Dr Gordon Moore, one of the three co-founders of Intel Corporation has passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. I had the privilege of interviewing him in London in March 1997, and he came across as a genuinely humble man, typical of the genuine ‘boffin’ type of the time. The thing I remember mostly from the interview was his professed love for antiques. Apparently he and his wife, Betty, spent a lot of their free time browsing for…
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Fruit harvesting is one of the trickiest parts of the agricultural spectrum. The fruit not only has to be selected when it’s at the ideal ripeness, but also has to be picked very carefully so it doesn’t bruise or suffer damage. Now Israeli made Tevel Autonomous harvest robots promise to revolutionize the process of fruit harvesting in a big way.
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Shutterstock, the $2 billion market cap digital content company, has just announced the launch of a free AI generative art service. The announcement wasn’t exactly unexpected, but even so it’s going to rock the foundations of the creative arts industry to its core. It’s one thing to watch small upstart companies like Stability AI and Midjourney unveil artificially generated imagery. It’s altogether another to see a publicly quoted giant like Shutterstock embrace the technology as a first mover advantage.
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Californian company Brimstone has announced the development of the world’s first carbon negative cement product. It’s a bold statement, and if true could revolutionize the global building industry and lead to a new era of carbon neutral construction. Cement is a big deal. Every year and estimated 4.4 billion tons of the stuff is produced to craft our buildings. But there’s a hidden cost to the environment. If cement was a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter…
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Happy New Year to everyone. Here’s to a spectacular fresh year and lots of cake.
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A new system called Pomelo has been developed to estimate population densities during emergencies with unerring accuracy using artificial intelligence. The system has been designed to provide a fast and accurate mini census in times of emergency, such as natural disasters or war. Pomelo, created as a joint venture between the International Red Cross, Lausanne Polytechnic and Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, uses large sets of data from remote sensing systems, and uses a neural network to identify likely population…
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A team of engineers from UNSW Sydney have successfully converted a standard diesel engine to run as a hybrid diesel hydrogen engine. The resulting hybrid reduces CO2 emissions by 85%, and increases output efficiency by around 26%. The team, led by Professor Shawn Kook, spent some 18 months developing the direct injection dual fuel system. The retrofitted engine runs using 90% hydrogen. Professors Kook believe that the new tech could significantly reduce the emissions from the trucking industry and the…
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This EMF Radiation Blocking Hoodie from Bon Charge looks like it’s just the ticket for these warm winter nights. And when we say warm, you know we’re not just referring to the temperature, right? According to some very sensible people, over exposure to high levels of electromagnetic radiation can be a very not good thing.
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Twitter user ‘Progen’ just released a short video proudly showing AI acting like a digital design assistant for some basic everyday tasks. The A.I. in question is not one entity, but three tools – two of which are open source – working together to deliver a scarily competent service to their human.
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Most people will agree that while electric cars and renewable technology is great, a big problem is the huge amount of ugly unsustainable mining that’s needed for the humble battery. Digging the material out of the ground is very carbon intensive, dirty and sometimes downright toxic. So anything that promises to provide a decent recycling route gets our vote. Now a clever company based out of the US has come up with a new recycling technology they claim can recover…
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So another day, another wonderous technological development. Solein, from Finnish startup Solar Foods, is being billed as a ‘nutritious protein made out of thin air’. Whoa, that’s just what we need to feed the hungry billions. The marketing is extremely slick. There’s lots of gorgeous shots of food, processed product and laboratory stuff, all wrapped in some enticing copywriting. The concept is pretty simple. Take some random microbe, add in carbon (CO2), nitrogen and a couple of other bits, mix…
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According to this report from New Atlas, the first 1000 km EV coming off the production line is going to be the Zeekr 001 in Q2 of next year. You’ll remember a few weeks back we talked about the cool new CATL battery technology which is promising massive range and ridiculously short charge times? Well this is the first fruit of that development cycle. It’s not clear exactly what the charge time will be on the Zeekr 001, but it…
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We recently came across an interesting article in New Scientist magazine which looked very exciting. The headline read ‘Supercharging tweak could fill electric car batteries 90% in 10 mins’. Wow, that sounded like it could really change the EV market significantly. Naturally we started our typical process of due diligence (learned over 20 years of publication) to learn the background to this seemingly revolutionary new tech. Yeah well, about that…
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The world is literally swimming in waste plastic. We produce around 300 million tons of the stuff a year, of which a mere 9% gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, oceans and inside poor creatures who mistake it for food (and usually die). So what to do? Well there may be a real hope on the horizon. A Finnish company called Olefy Technology claims that after 40 years of development and testing it can now recycle almost any…
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The world’s largest EV battery maker, CATL, released a ground breaking 1000 km (620 mile) range battery back in June which set the EV world alight. The new Qilin (pronounced cheeling) battery not only offers mind blowing range and energy density, but features a bunch of other cutting edge tech which will speed up charging to the point where it rivals filling up at a gas station. The first iteration of the battery uses ‘rapid thermal control with a quadruple…
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