A Swedish Company Claims It Has Built The World's Most Efficient Solar Panel That Tracks The Sun.

A Swedish technology company has installed a new solar electricity generation system in South Africa’s sun-soaked Kalahari desert, saying it’s not only the most efficient system of its kind in the world, but it doubles the efficiency of standard solar panels.

The system, which features a pair of huge, 12-metre mirror dishes, runs on a Stirling engine - a type of closed-cycle regenerative heat engine that was invented way back in 1816, and uses trapped gas instead of water to propel the internal pistons and flywheel. The dishes are slowly rotated throughout the day to capture the maximum amount of solar rays and focus them into a specific point, which kicks the Stirling engine into gear.

Room With The Lowest Magnetic Field In The Solar System.

Some experiments, especially in fundamental physics, require the complete absence of magnetic fields. The only places you would find such a spot would be either in intergalactic space or inside a superconductor. Now an international team of researchers claim to have created such a space with a magnetic field that is the weakest in the solar system.

In the Journal of Applied Physics of 14 May the researchers report that by building a box consisting of metal shields arranged in a "Russian nesting doll" structure, they have been able to attenuate changes in the ambient magnetic field caused by man, such as passing cars, or of natural origin, such as solar flares, by a million fold, a factor they have increased to seven million since the acceptance of their paper. In practical terms, the shielded box can reduce magnetic disturbances from passing cars to below one pico Tesla. In comparison, the magnetic field of the Earth averages 48 microtesla at the surface.

This million-fold attentuation is an increase of two orders of magnitude over the previous best magnetically shielded space, the BMSR-2 in Berlin, explains Peter Fierlinger, a physicist at the Technical University Munich, Germany. "There is a very fundamental experiment that we are intending to do.  It will allow us to look at the origin of the universe much closer to the Big Bang than the Large Hadron Collider," says Fierlinger.

The team of 19 researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United Sates used an industrial alloy of nickel and iron, Magnifer, that responds to external magnetic fields by becoming easily magnetized and redirecting the magnetic field lines towards the inside of the metal. The complete magnetic shield has a large external chamber consisting of three alloy shields and an aluminum shield for stopping RF radiation. A second box, also consisting of three Magnifer shells, called the "insert," is mounted on rails and can be rolled in and out of the external shield.  The total space available for experiments is slightly more than 4 m3.

"You can lock yourself in this room, but you will be the most magnetic item inside," says Fierlinger.

Although such magnetic shields have been built in the past, an efficient design, with optimized spacing and thickness of the metal sheets, became possible with advances in numeric modeling over the last few years, explains Fierlinger.  "It took us several years of elaborate work to achieve this improvement," he says.

The magnetic field the researchers achieved is now low enough to tackle an experiment that will  allow them to probe the Standard Model of Particle Physics beyond the capabilities of the LHC.

"We are trying to measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron, and this is a very fundamental quantity, it is a quantum effect inside the neutron which is forbidden by the laws of nature that are part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but it is an effect required to explain physics beyond our Standard Model,”  says Fierlinger. “And this physics must exist because it would explain why the universe, as we see it, has more matter than antimatter."

However, he is quick to add that their magnetically shielded room will profit other areas of science and technology, such as measuring magnetic signals from the brain with SQUIDs, the design and testing of SQUIDs, superconducting detectors, and low-noise electronics.  "Our chamber will not be a user facility, but experiments will be collaborative."

Diamond+Graphene Engineered to Reduce Friction To Almost Zero.

Friction is an important fact of life, robbing efficiency from anything where two surfaces interact with each other, such as engines and wheels. Lubrication can reduce the amount of friction, but it's never possible to get rid of it entirely.

In some rare cases, however, it's been possible to get the coefficient of friction to drop dramatically. A phenomenon called superlubricity occurs when two perfectly flat surfaces with incompatible crystal structures slide past each other. It's only been observed in extremely small samples, however, as larger surfaces have imperfections that tend to get stuck as they slide around.

Now, researchers have managed to create superlubricity in a large sample. They do so by getting graphene to wrap around nanoscopic diamonds, creating something akin to tiny ball bearings.

The authors of the new paper, a team from Argonne National Lab, were initially intending to study the traditional type of superlubricity. They reasoned that graphene and diamonds would have incompatible surfaces, and hoped that coating two surfaces with them would allow them to slide with minimal friction. Although friction was low, it didn't fall into the superlubricity category.

By looking at the surfaces afterwards, however, they found that small sheets of graphene had peeled off one of the surfaces and rolled up, creating scrolls in the debris. However, as graphene is only a single atom thick, these scrolls weren't very robust, and they ended up crunched between the two surfaces. In order to give the graphene more staying power, the team then turned to a rather robust substance: diamonds. The authors expected that the diamonds would act like tiny ball bearings, allowing the graphene scrolls to roll while the two surfaces slid past each other.

Diamonds have two other properties that make them an excellent choice. For one, they provide the same sort of surface that the authors had already reasoned would slide past graphene with minimal resistance. It's also possible to create incredibly small diamonds, which the authors refer to as nanodiamonds.

So, the authors coated a surface with graphene, coated another with diamond-like carbon, and sprinkled nanodiamonds in between. This dropped the coefficient of friction down to near zero, indicating the superlubricity had been achieved. Electron micrographs of the surface revealed that, as expected, graphene sheets had wrapped themselves around the nanodiamonds, which acted a bit like a ball bearing.

The authors tried a variety of conditions, changing the temperature, varying the load on the surfaces, and increasing their relative velocity. In all cases, the nanodiamonds retained superlubricity. The only exception came when the increased the relative humidity to 30 percent, which caused friction to increase dramatically. Apparently, water vapor can make its way into the space between the two surfaces and act as a bridge between them, creating transient bonds that need to be broken to shift the surfaces.

This is the first time that superlubricity's been demonstrated for something other than two microscopic, defect-free surfaces. So, in that sense, it represents significant progress, and may point a way forward to getting rid of some of the friction that robs us of energy.

Using Human Cells to Develope 3D Printed Ears.

3D printing has taken another huge step forward with engineers and physicians successfully creating a prosthetic human ear by using injectable moulds.

The injectable moulds contain living cells that were used to mould the shape of the ear. Over three months, the collagen used to mould them is replaced by cartilage once implanted. The discovery was made by scientists and biomedical engineers in Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College and detailed in online peer review journal PLOS ONE.

The process starts with a digitised image of an ear for the printer. The file instructs the printer to mould the ear accordingly and then injects the gel containing living cells.

The whole procedure is quite fast. The mould takes roughly half a day to print and 30 minutes to inject the gel. It is then trimmed and left to culture in ‘nourishing cell culture media’ for a number of days before it is implanted on to a person.

The manufactured ear could help babies who have been born with ear deformities and in the long run be used to help people who lost their hearing later in life, whether through injury or illness, explains Dr Jason Spector.

Spector is the directorof the Laboratory for Bioregenerative Medicine and Surgery in New York and associate professor of plastic surgery with Weill Cornell. His colleague and co-lead author of the study, Lawrence Bonassar who is the associate professor of biomedical engineering also stated: “This is such a win-win for both medicine and basic science, demonstrating what we can achieve when we work together.”

Virtual Flowmeters: A Low-Cost Alternative

The use of virtual flowmeter (VFM) systems can help lower the costs and improve the reliability of subsea multiphase metering efforts. However, despite the maturation of VFM technology and the widespread use of VFM models as backups to physical meters, the industry has still not accepted it as an alternative to the physical meter or even as a tool to supplement physical meter measurements, an expert said. Speaking at a technical section on Tuesday at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Amin Amin, senior technical adviser at the Letton-Hall Group, discussed the study his group conducted into the viability of VFM systems. Amin compared five commercially available VFM software packages by using production data from a subsea well with a subsea multiphase flowmeter. He ran three rounds of evaluation. The first was an “out of the box” test, where the models were tested without any modifications. In the second round, the meters were tuned using elemental computing parameters for subsea multiphase meters such as total mass flow rate, gas volume fraction, and water/liquid ratio. In the third round, Amin factored fluid property errors into his measurements. “We really wanted to have a complete vote of confidence of VFMs,” Amin said. “Here was a real test case for us.” After the first round of testing, Amin noted that the real production data were valuable in comparing the methodologies used by each flow model to arrive at the given flow rates measured by the subsea multiphase flowmeter. In the second round, he found that the gas volume fraction could be estimated to a sufficient degree of accuracy by tuning the total mass flow rate in each model. Though the gas flow rate predictions grew increasingly uncertain over time, each package was consistent with regards to the anchoring role that the total mass flow rate parameter played in the VFM tuning process. The flow rate predictions from all participating models showed less than a 5% deviation from the measured oil flow rate and less than a 10% deviation from the measured gas flow rate. Adjusting the models to account for fluid properties did not change the results much. The deviation of individual phase densities had little effect on the flow rate projection, provided that the total mass flow rate used in the tuning process was accurate. Amin said the dependency of VFM models on the mixture density measurement at a given point for the purpose of defining the total mass flow rate is greater than it would be on the individual phase densities. Amin found that the presence of anomalous input data can impair the flow rate predictions of VFM systems, but with only one case study of note, it is hard to determine if this is a serious concern. He said more work is needed to establish a systematic approach to understand and interpret VFM systems in order to identify anomalous devices. “The systematic errors can be compromising, so the detection of these errors may not be as easy as one might expect from this system,” he said.

Technological Innovation Needed To Extract Value From Mature Oil Fields

With the oil industry facing an uncertain future in the wake of low oil prices, the maintenance of mature fields has become an extremely tough challenge. Despite the volatile economic environment, it is still possible for operators to wring additional value from these fields while keeping costs at a reasonable level, a trio of experts said. In a forum that took place at IHS CERAWeek in Houston, Tim Dodson, Michel Hourcard, and Leta Smith discussed the need for the industry to preserve mature fields by emphasizing technological innovation and creative management strategies. Dodson is the executive vice president at Statoil; Hourcard is a senior vice president of development, exploration, and production at Total; and Smith is a director at IHS. Dodson’s presentation focused primarily on Statoil’s efforts in the North Sea, particularly the Norwegian continental shelf. He said the mature areas in the Norwegian shelf remain attractive to the company because it is familiar with the geology, and it has the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the resources in the area. “As an operator of large production hubs in Norway, Statoil puts a lot of effort into proving up additional, timely resources in the surrounding areas in order to prolong the lifetime of the existing structure,” Dodson said. An example of this strategy is the Aasta Hansteen field, which was discovered by BP in 1997. Statoil is building a spar platform from which it will run the Polarled pipeline approximately 300 miles to a gas plant on the Nyhamna peninsula off the central Norwegian coast. Polarled is expected to deliver up to 70 million scf/D of gas to the Nyhamna plant. Furthermore, the company plans to build a separate pipeline between Polarled and the Kristin platform.

Worst-Case Discharges

In March, the SPE Board of Directors approved the publication of a technical report on the calculation of worst-case discharges (WCDs). The report, “Calculation of Worst-Case Discharge,” documents the consensus from an SPE-sponsored summit held in March last year. At the summit, 68 subject matter experts met in New Orleans with the goal of improving the methods of calculating and reporting WCD scenarios. The attendees—representing operators, regulators, academia, and service providers—developed the report, which was made available for comment for 30 days and edited to include comments before being approved by the Board. The focus of the technical report is on the calculation of WCD rather than well design or intervention. Its primary application is in the US Gulf of Mexico, although the report may be used for wells elsewhere. Deterministic methods are proposed because of the wording of regulations and requirements for detailed well design and response planning. Probabilistic modeling and statistical analysis are unacceptable. All reservoir properties, the report says, should be best-estimate, success-case values based on sound geology, geophysics, and engineering judgment. All calculation parameter values should be explained and justified to ensure consistency and transparency. Parametric sensitivity is recommended for identifying the major variables and their impact on the WCD calculation. Topics covered in the technical report include reservoir properties, inflow modeling, outflow modeling, total volume, special cases, and reporting. Future improvements could include flow correlations for high rates in large-diameter pipes, sonic velocity effects, and probabilistic methods. According to the report, the flow scenario should be modeled over the duration of the spill to determine when the highest, single-day flow rate from the well occurs, which may or may not be the first day. In multiwell situations, the report says, it is important to remember that the WCD well may or may not be the first well drilled on the block or in the field. Each potential well location must be assessed and the WCD determined by the planned well that has the highest WCD flow rate. The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management defines WCD as “the single highest daily flow rate of liquid hydrocarbon during an uncontrolled wellbore flow event,” that is, the average daily flow rate on the day that the highest rate occurs under worst-case conditions (e.g., a blowout). It is neither the total volume spilled over the duration of the event nor the maximum possible flow rate that would result from high-side reservoir parameters, nor a distribution of outcomes. It is a single value for the expected flow rate calculated under worst-case wellbore conditions using known (expected) reservoir properties.

Accounting for HSSE in an Enterprise Resource Planning System

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems help organizations manage data from product planning to shipping. By automating primary business-related processes, the systems allow companies to define their business models and plan workloads. However, most companies do not include processes related to health, safety, security, and environmental (HSSE) concerns within the scope of their ERP systems, and failing to account for HSSE may be a costly mistake, an expert said. Jeff Morgheim, a former climate change director at BP, said the early inclusion of HSSE practices in ERP systems is a good business practice because it sets a societal expectation that leads to improved decision making. He spoke at a webinar, “What About HSSE? Why Early Inclusion of HSSE Into Enterprise Resource Planning Efforts Makes Sense,” held by the SPE Gulf Coast Section’s Health, Safety, and Environment study group. Morgheim, who was part of BP’s executive team in the aftermath of the Macondo incident in 2010, is the founder of Edge Consulting. HSSE plays an important part in the operational excellence of an organization, Morgheim said. However, financial issues may make it difficult for a company to execute primary HSSE functions. “When an enterprise decides that it needs to implement something that allows all this information to flow together, the usual motivator has to do with getting a better handle on their accounting systems,” Morgheim said. “So, what you’ll find is that the executive sponsor within an enterprise will tend to be someone from within the finance function. That has an impact on the scope (of ERP implementation).” The following factors drive the inclusion of strong HSSE policies in an ERP system: Seizing the opportunity for near-term process improvements Avoiding rework Fostering a collaboration between functions Leveraging the risk reduction potential of an ERP system Enhancing workforce sustainability Signaling the role of HSSE to the organization Morgheim said near-term process improvements provide organizations with a framework for identifying the processes for simplification or elimination, and removing duplicity in data collection and reporting. An organization’s ability to use its HSSE policy in the investigative process in a consistent way with the rest of the ERP system is a powerful opportunity. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for your function to be able to sit down and look at how exactly our processes work,” he said. “Where do we get information from? Who do we get information to? How do we validate that information? What do we do with that information?” Avoiding rework on ERP systems is critical to keeping their cost down. Morgheim said incorporating good HSSE practices into a plan early will always cost less in the long run than retrofitting a plan to incorporate those practices after an incident. “As anyone who has done house remodeling knows, there is a lot less pain and suffering and mental anguish involved in designing all the rooms ahead of time rather than building two separate parts of the house and figuring out how you’re going to integrate them together,” he said. In addition, fostering collaboration between functions (operations, drilling, accounting, human resources, and the supply chain) helps reduce workload and errors within an organization. Leveraging an ERP’s risk reduction potential helps improve compliance, risk management, and operational assurance, which leads to long-term benefits in accounting and finance. Enhancing the HSSE workforce’s sustainability helps lower turnover costs and risks. It expands the pool of potential HSSE employees and lowers the costs to bring in new people. By emphasizing the importance of the role of HSSE, an organization is making it part of the creation of a culture of operational excellence. Morgheim said companies should reinforce the belief that good HSSE practices lead to good business practices.

STEM Learning Lab Promotes Love of Science and Maths in Children.

STEM Learning Lab provides young students with engaging and interactive learning experiences in science, technology, engineering and math by integrating those subjects in ways that are fun and hands-on.

For example, STEM’s curriculum also includes the powerful robotics platform EZ-Robot enabling kids engage in science and technology through building and playing with robots.

Here’s more from founders Gina Cherkowski and Ryan Clements:

How did you come up with the idea for your startup? Was there an “ah-ha” moment?

Gina: After many years of teaching in the classroom we still have so many kids who don’t have the competitive advantages in a world that requires an understanding of math, science, data, technology, and real world problem solving. This new world is based on having strong numeracy skills as well as visual and spatial reasoning skills. Adding arts to the equation is one way to do this.

We can also build these skills by teaching math visually using spatial temporal reasoning and by teaching things such as robotics. Most school curriculums do not target visual spatial skill development; in fact it is the smallest part of most math curriculums. Given that visual spatial reasoning is critical for learning, we know that supplementing children’s experiences with activities that promote visual spatial skills is important.

We wanted to provide a platform for children to learn these important skills while they are engaging in fun hands-on experiences and making new friends. Our camps not only target visual spatial skills and math and science skills, we also foster the development of computational literacy, analytical reasoning, problem solving, computer programing and logic-systems thinking.

What has been the biggest challenge so far? What have you done to solve it?

Distinguishing our niche from the many other great camps that are currently available. Parents need to find camps that best support their child and also understand the difference between each camp and what best suits them. Our niche is very different from any of the other camps in that our focus is on the visual spatial dynamic in learning through robotics and maker activities. To solve this challenge we have created many strategic partnerships, which has given us exposure and access to new networks, established relationships with many schools, and provided many demos of the robots and how they will work in our camps.

What’s new with your startup that we can share?

We have a full slate of camps and workshops for this summer open for registration at www.stemlearninglab.com. In the fall we will be adding math and robotics programs as well as science and computer camps for home-schoolers. Later this year we will launch a series of enrichment camps for kids on weekends, a pre-school program targeted to develop young children’s visual spatial skills that are critical to develop from ages 3 to 5, and bots for tots camps.

What advice would you like to share with others just starting out?

Take a process driven approach – utilize lean startup thinking, get your product to market quickly, test it with real customers and improve it based on feedback. Develop many strategic partnerships, networking opportunities, and mentoring relationships.

What made you choose to go down the path of entrepreneurship?

We both wanted the freedom to create things that added value and solved problems for others. We love the creative process, developing relationships, and the ability to act independently. We also are driven by the idea of disruptive innovation and we saw an opportunity to offer kids things that they couldn’t get in schools.

What do you and your startup need help with?

Getting the word out, growing our exposure and connecting to the people who could most benefit from our product. Please visit www.stemlearninglab.com for more information.

Lloyed Lobo covers technology startups in Alberta. He is a partner at Boast Capital and co-founder of Traction Conf. If you’d like to be featured, please email llobo@boastcapital.com.

Renewable Propane-Our Gabbage Could Produce Renewable Fuel.

Propane is a relatively clean-burning alternative to fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel. But drilling for propane can damage the environment and in the end adds to the atmosphere’s carbon content.

Converting Waste Biomass & Garbage Into Propane

The US propane market has been in the news over the past several years as its supply and price have been very unstable, with shortages having a negative effect on some sectors of the economy. Coming up with a renewable form of propane for use in furnaces, outdoor grills and to make liquefied natural gas would be a major breakthrough as it would increase overall supply and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Creating Next Generation Biofuels

Researchers at Imperial College and the University of Turku are developing a renewable form of propane that is created through microbial biosynthesis using the “fermentative butanol pathway.” Until now scientists have not been able to find natural metabolic pathways for renewable biosynthesis.

The process involves using E. coli bacteria, Escherichia coli, derived from human intestines and fatty acid synthesis. Now researchers are working to make the process scalable for commercial production.

Papers on the process have been published in the Journal of Biotechnology for Biofuels and the Journal of Nature Communications. According to the papers, genetically engineered bacterium could also be used and possibly ready for commercial-scale production within the next decade.

One obvious application of renewable propane would be to supply it to automobiles equipped with CNG or propane retrofits.

New Aluminium Battery Can Recharge in Just 60 seconds.

We were all happy to see rechargeable Lithium-ion batteries replacing the heavier and single use alkaline type batteries. But these Li-ion batteries are already struggling to meet ever-increasing power requirements. Smartphone users know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery.

Stanford University has developed a new type of aluminum-ion battery that is much cheaper, longer lasting, and also offers super-fast recharging as compared to a Li-ion battery. The battery can be recharged in just one minute.

It is a much safer alternative to conventional Li-ion batteries as well. Since it is made of aluminum, it won’t catch fire and has high-charge storage capacity.

Like any other battery, an aluminum-ion battery has two electrodes: a negatively charged electrode made of aluminum and a positively charged cathode. So far, different kinds of materials for the cathode have been tested unsuccessfully in search of the right material.

But Stanford scientists have discovered a simple solution using graphite. Graphite has given a great performance after repeated cycles of charging and discharging. The scientists placed the aluminum anode and graphite cathode, along with an ionic liquid electrolyte, in a flexible polymer coated pouch for testing.

The ultra durable aluminum battery developed by Stanford was able to withstand more than 7500 cycles without any loss of capacity as compared to 1000 cycles for a standard Li-ion battery.

This Engineering Design Could Make Living in Mars a Reality.

For years, people have speculated about the likelihood of life on Mars due to the planet’s proximity and similarity to Earth.

To kill the curiosity, NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 to find if Mars ever supported primitive life.

But if we are able to send people to Mars one day, what kind of homes will they inhabit?

NASA and MakerBot recently hosted a competition which asked entrants to make a 3D-printed model home suitable for the Red Planet. Participants were asked to take into account the extreme weather conditions, lack of oxygen and dust storms when designing their Martian abode.

Noah Hornberger’s modular beehive won the MakerBot Mars Base Challenge

The winner ‘Queen B’ concept home offers future architecture if humans successfully colonize Mars some day.

The ‘Queen B’ concept home is a space-saving and modular honeycomb design that’s flexible and compact. The hexagonal modules of this home.

The ‘Queen B’ features all the modern home comforts like a fully functional apartment.
It has a kitchen, two bathrooms, a garden, laundry room and even a 3D print lab…all fitted inside 16 ft diameter hexagons. Each of the 10 hexagonal modules is arranged around a central lounge area that contains a couple of couches, a TV and a charging station.

The average temperature is around -80ºF (-60ºC) which makes it really really cold on Mars.
An underground electric heater or an exothermic chemical reactor will be used to heat an underground water container. This would provide heat to the base camp. Excess steam could be used for steam power generators to supplement solar power.

New Way to Print Silicon for electronics could help make elctronics recyclable.

Printed electronics have opened up applications—flexible circuits and rollable displays, to name two—that were impossible with conventional electronics. Usually, printed electronics are created using organic or metal-oxide inks whose electronic properties often pale in comparison to silicon. Now scientists have discovered a new way to print silicon, potentially ousting its erstwhile usurpers.

The ability to print silicon onto substrates has existed for some time, but producing solid silicon from liquid polysilane ink required exposing the silicon to temperatures upwards of 350 degrees Celsius—far too hot for many of the flexible surfaces onto which one might want to print. The new technique, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Ishikawa, completely bypasses this step. The collaborators detailed their findings in the 21 April online edition of the journal Applied Physics Letters.

First, the researchers coated paper with liquid polysilane by skimming the fluid onto the surface with a blade in a virtually oxygen-free, water-free environment. They next transformed this ink into polycrystalline silicon with a blast from an excimer laser, a tool commonly used for manufacturing smartphone displays. The laser pulse only lasted a few dozen nanoseconds, leaving the paper completely intact.

The final silicon film, which is about 200 nanometers thick, required “baking” at a maximum temperature of only 150 °C. The researchers found that the thin-film transistors they created using this new strategy performed on par with conventional polysilicon devices and far better than other ink materials.

The researchers say this work could lead to low-cost, high-speed, flexible, biodegradable, recyclable electronics that could show up in wearable electronics, solar cells, RFID tags, edible devices, and trillions of Internet of Things sensor nodes.

Ramshackle Infrastructure in US.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the United States is currently ranked 19th in the world for the quality of its infrastructure coming in behind Spain, Portugal and Oman. The US problem is so big that in just one city, Pittsburgh, there are over 4,000 bridges serving 9 million passengers a day to keep track of.

According to an Associated Press analysis of over 600,000 bridges, more than 65,000 were deemed “structurally deficient” and over 20,000 as “fracture critical” or in imminent threat of collapse.

According to a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) the United States gets a D+ to reflect the current state of the country’s infrastructure. Seemingly oblivious to the need for critical infrastructure investment, the US House recently submitted a budget cutting funding for transportation programs by $51 billion or 93%. In short, the US Federal Fund for road and bridge repair has gone broke.

To complicate matters, a large number of US lawmakers have not accepted the idea of “climate change”. According to scientists it is likely that the old and decrepit US infrastructure will fare far worse due to the expected increase in coming years of extreme weather events that will further compromise the roads, bridges, water pipes, levies and other critical infrastructure.

To be fair, ASCE reports that 90% of the $267 billion earmarked for public sector construction spending is for building schools, highways and waste disposal facilities at the state and local level so that the funds must be allocated by state and local governments.

ASCE reports that by 2020, the US will lose 700,000 jobs, and if no improvements in infrastructure, 1.4 million jobs by 2040. Both foreign and domestic businesses will assess infrastructure, taxes and other factors in the US versus other destinations and begin making decisions to offshore new businesses.

Become a Superhero! Get Night Vision Injected into your Eyes.

A team of independent researchers called Science for the Masses has announced that they’ve successfully induced night vision in a human. They maintain that the procedure allowed their subject to see quite clearly in the dark at a distance of up to 50 meters.

How they managed to do the same: The researchers made use of a chemical compound chlorine e6 (Ce6), and injected it into one of their members, researcher Gabriel Licina. This chemical compound is found in some deep-sea fish and has light-amplification properties. About 50 microliters of solution was dropped into Licina’s eyes, aiming for the conjunctival sac, which carried the chemical to the retina. After about an hour, the effect kicked in.

To test the effect, Licina and three researchers performed a series of vision tests in a dark field. Licina was able to spot and recognize objects, symbols and people in the dark field moving against different backgrounds. He was even able to point out people hidden among trees and shrubs.

Lasers could be used to shoot down debris from space

The amount of space debris as a result of human activity has nearly doubled over the last 15 years, posing a threat to the International Space Station and satellites around it. The debris – consisting of satellites, rocket bodies and fragments from collisions – has a total mass of approximately 3,000 tons.  A group of international researchers say they can solve this ever-growing issue with a machine boasting a high-efficiency laser.

The debris exists in different orbits, making it extremely difficult to come up with a remediation solution. However, a team of international scientists says it might be able to solve the problem thanks to the EUSO telescope, which was initially developed to spot ultraviolet light.

“We realized that we could put it to another use,” says Toshikazu Ebisuzaki of Japan’s RIKEN research institute, one of the groups working on the project. “During twilight, thanks to EUSO’s wide field of view and powerful optics, we could adapt it to the new mission of detecting high-velocity debris in orbit near the ISS.”

Ebisuzaki and his team, decided to integrate another device, the CAN laser, which is made using optical fibers that help the system produce strong laser pulses. It was initially developed with the purpose of powering particle accelerators.

The researchers say that combining these two instruments will create a device that can track down and deorbit high-risk space debris. It works as follows:

The intense laser beam focuses on the debris

This results in a high-velocity plasma ablation

The reaction force reduces the debris’ orbital velocity

The debris re-enters earth’s atmosphere

The team, which includes researchers from the universities of Paris 7 and California at Irvine, is set to deploy a proof-of-concept version on the ISS measuring just 20 centimeters. “If that goes well, we plan to install a full-scale version on the ISS, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers,” adds Ebisuzaki. “Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers, where the greatest concentration of debris is found.”

Their debris strategy differs drastically from traditional ones that are ground based. According to Ebisuzaki, his group’s device is cost effective and would offer a manageable solution to this issue.

“We may finally have a way to stop the headache of rapidly growing space debris that endangers space activities,” he says. “We believe that this dedicated system could remove most of the centimeter-sized debris within five years of operation.”

Disney is Developing an Accessory that will control your smart phone.

Disney Research is apparently developing plastic accessories that can control phones, which might even be more far-out than MIT's thumbnail trackpads. They're called acoustruments, and they can control phones with sounds from their own speakers. How? Well, each acoustrument comes with a U-shaped tube that feeds ultrasonic sound from the phone's speaker to its mic. You can control the phone with that setup by disrupting the sound, say, by blocking holes on the tube like you would on a flute. Its controls don't necessarily have to be holes, either -- they could be buttons, switches, knobs, wheels, sliders and anything else that can alter the sound wave to indicate an action.

Thus far, the researchers have already developed an acoustrument that integrates with a phone case and acts as a camera shutter, one that acts as an alarm controller, another that turns a phone into a toy car and one that transforms a device into an interactive doll. They believe the accessories can be especially useful whenever you don't have access to the touch screen, such as when you're using your phone as a virtual reality device. We doubt we'll see acoustruments being sold on Amazon or elsewhere anytime soon, but the good news is that they're reportedly cheap to manufacture. Hopefully, that means they're also affordable if they do come out, so you can try the curious controllers without breaking the bank.

Using Solar Powered Wi-fi, Los Angeles prepares Against Quakes.

Earthquakes are not a new threat to America’s second most populous city, Los Angeles. Los Angeles has been at the epicenter of seismic risk for a long time. Twenty years ago, an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale devastated Los Angeles, killing a large number of people.

The solar powered Wi-Fi system will help ensure communication: Since an earthquake could knock out Internet connectivity, Los Angeles is proactively addressing this earthquake vulnerability by proposing solar powered Wi-Fi. The city’s residents will be able to access the Internet if the primary system is disrupted in the event of a quake. People will be able to find important information related to food, water, traffic, or rescue operations. They could also get in touch with police, fire, or medical personnel.

Many buildings lack modern retrofitting: The old buildings in LA that were built in 50s and 60s pose a real challenge. As per a study, there are 1,451 old concrete buildings that have not been retrofitted, and many of them may collapse during an earthquake. As part of its seismic preparedness, the city plans to invest heavily in expensive retrofitting processes, like reinforcing buildings with steel braces.

21-Year-old Design Student Created a Real Life Batsuit

As a 24-year-old Engineering student, I found this really challenging.

Jackson Gordon is a 21-year-old design student/prop maker who focuses on bringing superhero suits to life.

His latest creation is a real life batsuit, fully capable of taking on multiple knife attacks, which includes stabbing and slashes to the suit.

Gordon’s militarized batsuit is made up of a mixture of Kevlar and composite armor, providing optimum safety and mobility for those who want to wear the batsuit on the move.

Students Develope a 3D printer for painless flu shots

Getting the flu shot is one of the many rituals that comes once a year, inoculating the population against a potentially life-threatening disease. However, for some, especially children, the experience can be frightening and painful. However, that may soon change thanks to a Rice University students’s 3D-printed invention.

The Comfortably Numb is a simple device that numbs the skin to decrease the sensation of the injection. The team of three freshmen, include Andy Zhang, Mika Hua, and Greg Allison, developed this easy-to-produce mechanism to create a portable and ready to use ice pack. The small device is composed of a 3D printed cylinder containing two chambers, one with water and the other with ammonium nitrate, and a metal plate attached at one end. When the device is activated by twisting the top, the two chambers open and the chemical reaction that occurs cools the metal plate, just like a cold pack.

From there, a physician or other medical worker places the plate against the skin to numb the are and then inject the vaccine.