Next Big Future - 7 new articles

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Subject: Next Big Future - 7 new articles

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"Next Big Future" - 7 new articles

1. 3-D printing multi-material objects in minutes instead of hours
2. Carnegie Mellon computer uses visual learning by analyzing millions of images to teach itself common sense
3. Ex-800 Blade server uses hybrid memory cubes for super data performance with lower power usage
4. Two person electric 18 rotor helicopter is now flying
5. Ten small propellors for electric vertical take off and landing personal flying car
6. Construction underway of second Vogtle AP1000
7. NASA is unwilling to share the costs of a Mars Flyby so Dennis Tito must look to Russia or China
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9. Search Next Big Future
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3-D printing multi-material objects in minutes instead of hours New 3-D printing process speeds up fabrication of multiple-material objects.   Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a faster 3D printing process and are now using it to model and fabricate heterogeneous objects, which comprise multiple materials. Although 3D printing – or direct digital manufacturing – has the potential to revolutionize various industries by providing faster, cheaper and more accurate manufacturing options, fabrication time and the complexity of multi-material objects have long been a hurdle to its widespread use in the marketplace. With this newly developed 3D printing process, however, USC Viterbi professor Yong Chen and his team have shaved the fabrication time down to minutes, bringing the manufacturing world one step closer to achieving its goal. USC Viterbi researchers developed improved mask-image-projection-based stereolithography (MIP-SL) to drastically speed up the fabrication of homogeneous 3D objects. In the MIP-SL process, a 3D digital model of an object is sliced by a set of horizontal planes and each slice is converted into a two-dimensional mask image. The mask image is then projected onto a photocurable liquid resin surface and light is projected onto the resin to cure it in the shape of the related layer. The USC Viterbi team also developed a two-way movement design for bottom-up projection so that the resin could be quickly spread into uniform thin layers. As a result, production time was cut from hours to a few minutes. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Carnegie Mellon computer uses visual learning by analyzing millions of images to teach itself common sense A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.   NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision. In turn, the data it generates will further enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world. But NEIL also makes associations between these things to obtain common sense information that people just seem to know without ever saying — that cars often are found on roads, that buildings tend to be vertical and that ducks look sort of like geese. Based on text references, it might seem that the color associated with sheep is black, but people — and NEIL — nevertheless know that sheep typically are white. "Images are the best way to learn visual properties," said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well." A computer cluster has been running the NEIL program since late July and already has analyzed three million images, identifying 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images. It has connected the dots to learn 2,500 associations from thousands of instances. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Ex-800 Blade server uses hybrid memory cubes for super data performance with lower power usage A single HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) can produce an incredible data bandwidth of 160 GBytes/sec, thereby providing more than 15 times the performance of a state-of-the-art DDR3 memory module while consuming 70% less power. (Multiple HMCs can be chained together to appear as a single, mega-humongous memory.) The EX-800 Blade Server uses hybrid memory cubes for more data performance with lower power usage.   The EX-800 is a PCI Express board that features the combination of an HMC and four Altera Stratix V FPGAs (providing 3.6M FPGA gates). The massively parallel computational capabilities of the FPGAs can be used to drive the HMC at full speed. Key features of the EX-800 include: 160 GB/s of memory bandwidth 16 full-duplex lane connections from the HMC to each of the four Stratix V FPGAs A 4GB Micron DDR3L SODIMM dedicated to each of the four FPGAs (32 GB total) PCI Express Gen 3 full duplex switch x16 Gen3 PCI Express to the host x8 Gen3 PCI Express link to each Stratix V FPGA Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Two person electric 18 rotor helicopter is now flying A two person electric volocopter has flown. The Volocopter has six arms extending from the central part of the rotor ring split into twelve more arms, with rotors placed at each juncture. The Volocopter is an environmentally friendly and emission-free private helicopter. Instead of one combustion engine, eighteen electrically driven rotors propel it. A prototype of the 2-person VC200 flew on Sunday, November 17, 2013. Based on this model, it will be prepared for series production in the coming years. "There are already numerous requests for the Volocopter from around the world," said Alexander Zosel, managing director of e-volo. With multiple flights lasting several minutes reaching the nearly 22 meter high ceiling of the dm-arena, including a number of smooth takeoffs and landings, the Volocopter concept exceeded all expectations. "Rich and incredibly quiet sound, absolutely no noticeable vibrations in the flight, convincing structure with a great, new spring strut landing gear, and an extremely calm rotor plane," concluded the e-volo managing director, thanking the KMK. "New innovations that have the possibility to change our world are continually presented at the Messe Karlsruhe. Therefore it was natural to work in partnership with the e-volo team to enable the test flights in the dm-arena," announced KMK managing director Britta Wirtz. "The fair is not just a display of strengths in the technology field, but concretely supports pioneers of aviation as well." Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Ten small propellors for electric vertical take off and landing personal flying car Zee.Aero is working on a flying car concept that can take off and land vertically using a plethora of small electric motors turning four-bladed propellers. According to illustrations included with the patent filings, one version of the vehicle is narrow enough to fit into a standard shopping center parking space. The Zee.Aero design sees wings mounted fore and aft, with the payload area mounted in between. This arrangement is called a canard wing, with the aircraft's horizontal stabilizer mounted on the front of the aircraft instead of on the tail. On the top of this compact wing arrangement are a number of electric engines turning fat, four-bladed propellers. This group of engines, which from the illustrations seems to number eight, can use battery power to lift the aircraft vertically for takeoff. Then two vertically mounted engines provide forward thrust until the wings have enough air traveling over them to provide lift. The small vertical engines can be shut down then for an efficient cruise flight. The large number of propellers are to provide redundancy in the case of failure. This vehicle design is being led by Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics professor and NASA scientist who has founded Zee.Aero and is listed as the inventor on the patent applications. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Construction underway of second Vogtle AP1000 Safety-related concrete has been poured for the basemat of the second AP1000 unit at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. The milestone means that four AP1000s are now officially under construction in the USA. the Vogtle plant will be the only four-unit nuclear power plant in the USA. Two AP1000 units are also under construction at the VC Summer plant in South Carolina, operated by South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G), a subsidiary of Scana Corporation, and co-owned by SCE&G and Santee Cooper. First concrete at Summer 2 came in mid-March, just days before the same milestone at Vogtle 3. First concrete at Summer unit 3 was poured in early November. Westinghouse senior vice president for nuclear power plants Jeff Benjamin said, "This has been an exciting month for Westinghouse; our consortium partner, Chicago Bridge & Iron (CB&I); and our customers, as we successfully completed the basemat nuclear concrete placement for the second AP1000 units at both the VC Summer and Vogtle nuclear sites." He added, "This milestone has now been achieved at all eight of the AP1000 units we are delivering to our customers globally." Four AP1000 reactors are also being built in China, at Sanmen and Haiyang for China National Nuclear Corporation and China Power Investment Corp respectively. Sanmen unit 1 is expected to be the first AP1000 to begin operating. The unit is expected to begin generating electricity next year. All four Chinese AP1000s are scheduled to be in operation by 2016. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • NASA is unwilling to share the costs of a Mars Flyby so Dennis Tito must look to Russia or China Dennis Tito is trying to put together a Mars flyby mission. He would need to launch in late 2017 to take advantage of a rare alignment of the planets that would greatly shorten the trip, or maybe in 2021, the second best option. He has raised $300 million (mostly his own money) and has asked the US congress to provide the heavy launch rocket for about $700 million in cost. NASA has rejected the proposal. NASA's response - Inspiration Mars' proposed schedule is a significant challenge due to life support systems, space radiation response, habitats, and the human psychology of being in a small spacecraft for over 500 days. The agency is willing to share technical and programmatic expertise with Inspiration Mars, but is unable to commit to sharing expenses with them. Given Russia's clear recognition of the value and prestige of accomplishments in human space exploration, and their long-time interest in exploring Mars, my personal belief is that in all likelihood the Energia super-heavy rocket revival announcement signals Russian intent to fly this mission in 2021," Tito stated. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • More Recent Articles Harvard Business Review says if you want to change the world then partner with China Russia unveils plan for 21 new nuclear reactors by 2030 and includes two BN-1200 sodium cooled fast reactors Planetary Resources explains how asteroid mining will open space for human colonization Metamaterial route to high temperature superconductivity Very Light Car and OLED solar could make a practical electric car with enough solar power for a typical commute

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