Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today’s Best

Zothecula (1870348) writes “The Retina displays featured on Apple’s iPhone 4 and 5 models pack a pixel density of 326 ppi, with individual pixels measuring 78 micrometers. That might seem plenty good enough given the average human eye is unable to differentiate between the individual pixels, but scientists in the UK have now developed technology that could lead to extremely high-resolution displays that put such pixel densities to shame.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today’s Best

Rocket Scientist Designs "Flare" Pot That Cooks Food 40% Faster

An anonymous reader writes Oxford University engineering professor Dr Thomas Povey just invented a new cooking pot that heats food 40% faster. The pot is made from cast aluminum, and it features fins that direct flames across the bottom and up the sides, capturing energy that would otherwise be wasted. The pot is set to hit the market next month in the UK. “Povey specializes in the design of high-efficiency cooling systems for next-generation jet engines. He is also an avid mountaineer and says that this invention was spurred by the long time it takes for water to reach a boil at high altitudes. He and a group of his students worked three years experimenting with different designs before they came up with one being marketed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rocket Scientist Designs "Flare" Pot That Cooks Food 40% Faster

New Technology Uses Cellular Towers For Super-Accurate Weather Measurements

Iddo Genuth (903542) writes “Israeli scientists from the Tel Aviv University perfected a method for using cell phone service towers’ microwave emitters to measure rain and snow and even (for the first time ) detect fog with great accuracy over vast areas in real time. The research team members have analyzed endless amounts of raw cellular data and developed more accurate ways to measure meteorological information and added more parameters that they can now measure using their growing database. When combined with existing meteorological monitoring technologies such as radars and local ground based weather stations, the results show unprecedented level of accuracy that can give better and further weather forecast as well as special warnings about upcoming floods, fog and hail which can affect both people and crop production.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Technology Uses Cellular Towers For Super-Accurate Weather Measurements

Sand-Based Anode Triples Lithium-Ion Battery Performance

Zothecula (1870348) writes “Conventional lithium-ion batteries rely on anodes made of graphite, but it is widely believed that the performance of this material has reached its zenith, prompting researchers to look at possible replacements. Much of the focus has been on nanoscale silicon, but it remains difficult to produce in large quantities and usually degrades quickly. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have overcome these problems by developing a lithium-ion battery anode using sand.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sand-Based Anode Triples Lithium-Ion Battery Performance

How Japan Lost Track of 640kg of Plutonium

Lasrick sends this quote from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Most people would agree that keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea. So it may come as a surprise to some that the arrangements that are supposed to account for weapon-grade fissile materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—are sketchy at best. The most recent example involves several hundreds kilograms of plutonium that appear to have fallen through the cracks in various reporting arrangements. … [A Japanese researcher discovered] that the public record of Japan’s plutonium holdings failed to account for about 640 kilograms of the material. The error made its way to the annual plutonium management report that Japan voluntarily submits to the International Atomic Energy Agency … This episode may have been a simple clerical error, but it was yet another reminder of the troubling fact that we know very little about the amounts of fissile material that are circulating around the globe. The only reason the discrepancy was discovered in this case was the fact that Japan has been unusually transparent about its plutonium stocks. … No other country does this. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Japan Lost Track of 640kg of Plutonium

Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph

Zothecula writes: As one of the contenders in the race to win a $100 billion contract from the U.S. government for the next generation of attack helicopter in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program, AVX Aircraft Company has conceived a futuristic machine kitted out with coaxial rotors, ducted fans and a retractable undercarriage that could hit speeds of over 270 mph (435 km/h). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph

GE’s Made a Microwave That Can Measure the Calories on Your Plate

Health and fitness monitoring is helping us all look after ourselves a little better, but there’s one stumbling block: calorie intake is still self-reported, making it laborious and often inaccurate. GE, however, thinks it has a way to change that. Read more…

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GE’s Made a Microwave That Can Measure the Calories on Your Plate

The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptime, 99.9%, which beats London’s tube or NYC’s sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10, 000 people would be carrying out 2, 600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the one carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn’t a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chan of Hong Kong’s City University, who designed the AI system, says, “Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen.” Chan’s AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedules less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chan’s team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong’s AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chan. “We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works, ” he says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Chinese Company ‘3D-Prints 10 Buildings In One Day

Lucas123 writes: A company in China has used additive manufacturing to print 10 single-room buildings out of recycled construction materials in under a day as offices for a Shanghai industrial park. The cost: about $5, 000 each. The company, Suzhou-based Yingchuang New Materials, used four massive 3D printers supplied by the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. Each printer is 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long. Like their desktop counterparts, the construction-grade 3D printers use fused deposition modeling (FDM), where instead of thermoplastics layer after layer of cement is deposited atop one another. The cement contains hardeners that make each layer firm enough for the next. Yingchuang’s technique builds structures off site in a factory one wall at a time. The structures are then assembled onsite. The technique is unlike U.S.-based Contour Crafting, a company whose 3D printing technology to form the entire outer structure of buildings at once, The Yingchuang factory and research center, a 33, 000 square foot building, was also constructed using the 3D printing manufacturing technique. It only took one month to construct. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Company ‘3D-Prints 10 Buildings In One Day

In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions

The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700, 000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion, ” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions