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The March Of Technology

The shark one is the best!

suntory-ice-cubes-12.jpg
 
Smartphones could be charged in 60 seconds with new battery
An iPhone 6 takes around two hours to charge but could be full of power in a minute if fitted with a new aluminium battery
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
4:00PM BST 06 Apr 2015

Smartphones could be charged in less than one minute after scientists at Stanford University invented an aluminium battery so powerful it could revolutionise the industry.
The new rechargeable battery can go from flat to full in a fraction of the time it currently takes to pull in enough electricity to fully charge a phone, laptop or tablet.
While an iPhone 6 takes around two hours to fully charge its in-built battery, if it was fitted with the aluminium power source it would be completely topped up in around 60 seconds.

And it will keep going for more than seven times as long as a lithium-ion battery. A traditional battery can be recharged around 1,000 times, while the new one can withstand 7,500 cycles.
Although the new battery currently only produces half the voltage of a typical lithium battery, the scientists are confident that they will improve output within the next few years.
“Otherwise, our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life,” said said Hongjie Dai, Professor of chemistry at Stanford University.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...e-charged-in-60-seconds-with-new-battery.html
 
rynner2 said:
Cornwall gold rush: history of 3,500 year-old local mining industry
South Crofty near Redruth, Cornwall – on the site of the last tin mine to operate in Britain – has discovered valuable deposits of a very rare element used in televisions, laptops and new smart phones such as the iPhone. Here are some facts about the Cornish mining industry.
By Andrew Hough 7:15AM GMT 11 Feb 2011

........

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... ustry.html
Click to expand...
That story seems to have gone quiet since 2011. But the story of Cornish tin may not be over yet - the spirit of Poldark lives on!

Mining firm completes first part of tin survey at St Columb Major
By Cornish Guardian | Posted: April 21, 2015

A COMPANY which is researching the possibility of mining tin near St Columb Major says it is still committed to its exploration programme in the area.
Treliver Minerals started "near-surface" drilling at Treliver Farm two years ago and claimed initial research showed there could be tin deposits worth as much as $1 billion beneath the ground in mid-Cornwall.
The St Columb-based company, which also has two other sites in the St Austell area, says it has completed the first phase of its exploratory drilling programme at St Columb and is now analysing and doing further work on the resulting data.
Company spokeswoman Sally Norcross Webb said this would enable Treliver Minerals to produce an estimate of the site's tin resources which complied with the official reporting code. "This will include additional drilling and metallurgical analysis in due course," she said.

Treliver Minerals is also bidding for the right to survey a stretch of seabed off Carlyon Bay, between Dodman Point and Lansallos, in the hope of identifying ancient – and potentially lucrative – tin seams. If it wins approval, the firm will carry out a two-stage project to determine the size of each seam, and whether mining is economically viable.
"We are also actively working on our other exploration projects in Cornwall, both onshore and offshore," said Ms Norcross Webb. "In particular, we are making good progress with our St Austell Bay project and hope to commence the necessary surveying and bathymetry [seabed depth analysis] work in the spring/summer of next year."
Treliver's proposals for St Austell Bay could involve dredging, and the use of so-called jack-up drilling platforms, which would be visible from the shore.
The Crown Estate, which manages the entire UK seabed, will have the final say over whether a survey can take place.

http://www.cornishguardian.co.uk/Mining-firm-completes-tin-survey/story-26330322-detail/story.html
 
rynner2 said:
The road to obscurity

The decline of the standalone satnav is an object lesson in realising that the next big thing may not be big for very long, writes Ross Davies.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has taken the standalone satnav out of its basket of goods used to gauge UK inflation. People aren't buying enough of them.
The smartphone has been killing the satnav for some time.

In October 2009, when Google announced that its Android 2.0 operating system would support Google Maps Navigation, the shares in manufacturers like Garmin and TomTom plunged. At the same time, more and more cars have them built in.
In this case, the idea of navigating using satellite information in the car hasn't become unpopular, but a particular object for doing it has.

"It's no surprise," says Paul Davies, senior technology and leisure analyst at Mintel. "Just 39% of consumers now have a satnav in their home, down from 46% some 18 months ago."
It's only been eight years since the standalone satnav was first included in the ONS's consumer prices index (CPI) basket. In 2007, it was added alongside mobile ringtones and flat-panel TVs - at the expense of VHS cassette players and "ghetto blasters".
There was a sustained period of popularity before 2007 - marked by endless news stories about misdirected cars getting stuck in alleys and rivers - but the satnav does seems to have had a rather short window of utility.
The march of technology is remorseless. :D

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31920948
Click to expand...

They confused the app - Satnav - with the device. Some Symbian phones had satnav - or at least gps tracking - as far back as 2000. It doesn't inspire confidence in the PTB's that they are so naive about such things. Satnav as a dedicated device was obsolete before anyone bought one (I didn't, obviously).

The phone battery - a bit premature, the announcement? If it won't actually power a phone its irrelevant how fast it will charge. I have camera batteries that recharge in 15 minutes, had them for years. Can't really see the breakthrough.
 
IN THE 19th century, inventors were heroes. The likes of Stephenson, Morse and Goodyear were the shock troops of the Industrial Revolution. Their ideas helped drag humanity from agrarian poverty to manufactured plenty. These days, though, inventor-superstars, while not absent, are fewer and farther between.

That may, in part, be because the process of invention has itself changed since the 19th century. There is no let-up in the growth of the number of patents issued each year, but the introduction of fundamentally new classes of technology seems rarer now than it was in the past. Information technology has certainly transformed the present day. But railways, the electric telegraph, photography, fixed-line telephony, the automobile and the chemical and steel industries each, separately, brought about transformations as big as anything IT has wrought so far. Perhaps the process of invention really was more heroic in Victorian times.

To have an impression that something has changed is not, however, to prove that it really has. For that you need data. And, in a paper just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Youn Hyejin of Oxford University and her colleagues have provided some. ...

http://www.economist.com/news/scien...-changed-over?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/nowandthen
 
Greener, quieter and more efficient - has Rolls-Royce created the train of the future?
Aero engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce is developing a hybrid power system for trains that could mean quieter lives for those living near railway lines
By Alan Tovey, Industry Editor
6:27PM BST 10 May 2015

A new generation of more efficient, quieter and greener trains could be coming to Britain’s railway lines, driven by a new hybrid power system built by Rolls-Royce.
The company – best known for its aircraft engines but which also has creates engines used on landand at sea – is developing a combined diesel-electric system that also incorporates batteries.
The system also utilises regenerative braking systems first seen in Formula 1 cars. These store energy in the batteries that is created by slowing down, and which would otherwise be wasted.

MTU, which comes under Rolls’ power systems division, has been testing the new design on a Siemens train for four years in Germany, in partnership with rail operator Deutsche Bahn.
The new system has been found to be 25pc more fuel-efficient than current trains and much quieter.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...ls-Royce-created-the-train-of-the-future.html
 
They'll still go clickety clack, clickety clack, though, won't they?
 
I hope it sounds like this:
 
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The car of the future is 'the most powerful computer you will ever own'
The chips inside driverless cars will be as powerful as those used in some supercomputers, according to Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia
By Sophie Curtis
12:30PM BST 17 May 2015

The car of the future will be the most powerful computer you will ever own, packing the processing power of a supercomputer into a box the size of a car stereo, according to American chip maker Nvidia.
Nvidia is best known for supplying powerful graphics processors for video game consoles and laptop computers, but ten years ago the company started adapting its chips for use in cars. The third generation Audi A8, which launched in 2009, was the first car to use an Nvidia graphics processor to power its 3D navigation system display.

Today, there are 8m cars on the road with Nvidia’s processors inside – including models from Telsa, Volkswagen, Honda and Mercedes as well as Audi – but Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia, claims the company is just getting started.
“We have contracts with a lot of automakers, so over the next several years we’re going to grow that number by over 25m,” he said. “Younger first-time car buyers have grown up with iPhones and iPads, so the expectation is that if you’re going to spend this much money on a car, the electronics in the car should be at least as good as your tablet.”

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...most-powerful-computer-you-will-ever-own.html
 
Reading Buses 'cow poo bus' sets speed record
20 May 2015
A bus powered by cow manure has set a land speed record for a regular bus by driving at 77mph.
Reading Buses' "Bus Hound" was recorded doing a lap speed of 76.785mph (123.57km/h) at Bedford's Millbrook Proving Ground.
It runs on biomethane compressed natural gas and is painted black and white like a Friesian cow. It normally carries passengers around Reading.

The UK Timing Association confirmed the new record.
Trevor Duckworth, the association's chief timekeeper, said this was the first time a bus had been on Millbrook Proving Ground and described it as "quite a sight".
The bus is normally speed limited to 56mph (90km/h).

Martijn Gilbert, chief executive of Reading Buses, said it would not be recognised as a Guinness World Record unless it reached speeds above 150mph (241km/h).
Chief engineer John Bickerton said the company wanted the "world's first service bus speed record" to bring to light the viability, power and credibility of buses fuelled by cow poo.
"We've laid down a challenge for other bus operators to best our record and we had to make it a bit hard for them.
"Most importantly we wanted to get the image of bus transport away from being dirty, smelly, and slow. We're modern, fast, and at the cutting edge of innovation.
"It was an impressive sight as it swept by on the track. It sounded like a Vulcan bomber - the aerodynamics aren't designed for going 80mph." :D

Its fuel is made from animal waste which is broken down in a process called anaerobic digestion to produce biogas, which is then liquefied, Mr Gilbert said.
It is stored in seven tanks fixed inside the roof of the bus.
The vehicle's name was inspired by the British Bloodhound super-sonic car which aims to go beyond 1,000mph in 2016.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-32801974
 
Freight Tetris: Exploring London's hi-tech Gateway port
By Adrian Lacey Business reporter

Cables whistle through pulleys, as quay cranes swing containers between ship and shore.
Heavy machinery rolls along rails to the strange music of beeps and sirens. Further from the shore, 20m-high stacking cranes choreographed by computers load and unload lorries . And all this comes with a minimum of visible human effort.

Welcome to the 21st Century container port.
This is London Gateway on the River Thames in Thurrock, Essex. It's owned by Dubai-based DP World.
Britain's newest container port - it's less than two years old - uses the latest technology to make its operations as efficient as possible.

In the control room, banks of computer screens could place you in any generic open-plan administrative office.
But the hard hats dotted about hint that this is somewhat different.
Closer inspection of some of the screens reveals charts containing numerous charcoal blocks - graphic representations of the metal containers that are the staple of the global freight trade.
"From here we plan, control, monitor and execute all the container movements", says operations manager Ivan Deosdad i Lopez.
"It's like a very complicated game of Tetris." :D
Tetris is a maddeningly addictive computer game involving the arrangement of coloured blocks. This is why London Gateway actively seeks job applications from gamers.
After all, the controls of a quay crane are not too dissimilar to a game console.

These quayside cranes are huge, roughly equivalent to the London Eye in height with their booms up. And they can move four containers on or off a ship at once.
Each container is identified by an optical character recognition system that reads a unique identifying code - a combination of four letters and seven numbers. This helps track the containers as they move around the world.
The 6m or 12m long metal containers can carry anything from car parts to clothing, perishables to periscopes - in short, a vast array of goods demanded by industry or consumers.

Southampton's port - also owned by DP World - offers customers "live terminal data" giving them the ability to track cargo "from ship to shore", while the UK's busiest container port at Felixstowe has just commissioned two new track-mounted gantry cranes to increase cargo volumes by rail.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33245840
 
Designers create the 'impossible' zero-carbon house
By Roger Harrabin BBC environment analyst

Designers at Cardiff University say they have constructed the sort of house George Osborne once described as impossible.
The chancellor scrapped a requirement for new homes to be zero carbon by 2016 because he said it would prove too expensive.
But Cardiff University say they have built a house that exports more power to the grid than it uses.
And crucially they say the cost fell within the normal budget for social housing.
A government spokesman said house builders needed to be given more time to develop low energy homes.

The house took just 16 weeks to construct and cost £1,000 per sq m - that's within the range for social housing of £800 to £1,000 per sq m, the designers said.
In future, they say its owners will make money from selling excess energy.
The property, near Bridgend, has insulated render on the outside and air heating systems that rely on the sun.
The designers say it will need to import energy in the winter, but the imports will be trumped by energy exports during summer months.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33544831

Nothing particularly new, just careful selection and assembly of various technologies.
 
This is a freaky development - remotely hacked cars. The hackers gained access to the cars functions through it's entertainment system. As the report says, "All of this is possible only because Chrysler, like practically all carmakers, is doing its best to turn the modern automobile into a smartphone".

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

The test was done on Jeep Cherokee but other makes/models have vulnerability as well. Chrysler are taking it seriously enough to recall 1.4 million vehicles...
 
Signing off: Finnish schools phase out handwriting classes
Joined-up writing lessons dropped in favour of keyboard skills, in recognition of changing methods of communication

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...t-handwriting-classes-keyboard-skills-finland

Spidery scrawls across faintly lined paper or the carefully penned love letter will be the stuff of fairytales for many young Finns thanks to a new government policy. Schools in Finland are phasing out cursive handwriting classes in favour of keyboard skills, as officials accept that texting, tapping and tweeting have taken over as the primary means of communication in the modern age.
 
'World's biggest hard drive' will store more than two years of video
Samsung's solid state 16TB PM1633a is billed as the world's largest - but will cost you
By James Titcomb
9:55AM BST 14 Aug 2015

Get ready hoarders. Samsung has unveiled a solid-state hard drive that stores 15.36 terabytes of data.
The 2.5-inch drive - the size used in conventional laptops - was unveiled at the Flash Memory Summit in California.
The PM1633a's capacity - which was presented as 16TB by Samsung but in fact totals 15.36TB - far outstrips recent 8TB and 10TB drives unveiled by Seagate and HGST.

At 1.5GB for a two-hour standard-definition movie (the approximate size given by the iTunes store), the hard drive could (in theory) store 10,240 two-hour movies. That's 853 days, or two years and four months.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11802629/samsung-unveils-worlds-biggest-hard-drive.html

Is that :eek: or :glee:?
 
Impressed that its physical size is that small.
 
What will Royal Navy warships look like in 2050?
By Jonathan Beale Defence correspondent, BBC News

Futuristic images of what Royal Navy vessels could look like in 2050 have been developed by young British scientists and engineers. They hope it will offer a glimpse of how advanced vessels could be.
A group of British scientists and engineers are working for major players in the industry and the Ministry of Defence on a project called Starpoint.
Its aim is to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of military maritime technology.

A 3D holographic command table in the operations room could potentially allow the crew to rotate and zoom into the battlefield, viewing it from space or underwater.
An acrylic hull that can be turned translucent to give all-round visibility, laser and electro-magnetic weapons and a fleet of drones all built on board with a 3D printer are also possibilities for the fleet.

The purpose of commissioning the designs was to push the industry top minds to explore what the Royal Navy could look like in its most advanced form.
You might have already seen some of it in science fiction movies. But the ideas behind what Starpoint, a collective of defence companies and the MoD, has called "Dreadnought 2050" are already rooted in reality.

Stealth design, to ensure low visibility on radars, is already being adopted in most modern warships; the US Navy is developing laser weapons and electro-magnetic rail-guns; basic drones have already been produced by 3D printers.

HMS Dreadnought, which the futuristic warship is named after, was a 1906 Royal Navy ship that "rendered other warships obsolete with her advancements".
But some of these ideas will likely remain on the drawing board, not least because of cost. Hi-tech weapon systems don't come cheap.
The Royal Navy's most modern destroyers to date, the Type 45, cost £1bn each. The Navy was supposed to be getting 12 but has ended up with just six.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34077719
(several photos on page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer
 
A look back at the state of computing in the the 1980s:

Back to BASIC
Go back to the 1980s, when the BBC launched the BBC Micro with a selection of TV programmes to help people make the most of their computers.

6 programmes available from the archives:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p031v2bg

All these programmes are available for over a year.
 
Video: Surprisingly elegant movement...
Drones build rope bridge that humans can cross

Quadcopter drones have been programmed to build a rope bridge capable of supporting the weight of a human.

The project was the result of a joint study by two researchers - one specialising in robotics, the other architecture - at ETH Zurich University's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research.

They hope the technology could eventually be used to save lives.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34327364
 
The march isn't always inexorable...

Waterstones to stop selling Kindle as book sales surge
Managing director James Daunt says: ‘Sales continue to be pitiful so we are taking the display space back.’
Nicola Slawson
Tuesday 6 October 2015 23.46 BST

The UK’s largest book retailer is removing Amazon’s Kindle ebooks from its stores nationwide and replacing them with print books due to “pitiful sales”.
Waterstones, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the electronic reader in its stores, will use the display space for physical paperbacks and hardbacks instead.

James Daunt, the managing director of the retailer, told The Bookseller: “Sales of Kindles continue to be pitiful so we are taking the display space back in more and more shops.
“It feels very much like the life of one of those inexplicable bestsellers; one day piles and piles, selling like fury; the next you count your blessings with every sale because it brings you closer to getting it off your shelves forever to make way for something new.
“Sometimes, of course, they ‘bounce’ but no sign yet of this being the case with Kindles.”

The move comes after physical book sales at Waterstones rose 5% in December 2014 at the expense of the e-reader.
It appears this trend is not unique to Waterstones. Figures released by Nielsen Bookscan show sales of print books for the first 36 weeks of 2015 rose by 4.6% (worth £739.5m) when compared to the same period in 2014.

This is the first time the print market has seen year-on-year growth at this stage of the calendar year since 2007.
Douglas McCabe, analyst for Enders, told The Bookseller it was no surprise Waterstones was removing Kindle devices from its shops. “The e-reader may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived consumer technology categories,” he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/06/waterstones-stop-selling-kindle-book-sales-surge
 
Of course Kindle sales are pitiful in a bookshop - I bet Amazon sell plenty.
 
And they probably sell more in electronics shops, too (although probably less than Amazon). As a general rule, people probably don't go to a bookshop to buy electronics.
 
Solu: the Finnish pocket computer that wants to take over the world
Three ambitious engineers from Finland are bidding to change personal computing with a new portable computer and operating system
Olivia Solon
Friday 16 October 2015 09.59 BST

Personal computers, says entrepreneur Kristoffer Lawson, haven’t changed much in 20 years. It’s still a box, a screen and, if you’re using a desktop, a keyboard.

But Lawson thinks that the era of cloud computing deserves its own kind of computing device. Portable, but more powerful than a mobile, designed to be plugged into any desktop screen and with a new kind of operating system that connects more fluidly to your contacts. And at a launch in San Francisco on 15 October, that’s what Lawson and the rest of the Solu team unveiled.

Solu might look like a drinks coaster but don’t put your coffee on it; this is a four-inch wide block of curved, wood-encased computer with an edge-to-edge touch screen. Inside is a powerful 2.3GHz processor, battery and Wi-Fi capability. It can be used on its own or paired with a keyboard and a display up to a resolution of 4K. When paired in this way, the Solu acts as an input device instead of a mouse.

“This is something I’ve been thinking about for 15 years, but back then the technology that would have allowed us to do this would have been so complex and expensive – particularly the hardware – that it would have been impossible,” says Lawson in a disorienting Belfast-Finnish accent.

He describes Solu as “the smallest general purpose computer ever created”. At around 10cm squared with a thickness of 12mm it is indeed small – more like a mobile phone than a PC, but with processing punch.
Lawson has been working on Solu’s hardware and operating system for the last 12 months, with a team that includes the former Nordic director of TMF Group Javier Reyes and Pekka Nikander, who founded IT security consultancy Nixu.
The team was, says Lawson, attracted to the leaping ambition of the Solu project: to disrupt the personal computing establishment. “When the challenge is big enough, the smart people will get inspired.”

Lawson draws directly on experience building Holvi, a simple online banking and accountancy service. Like banking, personal computing is a market that’s been dominated by major players like Microsoft and Apple for decades. The mobile revolution has given us computing power on the move, but the desktop staple – particularly the user interface – has remained unchanged.

Lawson’s biggest gripe with today’s computers is “how badly they use the internet as part of their whole experience”.
“Yes we have email but we’re still fighting with backups, hard drive space and downloading and installing applications,” he says. “The whole internet is not a natural part of the computer itself. If you run out of local resources, you’re screwed.”

etc...

http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...et-computer-that-wants-to-take-over-the-world
 
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