• Letters to the editor: volume 16, issue 8

    Vehicle use data needs to be realistic The conclusions reported in the story  ‘Most UK cars only driven for one hour a day leaving ample time for EV charging’  on the E&T website are misleading, given that so many properties built in the 1950s, ’60s and even ’70s did not provide off-road parking. Many that did had garages separate from the main dwelling with no possibility of providing mains electricity, making it difficult to provide EV-charging facilities without considerable expense. This article would provide a more balanced view of the opportunities for EV parking if the percentage of time vehicles were parked could be modified to include off-road parking that has access to mains electricity. This would show how many vehicles could not have the option of being charged while parked…

    IET EngX
    IET EngX

  • Gadgets: Trust Taxon webcam, Sony SRS-NB10, MyndPlay MyndBand and more

    Trust Taxon webcam Image credit: Trust A webcam with a 2K camera to improve the quality of your video calls. Its 80° wide-angle glass lens takes more in, while a sliding lens cover offers privacy. Twin noise-cancelling mics ensure sound is equally well handled. It’s designed to hook over the top of your screen or sit on the table at an adjustable angle; it works with a tripod, too. Read Caramel’s hands-on review £69.99 trust.com The Little Botanical Living Art Image credit: Little Botanical This stunning living wall is a picture frame-style planter, made from recycled plastic. Its built-in reservoir waters the plants for up...

  • Child-friendly changes coming to Google Search and YouTube

    Among the measures, videos uploaded to YouTube by users under the age of 18 will be set to private by default, meaning that they may only be viewed by themselves and users who receive a link. However, the uploader can still choose to adjust the settings, if they wish, to make the content available to the general public. YouTube will also switch existing settings to disable autoplay and provide young users with break and bedtime reminders to discourage compulsive binge-watching. Google is also planning to make changes to Google Search. New rules for Google Images will enable anyone under the age of 18 or their parent or guardian to request that their photo is removed from results. Regarding data protection, Google will switch off location history – without the option to turn it back on…

  • Banks rapidly adopting AI to detect and counter money laundering

    The study by SAS, KPMG and the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS), surveyed more than 850 ACAMS members worldwide about their use of technology to detect money laundering, which amounts to around 2 to 5 per cent of global GDP – or $800bn to $2tr – annually. 57 per cent of respondents said they had already deployed either AI or ML into their anti-money laundering compliance processes or are piloting solutions that they plan to implement in the next 12-18 months. “As regulators across the world increasingly judge financial institutions’ compliance efforts based on the effectiveness of the intelligence they provide to law enforcement, it’s no surprise 66 per cent of respondents believe regulators want their institutions to leverage AI and machine learning,”…

  • Barnacle-inspired medical glue halts bleeding

    The paste was inspired by barnacles, which use their cement glands to adhere to rocks, ships and larger animals and remain stubbornly in place despite being affixed to often contaminated, wet conditions and variable surfaces. They are able to do this due to the production of a type of oil matrix which cleans the surface and repels moisture, which is followed by production of a protein which cross-links them with the molecules of the surface. This two-step process was replicated in the quick-acting medical glue, which functions well in challenging sites covered with blood or other bodily fluids. Surgeons historically use a type of material to speed up coagulation and form a clot to halt bleeding, which takes several minutes at best. However, this paste can halt bleeding in as little as 15…

  • SpaceX buys tiny satellite firm in first public acquisition

    The purchase was revealed in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US. SpaceX has reportedly scooped up Swarm’s 30 employees alongside its network of 120 tiny satellites. The satellites are functioning as a wireless network providing continuous coverage across the planet for IoT devices, particularly in remote areas in industries such as agriculture and maritime. The service is somewhat analogous to SpaceX’s Starlink service, which has been designed to provide broadband internet using its own constellation of satellites. Starlink currently has 1,740 satellites in orbit, but more are planned before the rollout of its full commercial service, which has faced delays . The merger agreement, in which Swarm will become a direct and wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX…

  • Magnetic ‘millirobots’ climb and swim to deliver drugs to neural tissue

    The study investigated how the robots – 'Magnetically Aligned Nanorods In Alginate CapsuleS' (aka ‘Maniacs’) – could perform as drug delivery vehicles inside the body. It found that, when controlled using a magnetic field, the robots can move against fluid flow, climb slopes and move through neural tissue, such as the spinal cord, to deposit substances at precise locations. Disease in the central nervous system can be very difficult to treat. Lamar Mair of Weinberg Medical Physics, which partnered with the academics on the study, explained: “Delivering drugs orally or intravenously, for example, to target cancers or neurologic diseases, may affect regions of the body and nervous system that are unrelated to the disease. Targeted drug delivery may lead to improved efficacy and reduced side…

  • 2020 reduction in business carbon emissions offset by extra home energy usage

    Personal energy usage was found to have increased by around 37 per cent, largely balancing out business savings of 6 per cent on electricity and 1 per cent on gas, on average in 2020. Hospitality saw the largest fall in business consumption while manufacturing experienced just a 5 per cent reduction. The research found that many businesses may have unknowingly experienced an increase in total net energy consumption, when accounting for a remote workforce. Gazprom Energy is wholly owned by Russian oil producers Gazprom, the third largest carbon emitting firm in the world, according to a study from 2019. The business energy supplier said it wanted organisations to educate themselves on their true total consumption by taking employees’ working-from-home consumption into account, and has…

  • Where will the games industry find the 4D engineers it needs?

    Engineering provides fantastic possibilities, allowing us to create everything from infrastructure, roads and bridges, to bridges into entirely virtual worlds – and almost anything in between that we can imagine and make technically feasible. Too often, however, the world of engineers is siloed. Our educational path, intellectual curiosity and analytical rigour may be similar, but different fields of technology and engineering operate in separate disciplinary silos that could learn a lot from one another when it comes to tackling challenges facing the wider profession. Within engineering and computer science, the creation and development of online games remains a popular choice for graduates. Those of us in the video game industry have seen the past year supercharged by demand from consumers…

    IET EngX
    IET EngX

  • 25,000 webcams seized in Chinese anti-voyeurism crackdown

    The powerful Chinese internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), published a statement explaining that it has been working with various other government bodies on the crackdown, including the Ministry of Industry and IT, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration of Market Regulation. The bodies are reportedly involved in widespread efforts to curb voyeurism conducted online such as “trading private videos”, Reuters reported. In addition to the dozens of arrests and the seizure of 25,000 webcams, the CAC said that online platforms have “cleaned up” more than 8,000 pieces of information associated with illegal voyeurism and taken action against 134 accounts associated with the activity. Meanwhile, e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com cooperated…

  • UN climate report must be ‘death knell’ for fossil fuels

    The summary report  from the IPCC provides a comprehensive picture of the impact human activity is having on the climate, bringing together climate data and physical sciences expertise from around the world, including drawing on the findings of more than 14,000 technical papers. The 4,000-page report – the first instalment of the IPCC’s sixth assessment since the 1980s and the first since 2013 – has been approved by representatives of 195 governments prior to its publication. At the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November this year, governments will present their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions aligned with the Paris Agreement target of keeping temperature rises within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Remaining within this target temperature rise could help avoid the…

  • Wind turbine plant in Hull gets government funding to support expansion

    Siemens said the upgrade of its operation on the Humber, which was first announced earlier this year, will create 200 direct new jobs as part of a £186m total investment. For its part, the UK government has said that Siemens Gamesa will receive grant funding from its £160m 'Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Support' scheme. The Hull plant, in Alexandra Dock, is the largest offshore wind manufacturing facility in the UK, employing around 1,000 people. It has built more than 1,500 offshore wind turbine blades since it opened in 2016 and Siemens Gamesa said the new investment will mean the operation will continue to be a major driver of economic growth in the Yorkshire and the Humber region. The giant turbines are used in wind farms already being constructed in the North Sea, as well…

  • Scottish weather data could help improve self-driving cars

    Professor Andrew Wallace and Dr Sen Wang, from Heriot-Watt University, chased rain, snow, and fog around the rural northern roads and the urban sprawl of Edinburgh to gather the data. As part of the road trip, the two researchers kitted out a van with light detection and ranging (lidar) radar, stereo cameras, and geo-positioning devices. The technology produced a new dataset of three hours’ worth of radar images and 200,000 tagged road objects, including other vehicles and pedestrians. Image credit: Heriot-Watt University According to the researchers, the information will be valuable to manufacturers and researchers of driverless vehicles as most public data currently available is based on sunny, clear days. It has also relied mainly on data collected from optical…

  • Fibre-optic cables could be carried through UK water pipes

    The £4m trial will examine whether passing cables through water pipes could improve connectivity for homes, businesses and mobile masts. Digging for cable laying is an expensive and disruptive process; civil works such as installing new ducts and poles can comprise up to four-fifths of the cost of building new gigabit-capable broadband networks. Fibre cable has been deployed in the water pipes of other countries, such as Spain, and broadband providers are already using existing infrastructure in England to lay cable, including electricity poles. If the project is successful, broadband firms could gain access to more than one million kilometres of underground utility ducts – not just water, but also electricity, gas and sewage – to help their rollout of gigabit-speed broadband. “The cost…

    IET EngX
    IET EngX

  • View from India: Data readiness and AI strategies for future growth

    It’s a known fact that many big companies have leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and enjoyed a significant return on investment (ROI). The power of automating and streamlining processes is so strong that AI strategies are increasingly aligned with business goals. Customer satisfaction, minimal errors and better performance levels are some of its outcomes. Cloud migration has also helped cut costs. There appears to be the notion that only large corporations need to automate processes and that smaller ones needn’t necessarily adopt frontier technologies. To that effect, many fledgling companies treat AI with skepticism. Moreover, many of them don’t have the wherewithal or skill sets to handle AI-cloud solutions. Other hurdles present themselves. The cost of scaling-up operations…

  • Hands-on review: Fauna audio glasses

    Arguably, Google didn’t initially do the optical trade much of a service when it released its publicly available SMART glasses back in 2014. While a brave and necessary step in the march towards facially adorned tech, it separated the world into the geeks and the rest, exacerbated by the futuristic styling. While smart glasses continue to be developed in less obtrusive styles, those offering more exotic functions such as AR require cameras, electronics, and enough space on at least one lens to project images. The result is that they remain aesthetically clunky and still at the thin end of the market wedge that they will no doubt expand along in the future. Further up that wedge are audio glasses. Although still more novelty than mainstream, the amount of real estate required for sensors…

  • Freeze-dried mouse sperm sent via postcard

    “When I developed this method for preserving mouse sperm by freeze drying it on a sheet, I thought that it should be able to be mailed on a postcard and so when offspring were actually born after being mailed, I was very impressed,” said the University of Yamanashi’s Professor Daiyu Ito, first author of the iScience paper . “The postcard strategy was easier and cheaper compared to any other method. We think the sperm never expected that the day would come when they would be in the mailbox.” Ito belongs to the laboratory of mouse-cloning expert Professor Teruhiku Wakayama. The group had previously become the first to freeze dry and preserve mammalian sperm, which was sent to the ISS for studies into the effect of space radiation on young mice. The semen samples were originally preserved…

  • Bamboo inspires new approach for rechargeable battery boost

    Professor Ziqi Sun, whose work involves mimicking the structural and optical properties of natural objects such as seashells, fish scales and fly eyes in order to develop sustainable energy solutions, was inspired in his latest project when he walked past a clump of bamboo in the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, in Australia. Professor Sun and a team of researchers - including QUT’s Dr Jun Mei, Professor Xiaomin Peng, Dr Qian Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhang and Associate Professor Ting Liao - published their research, 'Bamboo-Membrane Inspired Multilevel Ultrafast Interlayer Ion Transport for Superior Volumetric Energy Storage', in the journal Advanced Functional Materials  in May of this year. In the paper, the team explains how they were inspired by the multilayer membrane that runs up inside the bamboo…

  • Goodbye: A great run with open data

    In 2005,  Gijs de Vries , back then the European Union's first anti-terrorism coordinator, told  reporters : "You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services". De Vries was referring to the incorporation of domestic-security services into Europe's counter-terrorism analysis work. The thinking is good. Cross-disciplinary and collaborative intelligence analysis work increasingly pays off today outside governments, and De Vries's often cited quote rings true outside the anti-terrorism domain, especially in journalism. A new trend towards a more liberal approach to open-source information allows the public and journalists to take control of what people should know. Your humble correspondent argued for using open-source intelligence…

  • Government urged to block Cambo oil field ahead of COP26

    Authorities are weighing up proposals for oil and gas drilling from the Cambo oil field, in the North Atlantic just west of the Shetland Islands. The oil field is owned by Shell and private equity firm Siccar Point Energy. Licensing for fossil fuel exploration at Cambo was initially approved in 2001. If the project receives the full go-ahead, a further 150-170 million barrels of oil may be extracted from the site - the equivalent of running a coal-fired power station for more than 16 years. The site is expected to operate from 2022 until 2050. The decision is nominally in the hands of the Oil and Gas Authority and Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning, although government ministers are under pressure to intervene. While the government has recently introduced a…

  • Apple to search iCloud uploads for child sexual abuse content with ‘NeuralHash’

    Among the tools is a new technology that will allow Apple to detect known child sex abuse images stored in users’ iCloud Photo accounts and report them to law enforcement. The detection process will not involve indiscriminate manual inspection of users’ iCloud content. Instead, it will use a new tool called “NeuralHash” which is based on a database of hashes – a digital fingerprint which allows a unique piece of content to be identified but not reconstructed – which represent known images from a database provided by child safety organisations; the hashes will be stored locally. Other major tech companies - including Facebook, Microsoft and Google - already use the same database to detect child sex abuse content on their own platforms. The tool allows edited images similar to the originals…

  • Universities urged to be vigilant against cyber-security threats from essay mills

    The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) said essay-writing services could “dupe students” and cash in by hacking into university websites and placing content that appears legitimate. Essay-mill attackers typically write on student-facing pages with hyperlinks to their own websites or hijack links to legitimate services with redirects to contract cheating sites. US and Australian universities have already picked up on such activity and UK authorities could employ similar tactics, the watchdog warned. The sector has seen a spike in ransomware attacks. The QAA and education technology not-for-profit organisation Jisc have recently collaborated to raise awareness of the emerging threat and issue advice directly to higher education institutions. Essay mills, which are illegal…

  • ‘Carbon debt system’ proposed for polluting companies to encourage eco commitment

    In the research article, published in July in the journal Nature, the authors detailed a mechanism for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, inspired by the financial market. By treating greenhouse gas generation as a financial debt, any company that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would incur a carbon debt and must commit to removing its emissions. This commitment is called a ‘Carbon Removal Obligation (CRO)’ and carbon debtors would have to pay interest until their debts were cleared. The money raised in this way could be used to cover the default risks of the CROs and the potential environmental damage caused by such ‘borrowing’. This reflects the fact that carbon borrowing can lead to short-term increases in the carbon budget target temperatures of 1.5°C to 2°C targets considered…

  • Career-changing decisions empowered by AI tool

    The tool, created by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and UNSW Sydney, uses machine learning to identify and recommend jobs with similar underlying skill sets to a person’s current occupation. The system can also respond in real-time to changes in job demand and provide recommendations for the precise skills needed to transition to a new occupation. According to Dr Nikolas Dawson from the UTS Data Science Institute, while workplace change is inevitable, if experts can make the job transition process easier and more efficient there are significant productivity and equity benefits not only for individuals but also for businesses and government. “It can be a daunting proposition to switch to a new career, particularly for those who have been in the same job for a…

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