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The March Of Technology

A long article about the fall and rise of tilting trains:
APT tilting train: The laughing stock that changed the world

It's 30 years since the Advanced Passenger Train carried its last passengers. In its short life it attracted scorn and mockery, but did the APT actually revolutionise the world of travel?

Trains didn't use to tilt. They just ran quickly along straight lines and then slowed down when they came to a bend.
These days, passengers on Italian-designed Pendolino trains on the UK's West Coast Main Line think nothing of listing as they make their way to destinations at speeds well in excess of 100mph, even through windy sections. Those travelling from Paris to the Cote D'Azur, or in Switzerland, China and Japan experience the same sensation.

What's often forgotten is that much of the technology enabling trains to tilt as they enter bends - using sensors and hydraulic jacks - was developed in the UK. The Advanced Passenger Train was in service in short patches from 1981 until it was finally removed in the winter of 1985/6.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35061511
 
SpaceX rocket in historic vertical landing
[Video]

US space company SpaceX has successfully landed an unmanned rocket upright - the first time such a feat has been accomplished.

The Falcon-9 rocket booster despatched 11 communications satellites before returning to an upright position at Cape Canaveral.
The achievement has been hailed as milestone towards reusing rockets.
It is hoped the mission will boost moves to reduce the cost of private space operations.

The launch of a rocket is the first by SpaceX since one exploded in June.
On that occasion an unmanned Falcon-9 broke apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with debris tumbling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocket, which had 18 straight successes prior to the fateful flight, was in the process of sending a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS).
SpaceX has a $1.6bn (£1.08bn; €1.47bn) contract with Nasa to send supplies to the ISS.

The upgraded, 23-storey-tall rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the main stage returning about 10 minutes later to a landing site about 9.65km (6 miles) south of its launch pad.
The flawless launch on Monday is a major success for privately-owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, the California-based company set up and run by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Mr Musk has said the ability to return its rockets to Earth so they can be reused and reflown would hugely reduce his company's operational costs in the growing but highly competitive private space launch industry.
SpaceX employees broke out in celebration as they watched a live stream of the 47m-tall (156ft) white booster slowly descend to earth in the form of a glowing orange ball.
"Welcome back, baby!," Musk said in a celebratory tweet.

SpaceX commentators described the launch and return - the first time an orbital rocket successfully achieved a controlled landing on Earth - as "incredibly exciting".
"This was a first for us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and I can't even begin to describe the joy the team feels right now having been a part of this historic first-stage rocket landing," the top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig Gen Wayne Monteith, said in a statement.

SpaceX is aiming to revolutionise the rocket industry, which up until now has lost millions of dollars in discarded machinery and valuable rocket parts after each launch.
Several earlier attempts to land the Falcon 9's first stage on an ocean platform have failed.

The rocket reached a height of 200km (125 miles) before heading back to Earth and touching down.

Photos, etc, on page

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35157782

Impressive!
 
Just a brilliant feat of engineering. Brilliant. :clap::glee:
 
rynner2 said:
SpaceX rocket in historic vertical landing
[Video]

US space company SpaceX has successfully landed an unmanned rocket upright - the first time such a feat has been accomplished.

The Falcon-9 rocket booster despatched 11 communications satellites before returning to an upright position at Cape Canaveral.
The achievement has been hailed as milestone towards reusing rockets.
It is hoped the mission will boost moves to reduce the cost of private space operations.

The launch of a rocket is the first by SpaceX since one exploded in June.
On that occasion an unmanned Falcon-9 broke apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with debris tumbling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocket, which had 18 straight successes prior to the fateful flight, was in the process of sending a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS).
SpaceX has a $1.6bn (£1.08bn; €1.47bn) contract with Nasa to send supplies to the ISS.

The upgraded, 23-storey-tall rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the main stage returning about 10 minutes later to a landing site about 9.65km (6 miles) south of its launch pad.
The flawless launch on Monday is a major success for privately-owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, the California-based company set up and run by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Mr Musk has said the ability to return its rockets to Earth so they can be reused and reflown would hugely reduce his company's operational costs in the growing but highly competitive private space launch industry.
SpaceX employees broke out in celebration as they watched a live stream of the 47m-tall (156ft) white booster slowly descend to earth in the form of a glowing orange ball.
"Welcome back, baby!," Musk said in a celebratory tweet.

SpaceX commentators described the launch and return - the first time an orbital rocket successfully achieved a controlled landing on Earth - as "incredibly exciting".
"This was a first for us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and I can't even begin to describe the joy the team feels right now having been a part of this historic first-stage rocket landing," the top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig Gen Wayne Monteith, said in a statement.

SpaceX is aiming to revolutionise the rocket industry, which up until now has lost millions of dollars in discarded machinery and valuable rocket parts after each launch.
Several earlier attempts to land the Falcon 9's first stage on an ocean platform have failed.

The rocket reached a height of 200km (125 miles) before heading back to Earth and touching down.

Photos, etc, on page

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35157782

Impressive!
Click to expand...

Dan Dare style rockets!
 
Fantastic news! Woo hoo!
[Does the dance]
 
It's happened. Someone built a quadcopter big enough to carry human cargo. The future is officially here, and it's kinda scary. Scary in the cool way, though. The same company that brought us the regular-sized Ghost drone has just announced the "184" Personal Flying Vehicle (PFV). It's about the size of a (very) small car, and claims to be able to deliver one human (up to 260 pounds) anywhere within a 10 mile/23-minute flight time reach. A working prototype of the autonomous craft is being shown at CES, and we're pretty excited. If a little skeptical. ...

http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/06/184-delivery-drone-for-people/
 
I'd want one, except I'm probably at the weight limit and 10 miles is no use for my daily commute.
 
A lightbulb moment for the old-fashioned filament
Do you yearn for the soft, instant light of the incandescent bulb? Edison’s invention could be back – in an even more efficient form than energy-saving fluorescents
Emine Saner
Tuesday 12 January 2016 17.38 GMT

As a metaphor, the “lightbulb moment” doesn’t work so well now that we have to wait five minutes for a low-energy bulb to get going. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have had a bit of a lightbulb moment. The fondly remembered, but extremely inefficient, old-fashioned tungsten bulb could soon be modified to reuse its wasted energy. This would make it even more efficient than the new types of energy-saving LED and compact fluorescent bulbs to which we’ve switched in recent years.

Almost all the energy used by old filament bulbs is converted to heat, with only around 5% given off as light. In their paper, poetically entitled “resurrection of the incandescent source”, the MIT team describe how infrared radiation, which would otherwise be wasted, can be reflected and reabsorbed through a structure of up to 300 layers around the filament, using nanotechnology. “It is not so much the material you make the surrounding structure from, it is how you arrange the material to create the optical filtering property that will recycle infrared light and let the visible light through,” said Ognjen Ilic, from MIT’s research laboratory of electronics. This research could lead, one day, to the introduction of a high-tech lightbulb with an old-world glow.

The lightbulb, virtually unchanged since the 19th century, has become a target for climate-change campaigners in recent years. In the UK, it has been fiercely protected by those who view the EU – which ordered the phasing-out of incandescent bulbs – as a meddling force that wants us all to live in the cold, blue glow of low-energy lighting.

“It’s only a small thing, but people get intensely upset about it,” says Jonathan Wright, the owner of two lighting shops in south-east England and the purveyor of dwindling stocks of filament lightbulbs (“We strive to provide what the public wants regardless of European bans,” proudly proclaims its website). He sells lightbulbs under a loophole that allows the sale of “industrial” bulbs, which are essentially the same as domestic, but tougher and slightly more expensive. He says people travel miles to buy them. “People want them. The colour rendering is good, it’s soft. The fact they come on instantly.” Domestic users, he believes, have been unfairly penalised when other areas, such as street lights and office blocks that are lit all night long, should be looked at.

There is no other household essential that inspires the same level of affection as the humble lightbulb (see also the trend for oversized, exposed lightbulbs, as seen in every hipster coffee shop, which look as if they’ve been salvaged from Thomas Edison’s workshop). “Light is an emotional and emotive matter,” says the design critic Stephen Bayley. “I like it that [Henry David] Thoreau said candles illuminate darkness, but artificial light destroys it. Our affection for outlawed incandescent Edison bulbs is surely based on some lingering sense that the warm glow from a hot filament is closer to primitive candles than the chilly hiss and fizz of alien electrons.”

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...ent-incandescent-back-efficient-energy-saving
 
Good.

Plenty of architects and lighting designers would agree, apparently.
 
Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs

Researchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost

jeff-howell_1914133b.jpg

An incandescent light bulb


By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

5:03PM GMT 11 Jan 2016

Ever since the EU restricted sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs, homeowners have complained about the shortcomings of their energy-efficient replacements.

The clinical white beam of LEDs and frustrating time-delay of ‘green’ lighting has left many hankering after the instant, bright warm glow of traditional filament bulbs.

But now scientists in the US believe they have come up with a solution which could see a reprieve for incandescent bulbs.

"The lighting potential of this technology is exciting."
Prof Gang Chen, MIT

Researchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure in the glass they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost in heat, while still allowing the light through.

They refer to the technique as ‘recycling light’ because the energy which would usually escape into the air is redirected back to the filament where it can create new light.

"It recycles the energy that would otherwise be wasted," said Professor Marin Soljacic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...Ds.html#_ga=1.264249807.1140852717.1445850974
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More text at link.
 
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Inventor unveils ‘detachable cabin’ concept to save lives in plane crash
An inventor has showcased an idea for a detachable cabin he believes could save lives during an air crash
[Video]
By Mark Molloy, video source YouTube / Владимир Татаренко
1:18PM GMT 17 Jan 2016

Is it possible to survive a plane crash? An inventor believes he has the answer with this ambitious detachable cabin concept.

Vladimir Tatarenko has unveiled a video demonstrating how the detachable cabin idea would work during an aviation emergency.
The cabin would detach from the rest of the plane and safely land on the ground or water with the aid of attached parachutes, boosters and rubber tubes which would automatically inflate on water.

“Surviving a plane crash is possible. While aircraft engineers all over the world are trying to make planes safer, they can do nothing about the human factor,” he told LiveLeak.

“The existing technology of using Kevlar and carbon composites for fuselage, wings, flaps, spoilers, ailerons, tail will be used during the design.
“It allows to partly compensate the weight of parachute system.”

The aviation engineer has reportedly been working on the project for three years and believes his concept could help save many lives.
His design includes space at the bottom of the detachable cabin where passengers’ luggage can be stored.

Viewers of the video appear divided on the concept, with many pointing out the design wouldn’t be very cost-effective.
“It doesn't make sense from a cost benefit analysis, from both mechanical, economic and operational reasons,” explained one.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/avi...bin-concept-to-save-lives-in-plane-crash.html
 
Largest known prime number discovered in Missouri

The largest known prime number has been discovered by a computer at a university in Missouri in the US.

Prime numbers - such as two, three, five and seven - are divisible only by themselves and one, and play an important role in computer encryption.
The new prime is more than 22 million digits long, five million longer than the previous largest prime.
Primes this large could prove useful to computing in the future.

The new prime number was found as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a global quest to find a particular type of large prime numbers.
Mersenne primes are named after a French monk who studied them in the 17th Century.
They are hunted by factoring two by a large number and taking away one, a relatively manageable calculation for today's computers, but not every result is a prime.
The discovered prime is written as 2^74,207,281-1, which denotes two, multiplied by itself 74,207,281 times, then take away one.

The Gimps project has discovered the 15 largest Mersenne primes in the 20 years it has been running and it is possible that there could be an infinite number of them to discover.
Large prime numbers are important in computer encryption and help make sure that online banking, shopping and private messaging are secure, but current encryption typically uses prime numbers that are hundreds of digits long, not millions.
"This prime is too large to currently be of practical value," the Gimps project admitted in a statement.

However, searching for large primes is intensive work for computer processors and can have unexpected benefits.
"One prime project discovered that there was a problem in some computer processors that only showed up in certain circumstances," said Dr Steven Murdoch, cybersecurity expert at University College London.

The new large prime, the 49th known Mersenne prime, was discovered by Dr Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri.
Although computers do most of the hard work, primes are said to be discovered when a human takes note of the result.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35361090
 
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"Prime numbers ... play an important role in computer encryption."
Such as this next level that we're going to have to get our heads around:
How blockchain tech could change the way we do business

Blockchain - the technology underpinning digital currency Bitcoin - has been in the news lately.
Banks think it could be the future of financial transactions, while diamond miners hope it will help end the trade in conflict diamonds.
And this week the UK's chief scientific adviser encouraged the British government to adopt the technology.
But what exactly is it and why is it causing such a stir? Technology of Business (tries) to explain.

Does it have anything to do with bicycles?
No. Blockchain is a method of recording data - a digital ledger of transactions, agreements, contracts - anything that needs to be independently recorded and verified as having happened.
The big difference is that this ledger isn't stored in one place, it's distributed across several, hundreds or even thousands of computers around the world.
And everyone in the network can have access to an up-to-date version of the ledger, so it's very transparent.

But how does it work exactly?
Digital records are lumped together into "blocks" then bound together cryptographically and chronologically into a "chain" using complex mathematical algorithms.

This encryption process, known as "hashing" is carried out by lots of different computers. If they all agree on the answer, each block receives a unique digital signature.
"You don't store details of the transaction, just the fact that it happened and the hash of the transaction," explains Adrian Nish, head of threat intelligence at BAE Systems.

Once updated, the ledger cannot be altered or tampered with, only added to, and it is updated for everyone in the network at the same time.

What's so clever about that?
Well, the distributed nature of a blockchain database means that it's harder for hackers to attack it - they would have to get access to every copy of the database simultaneously to be successful.

It also keeps data secure and private because the hash cannot be converted back into the original data - it's a one-way process. [That's where the Primes come in.]

So if the original document or transaction were subsequently altered, it would produce a different digital signature, alerting the network to the mismatch.
In theory then, the blockchain method makes fraud and error less likely and easier to spot.

Is this a new thing?
The idea has been around for a couple of decades, but came to prominence in 2008 with the invention of Bitcoin, the digital currency.
Bitcoins are created by computers solving complex mathematical puzzles and this requires lots of computing power and electricity. Blockchain is the technology underpinning it.

But there isn't just one program - lots of companies, from Ethereum to Microsoft, are developing their own blockchain services. Some are open to all ("unpermissioned", in the jargon), others restrict access to a select group ("permissioned").

Why are the banks so excited?
"Banks do very similar things to each other, even though they compete," says Simon Taylor, vice-president of blockchain research and development at Barclays.
"They basically keep our money safe and a big computer keeps track of who has what. But getting these computers to talk to each other is remarkably complex and expensive - the tech is getting a little old," he says.

If banks started sharing data using a tailor-made version of blockchain it could remove the need for middlemen, a lot of manual processing, and speed up transactions, says Mr Taylor, thereby reducing costs.

Having access to an open, transparent ledger of bank transactions would also be useful for regulators, he adds. And it could help governments tackle tax fraud.

Tech company R3 CEV has persuaded more than 40 banks around the world, including Barclays, UBS and Wells Fargo, to join a consortium exploring distributed ledger technology.
Just this week, R3 announced that 11 global financial institutions had taken part in an experiment involving the exchange of tokens across a global private network without the need for a central third party verifying the transactions.

"It's very early days for this technology but the potential is phenomenal," Mr Taylor concludes.

etc...

We might not understand blockchain too well just yet, but it seems like its influence could be profound.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35370304

All clear now? :twisted:

(I must confess that at the centre of my maths, science and computer-loving soul lurks an unreformed Luddite who warns:
"Something as complex as all this will create an awful big mess if it ever goes wrong, and no-one will be able to fix it!"







 
I don't know how well known Bernard Lovell's building of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope is among the general public, but here it's covered in about 5 minutes of a video interlude on Antiques Road trip:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06z8t63/antiques-road-trip-series-12-episode-20

Clip starts 21m30s in.

Quite an inspiring story. I'd forgotten the time when they outflanked the Russians and published a photo from a Russian lander on the moon before the Russians published it themselves! :D Brilliant stuff, achieved by cannibalised war-time radar and a fax machine!
 
Lift-off for Europe's space laser network
By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent

Europe has begun to roll out a data superhighway in orbit above the Earth.
The first node in the network is a telecommunications satellite that has just launched from Kazakhstan.
It will use a laser to gather pictures of the planet taken by other spacecraft and then relay them to the ground.
One benefit will be to put information on natural disasters, such as flooding and earthquakes, into the hands of emergency responders far faster than has previously been possible.

Currently, it can take hours to get the pictures taken by Earth observation satellites down on the ground.
Part of the reason is that spacecraft can only transmit their images when they pass over a receiving dish, and they will have visibility of this antenna for just 10 minutes in most cases during every 90-minute tour around the globe.
The European Space Agency's (Esa) answer is to fire the pictures upwards instead, via laser, to another satellite much higher in the sky that has a constant view of the ground station.

In the past couple of years, the agency has put up two Earth observers that are equipped with optical transmission equipment. These will now be able to offload their data through the new relay satellite, which will be positioned 36,000km above the equator at 9 degrees East.
Testing by Esa's industrial partner, Airbus Defence and Space, shows it should be possible for the system to put pictures on the desks of the people who need them within 20 minutes of those images being acquired.
For some applications - such as the monitoring of pollution incidents, or illegal fishing or ocean piracy - the time saved could be critical to achieving an effective response.

The European Data Relay System, or EDRS for short, has been more than 10 years in development. Getting satellites to talk to each other via a narrow laser beam is no easy task, says Esa project manager Michael Witting.
"The difficulty is basically that you have to hit another satellite with your laser beam over a distance of over 40,000km, which is akin to hitting a two-euro coin over the distance of the Atlantic," he told BBC News.
With a successful connection, data will move at a rate of up to 1.8Gbps.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35446894
 
Long article, many photos:
This North Cornwall teen had his epilepsy cured - by a robot using a "sat-nav" of his brain
By CGBen | Posted: February 02, 2016

A teenage boy from Trequite has had his epilepsy cured by a robot which mapped his brain using a kind of "sat-nav".
Billy Whitaker had suffered daily seizures since he was 8 years-old, and conventional surgery to cure his condition had failed.
But using a £350,000 robot – similar to the kind used in car factories – neurosurgeons were able to cure his condition by drilling deep into his brain.

Using the machine, they were able to target the area of tissue believed to be causing Billy's seizures and then remove it.
Since undergoing treatment a fortnight ago, Billy hasn't suffered a single seizure, and doctors believe he's finally been cured.

Consultant neurosurgeon Michael Carter said: "There were little parts of his brain we suspected were the candidates for causing these residual seizures.
"We used the robot to implant a series of electrodes using ultra-high, sub-millimetre precision, into these small areas of the brain, in order to see if his seizures were coming from them."
"In fact we located the area absolutely beautifully using one of the electrodes and on the strength of that we took him back to theatre a week later and we removed the area of brain tissue that was defined by the examination.
"We can use the robot to define extremely safe and high precision trajectories through the brain tissue, so that we can implant a number of electrodes through tiny little holes in the skull, with little stab incisions, directly into the areas we want."
"It is incredibly well tolerated, and got a very high safety profile, and gives us very high quality recordings."

Billy, a keen sportsman, had suffered with epilepsy since the age of eight with daily seizures or 'auras' - pre-attack episodes which left him feeling dazed.
In 2014 surgeons removed a section of his right temporal lobe removed, the area where it was thought the abnormal electrical signals were being produce.
The seizures stopped for around a year but Billy was devastated when they returned - and they became harder to control with medication in recent months.

When Bristol Royal Hospital for Children got their new Neuromates Robot, thanks to fundraising by local people, they decided he would be their ideal first child patient.

etc...

http://www.cornishman.co.uk/North-C...-robot-using/story-28654106-detail/story.html

A much earlier attempt at curing epilepsy (1953 ) was shown in
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06yrqzh/the-brain-with-david-eagleman-2-what-makes-me
(which coincidentally I watched last night). Although the epilepsy was cured, the patient's memory was negatively affected - he became 'stuck in the present'. This part of the video starts at about 37m 20s.

Wiki covers the case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison
 
rynner2 said:
Largest known prime number discovered in Missouri

The largest known prime number has been discovered by a computer at a university in Missouri in the US.

Prime numbers - such as two, three, five and seven - are divisible only by themselves and one, and play an important role in computer encryption.
The new prime is more than 22 million digits long, five million longer than the previous largest prime.
Primes this large could prove useful to computing in the future.

The new prime number was found as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a global quest to find a particular type of large prime numbers.
Mersenne primes are named after a French monk who studied them in the 17th Century.
They are hunted by factoring two by a large number and taking away one, a relatively manageable calculation for today's computers, but not every result is a prime.
The discovered prime is written as 2^74,207,281-1, which denotes two, multiplied by itself 74,207,281 times, then take away one.

The Gimps project has discovered the 15 largest Mersenne primes in the 20 years it has been running and it is possible that there could be an infinite number of them to discover.
Large prime numbers are important in computer encryption and help make sure that online banking, shopping and private messaging are secure, but current encryption typically uses prime numbers that are hundreds of digits long, not millions.
"This prime is too large to currently be of practical value," the Gimps project admitted in a statement.

However, searching for large primes is intensive work for computer processors and can have unexpected benefits.
"One prime project discovered that there was a problem in some computer processors that only showed up in certain circumstances," said Dr Steven Murdoch, cybersecurity expert at University College London.

The new large prime, the 49th known Mersenne prime, was discovered by Dr Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri.
Although computers do most of the hard work, primes are said to be discovered when a human takes note of the result.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35361090
Click to expand...

Leave it to a computer, but on the other hand someone had to generate that calculation code. So there you go, it's a combined human and digital - programming effort.
 
I expect most regulars on this thread understand the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, so I'm posting this here just as a matter of record:
BT ad gets into a muddle about the internet's origins

An advert published by the UK's leading broadband provider indicates confusion within the firm about the internet's origins.
BT's Openreach division referred to the UK as the "country that invented the internet" in the ad, which was printed over the weekend.
However, the US is widely credited as being the net's creator thanks to a Department of Defense project that dates back to the 1960s.

BT has acknowledged the error.
"For most people, the words 'internet' and 'world wide web' are interchangeable," said a spokesman for the firm.
"We accept the language wasn't precise enough for some, but no harm has been done."

The internet refers to the millions of interlinked computer networks used to transmit data. It encompasses information sent via email, chat tools, apps and a range of other online services in addition to websites.
By contrast, the world wide web is a subsection of the internet made up of webpages, documents and other resources connected together via hyperlinks.

The internet was born out of Arpanet, a US government-backed scheme that initially only connected the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 400 miles (644km) away.
It was not until 1973 that a university in the UK and a Norwegian research institute were added as the first international participants in the project.

Although University College London subsequently helped test the networking protocols that gave rise to what we now recognise as the internet, much of the original work on them had been carried out at Stanford.
"While Donald Davies and his team at the National Physical Laboratory can lay claim to having developed packet-switching that enabled the technological infrastructure of the internet, Vint Cerf and a number of Americans were the driving forces behind the Arpanet that became the internet," commented Prof Martin Campbell-Kelly, a trustee at The National Museum of Computing.

It is not clear, however, that the UK can even lay claim to having invented the web.
The English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was indeed its creator, but he was working at Cern - the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland - at the time.

Even so, one computing historian suggested BT's mistake was an easy one to have made.
"People mistakenly conflate the internet and the world wide web all the time," said Tom Lean.
"But while Britain may not have invented the internet, not only was the web co-invented by a Brit, BT themselves rolled out the world's first service that was a lot like the world wide web, Prestel, back in the 1980s.
"Sadly BT closed Prestel in the early 1990s, because they couldn't interest enough people in using it."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35579225
 
This man's invented and completed a way of fusing an artificial limb into/inside a dog, an incredible result! .. tissue and skin growing back over it with no infection reported as yet .. he wants to take it steps further to be used on humans but states that government guidelines are holding him back .... my only negative against his work so far is that a human weighs a lot more than a dog but if he's correct, he could prove to be a medical pioneer not just for pet surgery but also for future artificial limb human surgery. After future medical tests, if he's allowed to carry them out and they are proven, he might be the man who's brought cyborgs out of science fiction and into reality :cool: ... or not.

 
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I think the only thing that looks new about that is the end bit, where the skin fuses with the prosthetic (presumably that woven mesh thing). The rest is pretty well established technology.
 
I'm putting this item in the March of Technology thread because it involves the creative use of an iPad but I'll defer to the mods if they wish to move it elsewhere.

Member of Parliament with ALS serves as honorary speaker of the House of Commons (Ottawa) for one day and uses a computer-generated voice on his iPad to command the House:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/belanger-speaker-house-of-commons-1.3483371

My godmother died of ALS in 1988. It's a nasty disease -- not that there is such a thing as a pleasant one, of course. I was nevertheless shocked to note how quickly Mauril Bélanger's condition has deteriorated since he announced the diagnosis last November. At that time his voice was shaky but he was still mobile. It appears the disease is progressing quickly. :( I'm glad he was given this opportunity.
 
This video is not to trivialise your loss, sorry to hear about that GingerTabby ... :(

On this note, wait for it .. or skip to 1:20 ... :)

 
Swifty said:
This video is not to trivialise your loss, sorry to hear about that GingerTabby ... :(
Click to expand...

No worries, Swifty! I appreciate your sympathy.

That video is quite interesting. It's curious how virtual reality devices can alter our perceptions. That fellow's reaction suggests that the visual input overrode his rational thought since he clearly knew he wasn't really standing on top of a roller coaster. The human brain is a strange thing.
 
I probably come over as a terrible pessimist. I don't mean to be. But , in my working life, I've done a lot of troubleshooting on computer systems and it leads me to doubt that things are really as wonderful as the proponents would like us to believe.

I was going to post this under the electronic money discussion, but it seems more relevant here - the discussion had wandered to the robustness of the Internet.

It could be that the very software that is supposed to make the Internet resilient could be the agent that brings it totally down if large sections of it are damaged.

I have seen this happen (albeit on a private network, but one that was UK-wide). I think I may have mentioned this before, but a little more detail might help to explain my suspicions.

There was a damaged switch at the main server site which was causing a high volume of disconnections, and the software that under normal circumstances automatically reconnected a lost connection was demanding so many resources to reconnect the thousands of disconnections that the main servers were overwhelmed and the whole thing locked up.

This masked the true source of the problem, so that there were months of constant lock-ups (it took a while after reboot for the volume of transactions to build up to the point where the fault became terminal) .

The company I then worked for was called in and (eventually - it was a Sherlock Holmes job - you know, eliminate the impossible and the improbable has to be the cause) identified the problem. We actually demonstrated the problem to the assembled ptb's. The cure would only have cost a few thousand pounds, peanuts compared to the whole cost of the project. But by then the whole thing had been discredited totally in the minds of its users, the blame for the problems had become a political football and avoiding blame had become more important than actually fixing the problem. Our report was not acted on, and eventually the whole project was abandoned. This was a government project and as far as I know the real reason for the failure has never been made public. Despite the fact that if you are a UK taxpayer you are probably still paying for it.

Arguably the real failure was not a technical one but a management one. But that makes no difference to the users and the user's 'customers' .
 
The world's first website went online 25 years ago today
Invented by Tim Berners Lee, the first website went live at research lab CERN in 1990
By Madhumita Murgia
4:51PM GMT 21 Dec 2015

Today the world's first website turns 25 years old. Created by 60-year-old British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, while he was a researcher at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the website still exists today.
The site's address is info.cern.ch, and provides information about the world wide web - the platform that sits on top of the Internet, where documents and pages on the Internet can be accessed by URLs, and connected to each other via hyperlinks, like this.

"When we link information in the web, we enable ourselves to discover facts, create ideas, buy and sell things, and forge new relationships at a speed and scale that was unimaginable in the analogue era," Sir Berners-Lee has written.
That simple idea - the link - has transformed politics, overthrown governments, led to the invention of today's best known global businesses, and irrevocably changed our social interactions with the world.

When Berners-Lee created the first website, the “internet” was a group of static documents, used almost exclusively by defence organisations and academic institutions.
His proposal was supposed to allow electronic documents on the internet to be easily searched and shared.
"I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it.
"Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

"Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.
"I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, 'Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?'
"That became 'Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?' And that became the World Wide Web."

Today, he is a passionate advocate of the open web and net neutrality - the principle that all information on the Internet should be equally accessible to users, regardless of their source.
In particular, he has publicly campaigned against censorship of the web by governments.
He has also called for a new model of privacy on the web, where people legally own all their data on the web, so it cannot be used without their permission.

Meanwhile, CERN has evolved from an organisation studying computing and networking, to a cutting-edge particle physics laboratory. In 2013, scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN, which "marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world,” said CERN's Director-General Rolf Heuer.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...t-website-went-online-25-years-ago-today.html
 
Supersonic jet startup vows 'affordable' travel – if you have $5,000 to spare
Sir Richard Branson says Virgin will partner with Boom to build and test plane to succeed where Concorde failed – ‘this lets you commute’ across oceans
Rupert Neate in New York
Wednesday 23 March 2016 18.04 GMT

Sir Richard Branson is hoping to bring back supersonic transatlantic passenger flights, and this time they will be “affordable”.
Branson, who has already launched plans for $250,000-a-ticket flights into space, on Wednesday announced that his Virgin empire would help build a new generation of supersonic jets. Virgin has also signed an option to buy 10 of the planes to hopefully reintroduce 3.5-hour passenger flights between London and New York 13 years after Concorde was decommissioned.
...

Branson is partnering with Blake Scholl, a pilot and former Amazon executive, who is building a prototype of the new jet, called Boom, in an aircraft hanger in Colorado. While several other companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are developing new supersonic jets Scholl said his plan is likely to beat them to market as it does not require any new technology that would need approval by regulators.

“We are talking about the first supersonic jet people can afford to fly,” Scholl, the founder and chief executive of Boom, said. “This isn’t science fiction, we are actually doing this. You will be able to fly New York to London in three-and-a-half hours for $5,000 return, [which is roughly] the same as [the cost] of business class.”
Scholl, 35, said his team of experienced aerospace engineers will build and test a prototype plane by the end of next year and commercial flights could begin within just a few years.
...

Boom’s plane will have 40 seats in two rows either side of the aisle, meaning that every passenger will get a direct view of the curvature of the earth as the plane cruises at 60,000ft, as well as direct access to the drinks trolley.

“We are offering a service that’s way faster, but for the cost of business,” Scholl said. “There is a huge market out there, more than 20 million a year fly business class internationally. We can take them to Mach 2.2 (1,451mph, and faster than Concorde which flew at a top speed of Mach 2.04) and save them half their journey time.”

Scholl reckons there is so much demand for faster international travel that affordable supersonic flights could become a $100bn market. He said his plane could work on 500 different routes, but will concentrate initially on London to New York, San Francisco to Tokyo, and Los Angeles to Sydney. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and its equivalents in most countries, bans supersonic air travel overland.
...

Scholl is leading an 11-person team, including former Nasa, Lockheed Martin and Boeing engineers, constructing the plane in a hanger in Denver, Colorado. He said cheaper commercial supersonic travel is possible mainly due to advances in carbon fibre technology, which should enable his team to construct a plane that’s 30% more fuel efficient than Concorde.

When asked if his plans are really going to come to fruition, Scholl said: “This isn’t science fiction. If I was telling you it was going to go Mach 4 [four times the speed of sound] – but, I’m not. We’re not using any technology that doesn’t already exist, it is just putting it together in the right way. It will still be tested rigorously.”

etc...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/23/boom-supersonic-jet-travel-affordable-business-class
 
'Boom'. Is that a good name for a plane, I wonder?
It'd worry me.
 
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