• 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…

  • Summer STEM Challenge: Vacuum Pile-Driver

    STEM Challenge #51: The pile-driver run Pile-driving is like hammering nails into wood. Except the nails are 30cm or even metres in diameter and 10 or 50m long, and the wood is the Earth! Once in the ground, piles are joined together and form the foundations of buildings from skyscrapers to wind turbines. There are other ways, but a lot of piles are put in the ground by a falling weight. The weight – the hammer – is simply hauled up and then let drop. Here is how to make a pile-driver run off a vacuum cleaner that can hammer garden stakes and posts into the ground. A mains vacuum cleaner can put out about 200mbar pressure – 20 per cent of atmospheric pressure – and a flow rate of tens of litres/second. With this kind of power, up to ~10kg force on an 8cm pipe, a wooden hammer-piston of a…

    IET EngX
    IET EngX

  • How can we stay secure in an extended-reality world?

    A recent   report from the Future of Privacy Forum [PDF]   sets out recommendations to tackle the privacy risks associated with immersive augmented (AR) and virtual-reality (VR) technologies that are increasingly being implemented in education and training, gaming, multimedia, navigation and communication. As AR and VR applications that let users explore a shared digital overlay of the physical world in real-time become more widely adopted and improved, they will likely converge into one ‘extended reality’, or XR. These technologies accumulate and process vast amounts of sensitive personal information including biometric data, unique device identifiers, location and information about homes and businesses. Like other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and 5G communications…

  • Climate injustice: how a biocarbon fund failed Uganda's tree planters

    The area around Rwoho forest in the south of Uganda is a lush reserve spanning more than 9,000 ha, an area equivalent to around 12,600 soccer pitches (see map). In 2006 a programme was launched to pay locals to farm and reforest some of it, mainly with new timber plantations of pine and mixed native trees, after years of deforestation and soil erosion. The plan was simple. Locals would look after trees for 22 years or until they reached a certain diameter. They would get paid for it in small increments. But what initially appeared to be a boon to the local rural economy and climate change turned out to be a complicated relationship between funders and farmers – one that ultimately failed. What sounded so simple stopped abruptly last year. The carbon credit project was meant to be an environmental…

  • Rocky planet discovered half the size of Venus, with potential for life

    The VLT, which was updated in 2017 to better detect potentially habitable planets, is comprised of four telescopes that operate at visible and infrared wavelengths. It has shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L 98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System, including this new ocean-based exoplanet. “The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life,” said María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain. The results are deemed to be an important step in the quest to find life on Earth-sized planets outside the Solar System. The detection of biosignatures on an exoplanet depends on the ability to study its atmosphere, but current telescopes are not large enough to achieve the resolution…

  • Plastics, proteins and plants key to reaching net-zero emissions

    Electricity, transport, and heating together account for 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and are the priority for governments and businesses working to cut carbon emissions in line with their Paris Agreement obligations. However, reaching net-zero emissions also requires efforts directed at the remaining emissions. The 'Final 25 per cent' of emissions refers to the remaining 20 per cent of emissions contributed by sectors such as agriculture, cement, waste, and plastics, in addition to the extraction of at least 5 per cent equivalent from the atmosphere to account for unavoidable emissions. These emitters come from a wide range of greenhouse gas emitters, making them trickier targets than, for instance, large centralised power stations. Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the…

  • More than 75,000 green jobs lost in past five years, Labour says

    The Labour leader called for “rapid green investment” during his two-day tour of Scotland. “Tackling the climate crisis must be at the heart of everything we do. We are at a critical moment. In less than 100 days, COP26 will be over and our chance to keep the planet’s warming below 1.5°C will have either been grasped or abandoned,” said Starmer. “The UK must rise to this moment and lead by example. That means rapid action to create good, green jobs across the country. And it means a proper strategy to buy, make, and sell more in Britain, to create good, unionised jobs in clean energy and through supply chains. “Nobody here in the UK can afford for this issue to be yet another example of Boris Johnson bluster. We need real action, now. It is time for a Green New Deal.” Figures from the…

  • Rolls-Royce confirms return to profit as aviation sector faces long Covid recovery

    Alongside much of its sector, Rolls-Royce fell into the red last year as the number of passengers willing to take flights fell dramatically due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Heathrow, the UK’s largest airport, said its passenger numbers were down 72.2 per cent in 2020 compared to the year before. However, the firm's bottom-line profits picked up to £393m for the first six months of 2021, a significant improvement over the £5.4bn losses of one year ago. Part of the recovery relied on stringent cost-cutting measures, including shedding over 9,000 jobs, two-thirds of which will affect the UK. It confirmed that around 8,000 jobs have already been scrapped under the proposals. The firm also plans to raise at least £2bn from selling off some parts of the business. This came just days after it announced…

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