With each passing year, new cars get more complicated and high-tech. The new higher power requirements associated with these advancements—along with ever-stricter emissions regulations—are why 48-volt electrical systems are spreading like wildfire, with experts expecting the tech to make its way into one-fifth of all… Read more…
Read more here:
Everything You Need To Know About The Upcoming 48-Volt Electrical Revolution In Cars
schwit1 quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In the southern Indian city of Tuticorin, locals are unlikely to suffer from a poorly risen cake. That’s because a coal-fired thermal power station in the area captures carbon dioxide and turns it into baking soda. Carbon capture schemes are nothing new. Typically, they use a solvent, such as amine, to catch carbon dioxide and prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere. From there, the CO2 can either be stored away or used. But the Guardian reports that a system installed in the Tuticorin plant uses a new proprietary solvent developed by the company Carbon Clean Solutions. The solvent is reportedly just slightly more efficient than those used conventionally, requiring a little less energy and smaller apparatus to run. The collected CO2 is used to create baking soda, and it claims that as much as 66, 000 tons of the gas could be captured at the plant each year. Its operators say that the marginal gain in efficiency is just enough to make it feasible to run the plant without a subsidy. In fact, it’s claimed to be the first example of an unsubsidized industrial plant capturing CO2 for use. schwit1 notes: “A ‘climate change’ project that doesn’t involve taxpayer dollars? Is that even allowed?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View post:
A Coal-Fired Power Plant In India Is Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Baking Soda
China will invest $361 billion in renewable power generation between 2016 and 2020, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday, as the world’s largest energy market pushes to shift away from coal power. From a report: The investment will create over 13 million jobs in the sector, the NEA said in a blueprint document that lays out its plan to develop the nation’s energy sector in a five-year period. The NEA repeated its goal to have 580 million tonnes of coal equivalent of renewable energy consumption by 2020, accounting for 15 percent of overall energy consumption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taken from:
China To Plow $361 Billion Into Renewable Fuel By 2020
If you’re heading out to the coast or the lake for a spot of fishing, you can have the best gear and the perfect bait but you won’t land anything if you’re set up in the wrong spot. Experience can only guide so you so much, so PowerVision — the company behind the incredible PowerEgg drone we saw last year — has built an underwater robot called the PowerRay to help find and lure in your next catch. The PowerRay can dive down to 30 meters (98 feet) underwater, where it can use an optional “Fishfinder” sonar component to detect fish another 40 meters below it. The drone’s WiFi system beams video and images captured by its integrated 4K camera and additional data on the underwater landscape and temperature up to the surface, which can then be viewed via the dedicated iOS or Android app. It also features an “internal fish luring light” that will apparently attract fish with a welcoming “hue of blue” and an optional remote-controlled bait drop that can place tasty snares in your desired location. If that’s not immersive enough, PowerVision wants to add a touch of virtual reality to proceedings. The PowerRay comes with an option to be controlled by a wearable device or via its own VR goggles. The PowerVision VR Goggles recognize both “gravity and gestures, ” allowing you to control the robot by simply moving your head. If you’re looking to be the envy of all your fishermen and women friends, the PowerRay will be available for pre-order from February 27th. PowerVision hasn’t yet announced a price, but judging from the company’s other robots, expect it to be on the high side. Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017. Via: PowerVision (PRNewsWire) Source: PowerRay
Continue Reading:
The PowerRay underwater drone finds fish and films them in 4K
A portrait is often defined with a little depth of field of effect that makes the person in focus really pop. Most smartphone’s can’t produce this effect, but How-To Geek shows off a way to use a single Photoshop effect to create the same look. Read more…
Read More:
Quickly Improve a Smartphone Portrait in Photoshop with a Simple Depth of Field Effect
Consumer Reports has released its evaluation of the new MacBook Pro laptops, and it’s not good. The 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to fail to receive a recommendation from the nonprofit organization dedicated to unbiased product testing. 9to5Mac reports: In a post breaking down the decision not to recommend the new MacBook Pros, Consumer Reports explains that while the new models held up well in terms of display quality and performance, the battery life issues were too big of an issue to overlook. The organization tested three MacBook Pro variants: a 13-inch Touch Bar model, a 15-inch Touch Bar model, and a 13-inch model without the Touch Bar. The general consensus was that “MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next.” Consumer Reports explains that the 13-inch Touch Bar model saw battery life of 16 hours in one test and 3.75 hours in another, while the non-Touch Bar model maxed out at 19.5 hours, but also lasted just 4.5 hours in another test. The 15-inch model ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours. Generally, according to the report, it’s expected for battery life to vary from one trial to another by less than 5 percent, meaning that the battery life variances with the new MacBook Pro are very abnormal. Once that was completed, Consumer Reports experimented by conducting the same test using Chrome and “found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.” While the organization can’t let that affect its final decision due to its protocol to only use the first-party browser, it’s something users may want to try. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original post:
2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The “reactionless” Electromagnetic Drive, or EmDrive for short, is an engine propelled solely by electromagnetic radiation confined in a microwave cavity. Such an engine would violate the law of conservation of momentum by generating mechanical action without exchanging matter. But since 2010, both the United States and China have been pouring serious resources into these seemingly impossible engines. And now China claims its made a key breakthrough. Dr. Chen Yue, Director of Commercial Satellite Technology for the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) announced on December 10, 2016 that not only has China successfully tested EmDrives technology in its laboratories, but that a proof-of-concept is currently undergoing zero-g testing in orbit (according to the International Business Times, this test is taking place on the Tiangong 2 space station). If China is able to install EmDrives on its satellites for orbital maneuvering and altitude control, they would become cheaper and longer lasting. Li Feng, lead CAST designer for commercial satellites, states that the current EmDrive has only a thrust of single digit millinewtons, for orbital adjustment; a medium sized satellite needs 0.1-1 Newtons. A functional EmDrive would also open up new possibilities for long range Chinese interplanetary probes beyond the Asteroid belt, as well freeing up the mass taken up by fuel in manned spacecraft for other supplies and equipment to build lunar and Martian bases. On the military side of things, EmDrives could also be used to create stealthier, longer lasting Chinese surveillance satellites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original post:
China Claims Tests of ‘Reactionless’ EM Drive Were Successful
New submitter mirandakatz writes: Since India’s prime minister banned 86 percent of the rupee notes in circulation last month, citizens have been waiting in hours-long lines for ATMs. But these circumstances have also created an unexpected progression: a burgeoning cashless economy. At Backchannel, Lauren Razavi explores how India is now beating many Western countries in adopting mobile payments, and how demonetization has triggered a radical shift toward reimagining India’s enormous informal economy as a data-driven digital marketplace. From the report: “Before last month, Paytm, a mobile app that allows users to pay for everything from pizza to utility bills, saw steady business — it was processing between 2.5 and 3 million transactions a day. Now, usage of the app has close to doubled. 6 million transactions a day is common; 5 million is considered a bad day. Rather than being forced to idle away time in excruciatingly long lines, ‘people are proactively exploring other ways to settle payments besides cash, ‘ says Deepak Abbot, senior vice president at Paytm. ‘Now people are realizing they don’t need to really line up, because merchants are starting to accept other forms of payment.’ All of this has created a newfound system that practically incentives mobile payment. With so many people queuing up at banks every day — and a lot of Indian bureaucracy to wade through in order to open a traditional bank account or line of credit — the appeal of more convenient digital alternatives is easy to understand. According to a report in the Hindu Business Line, as many as 233 million unbanked people in India are skipping plastic and moving straight to digital transactions. ‘Cash has lost its credibility and payments are no longer perceived in the same way, ‘ says Upasana Taku, the cofounder of Indian mobile wallet company MobiKwik, which reported a 40 percent increase in downloads and a 7, 000 percent increase in bank transfers since demonetization. ‘There’s chaos at the moment but also relief that India will now be an improved economy, ‘ she says.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taken from:
India Just Flew Past Us In the Race To E-Cash
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth. Incorporated into terrestrial power plants, this “star in a jar” technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever. And according to new reports out of Europe this week, we just took another big step toward making it happen. In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process. It works like this: Unlike a traditional fission reactor, which splits atoms of heavy elements to generate energy, a fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste. The “fuel” used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water. The W7-X device confines the plasma within magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils cooled down to near absolute zero. The plasma — at temperatures upwards of 80 million degrees Celsius — never comes into contact with the walls of the containment chamber. Neat trick, that. David Gates, principal research physicist for the advanced projects division of PPPL, leads the agency’s collaborative efforts in regard to the W7-X project. In an email exchange from his offices at Princeton, Gates said the latest tests verify that the W7-X magnetic “cage” is working as planned. “This lays the groundwork for the exciting high-performance plasma operations expected in the near future, ” Gates said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
‘Star In a Jar’ Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy
MojoKid writes: Intel is laying out its roadmap to advance artificial intelligence performance across the board. Nervana Systems, a company that Intel acquired just a few months ago, will play a pivotal role in the company’s efforts to make waves in an industry dominated by GPU-based solutions. Intel’s Nervana chips incorporate technology (which involves a fully-optimized software and hardware stack) that is specially tasked with reducing the amount of time required to train deep-learning models. Nervana hardware will initially be available as an add-in card that plugs into a PCIe slot, which is the quickest way for Intel to get this technology to customers. The first Nervana silicon, codenamed Lake Crest, will make its way to select Intel customers in H1 2017. Intel is also talking about Knights Mill, which is the next generation of the Xeon Phi processor family. The company claims that Knights Mill will deliver a 4x increase in deep learning performance compared to existing Xeon Phi processors and the combined solution with Nervana will offer orders of magnitude gains in deep learning performance. “We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks, ” said Diane Bryant, Executive VP of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We expect Nervana’s technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster, ” added Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the article:
Intel Lays Roadmap For 100-Fold AI Performance Boost With Nervana and Knights