Category Technology/Electronics

Sandia National Laboratories technician Eric Breden installs a transmission cable on the silver disk that is the new pulsed-power machine’s central powerflow assembly. Credit: Randy Montoya

A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40X more efficient than Sandia’s Z machine, the world’s largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions.”Thor’s magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth’s core,” said David Reisman, lead theoretical physicist.

Though unable to match Z’s 5 million atmospheres, the completed Thor will be smaller—2,000 rather than 10,000 square feet—and will be considerably more efficient due to design improvements that use hundre...

Human computation (HC), which encompasses methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and distributed knowledge collection offers new promise for addressing wicked problems, by enabling participatory sensing, group intelligence, and collective action at unprecedented scales.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. They present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pa...

HyQ2 is a quadruped that has been in high focus at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Dynamic Legged Systems lab. They have been getting it disaster-ready for search and rescue missions and for environment disasters.

This DLS lab makes high-performance, versatile legged robots. Their torque-controlled hydraulic quadruped robot HyQ is their flagship platform. They need to know if the robot can get back on its feet even if it is completely knocked over. The HyQ robot was developed at the IIT in Genoa. The lab works on achieving accurate hydraulic force/ torque control at the joint level. They explore a variety of different locomotion gaits, strong enough to withstand external disturbances and changing environmental conditions.

A significant part of our groups’ effort is devoted to percept...

Fans hail the smooth new velo routes as the answer to urban traffic jams and air pollution, and a way to safely get nine-to-fivers outdoors

It’s every cyclist’s dream: no red lights, no trucks, just a clear, smooth lane to zoom down with the wind in your face. Welcome to Germany’s first bicycle Autobahn. Fans hail the smooth new velo routes as the answer to urban traffic jams and air pollution, and a way to safely get nine-to-fivers outdoors. As a glimpse of a greener urban transport future, Germany has just opened the first 5km stretch of a bicycle highway that is set to span over 100 kilometres.

It will connect 10 western cities including Duisburg, Bochum and Hamm and 4 universities, running largely along disused railroad tracks in the crumbling Ruhr industrial region...