Driverless cars are hitting the headlines across the globe but for the foreseeable future we will still have drivers. The pressure then is how might some of the safety features of driverless cars be incorporated into conventional vehicles? Writing in the International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, researchers from India describe a real-time automatic obstacle detection […]
How to Recycle Lithium Batteries
Rechargeable lithium ion batteries power our phones and tablets they drive us from A to B in electric vehicles, and have many applications besides. Unfortunately, the devices that they power can fail and the batteries themselves are commonly only usable for two to three years. As such, there are millions batteries that must be recycled. […]
How to Recycle Lithium Batteries
Rechargeable lithium ion batteries power our phones and tablets they drive us from A to B in electric vehicles, and have many applications besides. Unfortunately, the devices that they power can fail and the batteries themselves are commonly only usable for two to three years. As such, there are millions batteries that must be recycled. […]
Electricity and Economics
A nation’s electricity consumption has been seen as a useful proxy for measuring economic growth offering a useful alternative to conventional measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) by incorporating the assumption that greater consumption means a better quality of life. However, country-by-country analysis reported in International Journal of Global Energy Issues suggests that this […]
Phoney Protection for Passwords
Corporate data breaches seem to be on the rise, rarely a week passes without a company revealing that its database has been hacked and regrettably usernames, passwords, credit card details and its customers’ personal information has been leaked on to the open internet. A new protection, nicknamed Phoney, is reported in the International Journal of […]
Emotion Detector
A computer algorithm that can tell whether you are happy or sad, angry or expressing almost any other emotion would be a boon to the games industry. New research published in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics describes such a system that is almost 99 percent accurate. Hyung-Il Choi of the School of […]
Using Twitter to Generate a Realistic Birdsong Soundscape
Scientists in Brazil are using a genetic algorithm to create a realistic soundscape of birdsong that can be triggered by updates from the micro-blogging service, Twitter, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Details of the computer model which mimics the behavior of a bird’s songbox, its “syrinx”, to create realistic sounds are published this […]
Hydrocarbon Storage, Fracking And Lightning Risk
Fires caused by lightning strikes on hydrocarbon storage plants are a century-old, yet to be addressed, problem, according to research published in the International Journal of Forensic Engineering. In the era of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, this is becoming an even more poignant issue for the fossil fuel industry. Sterling Rooke of X8 Inc in […]
Car Alarm Detects Imminent Collision, Alerts Driver
An in-car alarm that sounds when sensors on the vehicle detect an imminent crash could cut crash rates from 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 for drivers over the of 60 suffering tiredness on long journeys, according to a study published in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics. Psychologist Carryl Baldwin of […]
End to End 5G for Super, Superfast Mobile
A collaboration between NEC Electronics, Samsung, and several academic centers in China and Iran, is investigating how software-defined cellular networking might be used to give smart phone users the next generation of super-superfast broadband, 5G. They provide details in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems. Currently, the fourth generation of mobile phone […]