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Technology

Submission + - NYC's Trash-Sucking Tubes May Be Upgraded, Expanded (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: When urban planners were trying to turn New York’s Roosevelt Island from a haven for the disabled and the mentally ill into a liveable city, they gotutopian. Lying beneath their plans was an unusual technology: a series of tubes that literallysuck garbage from buildingsat speeds up to 60 miles per hour to a central collection point, where the trash is taken off the island by truck or barge. Theoretically, that eliminates the emissions and traffic caused by giant garbage trucks, and makes trash sorting easier.

Now, more than thirty years after the “AVAC,” or Automated Vacuum Collection System, was installed, Envac, the Swedish company that built it, is exploring how to upgrade it and even extend the system to other parts of the city. Under a new feasibilitystudyconducted by City University and funded by two city agencies, the easiest option would be to stretch the current system south, to cover the new technology campuses being built on Roosevelt Island by Cornell University and the Technion.

Other potential trash tube candidates include the Coney Island boardwalk, in a new housing development there, and near Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. There, according to Envac’s new proposal, the tubes could ride underneath the infrastructure of the High Line, the hip railway-cum-park that floats along the neighborhood’s increasingly hip river-side edge.
HP

HP Creates First Hybrid Memristor Chip 155

Posted by timothy from the stitch-in-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "HP researchers have built the first functioning hybrid memristor-transistor chip. Lead researcher Stanley Williams and his team built the very first memristor — the '4th fundamental element' of integrated circuits after resistors, capacitors and inductors — back in April. Memristors can remember their resistance, leading to novel electronic capabilities. The new FPGA circuit uses memristors to perform tasks normally carried out by (many more) transistors and is therefore smaller, more power efficient and cheaper to make, HP says. Memristors could also turn out to be a more compact, faster alternative to flash memory."

Consumer Problems with Blu-ray and HD-DVD 403

Posted by Zonk from the have-to-buy-fifth-element-again dept.
bart_scriv writes "Business Week looks at the upcoming Blu-ray and HD-DVD product launches and predicts problems and confusion for consumers. In addition to anticipated difficulties in distinguishing between the two formats, some studios will be using copy protection that will intentionally down grade the picture. When combined with Sony's plans to upconvert based on hardware configuration and the fact that most HD TVs aren't capable of displaying either format at full resolution, early adopters may be getting a lot less than they bargained for. As the article suggests, it may be that 'the best bet for either format to gain acceptance now lies with next-generation game consoles.'"

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