• Letters to the editor: volume 18, issue 1

    Can we ever achieve a zero-waste economy? Reading the article ‘Is Chemical Recycling Greenwashing?’ in the December 2022 issue of E&T, I wondered why landfilling plastic waste does not qualify as a method of carbon capture. If plastics are made ultimately from hydrocarbons and if they last for millions of years in the environment, as is so often the complaint of green campaigners, then why not make a virtue of it? I dutifully recycle because it reduces my waste-collection bill and by now I have internalised the habit and its innate ‘goodness’. However, I long ago realised that it means I am also donating my time and some of my money to the cause as I wash the items in hot water and detergent to clean them first. I also fear that much of what I recycle ends up in developing nations and eventually…

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  • Why 2023 promises great expectations in a value-driven EV market

    It may still seem as if electric vehicles (EVs) have made little progress in the wider market, with reports showing only two models in the list of the UK’s top-selling cars for 2022. Based on data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), this could be the result of different factors that are currently affecting the automotive industry, including rising inflation and cost of raw materials. With the cost-of-living crisis also influencing consumers’ approach when shopping for a new car, what can EV manufacturers do to differentiate their offerings and win market share in 2023? The public are are more aware of EVs than ever before, driven partly by rising fuel costs and their own response to the climate crisis, and many are now looking to switch their internal combustion engine…

  • Royal Mail hit by Russia-linked cyber attack

    Royal Mail has been unable to send letters and parcels overseas since Wednesday (11 January) due to a ransomware attack that affected its computer systems.  The organisation has advised people not to try to send international letters and parcels until the issue is resolved. The attack has been claimed by L ockBit, a hacker group widely thought to have close links to Russia. According to The Telegraph, the group was able to get the p rinters at a Royal Mail distribution site near Belfast in Northern Ireland to start printing ransom notes that threatened to publish the stolen information online. The note said: “Lockbit Black Ransomware. Your data are stolen and encrypted.” The back office system affected is the one used by Royal Mail to prepare mail for despatch abroad, and to track and…

  • 2025 gas boiler ban proposed in UK government’s net zero review

    Tory MP Chris Skidmore, the chair of the Net Zero Review, was tasked by the Liz Truss administration in September last year to develop recommendations on how the UK could improve its net-zero efforts. It includes energy efficiency proposals that would ensure that all homes sold by 2033 would be able to demonstrate an EPC rating of at least C. It also proposes a 10-year plan to ensure heat pumps become more widespread throughout the UK and the banning of new gas boiler installations from 2025. A new infrastructure strategy should be implemented by 2025 that supports adaptation for new green energy sources such as hydrogen and other liquid and gaseous fuels, the report recommends. It also suggests a series of tax incentives to encourage businesses to invest in decarbonisation, including…

  • Renewables industry calls for grid investment as delays threaten net zero

    Speaking in front of a cross party group of MPs this week, Chis Hewett, chief executive of Solar Energy UK, said investment in the transmission grid “is in the interest of the consumer, businesses and the taxpayer”. He added that the UK must invest in the grid “to get renewables into the system as soon as we possibly can because that’s the cheapest power and that will bring everyone’s’ bills down”. In written evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), the solar trade body said it had received extensive reports of solar projects being delayed – sometimes into the 2030s – because distribution network operators (DNOs) could not connect them. Solar Energy UK said it knew of more than 40 projects and 3.5GW of capacity which had been impacted or delayed by grid connection problems,…

  • Europe’s largest rare earth deposit found in Sweden

    Swedish government-owned LKAB has found a deposit containing over a million tonnes of rare earth oxides in the Artic region of Sweden.  The deposit has been hailed as "decisive" for the green transition, given the expected rise in demand for electric vehicles and wind turbines, which depend on these materials for their manufacture. “This is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements in our part of the world, and it could become a significant building block for producing the critical raw materials that are absolutely crucial to enable the green transition,” said LKAB chief executive Jan Mostrom. “Without mines, there can be no electric vehicles.” Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth metals is located in the Kiruna area / LKAB Image credit: LKAB Rare

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  • Survey shows STEM skills still in short supply

    As the sluggish post-pandemic rebound combines with the economic drag of rising inflation, the Brexit hangover and a global energy crisis, the engineering employment market should be a perfect storm. And yet, salaries in the technology sector are continuing to rise, while on the job market demand for tech talent is outstripping supply. Almost half of filled vacancies are ‘ghosted’ by candidates receiving better offers, and six-figure salaries are becoming commonplace. Also, the same personnel increasingly want to work remotely. This picture is drawn using findings from online technology talent recruitment consultant hackajob, whose inaugural annual Marketplace Monitor presents an analysis of thousands of jobs based in the UK (including global remote hires) in an effort to understand technical…

  • Smart appliances become hacking risk due to poor update policies

    The firm analysed products including washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, smartphones, printers and smartwatches and found that hardly any brands came close to matching expected lifespans with their smart update policies. The failure to update their cyber defences also leaves some of the products open to hacking, Which? warned. Many brands were found to not give any guarantees, meaning consumers were unaware how long their appliance would be supported upon purchase. Appliances with smart home integration typically cost more than their non-smart counterparts – for example, a smart dishwasher costs on average nearly £300 more upfront, at £746 versus £455 119 product brands were surveyed about their update support policies and it was found that in most cases, the support period…

  • Back Story: Grazia Vittadini, ‘There is so much room for the heart in STEM’

    Shini Somara: What was your path into aviation and aerospace? Grazia Vittadini: My career path hasn’t quite followed a straight line, there were plenty of zigzags, but I have always loved aeroplanes, even as a child. Later on, I had a motorcycle, which I kept dismantling, rebuilding and optimising. I actually wanted to be a jet fighter pilot at that time, but the Italian Air Force didn’t allow women to fly. I applied nonetheless and, of course, was rejected. The unfairness of this prompted me to promise myself that if I couldn’t fly planes, then I was going to build them instead. That’s what brought me to aerospace engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, where I specialised in aerodynamics. Subsequently, I followed the professional opportunities which presented themselves and, after two…

  • Ocular lens could detect early-stage Alzheimer's

    The team is based at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) in collaboration with Yonsei University.  The lens is considered Korea's first smart intraocular lens technology, capable of diagnosing Alzheimer's, a degenerative brain disease, at its early stages. It works by being inserted into the eye to detect biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, as well as other neurological and degenerative brain diseases.  To detect these biomarkers, the researchers focused on the characteristics of the eye, which is directly connected to the brain. They developed an implantable biosensing system by mounting a bioresponsive hydrogel-based sensing module capable of detecting various biomarkers on an intraocular lens to express a signal in a moiré pattern. When the hydrogel pattern reacted…

  • EV makers and suppliers must prepare for a more contentious world

    The innovative world of automotive manufacturing could be about to get a lot more contentious due to disruption led by electric vehicles, lower barriers to entry and the divergence of global supply chains. Established automakers and leading OEMs could end up losing ground to agile new entrants if they fail to adequately prepare. The global automotive industry is undergoing a period of rapid technological and manufacturing transformation. Electrification, digitalisation, autonomy and connectivity are reducing the dominance of established OEMs and introducing greater uncertainty about the shape of the industry, particularly in the fast-growing EV market. The emergence of new technologies has encouraged a number of start-ups and non-traditional players to enter the market. Changes in the technological…

  • Fossil fuels firms should pay to have their emissions cleaned, study says

    Requiring fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up their carbon emissions could help curb dangerous global warming at a relatively affordable cost, a group of scientists from Oxford, the US and the Netherlands have suggested.  To do this, the firms should be required to offset emissions from all fossil fuels extracted or imported into a region, country or bloc by storing the same amount of carbon back underground. “The technology exists – what has always been lacking is effective policy,” said Myles Allen, a professor of geosystems science at the University of Oxford and one of the scientists behind the proposal. “The failure has been policy, not technology – we know how to do this.” The approach already exists in other areas such as plastic packaging or electrical goods, where firms…

  • Thousands of US flights grounded over database mishap

    As of last night, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was still trying to determine the root cause of the 'Notice to Air Missions' (NOTAM) system outage. NOTAM is used to alert aircraft pilots of potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight. It includes data on a raft of different hazards such as rocket launches; flights by important people, such as heads of state; closed runways; military exercises, and a whole host of other events which could disrupt a flight. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file,” the FAA said. “At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber-attack.” A senior official briefed on the internal review told ABC News that an engineer “replaced one file with another” without realising the mistake…

  • Satellite data detects hidden waste sites leaking into waterways

    Every year, millions of metric tons of plastic waste end up in oceans, harming hundreds of species and their ecosystems. Most of this waste comes from land-based sources that leak into watersheds. Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers said that efforts to address this issue require better understanding of where people dispose of waste on land. Current resources to detect and monitor such sites - both official sites and informal or illegal ones - are lacking. In recent years, the use of computational tools such as neural networks have been used to analyse satellite data to get a greater understanding of the Earth’s surface. Researcher Caleb Kruse, of Earthrise Media, California, developed a new system of neural networks to analyse data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel…

  • Are Big Tech hiring or firing?

    Redundancies are an inevitable consequence of tough economic times. Some 70 per cent of business costs are typically spent on staff, so it makes sense that people are the first to go when cutbacks are being made. It came as no surprise, then, that as the current economic crisis came starkly into view, news of layoffs began trickling in. What was surprising, and somewhat unprecedented, was just how far those mass layoffs would spread. And how even the likes of Big Tech would not be immune to this trend. At the time of writing, the number of tech job cuts worldwide in 2022 has exceeded 142,000, and 85,000 of those have come from the US, according to layoffs.fyi and Crunchbase figures. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, known under the acronym FAANG, have each responded to the downturn…

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  • James Webb Telescope gives insights into the formation of the first stars

    The image shows a young cluster of stars named NGC 346, which is located  the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way more than 200,000 light-years from Earth. NGC 346 is interesting to astronomers because it resembles the conditions of the early universe when the majority of stars formed.  For this reason, a stronomers believe studying this region could help shed light on how the first stars formed during the “cosmic noon”, which is only two or three billion years after the Big Bang. "We're seeing the building blocks, not only of stars but also potentially of planets," said Guido De Marchi, of the European Space Agency, and a co-investigator on the research team. “And since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon,…

  • Engineering skills crisis: a multi-pronged problem

    When it comes to determining whether the UK has enough engineers to do the jobs it needs, there is no shortage of surveys that suggest it has to do a lot more to get them. Based on data from the British Chambers of Commerce, the Open University concluded in June 2022 that almost 90 per cent of large employers and more than two-thirds of small and medium-sized enterprises are facing skills shortages. The majority of employers said the shortages are piling pressure on staff and reducing output and profitability. In engineering specifically, the 2021 Skills Survey conducted by the IET found two-thirds of those questioned reported gaps they were having trouble filling. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, there were clear shortages according to several bodies and that has grown worse in the…

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    E+T Magazine

  • Hands-on review: Zhiyun Smooth 5S smartphone gimbal

    Twelve months is a long time in Zhiyun World. The Smooth 5S – launched late last year – is the Chinese brand's successor to the Smooth 5 , which itself had been released towards the end of 2021 to replace the Smooth 4. And so it goes. The annual cycle of rebirth and renewal continues with the Smooth 5S. As a smartphone gimbal, the 5S is Smooth by name, smooth by nature. Smooth as in silky. With updated algorithms controlling the steel motors, it has the mechanical chops to cope with today's Pro Max monster phones – although the bigger the phone, the tighter the fit. If your phone is at the outer limits of size and weight, you will be Max-ing the envelope of what is possible. Available in either a striking white or smokey-grey colourway (we tested the more subtle/sober grey), the overall…

  • View from India: Research to improve daily lives

    The frontiers of research could probably reach a higher realm with some doses of encouragement. The research fraternity requires funding to work on solutions for the betterment of people. The UN’s 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDG) are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere. “To realise this goal, we need to encourage researchers by creating opportunities and a befitting environment for them to work. Besides political support, the financial investment should increase,” said S. Gopalakrishnan, president of the Board of Trustees, Infosys Science Foundation, and co-founder of Infosys Ltd, speaking at the 2022 Infosys Prize Ceremony. Private-public-philanthropic collaboration could lead to improved funding…

  • China regulates deepfake technology

    China will begin enforcing its strict new rules around the creation of deepfakes from today, 11 January 2023.  Deepfakes are images and videos which combine mixed source material to produce a synthetic result . They allow users to replace one person's face with another in a video, or to put words into a speaker's mouth, with their ability to pass as convincing realities sometimes outpacing the progress of tools to spot them effectively. In March 2022, a poor-quality deepfake of President Volodymyr Zelensky announcing Ukraine’s surrender to Russia surfaced on social media for a brief round of ridicule, before being removed. Due to their realism, deepfakes have come into question and sparked disinformation fears around the globe. In December 2022, the Cyberspace Administration of China…

  • US, Canada and Mexico to bolster chips and hydrogen industries

    In a series of talks taking place in Mexico City over the North American Leaders Summit (NALS), the US, Mexico, and Canada have agreed on a set of deliverables that focus on working together to tackle challenges ranging from immigration to the climate crisis.  US President Biden, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said the summit was an opportunity to promote "a common vision for North America". In a  fact sheet , the White House laid out the details of the partnership, with the first item on the agenda being  an initiative designed to bolster North American semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. The effort is expected to kick off with the "first-ever trilateral semiconductor forum" in early 2023, during which the Biden Administration…

  • Google, GM and Ford partner in push for ‘virtual power plants’

    The companies have made a commitment to  work together to establish standards for scaling up the use of VPPs - systems for easing the load on electricity grids when supply is short. The initiative, known as the ‘Virtual Power Plant Partnership’ (VP3), will be hosted by e nergy transition nonprofit the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) with a view to helping advance affordable, reliable electric sector decarbonisation and increase the resiliency of the energy grid.   The firms involved in VP3 include Ford, General Motors, Google Nest, OhmConnect, Olivine, SPAN, SunPower, Sunrun, SwitchDin, and Virtual Peaker.  "Virtual power plants will enable grid planners and grid operators to (better manage) growing electricity demand from vehicles, from buildings and from industry, and make sure that…

  • Government proposes stringent minimum efficiency standards for lighting

    The proposals would introduce performance standards that are higher than regulations currently in place in either the US or EU. Switching to more efficient lighting can save a household around £2,000 to £3,000 over the lifetime of the bulbs, depending on the size of the home. The EU instituted a ban on the sale of halogen bulbs in 2018 and the UK is banning high-energy fluorescent lightbulbs from September 2023. The higher standards being proposed would see only the most energy-efficient light bulbs, such as ones powered by low-energy-use LEDs, available in shops. LEDs are capable of turning about 70 per cent of their energy into light which makes them much more efficient than other bulbs, which waste a lot of energy by turning it into heat. It only takes a 6-watt LED bulb to produce…

  • ‘Worrying decline’ in engineering apprenticeships sparks inquiry

    Lord Knight, a former Labour education minister, and Lord Willetts, former Conservative universities minister, have urged employers, training providers and young people to get involved in a ‘call for evidence’. They want their views, evidence and ideas on how to improve the UK’s apprenticeship offerings in these sectors.   Despite a modest uptick in numbers last year, engineering-related apprenticeship starts in England are still 9 per cent lower than in 2014/15. The uptake varies by subject, but engineering and manufacturing technologies in particular have seen a 34 per cent decline. “Apprenticeships, especially in engineering and technology, enjoy enormous political and media support and are a crucial route into work for many people,” Lord Willets said. “Meanwhile the number of young…

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