sources, followed by Uruguay on 44 per cent. The UK comes in sixth in the ranking, behind Ireland, Germany and Spain, generating 29 per cent of its power from wind and solar in 2020, the analysis found. “Wind and solar will be the backbone of the electricity system of the future. Countries like the UK already prove that wind and solar are up to the job,” said Charles Moore, Ember’s Europe lead. The rankings come after Ember’s recent global electricity review, which revealed that wind and solar produced almost a tenth of the world’s electricity in 2020…

  • Competition watchdog may probe Motorola’s Airwave network for emergency services

    The Airwave network is used exclusively by emergency services for communications in the field. It is encrypted and secure and its exclusivity avoids possible congestion issues that can present themselves on commercial networks. The network was established in 2000 by BT before being acquired by Motorola for £817m in 2015. But in 2014, the UK decided to replace the network entirely with the ESN, which is 4G capable – allowing for more complex data operations to be transmitted by emergency services. While the ESN was supposed to come online by 2019, replacing Airwave, it has been beset by delays costing taxpayers nearly a £500bn a year in additional funds. With concerns that the delay could leave the UK’s emergency services with a “potentially catastrophic” six-month gap without their own…

  • EU fines major German car manufacturers over emission control collusion

    According to the European Commission, Daimler, BMW, VW, Audi, and Porsche avoided competing on technology to restrict pollution from petrol and diesel passenger cars. Daimler was not fined after it revealed the cartel to the European Commission. Meanwhile, all parties acknowledged their involvement in the cartel and agreed to settle the case. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said that even though the companies had the technology to cut harmful emissions beyond legal limits, all parties concerned avoided competing and denied consumers the chance to buy less polluting cars. The Commission said their decision to find the manufacturers was about how legitimate technical cooperation went wrong, stating that the entity does not tolerate collusion between companies. “It is illegal under…

  • ‘Climate Train’ to offer green travel option for COP26 delegates

    During their journey, the passengers will be invited to take part in a series of debates and seminars to draw attention to the important role that rail and sustainable travel can play in achieving the global 'Climate Change Goals'. While in Glasgow, they will also be able to see examples of the rail industry’s efforts to build even greener trains, including two running on hydrogen. The Climate Train initiative is a partnership between ProRail; Eurostar; NS; Avanti West Coast, and Youth for Sustainable Travel. Its aim is to bring together a diverse group from all over Europe, including young people; official delegations; mobility experts; NGOs, and representatives of the railway sector. A Eurostar service will start from Amsterdam Central on October 30 travelling via Rotterdam and Brussels…

  • Wearable patch for plants monitors diseases and damage in near real-time

    “We’ve created a wearable sensor that monitors plant stress and disease in a noninvasive way by measuring the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by plants,” said Qingshan Wei, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. Current methods of testing for plant stress or disease involve taking plant tissue samples and conducting tests on them in a lab. However, this only gives growers one measurement, and there is a time lag between when growers take a sample and when they get the test results. Plants emit different combinations of VOCs under different circumstances. By targeting VOCs that are relevant to specific diseases or plant stress, the sensors can alert users to specific problems. “Our technology monitors VOC emissions from the plant continuously, without harming the plant…

  • Urban greenery shown to reduce stress levels

    Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore used Virtual Reality (VR) to examine whether vertical greenery has a stress-buffering effect in urban environments. Using VR headsets, 111 participants were asked to walk down a virtual street for five minutes. Participants were randomly assigned to either a street that featured rows of planted greenery or one with only buildings that had green painted walls in place of green plants. To match a real-world experience, heavy traffic noise was played as the participants walked through the virtual street. Heart rate variability, which is a physiological indicator of stress, was continuously monitored using a portable electrocardiogram (ECG) device. The study found that those who viewed buildings which only had green paint experienced…

  • Engineers create protein circuits which respond in seconds

    The growing field of synthetic biology allows engineers to create cells which perform novel functions, such as by altering cells to express genes that can be triggered by a specific input. However, a drawback is the long delay between an input (such as detecting a molecule of interest) and the resulting output, due to the time required for cells to transcribe and translate the necessary genes. Now, synthetic biologists at MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have developed an alternative approach to designing such circuits, which uses fast, reversible protein-protein interactions. This removes the need to wait while genes are transcribed or translated into proteins, cutting working times to seconds. “We now have a methodology for designing protein interactions that occur at a very…

  • Computer servers’ climate impact lessened by elegant algorithm

    One of the flipsides of the world's burgeoning internet usage is its impact on climate due to the massive amount of electricity consumed by computer servers. Studies have demonstrated that global data centres consume more than 400 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. This accounts for approximately 2 per cent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions and currently equals all emissions from global air traffic. According to the Danish Council on Climate Change, a single large data centre consumes the equivalent of 4 per cent of Denmark's total electricity consumption. Furthermore, data centre electricity consumption is expected to double by 2025, resulting in increased emissions. Clearly, the green transition in IT is an urgent matter. Professor Mikkel Thorup and two fellow researchers…

  • UK urged to decarbonise railways with multi-billion-pound electrification plan

    In a new report, the body found that public expenditure has been rising steadily in recent years, with the railways receiving £5.1bn from taxpayers in 2019–20, a 99.7 per cent increase in real terms from 2015-16. This burden on public funds has been further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic – since March 2020, an estimated £8.5bn has been provided to the system. Statistics from the Office of Rail and Road in October showed that the number of rail journeys in the UK dropped by more than 400 million between April and June last year sit at levels not seen since the Victorian era . The PAC urged the Government to make “tough choices” and determine priorities for the future of rail as well as implement measures to ensure a net zero railway. Electrification of the network is the key mechanism…

  • View from Brussels: Jet fuel on EU’s tax radar

    Jet fuel’s enviable exemption from taxation dates back to the mid-1940s and the Chicago Convention, an international agreement set up to promote civil aviation. Politics and vested interests have prevented any major updates to the deal ever since. As the European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – mulls how to review all the bloc’s energy and climate laws to promote more emission cuts over the coming decade, kerosene’s free ride is standing out more and more as an inexplicable anomaly. The forthcoming rule changes will include shipping in emissions trading for the first time, slap a carbon price on fuel providers and aim to increase renewable power capacity. Those sectors are eyeing aviation and asking themselves why air travel is not on the radar. That is why the climate update…

  • Shortage of over-50s in IT ‘shows they need to reskill’

    The BCS said that this was well below the level of representation that could be considered “normal” and warned that it was an indicator of the digital skills gap – the lack of working-age people with sufficient digital skills to meet demand from employers – and the need for over-50s to reskill. If representation of over-50s in the IT sector was equal to the levels seen in other sectors, there would be an extra 119,000 IT specialists in the UK in this age group (480,000 in total), the study estimated. The BCS, which charters IT professionals, said the need for digital skills has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic as more firms relied on remote working, placing greater reliance on their IT departments. “The figure for over-50s working in IT is significantly lower than in other sectors…

  • How digitalisation will redefine industry’s approach to equipment monitoring

    The current pandemic has driven industrial businesses to reshape their service activities by embracing digital solutions that provide them with sharper business insights and long-term benefits. But even before the emergence of Covid-19, many companies were starting to re-evaluate their service philosophy, focusing on how to ensure the reliability of critical equipment such as drives and motors. The past year has seen that process accelerating as travel restrictions and the need for social distancing made it challenging to get service teams on site to carry out traditional maintenance and repair. The situation has given a major boost to digitalisation and remote-access-based services. Not only does digitalisation address the access problem, it also adds significant value by delivering sharper…

  • Nvidia launches supercomputer to advance healthcare research

    Dedicated to advancing healthcare, Cambridge-1 is a $100m (£74m) investment by Nvidia. Its first projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore include developing a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, using AI to design new drugs, and improving the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes. “Cambridge-1 will empower world-leading researchers in business and academia with the ability to perform their life’s work on the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, unlocking clues to disease and treatments at a scale and speed previously impossible in the UK,” said Jensen Huang, founder, and CEO of Nvidia. “The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the UK, but the impact will…

  • Hands-on review: Gigabyte Aero laptop

    If you’re a creative who doesn’t sit in the Apple camp then this is the laptop to buy. Like the latest MacBook Pro models, it is both powerful and pretty. Gigabyte has two different laptop ranges for power users: Aero for creatives and Aorus for gamers. Both feature state-of-the-art NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop graphics processors for stellar speed and energy efficiency. The energy-efficiency issue isn’t just greenwash for your tech – it really matters, because when computers think hard they tend to get hot. Nobody wants a hot lap while they’re working, or a loud fan. The Aero on test was impressively cool, yet quiet. There are two built-in fans but they’re really quiet; you don’t notice them. I tested the largest model in the Aero range, the flagship Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR, which…

  • UK’s largest chip plant acquired by Chinese-owned Nexperia

    Nexperia – a customer of NWF’s foundry services – became its second-largest shareholder in 2019. It has now completed the transaction to obtain 100 per cent ownership of the semiconductor production facility, the UK’s largest. NWF will be renamed Nexperia Newport. NWF is mainly based in Wales, with smaller manufacturing operations in Manchester and Hamburg. The fab was first built for Inmos in 1982 to manufacture transputers. It became NWF in 2017 and has received government backing as part of an effort to develop south Wales as a hub of expertise in compound semiconductors, which are faster and more energy efficient. When NWF recently failed to meet certain conditions of its supply contract with Nexperia, its partial owner exercised its right to appoint board directors and hence guide…

  • UK’s green industrial revolution plan ’10 times too unambitious’

    Dave Moxham, deputy general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, criticised the scale of the UK-wide plans while giving evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee this week. He described the government’s climate plan as “10 times too unambitious”. The plan, which was published in November 2020 , lays out 10 points to support a “green industrial revolution” in the UK. It aims to expand sectors such as hydrogen, offshore wind, EVs, and carbon capture and storage technology through the mobilisation of £12bn in funding. However, the Labour Party at the time noted that just £4bn of the proposed money was actually new and that the funding does not “remotely” meet the scale of what is necessary to tackle climate change and unemployment. “I’m just going to stick it out there; it’s 10…

  • Ransomware attack on networking provider affects 1,500 businesses

    The attack, which occurred on Friday (July 2), was reportedly executed by the Russian hacking group REvil who typically encrypt the files of victims before demanding a ransom payment to unlock them. The group said it wanted a $70m (£51m) payment to free the files “in less than an hour”. Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya, admitted that it was difficult to precisely determine the extent of the damage caused by the attack as the people affected were mostly customers of its own customers. The firm is working with the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to determine the root cause of the attack. “Our global teams are working around the clock to get our customers back up and running,” Voccola said. “We understand that every second they are shut down it impacts…

  • Riverside wetlands stop nitrates and fertilisers seeping into waterways

    Excessive nitrate or sediment levels can affect local fish populations and increase the cost to treat drinking water. The pollutants also find their way into water bodies downstream like a reservoir or the ocean and create algal blooms or hypoxic or ‘dead zones.’ According to the researchers, the dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico is directly correlated with nitrate that comes from the Mississippi River Basin. They compared different approaches to improving water quality, such as cutting runoff from farms and adding wetlands, then gauged the economic costs of each. Because most methods rely on voluntary participation by individual farms and are implemented by a patchwork of different agencies, the researchers found that they tend to be less effective. “Currently, there’s individual…

  • AI engine used by British Army during live-firing drill

    The tool was used by soldiers from the 20th Armoured Infantry Brigade during Exercise Spring Storm, as part of Operation Cabrit. Operation Cabrit is an annual Nato exercise which involves British soldiers working in conjunction with French, Danish and Estonian counterparts to tighten Euro-Atlantic security. During the event, held this year in Estonia, an AI engine was used by soldiers to carry out live-fire drills. The engine can rapidly process data to provide information about the environment and terrain, almost instantly providing useful insights to incorporate into planning. Major James McEvoy, who used the engine during the event, commented: “This was a fantastic opportunity to use a new and innovative piece of technology in a deployed environment. The kit was shown to outperform our…

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