ELEKTRO

 These days we are celebrating the UN’s 2015 Year of Light. Physicist John Perlin explains an excellent archive for any person wishing to keep abreast of today’s solar revolution. The year: 1872. It was this discovery that stirred keen interest in two British scientists, William Grylls Adams and Richard Evans Day. Adams and Day had received from Smith the bars of selenium he had experimented with. Their goal? To delve deeper into the peculiar behavior Smith had discovered. In one…

 The number one priority for Team Juncker is a €315-billion investment plan for Europe. Second, is “better regulation”. First Vice-President Frans Timmermans presented the European Commission’s 2015 work programme to MEPs in Strasbourg on 16 December. Energy Post looks at the new initiatives, scrapped initiatives and those that hang in the balance for energy and climate policy. Just 23 new policy initiatives are foreseen by the Juncker Commission for next year (compared to over 100 in…

By automatically turning on full brightness with the detection of a car or human being, the new generation Infrared Sensor LED Tube is the ideal replacement for fluorescent tubes in parking lots and garages. The Infrared Sensor LED Tube Light works in this way: When a car or human is detected (by the infrared sensor on the LED tube) moving in the direction of the garage, the LED tube will be turned on automatically with full brightness. After 10 to 30 seconds of delay (it can be adjusted), it…

Touchscreen is the best innovation till date in this decade in terms of display and interaction with the system. They have been used across industries. The automotive industry has integrated this in its dashboards,but mostly it is high-end class we see such technology. This is because of the high cost of the integration. This scenario may change with the rather cheap Continental “infrared curtain” which allows mutli-touch functionality only any automobile. The infrared is made out of the…

LG is partnering up with Mercedes-Benz to make the future of driving smarter and less about the drivers themselves. The Korean company announced that the duo are jointly working on “next-generation camera systems” which they said will allow computers and algorithms to handle “some aspects” of the driving experience. LG told The Verge that it will provide the “core components” of self-driving cars from Mercedes-Benz in the future. That joint system will be based on LG’s existing ‘ADAS’ …

OpenSensors is a service where anyone can publish real-time sensor data. Think of it as Twitter for sensors. You can publish a stream of data from virtually any source to the company’s computer servers—or subscribe to streams of data coming from others, using it for your own research, gadget, or online app. As environmental sensors and other “Internet of Things” devices creep into the mainstream—including web-connected cars, fitness trackers, and home automation systems—we can also benefit…

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin built Moscow's spectacularly beautiful metro as an example to the world, a symbol of "radiant Communist future". Now under strongman Vladimir Putin there are plans to make it the most connected in the world, with free, fast Wi-Fi even in the deepest tunnels. By the end of the year, all lines of the Russian capital's famous subway system – the world's second busiest, with some seven million passengers a day – will be connected to broadband Internet. Opened in…

Intel Corporation announced the Intel® IoT Platform, an end-to-end reference model designed to unify and simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things (IoT). Intel also introduced integrated hardware and software products based on the new platform and new relationships with an expanded ecosystem of system integrators that promise to move IoT from infancy to mass deployment. The new offerings and relationships will make it easier for solution providers to move IoT from pockets…

C. elegans is a little nematodes that have been extensively studied by scientists - we know all of their genes and their nervous system has been analysed many times. Now a collective called the OpenWorm project has mapped all the connections between the worm’s 302 neurons and managed to simulate them in software, as Marissa Fessenden reports for the Smithsonian. The ultimate goal of the project is to completely replicate C. elegans as a virtual organism, but for now, they’ve only managed to…

Graduate student Alec Momont of TU Delft has designed an unmanned, autonomously navigating mini aeroplane that can quickly deliver a defibrillator to where it is needed. A network of such drones could significantly increase the chance of survival following a cardiac arrest: from 8% to 80%! Alec Momont of TU Delft's Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering designed his prototype for an ambulance drone together with the Living Tomorrow innovation platform as part of his graduation programme.…

Today, MetaMind launched its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) platform and announced initial funding from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff. The company's ground-breaking deep learning software combines natural language processing and computer vision to solve a broad range of complex data problems, enabling automated predictions and smarter decision-making for businesses with greater speed and accuracy than ever before. The company's breakthrough…

For most of us, high-speed image capture, say 120 or 240 frames per second, is enough to get a good look at stuff happening in the blink of an eye -- like a water droplet hitting the ground or a Bichon Frisé snagging his favorite ball. For faster subjects, industrial-strength high-speed cameras can grab tens of thousands of frames per second (or more). But when your rapidly moving target is light itself, you're going to need something a bit quicker -- to the tune of 100 billion fps, according…

Physicists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter have kept a piece of ceramic in a superconducting state, disproving the widely-held assumption that materials need to be cooled to temperatures of at least -140 degrees Celsius to achieve superconductivity. Publishing the results in the journal Nature, the team hopes the discovery will help drive the potential of superconductor technology in the future. “It could assist materials scientists to develop new…

We knew the U.K. government had given the go ahead to start testing driverless cars on British public roads from this January — backed by £10 million of taxpayer money — but we didn’t exactly know where and by whom. My hope was that Milton Keynes would be chosen, simply because it is a town almost entirely made up of roundabouts. And, indeed, Milton Keynes does make this list. Today, Innovate UK, the government quango charged with overseeing the country’s driverless plans, announced that our…

It's tough to make cycling any greener, but the Dutch have done just that with a bike lane that powers street lights and even houses. What's being billed as the world's first solar-powered bike path will officially open on November 12 in Krommenie, a town northwest of Amsterdam. Riders will be able to hop on at one end and then, after a few seconds of pedaling, dismount at the other. Being a pilot project, the lane is only 230 feet long (though it'll stretch to 328 feet when finished). …