Robocup 2010 took place in Singapore and 2 German team faced each other in the finals. Robocup is an international research and education initiative. RoboCupRescue is a related effort to develop rescue robots for hostile environments.
Related: RoboCup 2008: Robot Football (Soccer) – Robot Playing Table Tennis – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair
Listen to Bug Highway In The Sky
Related: Monarch Butterfly Migration – Guadalupe Mountains National Park: Ladybug City – Leaf-footed Bug
Chart showing global installed wind energy capacity by Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog, Creative Commons Attribution. Data from World Wind Energy Association, for installed Megawatts of global wind power capacity._________________________
Globally 38,025 MW of capacity were added in 2009, bringing the total to 159,213 MW, a 31% increase. The graph shows the top 10 producers (with the exceptions of Denmark and Portugal) and includes Japan (which is 13th).
Wind power is now generating 2% of global electricity demand, according to the World Wind Energy Association. The countries with the highest shares of wind energy generated electricity: Denmark 20%, Portugal 15%, Spain 14%, Germany 9%. Wind power employed 550,000 people in 2009 and is expected to employ 1,000,000 by 2012.
From 2005 to 2009 the global installed wind power capacity increased 170% from 59,033 megawatts to 159,213 megawatts. The percent of global capacity of the 9 countries in the graph has stayed remarkably consistent: from 81% in 2005 growing slowly to 83% in 2009.
Over the 4 year period the capacity in the USA increased 284% and in China increased 1,954%. China grew 113% in 2009, the 4th year in a row it more than doubled capacity. In 2007, Europe had for 61% of installed capacity and the USA 18%. At the end of 2009 Europe had 48% of installed capacity, Asia 25% and North America 24%.
Related: Wind Power Provided Over 1% of Global Electricity in 2007 – USA Wind Power Installed Capacity 1981 to 2005 – Wind Power has the Potential to Produce 20% of Electricity by 2030
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan, in the Austrian Empire (today’s Croatia), he was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen. Nikoka Tesla studied electrical engineering at Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague.
Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor, which helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.
In 1882 he moved to Paris, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment brought overseas from Edison’s ideas.
According to his autobiography, in the same year he conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields for which he received patents in 1888.
He emigrated to the United States in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse the following year.
In 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single terminal vacuum tubes.
Tesla introduced his motors and electrical systems in a classic paper, “A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers” which he delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888. One of the most impressed was the industrialist and inventor George Westinghouse.
The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is widely used today in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment. Among his discoveries are the fluorescent light , laser beam, wireless communications, wireless transmission of electrical energy, remote control, robotics, Tesla’s turbines and vertical take off aircraft. Tesla is the father of the radio and the modern electrical transmissions systems. He registered over 700 patents worldwide. His vision included exploration of solar energy and the power of the sea. He foresaw interplanetary communications and satellites.
“Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe.” – Nikola Tesla, “The Transmission of Electrical Energy without wires as a means for furthering Peace” in Electrical World and Engineer (7 January 1905)
“Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.” – Nikola Tesla
Related: PBS – Tesla, Master of Lightning – Werner Heisenberg – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – Neil Degrasse Tyson: Scientifically Literate See a Different World
The White House added a bee hive last year. An Excellent White House Bee Adventure
Related: Bee Colony Collapse Continues – Virus Found to be One Likely Factor in Bee Colony Collapse Disorder – President Obama Speaks on Getting Students Excited About Science and Engineering – Bye Bye Bees – The Great Sunflower Project
A very simple overview of fiber to the home.
Related: Plugging America’s Broadband Gap – Next steps for Google’s Experimental Fiber Network – Net Neutrality, Policy, Economics and Intelligent Engineering – How Do You Fix an Undersea Cable?
Leaving your computer on all night/weekend/break just in case you need to connect remotely is not longer necessary. UC San Diego computer scientists created software that lets you put your computer to sleep without worrying that you’ll have to go into work on just because you suddenly need to access your computer connected to an enterprise network. SleepServer wakes up your sleeping PC remotely when you need it… but it won’t wake up the PC if the PC’s alter ego – a lightweight virtual image – can handle the job. Computers and the internet are great but they are also using a huge amount of energy to keep them going, so efforts to save wasted energy use are important (see more environmentally friendly posts).
That’s the simplest example of how SleepServer helps UC San Diego cut its carbon footprint. But SleepServer does much more. That sleeping computer of yours also remains active on voice over IP/IM/peer-to-peer networks as well thanks to SleepServer.
How is this possible? When you put your computer to sleep, the software activates a lightweight virtual image of your PC which runs on a commodity server, along with hundreds of images of other PCs on your network. That virtual image can do a number of basic things that would otherwise require the actual PC to be awake.
SleepServer reduces energy consumption on enterprise PCs previously running 24/7 by an average of 60 percent, according to a new study presented today at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
Yuvraj Agarwal from UC San Diego is presenting this work on June 25 in Boston at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Learn more
Related: New Server Uses 75% Less Power and Space – Cost of Powering Your PC – Data Center Energy Needs
The Droid Incredible really is a great gadget. I am too cheap to get it but if I were to use a cell phone much I think this is the one I would get. I personally prefer more open software like Android (which the Droid Incredible uses) to Apple (though Apple’s user experience is great, I admit).
The Droid Incredible by HTC features a body design that measures 4.63 x 2.3 x 0.47 inches (HxWxD), making it easy to slip into your pocket. A large, 3.7-inch HD screen with 480×800 resolution graces the front of the device. The responsive OLED touch screen features rich colors and is easy to use.
With a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal flash memory, the Droid Incredible delivers incredible performance, letting you run multiple applications. It includes an 8-megapixel camera with auto focus and 2x power LED flash, and also Google Maps Navigation, which provides GPS-based turn-by-turn voice guidance to get you where you need to go.
Related: more Curious Cat gadget posts – Apple’s iPad – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT – Cell phone Microscope
SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
So SeaMicro guessed that servers could benefit instead by using lots of smaller processors, and it got lucky when Intel started promoting its low-power, low-cost Atom chip for netbooks. That lowered power consumption, since Atom processors deliver three times the performance per watt versus Intel’s server chips.
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But SeaMicro also attacked the power consumption in the rest of the system, which accounts for about two thirds of the power consumed by a server.
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it applied the concept of virtualization to the inside of a server. Feldman designed custom chips that could take the tasks that were handled by everything beyond the Intel microprocessor and its chip set. The custom chips virtualize all of those other components so that it finds the resource when it’s needed. It essentially tricks the microprocessor into thinking that the rest of the system is there when it needs it.
SeaMicro virtualized a lot of functions that took up a lot of space inside each server in a rack. It also did the same with functions such as storage, networking, server management and load balancing. Full told, SeaMicro eliminates 90 percent of the components from a system board. SeaMicro calls this CPU/IO virtualization. With it, SeaMicro shrinks the size of the system board from a pizza box to the size of a credit card.
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This advance is coming just in time. Google said recently that if current power trends continue, the cost of energy consumed by a server during its three-year life span could surpass the initial purchase cost for the hardware. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that volume servers consume more than 1 percent of the total electricity in the US—representing billions of dollars in wasted operating expense each year.
Related: Google Server Hardware Design – Data Center Energy Needs – Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium
NASA will launch the first human-like robot to space later this year to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station. Robonaut 2, or R2, was developed jointly by NASA and General Motors under a cooperative agreement to develop a robotic assistant that can work alongside humans, whether they be astronauts in space or workers at GM manufacturing plants on Earth.
The 300-pound R2 consists of a head and a torso with two arms and two hands and will launch on space shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-133 mission planned for September. Once aboard the station, engineers will monitor how the robot operates in weightlessness. R2 joins another station robot, known as Dextre. That robot, built by the Canadian Space Agency, consists of two, long arms to perform tasks that normally require spacewalking astronauts to complete.
While Dextre is located on the station’s exterior, R2 will be confined to operations in the station’s Destiny laboratory. However, future enhancements could allow it to move more freely around the station’s interior, and it could one day be modified to operate outside the complex.
“The use of R2 on the space station is just the beginning of a quickening pace between human and robotic exploration of space,” said John Olson, director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Integration Office. “The partnership of humans and robots will be critical to opening up the solar system and will allow us to go farther and achieve more than we can probably even imagine today.”
The dexterous humanoid robot not only looks like a human, it is designed to work like one. With human-like hands and arms, R2 is able to use the same tools that station crew members use. In the future, the greatest benefit of humanoid robots in space may be as an assistant or stand-in for astronauts during spacewalks or for tasks too difficult or dangerous for humans. For now, R2 is still a prototype and lacks adequate protection needed to exist outside the space station in the extreme temperatures of space.
Related: Awesome Robot: uBot-5 – RoboCup German Open 2008 – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – The Robotic Dog