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Submission + - Solar Could Lead In Power Production By 2050 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Solar power could be the leading source of electricity compared with other renewables and conventional sources of power, such as oil and coal, according to a pair of reports from International Energy Agency. PV panels could produce 16% of the world's electricity, while solar thermal electricity (STE) is on track to produce 11%. At the end of 2013, there had been 137GW of solar capacity deployed around the world. Each day, an additional 100MW of power is deployed. One reason solar is so promising are plummeting prices for photovoltaic cells and new technologies that promise greater solar panel efficiency. For example, MIT just published a report on a new a material that could be ideal for converting solar energy into heat by tuning the material's spectrum of absorption. Ohio State University just announced what it's referring to as the world's first solar battery, which integrates PV with storage at a microsopic level. "We've integrated both functions into one device. Any time you can do that, you reduce cost," said iying Wu, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

Submission + - New HDMI Stick Based on Firefox OS Challenges Chromecast (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A new HDMI streaming media stick is preparing to launch and it's taking on Chromecast in both price and hardware performance. The new HDMI dongle from San Jose-based Matchstick will retail for $25 when it begins shipping in February. The dongle runs on a dual-core Rockchip 3066 processor. It has 4GB of onboard storage capacity and 1GB of DDR3 memory. Google's Chromecast uses a single-core Marvell Armada 1500-Mini CPU and has 2GB of flash and 512MB of DDR3. Matchstick said Mozilla recently certified the dongle and the first of the devices will ship in February. The Matchstick project is based on an open hardware and software platform and has launched a developer program called "Matchstick for Apps." The company is raising money for the project through Kickstarter. After three days, it surpassed its 30-day, $100,000 goal with more than $224,000.

Submission + - Mercedes-Benz Reveals Self-Driving Semi-Trailer Truck (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Mercedes-Benz displayed an 18-wheel semi-trailer truck that can drive itself on highways. The Mercedes-Benz Future Truck 2025 was demonstrated at the 2014 International Commercial Vehicle show this month. Like other self-driving vehicles, the truck uses sensors and exterior cameras to stay within lanes and detect objects around it in order to adjust speed. The inside of the truck's cab looks like a lounge. The driver's seat rotates 45 degrees to allow autonomous driving away from the steering wheel, and instead of the speedometer and tachometer digital displays, monitors and tablets are placed in the cockpit. Because acceleration and braking is optimized, creating a constant flow of traffic, gas consumption and emissions of the Future Truck 2025 can be reduced, the company said. Transport times are also predictable.

Submission + - 3D Printer Able to Produce Skin w/Hair Follicles and Sweat Glands (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A 3D printer developed by researchers at the University of Toronto is capable of using a patient's own cells to print skin. The technology could be used to treat burn victims and patients with other types of injuries, as well as to test pharmaceutical drugs. While still in pilot mode, the new PrintAlive Bioprinter is in the process of being commercialized by MaRS Innovations in collaboration with the Innovations and Partnerships Office (IPO) of the University of Toronto, whose labs have filed two patents on the device. The 3D skin printer works by placing the patient's cells along with other biomaterials into a micro-device, which then pushes them out through several channels. The biomaterials are then mixed, causing a chemical reaction that forms a "mosaic hydrogel", a sheet-like substance compatible with the growth of cells into living tissues. The hydrogel allows the various dermis cells to be seeded in precise and controlled patterns. The resulting thin film is then rolled up to crease thicker layers of tissue.

Submission + - Consumer Reports Sells Out To Apple (consumerreports.org) 2

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: CR claims that supposedly "unbiased" tests show that " both iPhones seem tougher" than #bendgate would imply and that the 6+ "outperformed the HTC One". CR also claims that "the Note 3's screen splintered and it stopped working."

Submission + - Utilities Should Worry. Rooftop Solar Could Soon Cut Their Profit (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicts that distributed rooftop solar panel installations will grow from 0.2% market penetration today to 10% by 2022, during which time they're likely to cut utility profits from 8% to 41%. Using those same metrics, electricity rates for utility customers will grow only by as much as 2.7% over the next eight years. By comparison, the cost of electricity on average rose 3.1% from 2013 to 2014. The study was performed for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy under the U.S. Department of Energy. One of the main purposes of the study was to evaluate measures that could be pursued by utilities and regulators to reduce the financial impacts of distributed photovoltaics.

Submission + - Acer Launches First 4K Panel With NVIDIA G-Sync Technology On Board (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Save for a smattering of relatively small, 3K and 4K laptop displays, we haven't quite gotten to the same type of pixel density on the PC platform, that is available on today's high-end ultra-mobile devices. That said, the desktop display space has really heated up as of late and 4K panels have generated a large part of the buzz. Acer just launched the first 4K display with NVIDIA G-Sync technology on board. To put it simply, G-SYNC keeps a display and the output from an NVIDIA GPU in sync, regardless of frame rates or whether or not V-Sync is enabled. Instead of the monitor controlling the timing and refreshing at say 60Hz, the timing control is transferred to the GPU. The GPU scans a frame out to the monitor and the monitor doesn't update until a frame is done drawing, in lock-step with the GPU. This method completely eliminates tearing or frame stuttering associated with synchronization anomalies of standard panels. There are still some quirks with Windows and many applications that don't always scale properly on high-DPI displays, but the situation is getting better every day. If you're a gamer in the market for a 4K display, that's primed for gaming, the Acer XB280HK is a decent new option with this technology on board, though it does come at a bit of a premium at $799 versus standard 28-inch panels.

Submission + - IBM Solar Concentrator Can Produce12kW/day, and Act as Desalinator, Cooler (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: IBM Research and Switzerland-based Airlight Energy today announced a parabolic dish that increases the sun's radiation by 2,000 times while also producing fresh water and air conditioning. The new Concentrator PhotoVoltaics (CPV) system uses a dense array of water-cooled solar chips that can convert 80% of the sun's radiation into useful energy. The CPV, which looks like a 33-foot-high sunflower, can generate 12 kilowatts of electrical power and 20 kilowatts of heat on a sunny day — enough to power several average homes, according to Bruno Michel, the project's lead scientists at IBM Research in Switzerland.

Submission + - Backblaze Data Center Study Shows High Capacity Drive Failure Rates on Rise

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Cloud storage service provider Backblaze released the latest data on failure rates for hard drives in its data center. The data comes from monitoring the health of more than 38,000 drives from Seagate, WD or HGST. The study showed that annual failure rates among 3TB models increased significantly over the past year. "The surprising (and bad) news is that Seagate 3TB drives are failing a lot more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate going up from 4% to 7%,” the company's blog states. For example, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.14 3TB hard drives with an average 1.9 year lifespan had a 15.7% annual failure rate. As with previous studies from Backblaze, the study also showed consumer drives are more reliable than enterprise drives.

Comment That's not what she's saying (Score 5, Interesting) 356

by Lucas123 (#47984333) Attached to: Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist
She's not saying the things are not "very very dense" rather just that they never collapse further than the state that gravity can overcome the speed of light. I believe she's saying a black hole's mass would be "evenly" (or not) spread out over the volume encompassed by the event horizon, rather than in a singularity.

Submission + - A Mobile Device is Wiped Every Three Minutes as Part of a Corporrate Policy (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Everyone wipes, according to a study by Fiberlink of small, medium and large corporations that use its remote data deletion software. Fiberlink looked at 130,000 devices running its MaaS360 mobile device management platform last year and found on average, businesses wipe 10% to 20% of their entire device population every year. The study also revealed 63% of devices are partially wiped and 37% are fully wiped. Additionally, 49% of wipes are done automatically and 51% are done by someone at the organization.

Comment Then it happens less in science than in general (Score 5, Informative) 460

by Lucas123 (#47946829) Attached to: Science Has a Sexual Assault Problem
The study the level of sexual assault of trainees in academic fieldwork environments... was 26% of women and 6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault. According to a study by the CDC, 51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker. More than half (54 percent) of the female rape victims identified by the survey were younger than age 18 when they experienced their first attempted or completed rape. Violence against women is primarily intimate partner violence: 64.0 percent of the women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. In comparison, only 16.2 percent of the men who reported being raped and/or physically assaulted since age 18 were victimized by such a perpetrator. Study: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...

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