Little tractor for big jobs

 

Harman is a compact mini-tractor designed for use in small fields, big gardens or vineyards. The design brings a new perspective to small tractors that despite their small size, are able to handle great works. To do this, the vehicle was designed with 2 tracks that lead to 1 exit on the body instead of wheels, which made the vehicle fast and small. These tracks absorb impact with a specialized damper system, enabling the driver to work with the utmost comfort. The track structure also makes it possible for the vehicle can be controlled with a joystick instead of a wheel.

The working part of the vehicle exists primarily at the back of the body. The chasis’ front is heavier then the back to balance the weight. The vehicle’s total weight is 60% on the front without its additions and 50% when its loaded or with additions.

Designer: Sinan Anayurt

 

IBM and Linux Advancing the Open Source Revolution

 

By Ross Mauri, General Manager, IBM z Systems on August 20, 2015 | Provided by IBM “I’ve felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn’t have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want…” Linus Torvalds The wisdom of Linus Torvalds and the magic of the Linux experience he created more than 20 years ago is rooted in a visionary commitment to openness and collaboration that has pushed the boundaries of innovation and transformed whole industries. For two decades now, Linux has played a major role in a transformation in information technology that has taken us to the brink of a new era, driven by three major disruptors – big data, cloud and analytics. Perhaps the greatest impact Linux has had on my company and the information technology industry over the past two decades is the way it has spurred so much innovation through building strong, open ecosystems. Linux and the growing open source community are demonstrating the value of the collaborative business model. It is clear that no one company alone can spark the magnitude or diversity of the type of innovation we are going to need to keep pace with the rapid changes occurring in the digital/mobile era. The partnership of IBM and Linux is a great example. Through its commitment to open source technology and an expansive ecosystem of partners, Linux has become the fastest growing operating system in the world, an engine of community innovation and a key part of the enterprise IT infrastructure. As a result, the market for Linux servers, applications, software and operating systems surpassed $57 billion in 2014, almost doubling in the past five years, according to IDC. For more than 50 years the mainframe has served as the backbone of the global economy. More than half of the world’s transactions run on the mainframe due to its reliability and ultra-secure environment. It now powers 92 of the top 100 banks and 23 of the top 25 airlines around the world. Since being introduced to the mainframe 15 years ago, demand for Linux on the mainframe has grown dramatically, with more than one third of all mainframe clients now using Linux. But the world is shifting. The mobile world and new app economy are changing the game for businesses, industries and society at large, creating new requirements and expectations that must be addressed. And also creating new opportunities to innovate and differentiate. In a world where consumer expectations continue to grow, clients demand: • Delivery at speed with lightning-fast response times, all the time • Access anytime, anywhere, and from any device, no matter how many users or transactions • Security for trusted engagement, with personalization through analytics • And new levels of IT efficiency and agility through cloud for responsiveness It is clear, we need to take Linux to the next level where it can fully support the future of high-volume, business-critical applications. That is the goal of IBM LinuxONE, a new family of enterprise-grade Linux systems and solutions that combines the flexibility and agility of the open source revolution with the most advanced high-performance engine that underpins enterprise IT. The line of systems provides the capabilities companies need to quickly react to market demands and customer requirements even as volumes increase. It provides unmatched availability to ensure critical systems continue running under any situation. And it provides the most secure Linux system, giving consumers the protection they expect for their data and transactions. We’ve also dramatically expanded the set of open source software and tools that run on IBM z Systems, providing developers with more flexibility and enabling the development of IT applications with new levels of speed, scale and security. And, because we know that open collaboration across academic, government and corporate partners is key to the advancement of technology, we’re contributing the single largest amount of mainframe code to the open source community and taking additional steps to bolster our already strong commitment to open source innovation. Taken together, all of this represents a quantum leap in open source innovation and a game-changer for the industry. The growing successes of Linux and the introduction of the LinuxONE portfolio prove the marriage of business-model innovation with technology innovation results in unparalleled choice, freedom and superior performance demanded by businesses and individuals around the world. It is clear, the future belongs to open, flexible, customized, cloud-capable and big data-ready IT systems. Strong, open ecosystems will take us there.

A One Stop Shop to Identify Blood Clots

 

Thu, 08/20/2015 - 2:30pm Greg Watry, Digital Reporter   The whole body of a rat can be imaged for blood clots with one PET scan (which is overlaid here on an MRI image) using the FBP8 probe. Arrow points to a blood clot. Image: Peter Caravan, PhDEach year, 795,000 Americans experience a stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nearly 185,000 of those people have had a previous stroke. It’s estimated strokes cost the U.S. $34 billion in health care services, medications and missed days of work. According to Peter Caravan, of Massachusetts General Hospital, strokes are caused when a blood clot somewhere in the body breaks off and travels to the brain. “Blood clots are associated with the leading causes of death and morbidity,” he said at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. Heart attack, stroke, pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis all occur because of blood clots in the coronary arteries, brain, lungs or legs. “There’s an urgent need to find these clots when they occur,” he said.   Physicians employ multiple methods to detect blood clots, including ultrasounds on carotid arteries or legs, magnetic resonance imaging to scan the heart and computed tomography for the lungs. But Caravan and his team have developed a new method to detect blood clots with a single scan. “In my lab, we’ve invented a new molecular probe that, upon injection into a vein, will go travel through the body and find blood clots wherever they’re occurring,” Caravan said. Called positron emission tomography, the method utilizes a fibrin binding probe, containing copper-64, to search the body for the clot. Caravan called it a “convenient” but “expensive” test, simply involving a puncture of a vein to deliver the probe. “It can replace multiple tests and that’s where we believe there is real value,” said Caravan. “The cost of the test is appropriate to the clinical decision that is occurring,” he said. With a half-life of 12.7 hrs, copper-64 clears through the kidneys and whatever remains decays in the body, according to Caravan. A human dosage would be 100 micrograms. After identifying a clot, different strategies can be employed for clearance, including a thrombectomy, breakdown via a tissue plasminogen activator or prescribing and antithrombotic. Currently, “we’re compiling the regulatory documents that will allow us to use this probe in (human) patients,” said Caravan. Clinical trials are slated to begin by the end of 2015 or early 2016. Tested on rodents, the new method yielded results of 97% accuracy.   http://www.rdmag.com/articles/2015/08/one-stop-shop-identify-blood-clots

Turning Atmospheric CO2 into Strong, Lightweight Carbon Fibers

 

A novel electrochemical process sequesters carbon in the form of a versatile building material. By Mike Orcutt on August 19, 2015 Why It Matters Avoiding dangerous climate change may require removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The fibers in this microscope image are made of carbon, produced via a new method that also removes carbon dioxide from the air. A new method for taking carbon dioxide directly from the air and converting it to oxygen and nanoscale fibers made of carbon could lead to an inexpensive way to make a valuable building material—and may even serve as a weapon against climate change. Carbon fibers are increasingly being used as a structural material by industries like aerospace and automotive, which value its strength and light weight. The useful attributes of carbon fibers, which also include electrical conductivity, are enhanced at the nanoscale, says Stuart Licht, a professor of chemistry at George Washington University. The problem is that it’s very expensive to make carbon fibers, much less nanofibers. Licht says his group’s newly demonstratedtechnology, which both captures the carbon dioxide from the air and employs an electrochemical process to convert it to carbon nanofibers and oxygen, is more efficient and potentially a lot cheaper than existing methods. But it’s more than just a simpler, less expensive way of making a high value product. It’s also a “means of storing and sequestering carbon dioxide in a useful manner, a stable manner, and in a compact manner,” says Licht. He points out that if the process is powered by renewable energy, the result is a net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In a recent demonstration, his group used a unique concentrated solar power system, which makes use of infrared sunlight as well as visible light to generate the large amount of heat needed to run the desired reaction. The process requires molten lithium carbonate, with another compound, lithium oxide, dissolved in it. The lithium oxide combines with carbon dioxide in the air, forming more lithium carbonate. When voltage is applied across two electrodes immersed in the molten carbonate, the resulting reaction produces oxygen, carbon—which deposits on one of the electrodes—and lithium oxide, which can be used to capture more carbon dioxide and start the process again. The researchers demonstrated the ability to make a variety of different nanofiber shapes and diameters by adjusting specific growth conditions, such as the amount of current applied at specific points of time, and the composition of the various ingredients used in the process. They also showed they could make very uniform fibers. Licht says the mechanisms underlying the formation of the fibers still need to be better understood, and says he’s confident the group can keep developing a greater degree of control over the nature of the fibers it makes. As for the technology’s emissions-cutting potential, the researchers are optimistic. They calculate that given an area less than 10 percent of the size of the Sahara Desert, the method could remove enough carbon dioxide to make global atmospheric levels return to preindustrial levels within 10 years, even if we keep emitting the greenhouse gas at a high rate during that period. Of course this would require a huge increase in demand for carbon nanofibers. Licht believes the material’s properties, especially the fact that it is so lightweight and also very strong, will spur greater and greater use as the cost comes down, and he thinks his new process can help with that. Imagine that carbon fiber composites eventually replace steel, aluminum, and even concrete as a building material, he says. “At that point, there could be sufficient use of this that it’s actually acting as a significant repository of carbon.”   http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540706/turning-atmospheric-co2-into-strong-lightweight-carbon-fibers/

One with the Speaker!

 

Nora Hipsher’s concept for an alternative portable audio system transforms your everyday bicycle into audio on wheels! The speaker works with vibration technology… unlike the regular structure of a speaker, there is no diaphragm. Instead, the voice coil of the speaker attaches to a movable plate that transfers the vibrations and energy to a surface on the bicycle and by that turns the bicycle into the speaker itself. The speaker connects to the bike frame and turns the frame into a big speaker. Therefore one can hear the music simply by plugging in to the bike!

Designer: Nofar Hipsher

Minimal Chapel in Austria

 

Posted: 14 Aug 2015 01:00 PM PDT

C’est dans une région entourée de vignobles et de collines, nommée Zollfeld et située en Autriche que le studio Sacher Locicero Architects a bâti la chapelle Maria Magdalena : une structure minimaliste en béton blanc, symbole de pureté. En fonction de la météo, les teintes de cet édifice religieux varient, passant du blanc immaculé au bleu dragée.

Computer science: Not just for boys or geeks

 

Mathematics and computer science teacher Jackie Corricelli is out to counter the myths about who should study what. She is a recipient of the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Credit: NSF

China's solar industry hits downturn

 

Kieran Cooke 16th August 2015 China is by far the world's biggest producer of solar panels, writes Kieran Cooke. But the industry is suffering from over-capacity, razor thin profits and a failure to innovate. The recent turmoil in China's stock market has sent shockwaves through the country's corporate sector, including its mighty solar power industry which in recent years has grown to dominate the world market. Harnessing solar energy is considered a key way of cutting back on fossil fuel use and of meeting the challenge posed by climate change. Seven out of the world's top ten manufacturers of solar panels are China-based companies, together providing about 40% of global solar supplies. But now the industry's future expansion is under threat as companies try to cope with too much production capacity, very low profit margins and crushing amounts of debt. In 2013 Suntech, a Chinese company which was at one time the world's biggest manufacturer, went bust. International creditors are still trying to recoup millions lent to the company. Earlier this year the Hanergy Thin Film Power Group, a Chinese company which is a world leader in the manufacture of solar products, lost half its share valueamid concerns about its corporate structure and worries of over-capacity and falling profit margins in the solar market. Export boom slows Meanwhile the China-based conglomerate Yingli Green Energy Holding, another world leader in solar production, has been beset with rumours of a slowdown in demand leading to a halt in production at some of its plants. Like many other industries in China, the solar sector has grown fast: in recent years companies rushed to join in a solar export boom, bolstered by generous loans from government banks. Exports of solar products surged. But then US solar manufacturers complained of heavily subsidised China-made solar goods threatening to destroy their industry. Tariffs were imposed on a number of Chinese solar products. A slowdown in Europe's economy also hit export sales. China cut the price of its products: according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance research group, China now sells solar panels for just over 60 US cents per watt of electricity generating capacity, down from US$4.50 per watt in 2008. While that's good news for those installing solar - and of considerable benefit in the fight against climate change - the price drop has put considerable pressure on China's solar manufacturers. It has also meant many solar companies elsewhere in the world have gone to the wall. China is subsidising the world's solar installations Varun Sivaram is a researcher at the US Council on Foreign Relations, specialising in renewable energy. He says that while China's dominance of the solar market has led to low global prices, the industry is not in a healthy state. "Solar is heading down a path of profitless prosperity", says Sivaram. In effect, he says, China is subsidising the global solar industry. Sivaram says one of the damaging side effects of China's dominance of the solar market is that production has tended to stick to old technologies and innovation in the industry has been stifled: "As panel manufacturers scrape by on razor-thin margins, kept afloat by government credit, investing in fundamentally new technologies is far from a priority." Some relief for the China industry might be provided by a government-backed campaign to boost sales in the domestic market. About a third of panels manufactured in China in 2014 were installed within the country. It's estimated that China will install 14 GWs (gigawatts) of solar panels this year, mainly involving giant solar farms in the Gobi desert and elsewhere. In central Europe an installed capacity of one GW of photovoltaics alone would be expected to produce almost 900 GWh of electricity annually, supplying around 225,000 households. In the first three months of 2015 China added the equivalent of the entire installed solar power of France to its electricity network.

Microscopic rake doubles efficiency of low-cost solar cells

 

A scanning electron microscope image shows the rigid pillar-like bristles of the FLUENCE rake, which is used to apply light-harvesting polymers to a solar cell. The distance between the pillars is 1 micrometer, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Credit: Z. Bao et al, Nature Communications Researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a manufacturing technique that could double the electricity output of inexpensive solar cells by using a microscopic rake when applying light-harvesting polymers. When commercialized, this advance could help make polymer solar cells an economically attractive alternative to those made with much more expensive silicon-crystal wafers. In experiments, solar cells made with the tiny rake double the efficiency of cells made without it and are 18 percent better than cells made using a microscopic straightedge blade. The research was led by Zhenen Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), which is run jointly by SLAC and Stanford. The team reported its results August 12 in Nature Communications. "The fundamental scientific insights that come out of this work will give manufacturers a rational approach to improving their processes, rather than relying simply on trial and error," Bao said. "We also expect this simple, effective and versatile concept will be broadly applicable to making other polymer devices where properly aligning the molecules is important." The Problem With Polymers Although prices for silicon-based solar cells are dropping, it still takes five to 15 years before they produce enough electricity to offset their purchase and installation. Silicon solar cells also require a large amount of energy to manufacture, which partly offsets their value as renewable energy sources. Polymer-based photovoltaic cells are much cheaper because they're made of inexpensive materials that can be simply painted or printed in place. They are also flexible and require little energy to manufacture. While small, lab-scale samples can convert more than 10 percent of sunlight into electricity, the large-area coated cells have very low efficiency -- typically converting less than 5 percent, compared with 20-25 percent for commercial silicon-based cells. Polymer cells typically combine two types of polymers: A donor, which converts sunlight into electrons, and an acceptor, which stores the electrons until they can be removed from the cell as usable electricity. But when this mixture is deposited on a cell's conducting surface during manufacturing, the two types tend to separate as they dry into an irregular assortment of large clumps, making it more difficult for the cell to produce and harvest electrons. The SLAC/Stanford researchers' solution is a manufacturing technique called "fluid-enhanced crystal engineering," or FLUENCE, which was originally developed to improve the electrical conduction of organic semiconductors. In the current work, as the polymers are painted onto a conducting surface, they are forced through a slightly angled rake containing several rows of stiff microscopic pillars. The rake is scraped along the surface at the relatively slow speed of 25-100 micrometers per second, which translates to 3.5-14.2 inches per hour. The large polymer molecules untangle and mix with each other as they bounce off and flow past the pillars, ultimately drying into tiny nanometer-sized crystals of uniform size with enhanced electrical properties. Simulations and X-rays The researchers used computer simulations and X-ray analyses at two DOE Office of Science User Facilities -- SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source (ALS) -- to customize the FLUENCE rake for making solar cells. "At SSRL, the team used X-ray diffraction to measure the degree to which the polymers formed crystals and X-ray scattering to determine how clearly the two polymers segregated themselves," said Mike Toney, SSRL Materials Sciences group leader and a co-author on the paper. "These are bread-and-butter techniques for which we've developed some novel approaches at SSRL in recent years." To achieve the polymer patterns they wanted for the solar cells, the researchers made the pillars in the rake much shorter and more densely packed than those used earlier for organic semiconductors. They were 1.5 micrometers high and 1.2 micrometers apart; for comparison, a human hair is about 100 micrometers in diameter. Close, But Not Too Close "Ideally, the two types of photovoltaic polymers should be close enough to each other for electrons to move quickly from donor to acceptor, but not so close that the acceptor gives back its electrons before they can be harvested to electricity," said Yan Zhou, a Stanford researcher on Bao's team. "Our new FLUENCE rake achieves this happy medium. Because we understand what's happening, we can tune the rake design and processing speed to alter the final polymer structures." Future research will be aimed at applying the FLUENCE technique to other polymer blends and adapting it to rapid industrial-scale roll-to-roll printing processes -- which can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour -- that promise the lowest solar-cell manufacturing costs. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Ying Diao, Yan Zhou, Tadanori Kurosawa, Leo Shaw, Cheng Wang, Steve Park, Yikun Guo, Julia A. Reinspach, Kevin Gu, Xiaodan Gu, Benjamin C. K. Tee, Changhyun Pang, Hongping Yan, Dahui Zhao, Michael F. Toney, Stefan C. B. Mannsfeld, Zhenan Bao. Flow-enhanced solution printing of all-polymer solar cells. Nature Communications, 2015; 6: 7955 DOI:10.1038/ncomms8955

Low-fat diet results in more fat loss than low-carb diet in humans

 

This is an artistic depiction of a study investigating whether low-fat or low-carb diets lead to more fat burning and fat loss. Credit: Kevin Hall A study from the US National Institutes of Health presents some of the most precise human data yet on whether cutting carbs or fat has the most benefits for losing body fat. In a paper published August 13 in Cell Metabolism, the researchers show how, contrary to popular claims, restricting dietary fat can lead to greater body fat loss than carb restriction, even though a low-carb diet reduces insulin and increases fat burning. Since 2003, Kevin Hall, PhD--a physicist turned metabolism researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases--has been using data from dozens of controlled feeding studies conducted over decades of nutrition research to build mathematical models of how different nutrients affect human metabolism and body weight. He noticed that despite claims about carbohydrate versus fat restriction for weight loss, nobody had ever measured what would happen if carbs were selectively cut from the diet while fat remained at a baseline or vice versa. His model simulations showed that only the carb-restricted diet would lead to changes in the amount of fat burned by the body, whereas the reduced-fat diet would lead to greater overall body fat loss, but he needed the human data to back it up. "A lot of people have very strong opinions about what matters for weight loss, and the physiological data upon which those beliefs are based are sometimes lacking," Hall says. "I wanted to rigorously test the theory that carbohydrate restriction is particularly effective for losing body fat since this idea has been influencing many people's decisions about their diets." Studying the effects of diet on weight loss is often confounded by the difficulty in measuring what people actually eat--participants may not adhere to meal plans, misjudge amounts, or are not truthful in follow-up surveys. To counter this, Hall and colleagues confined 19 consenting adults with obesity to a metabolic ward for a pair of 2-week periods, over the course of which every morsel of food eaten was closely monitored and controlled. To keep the variables simple, the two observation periods were like two sides of a balance scale: during the first period, 30% of baseline calories were cut through carb restriction alone, while fat intake remained the same. During the second period the conditions were reversed. Each day, the researchers measured how much fat each participant ate and burned and used this information to calculate the rate of body fat loss. At the end of the two dieting periods, the mathematical model proved to be correct. Body fat lost with dietary fat restriction was greater compared with carbohydrate restriction, even though more fat was burned with the low-carb diet. However, over prolonged periods the model predicted that the body acts to minimize body fat differences between diets that are equal in calories but varying widely in their ratio of carbohydrate to fat. "There is one set of beliefs that says all calories are exactly equal when it comes to body fat loss and there's another that says carbohydrate calories are particularly fattening, so cutting those should lead to more fat loss," Hall says. "Our results showed that, actually, not all calories are created equal when it comes to body fat loss, but over the long term, it's pretty close." Hall does caution against making sweeping conclusions about how to diet from this study. The study's purpose was to explore the physiology of how equal calorie reductions of fat versus carbs affect the human body. The research is limited by its sample size; only 19 people could be enrolled due to the expense of such research and the restrictiveness of the carefully controlled protocol. However, this study clearly reaches statistical significance. In addition,, the menu that the participants followed does not emulate normal dieting and does not account for what diet would be easier to eat over extended periods. "We are trying to do very careful studies in humans to better understand the underlying physiology that will one day be able to help generate better recommendations about day-to-day dieting," Hall says. "But there is currently a gap between our understanding of the physiology and our ability to make effective diet recommendations for lasting weight loss." Hall recommends that for now, the best diet is the one that you can stick to. His lab will next investigate how reduced-carbohydrate and reduced-fat diets affect the brain's reward circuitry, as well as its response to food stimuli. He hopes these results might inform why people respond differently to different diets. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Kevin D. Hall, Thomas Bemis, Robert Brychta, Kong Y. Chen, Amber Courville, Emma J. Crayner, Stephanie Goodwin, Juen Guo, Lilian Howard, Nicolas D. Knuth, Bernard V. Miller, Carla M. Prado, Mario Siervo, Monica C. Skarulis, Mary Walter, Peter J. Walter, Laura Yannai. Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity. Cell Metabolism, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2015.07.021 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150813130016.htm