• US government considers the break-up of Google to end the tech giant’s monopoly in online search

    The US government has said it may ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, in order to eliminate its monopoly in online search. In a landmark case in August 2024, the US district court found Google liable for maintaining monopolies in US general search services and US general search text advertising. Specifically, the court found two violations as a result of Google’s illegal maintenance of monopolies in those two separate markets. With Amit Mehta, the judge who presided over the case, branding the tech giant a “monopolist”, the Department of Justice has now said it is “considering behavioural and structural remedies” to end Google’s monopoly in search. In its court filing on Tuesday, the department…

  • Europe’s largest photonic quantum computer unveiled by German scientists

    The Paderborn Quantum Sampler (PaQS) designed by German researchers marks a significant milestone in the development of light-based quantum technologies. Researchers at Paderborn University in Germany have developed the PAQs quantum computer as part of an initiative by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in partnership with private firms. While the field of quantum computing technology is still in its infancy, scientists believe that with its ability to solve problems that are unsolvable on classic computers, the technology could help power innovation in a range of fields, from drug discovery and smarter encryption software to manufacturing and AI. While scientists across the globe are researching quantum computing, developing robust systems is proving to be very challenging…

  • HS2 should terminate in central London, transport secretary says

    HS2 is still expected to terminate at London Euston rather than an outer borough of the capital, transport secretary Louise Haigh has indicated. Rumours have swirled in recent years that the UK’s largest rail project since the Victorian era would only reach Old Oak Common in west London because of the high cost of building the remaining few miles to Euston. The project has had a rocky few years since the previous Conservative government cancelled phase 2 of the railway from the West Midlands to Manchester. Weeks after taking power, the new Labour government also announced the cancellation of a swathe of infrastructure projects, including road and rail. While nothing attached to HS2 was explicitly cancelled in that announcement, the final section of HS2 – which will bring the line into…

  • Eccentric Engineer: How Francis Bacon’s downfall sparked a revolution in scientific thought

    Francis Bacon’s public downfall had a surprising result – his revolutionary idea of scientific investigation. Francis Bacon was neither a mathematician nor an experimental scientist, yet without him it is doubtful that engineering as we know it would exist today. Bacon was born into a wealthy section of a changing world, as the son of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England and Anne Cooke, daughter of the Renaissance humanist Anthony Cooke. A bright boy, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1573 aged just 12, where he was personally tutored for three years by John Whitgift, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. Education at Cambridge at this time still followed the old medieval curriculum, conducted almost exclusively in Latin, but his time there did introduce him to two people…

  • Smart heat batteries offer an efficient low-carbon alternative to traditional home heating

    Comment: With many homes still reliant on fossil fuel heating systems, Johan du Plessis, CEO of Tepeo, a British clean tech company, looks at how smart heat batteries will help accelerate the transition to low-carbon heat while keeping the electricity grid in balance. According to a report published by the National Audit Office earlier this year, heating the UK’s 28 million homes accounted for 18% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2021. The main source of these emissions is from burning natural gas to heat homes. A low-carbon alternative to home heating presents itself in the form of domestic thermal energy storage (TES) or heat batteries. Electric storage heating technology such as night storage heaters, which store heat during off-peak hours and then release it gradually during…

  • Decision on £9bn Lower Thames Crossing delayed until May 2025

    The decision on whether to scrap the £9bn Lower Thames Crossing scheme between Kent and Essex has been delayed until May 2025, the Department for Transport (DfT) has confirmed. It said it needed “more time for the application to be considered” as part of a series of broader spending reviews around transport infrastructure that have been taking place since the Labour Party took power in July. In September, campaigners urged the government to cancel £10.5bn in road projects and use the money to fund new rail and public transport projects. Around £9bn of this was earmarked for the Lower Thames Crossing, with the remaining £1.5bn being saved by cutting the A66 Northern Trans-Pennine scheme. First proposed in the late 2000s, the crossing is designed to relieve the pressure on the existing…

  • £266m worth of copper in UK’s unused or binned electrical items – new research

    UK households should go ‘urban mining’ and recycle unused cables, phone chargers and other old tech to help stave off a looming shortage of copper, says the Recycle Your Electricals campaign. Copper mines are struggling to produce enough of the red metal to meet growing global demand. Analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence shows an increasing gap between the amount of copper produced and demand for the raw product. It estimates that globally there will be a 6.5 million tonnes gap by 2033. However, the same report also identifies that better recycling of copper could potentially meet the additional demand. A recent study by Recycle Your Electricals, a UK-wide campaign from independent not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, shows that if UK households had to look in their ‘drawer of…

  • Risk of winter blackouts in the UK drops to lowest level since Ukraine conflict

    This winter the UK will have the lowest risk of electricity blackouts in four years despite the recent closure of the nation’s last coal-fired power plant and delays to the upcoming Hinkley Point C power plant. The National Energy System Operator (NESO) said that energy margins this season will be “adequate”, assuming that energy demand peaks around 60GW during the worst cold spell, and is more confident than it was in advance of the 2023/2024 winter. It said the higher year-on-year margin is driven by a new interconnection, growth in battery storage capacity and an increase in generation connected to the distribution networks. In April, National Grid turned on the Viking Link – the longest land and subsea cable in the world – that links the Danish electricity system with the UK. NESO…

  • Lab-grown meat approval process boosted by £1.6m funding for food regulator

    The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is to ensure that cell-cultivated products, including lab-grown steak, beef, chicken and foie gras, are safe to eat before being sold to UK consumers. The UK is one of the largest potential markets for cell-cultivated products (CCPs) in Europe but currently none are approved for human consumption. The FSA, in collaboration with Food Standards Scotland (FSS), has been awarded £1.6m from the government’s Engineering Biology Sandbox Fund to develop an efficient safety assessment process for CCPs. Demand for alternatives to regular meat is surging because of concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment. Meat and dairy farming contribute to a rise in the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. However, in most parts of the world, CCPs, which are…

  • Former North Sea gas terminals could be repurposed as geothermal energy facilities

    Former gas terminals could be repurposed as geothermal energy facilities as the world moves away from fossil fuels. According to Andreas Busch, professor of earth sciences at Heriot-Watt University, the North Sea harbours easily exploitable geothermal energy in the form of heat that could be used to generate zero-carbon electricity. The North Sea oil basin is currently in decline, and production in 2023 was the lowest since the 1970s. With Britain looking to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2050, hundreds of wells will need to be decommissioned every year as more oil and gas fields shut down. According to Busch, repurposing the existing infrastructure for geothermal energy offers a “multitude of advantages” – largely because it’s much more cost-effective and has a lower environmental…

  • Starlink activates satellite service early for areas hit by Hurricane Helene to aid relief efforts

    Starlink has made its direct-to-cell satellite service available in areas hit by Hurricane Helene prior to its official launch. SpaceX offers internet connectivity via its Starlink satellite constellation. It is the world’s largest satellite constellation, with over 5,000 satellites in orbit at present. The firm, founded by Elon Musk, started launching satellites capable of providing a direct mobile connection to phones in January. It provides satellite internet coverage to dozens of countries, and is in the process of expanding mobile coverage into ‘dead zones’ impractical or impossible to reach with terrestrial network coverage, including more than half a million square miles of the US. Direct-to-cell is expected to launch with just text services later this year, with voice, data and…

  • EU votes for hefty tariffs on Chinese EV imports

    EU countries have voted in favour of imposing up to 45% on China-made electric vehicles (EVs) for five years. Just over a year ago, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (EC), announced that Brussels was to investigate the imposing of import duties on battery electric vehicles (BEVs) coming from China to the EU. Von der Leyen said the decision to do so was due to “growing evidence-based concerns about the recent and rapid rise in low-priced exports of EVs from China”. In July 2024, the EC announced that following the investigation it had concluded that the booming Chinese sector benefits from “unfair subsidisation” by Beijing which is causing a “threat of economic injury to EU BEV producers”. The EC proposed a provisional measure that included anti-subsidy tariffs…

  • UK’s £22bn bet on carbon capture will ‘lock the nation into fossil fuel dependence for decades’

    Scientists and environmental campaigners have criticised the government’s investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, saying the technology is unproven and will only extend our reliance on fossil fuels. On Friday (4 October), the UK government announced it would invest nearly £22bn in CCS projects over the next 25 years. CCS technology concentrates carbon emissions before they reach the atmosphere and stores them beneath the seabed. It is seen as a way to rapidly tackle existing carbon-intensive industrial sectors. While it may sound like a viable solution to simply bury carbon emissions underground, the technology does have strong opposition, especially from many scientists and environmental campaigners. Writing in The Conversation, Mark Maslin, professor of natural sciences…

  • Teardown: Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11

    New Microsoft models harness Snapdragon X power to quash repairability and speed issues, but do they represent a generational leap forward? In 2020, Apple left the laptop market reeling with the release of its M1 MacBook Air, which finally saw the firm begin its transition to ARM-powered CPUs replacing Intel and its x86 architecture. ARM CPUs had long been used for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets due to their superior battery life, but had not been considered powerful enough to run laptops. With the release of the M1 chip in 2020, Apple showed that ARM could be utilised very effectively to run a fully-fledged desktop while maintaining its battery life and portability benefits. The Surface Pro 11 battery is relatively easy to remove Qualcomm, the manufacturer behind the…

  • BAE Systems launches latest Royal Navy attack submarine from its shipbuilding base in Cumbria

    Agamemnon, named after the ancient Greek king, is the sixth of seven Astute Class submarines to emerge from BAE’s shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. The nuclear-powered craft weighs 7,400 tonnes and is 97 metres long. Having entered the water for the first time, Agamemnon will now begin the next phase of its test and commissioning programme before leaving Barrow for sea trials with the Royal Navy. The Astute Class boats are the largest and most advanced attack submarines ever built for the Royal Navy. Equipped with state-of-the-art nuclear technology, they never need to be refuelled. As they manufacture their own oxygen and drinking water for 98 crew members, they are also able to circumnavigate the globe without surfacing. Steve Timms, managing director of BAE Systems Submarines…

  • Emergency distress signal system to ensure astronaut safety on the Moon

    Scientists are designing a communication system for the Moon that will allow future astronauts to send emergency distress signals and geolocate their positions. The project, which is led by the University of South Australia (UniSA), proposes building a satellite constellation based on the COSPAS-SARSAT technology already used for search and rescue on Earth, but adapted for lunar conditions. With its Artemis program, Nasa is aiming to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon. This could leave astronauts exposed to high-risk situations in remote areas such as the lunar south pole. Dr Mark Rice, a UniSA researcher, says the distress system could allow continuous communication with astronauts for up to 10 hours, even in the most challenging terrain, such as craters or mountains. …

  • UK EV market not growing fast enough to meet government-mandated targets

    Automotive trade association the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and major car makers are calling on the government to introduce electric vehicle (EV) subsidies to stimulate demand. UK electric car sales hit a record high in September, according to the latest figures from the trade association, which represents the UK’s automotive industry. Over 56,300 EVs were sold during the month – the highest on record – achieving a 20.5% share of overall car sales. This is up from 16.6% a year ago. The fleet sector drove much of this growth, making up 75.9% of EV registrations. While private EV demand rose by 3.6%, SMMT says it is not rising fast enough to meet the government’s zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Under the ZEV mandate, which aims to phase out new petrol and…

  • Can we cut the Earth in half like a watermelon?

    Why dividing Earth into two separate hemispheres is even harder than one might assume . Dear Evil Engineer, We hope you are able to receive this message, which we are transmitting from a communications outpost located a few light-years from Earth. Our observations suggest that your planet remains unaware of the ongoing scramble for the planets of the Orion Arm between ourselves and our rival empires. Territorial claims have largely been settled with limited planetary destruction – however, the planet Earth, with its rich resources of water, oxygen and coffee beans, remains subject to competing claims. We have therefore signed a treaty agreeing to the partition of Earth between ourselves and those cretins from Scutum-Centaurus. We will decide afterwards who will take the northern hemisphere…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • UK to invest £22bn in broad roll-out of carbon capture and storage

    The government will invest nearly £22bn in carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects as it looks to curtail the UK’s carbon emissions. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the projects will create “thousands of jobs” while attracting around £8bn in private investment. CCS technology concentrates carbon emissions before it reaches the atmosphere and stores it beneath the seabed. The full £21.7bn investment will be made available in stages over the next 25 years as the UK looks to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Initial investment will be focused on two “carbon capture clusters” in Teesside and Merseyside, while the announcement also sees funding allocated to build the UK’s first large-scale hydrogen production plant. Prime Minister Keir Starmer…

  • Toyota to delay production of first US-made EV to 2026

    Toyota is pushing back the start date for electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing at its Kentucky-based assembly plant in the US to 2026. The Japanese carmaker initially targeted late 2025 to begin output of its first EV model at the Kentucky plant. However, Japan’s The Nikkei newspaper has reported that this date is now being pushed back to 2026. Earlier this year, Toyota had announced it was investing $1.3bn in the Kentucky factory to build a three-row electric sport utility vehicle (SUV). According to the Nikkei article, along with this delay Toyota has also cancelled plans to produce a Lexus brand SUV in North America by 2030, opting to ship completed vehicles to the US from Japan instead. However, it still expects the North American EV market to grow over the long term and plans to…

  • Rail manufacturing plant opens in Goole to build Piccadilly Line trains

    Transport secretary Louise Haigh will be at the inauguration ceremony for the new £200m Siemens plant that will support 700 high-skilled jobs. Siemens’ Rail Village will be responsible for manufacturing and assembling almost 100 new Piccadilly Line trains. The new facility complements Siemens’ existing operations, comprising some 450 trains in service and eight purpose-built maintenance facilities, plus wider activities in electrification, signalling and train control technologies. The rail village is Siemens’ second investment in East Yorkshire, following a £300m wind turbine blade plant that was opened in 2016 in Hull. Haigh said she wanted to end the ‘boom and bust’ approach to rail manufacturing by delivering a long-term industrial strategy for rolling stock. “This impressive, world…

  • UK faces infrastructure spending shortfall of £700bn by 2040, says report

    The UK is heading towards an infrastructure spending shortfall of £700bn by 2040, with £1.6tn of projects currently unfunded, according to a report by EY-Parthenon, EY’s global strategy consulting arm. The report – Mind the (investment) gap: funding and delivering capital projects amidst fiscal constraints – attributes the funding shortfall to a combination of economic headwinds. It finds that persistently high levels of inflation, rising cost of capital and expanding government balance sheets following Covid-19 have significantly increased the cost of capital projects while leaving many governments with less money to spend. In the UK, for example, there are £1.6tn of unfunded programmes and projects up to 2040. According to EY analysis, only around £900bn of these will be covered by…

  • Voyager 2 plasma instrument shuttered to preserve power as probe nears 50 years in space

    Nasa scientists have turned off one of the instruments on the near 50-year-old Voyager 2 space probe as its electrical power supply continues to decline. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and has travelled more than 20 billion kilometres from Earth. It continues to use four science instruments to study the region outside the solar system’s heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. While mission engineers have been trying to avoid turning off any of its key instruments for as long as possible, they recently made the decision to shut down the plasma science instrument that is designed to measure the flow of charged atoms in the space surrounding the craft. It has only managed to collect limited data in recent years because of its orientation relative…

  • Factory of the future: manufacturers harness AI to revolutionise the assembly line

    Comment: Why do manufacturers invest in technologies such as robotics, cloud computing and AI? What are the main barriers to adopting new tech? And how do these manufacturers plan to invest in the future? Anders Billesø Beck, vice president for strategy and innovation at Universal Robots, provides some answers. Prioritising the evolving needs of end customers is essential for any business. To gain a deeper understanding of what these needs are, Universal Robotics, a Danish manufacturer of collaborative robot arms (cobots), carried out a survey of 1,200 manufacturers in Europe and North America. The focus of the survey was to find out how these manufacturers are using technology now and how they plan to invest in the future. The four key takeaways from the survey include: 1. AI: From…

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