“Our approach is general, in that it can be integrated with virtually any kind of sulfur electrode to increase cycling stability,” said lead investigator of the study Hailiang Wang, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US.

In a study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers described the new material which can be applied to any sulfur cathode.

A cathode is the positive terminal on a battery.

Sulfur cathodes coated with the material can be stably discharged and recharged for more than 1,000 cycles, enhancing the battery’s efficiency and number of cycles, according to the researchers.

“The developed film is so thin and light it will not affect the overall size or weight of the battery, and thus it will function without compromising the energy and power density of the device,” Wang said.

New types of electrodes — positive and negative terminals — are considered essential for the development of a new generation of high energy-density batteries.

As lithium-ion batteries — currently widely used in mobile phones and laptops, among other electronic devices — begin to reach their capacity limits, many researchers are looking at lithium-sulfur as a solution.

Sulfur is both lightweight and abundant, with a high theoretical energy capacity.

The Yale team made its discovery by combining the distinct properties of two material components.

They merged the mechanical strength of graphene oxide with the ability of a dendrimer molecule to confine lithium polysulfides.

The result is a gel-like slurry that can be readily coated as a 100-nanometer-thin film onto sulfur electrodes, the study said.

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U.S. station commander Shane Kimbrough, 49, and French flight engineer Thomas Pesquet, 39, floated outside the station’s airlock as the $100 billion complex soared 250 miles (402 km) above Earth.

Kimbrough, making his fifth spacewalk, first upgraded a computer relay box on the station’s central beam, then worked on a docking system for new spaceships in development by Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is making the retrofits in the hope that private companies will begin flying astronauts to the station by the end of 2018. This would break Russia’s monopoly on crew transportation, a service that costs NASA more than $80 million per person.

The first of the space taxis is scheduled for an unmanned debut test flight later this year.

During Friday’s spacewalk, Kimbrough disconnected four cables on a docking tunnel to be used by the new commercial space taxis. On Sunday, ground control teams will use the station’s robot arm to move it onto a different module.

The astronauts also lubricated part of the station’s robot arm, replaced cameras on Japan’s experiment platform and tackled other maintenance tasks before heading back inside the station.

A second spacewalk by Pesquet and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is planned for Thursday to install new cables to the relocated docking tunnel.

Once all the work is finished, the U.S. side of the station will have two docking ports for passenger spaceships and two for cargo ships. Russia, which jointly operates the station with NASA, has five docking ports.

Also participating in the station program with research modules and equipment are Europe, Japan and Canada.

During Friday’s spacewalk, Pesquet inspected hoses, attachments and other components of the station’s ammonia cooling system. Flight controllers are looking for the source of a small leak in the system.

Pesquet, making his second spacewalk, did not see any leaking ammonia but engineers will review his video for closer scrutiny, said NASA mission commentator Gary Jordan.

NASA is expected to schedule a third spacewalk once its next cargo ship arrives at the station with more items to install. Engineers are troubleshooting a problem with the cargo ship’s launch vehicle.

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“We use artificial intelligence (AI) to look for patterns in the past to predict future behaviour,” says Tarun Wig as he explains why he hopes his company Innefu can do more business with India’s government.

“Cyber warfare isn’t a movie, it’s happening right now…. We lost out on the industrial revolution, we lost out on the defence revolution — let’s not lose out in the cyber revolution.”

While other countries have long relied on AI to gather intelligence, India — sometimes seemingly addicted to paperwork — has continued to use agents to eyeball reams of data gathered over the years.

It’s a process that sucks up time and can often miss crucial information.

India has been in three wars with its neighbours since independence and the target of numerous cross-border attacks, including in 2008 when Pakistan-based extremists killed more than 160 people in Mumbai.

Now the threat from cyber attacks is growing and its vulnerability has been exposed.

Some 22,000 pages of data related to submarines that a French government-owned company was building for the Indian navy were leaked to the media last year.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account was hacked in November while the elite National Security Guard’s website was reportedly defaced with profanity-laden messages for Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month.

“Our idea starting out was that if the next war is fought on cyber, we need our own weapons,” said Wig as he talks through software developed for India’s needs.

Innefu got a foot in the lucrative business of government contracts after resolving a thorny test case for a law enforcement agency that wanted to determine the background to an incident along one of India’s borders.

The agency handed over two CDs with about 1,500 intelligence documents, including social media snippets, such as posts on planned protests.

Innefu had to train the machine to read the agency’s language, including abbreviations, and then began extracting information on what happened, who were the main players and how they interacted with each other.

Its newest offering Prophecy is modelled on products made by Palantir Technologies, a private security firm whose founders include Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and whose clientele includes the CIA and the FBI.

“Prophecy is like an octopus with multiple tentacles that pulls data from multiple places,” said Wig’s co-founder Abhishek Sharma.

While the use of AI is commonplace elsewhere in Asia, it is still in its infancy in India.

About 75 percent of respondents to a recent survey by consulting firm EY India said cybersecurity deployed in their organisations does not meet their needs, pointing to big opportunities for companies such as Innefu.

Although Innefu is the only Indian company known to specialise in national security, other Indian companies such as Arya.ai and Haptik are also tapping what should be a lucrative market.

Banks have started to use AI to target products to customers and doctors are using it in a couple of experiments to map a patient’s medical history in order to devise new lines of treatment.

Work is also underway to create a system that can act as a backbone for all electronic warfare programmes for the Indian army.

But most of this is still at the laboratory stage, experts say.

“It’s expensive and our society is not used to automated decision-making,” Jiten Jain, chief of Indian Infosec Consortium, an industry body, told AFP. “We’re still used to manual and human decision-making.”

Subimal Bhattacharjee, a cyber security expert, said India had been caught off guard by the need to upscale its use of AI.

“We are definitely laggards in comparison to China and South Korea and the US,” he said.

Innefu operates from the eighth floor of a nondescript Delhi commercial complex that houses chartered accountants and eateries. Its windows are darkened with thick black paper, while clusters of wires sprout from walls adorned with photos of goddess Lakshmi, the purveyor of wealth.

But despite its humble surroundings, it is confident an ongoing trial of Prophecy will lead to more business with India’s security services — whom Wig expects to be naturally inclined to go local.

“You can’t really trust such sensitive data with foreign companies,” said Wig.—AFP

Image: innefu.com

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The idea came to Olivia Koburongo, 26, after her grandmother fell ill, and was moved from hospital to hospital before being properly diagnosed with pneumonia.

“It was now too late to save her,” said Koburongo.

“It was too hard to keep track of her vitals, of how she’s doing, and that is how I thought of a way to automate the whole process and keep track of her health.”

Koburongo took her idea to fellow telecommunications engineering graduate Brian Turyabagye, 24, and together with a team of doctors they came up with the “Mama-Ope” (Mother’s Hope) kit made up of a biomedical smart jacket and a mobile phone application which does the diagnosis.

Pneumonia — a severe lung infection — kills up to 24,000 Ugandan children under the age of five per year, many of whom are misdiagnosed as having malaria, according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF.

A lack of access to laboratory testing and infrastructure in poor communities means health workers often have to rely on simple clinical examinations to make their diagnoses.

With the easy-to-use Mama-Ope kit, health workers merely have to slip the jacket onto the child, and its sensors will pick up sound patterns from the lungs, temperature and breathing rate.

“The processed information is sent to a mobile phone app (via Bluetooth) which analyses the information in comparison to known data so as to get an estimate of the strength of the disease,” said Turyabagye.

The jacket, which is still only a prototype, can diagnose pneumonia up to three times faster than a doctor and reduces human error, according to studies done by its inventors.

Traditionally doctors use a stethoscope to listen for abnormal crackling or bubbling sounds in the lungs, however if medics suspect malaria or tuberculosis — which also include respiratory distress — the time lost treating those rather than pneumonia could prove deadly for their patient.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is diagnosing pneumonia at an early stage before it gets severe and we’re also trying to solve the problem of not enough manpower in hospitals because currently we have a doctor to patient ratio which is one to 24,000 in the country,” said Koburongo.

Turyabagye said plans were underway to have the kit piloted in Uganda’s referral hospitals and then trickle down to remote health centres.

“Once you have this information captured on cloud storage, it means a doctor who is not even in the rural area, who is not on the ground, can access the same information from any patient and it helps in making an informed decision,” he added.

The team is also working on patenting the kit, which is shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize.

“Once it is successful (in Uganda) we hope it is rolled out to other African countries and major parts of the world where pneumonia is killing thousands of children,” said Koburongo.

According to UNICEF, most of the 900,000 annual deaths of children under five due to pneumonia occur in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

This is more than other causes of childhood death such as diarrhoea, malaria, meningitis or HIV/AIDS.—AFP

Image: AFP

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The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is seeking tenders for a self-processing system to be introduced later this year, Australia’s ABC News reported.

The system will use fingerprints, iris or facial structure recognition at major air and sea ports.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the aim was for more than 90 per cent of passengers to avoid paperwork or manual processing by staff.

“In many cases that will mean people, whilst they’ll still have to carry their passport, may not have to present their passport at all in the long term,” Dutton said on Sunday.

“But in the immediate term, this will make it easier, it will make it quicker, for people going in and out of our airports.”

Under the new system, the existing SmartGates that scan passports electronically – introduced less than 10 years ago – would be retired.

Dutton said the $78 million upgrade would also boost security at the nation’s borders by making it easier to detect threats, ABC News reported.

He said cutting down processing times for travellers was also likely to boost tourism.

Forty-million air and sea travellers were processed by the Australian Border Force in the 2015-16 year, the Guardian reported citing an official report.—IANS

Image: Alamy

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The bicycles, which can switch between the solar energy powered motor and the pedals, may cost around 12,000 to 15,000 rupees, researchers said.

India was the sixth largest motor vehicle manufacturer in 2014-15, producing a record 23.4 million vehicles in the period, they said.

Two wheeler production reached 18.5 million units in the same year. The growth of vehicles has doubled in last two decades, and they have become the major source of pollution in urban India.

The major air pollutants emitted from vehicles are carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM).

Increasing air pollution is not only affecting the environment, it also has adverse health effects like lung cancer, cardiovascular mortality, leading to 10 per cent deaths in the country per annum according to estimates.

“To overcome this problem, an effort is being made for developing an eco-friendly vehicle to reduce pollution in India,” said S A Puviyarasu, from Dr N G P Institute of Technology, Anna University in Tamil Nadu.

“If we use solar assisted bicycle, we can reduce overall 60 per cent of all vehicle pollution in our country,” Puviyarasu told PTI.

The design consists of brushless DC motor mounted on the front wheel of the bicycle, an electric throttle for varying the speed of the bicycle, and a lead acid battery that stores solar energy.

“A solar panel is mounted on the bicycle carrier. We can use solar panels of any specification, and depending upon the specification of solar panel, energy is produced,” Puviyarasu said.

When the power supply is given to the hub motor from solar panel unit, the bicycle wheels rotate to move. The rider can choose between the motor and the pedals, or even use both at the same time.

The bicycle can be customised according to the needs of the user, Puviyarasu said.

For example, if users are looking for a bicycle with speeds of about 80 km/hr, the solar panel specification and hub motor power can be adjusted accordingly to suit people’s needs.

“My plan is to implement this bicycle soon. We can expect these type of bicycles by the year 2018 in India,” Puviyarasu said.

The research was published in the Indian Journal of Science and Technology.—PTI

Image: Alamy

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The findings of the World Economic Forum Digital Transformation Initiative (DTI) found much of the value that digitalisation can potentially generate for society would remain trapped unless efforts are stepped up to align private sector investment incentives with long term public good.

“More than half of the value that digitalisation offers is in the form of societal benefits. These include net job creation and reduced income inequality, improved health outcomes and fewer accidents, reduced carbon emissions and time and cost savings for consumers,” it said.

Bruce Weinelt, Head of DTI at WEF, said majority of the benefits of digital would accrue to society, but only if collective action is taken to assess the potential, using consistent criteria to evaluate the outcomes of specific policy actions.

“Digital transformation across industries could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in cost,” the report said, adding that digitalisation could benefit consumers more than businesses.

Among others, the report has emphasised the need for rapid re-skilling and greater alignment of education with the new demands of fast-changing markets.

While new technologies have the potential to increase economic growth, reduce inequality and promote inclusivity, the report said they could be jeopardised by retreat of globalisation, the rise of political populism and social instability.

There is also need for responsive and responsible leadership to proactively counter forces that would constrain innovation, trade and growth, it added.

The DTI project, in collaboration with Accenture, has completed value-at-stake analyses in 10 industries to help the private sector identify growth opportunities. This is complemented with a new societal value framework enabling the private and public sectors to understand and measure wider societal benefits in financial terms.

The new societal value model has been tried in India, the UK and Denmark to engage dialogue with policy-makers.

“In the Indian state of Telangana, the four digital initiative models demonstrated that value generated in the next decade could be equal to 40 per cent of India’s GDP in 2015.

“Of the benefits of digitalisation, 94 per cent could accrue to society and the environment, as opposed to industry,” the report said.—PTI

Image: weforum.org

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“Prime Minister Modi believes that competitive and cooperative federalism is key to India’s progress. This index will encourage states to compete with each other and, in turn, lead to better policies for inclusive growth,” said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog.

Each partnering organisation will nominate a working group member to work on the index. The first ranking is expected to be released at the India Economic Summit in New Delhi on October 4-6, 2017.

“We are delighted to collaborate on this index and believe that it can move India to an innovation-driven economy. We want to identify and measure the grassroots issues that affect innovation capabilities,” said Viraj Mehta, Head of India and South Asia, World Economic Forum.

The index will be based on key pillars of innovation and sub-indices that together will assist in tailoring policies that promote inclusive growth. The pillars include the strength of institutions, capacity of human capital and research, supporting infrastructure and the level of business sophistication, among others.

“We are very excited to collaborate on this and hope that this will further mobilise the availability of new data for the Global Innovation Index (GII) itself,” said Francis Gurry, Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The index will measure and rank the innovation performance of all Indian states with the aim of moving India towards an innovation-driven economy.

The index “will spur competition and ensure progress towards innovation at the local level in India,” said Soumitra Dutta, co-editor of GII and Dean, College of Business, Cornell University, USA.—PTI

Image: wipo.int

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The simulated stay on Mars with a carefully selected crew of researchers embarked on a mission Thursday to gain insight into the psychological toll a similar real-life voyage would have on astronauts. It’s part of a NASA-funded human-behavior experiment that could help the space agency send humans to the red planet in the next 20 years.

The man-made dome that the four men and two women call home is outfitted with futuristic white walls and an elevated sleeping platform on the world’s largest active volcano in Hawaii. The vinyl-covered shelter spans 1,200 square feet, or about the size of a small, two-bedroom house.

A video released by the group shows the six scientists in matching red polo shirts arriving and entering the dome to farewell handshakes from program associates.

Except for the presence of the white van that brought the group, the scene was reminiscent of the red planet — the dome set in a barren, rock-strewn and reddish landscape with distant hills giving the feel of a wind-swept and forbidding environment.

“I?m looking forward to building relationships with my crew,” said mission commander James Bevington, a space scientist. “I fully anticipate coming out with five new best friends.”

They will have no physical contact with people in the outside world and will work with a 20-minute delay in communications with their support crew — the time it would take for an email to reach Earth from Mars.

The project will study the psychological difficulties with living in isolated, confined conditions for an extended period.

NASA hopes to send humans to an asteroid in the 2020s and Mars by the 2030s.

“We’re hoping to figure out how best to select individual astronauts, how to compose a crew and how to support that crew on long-duration space missions,” said principal investigator Kim Binsted, a University of Hawaii science professor.

The team members include engineers, a computer scientist, a doctoral candidate and a biomedical expert. They were selected from 700 applicants subjected to personality tests, background checks and extensive interviews.

“When I started, my biggest fear was that we were going to be that crew that turned out like Biosphere 2, which wasn’t a very pretty picture,” Bevington said.

The experimental greenhouse-like habitat in Arizona became a debacle in the 1990s. It housed different ecosystems and a crew of eight to try to understand what would be needed for humans to live on other planets. The participants were supposed to grow their own food and recycle their air inside the sealed glass space.

But the experiment soon spiraled out of control, with the carbon dioxide level rising dangerously and plants and animals dying. The crew members grew hungry and squabbled so badly that by the time they emerged two years later, some of them weren’t speaking to each other.

The University of Hawaii operates the dome, called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, and NASA has dedicated more than $2 million to this stage of the project.

Scientists previously lived in the dome for two other long-term NASA-funded stays — one of them lasting a year, the other eight months — to study food requirements and crew cohesion.

A number of other Mars simulation projects exist around the world, but one of the chief advantages of the Hawaii experiment is the rugged, Mars-like landscape, on a rocky, red plain below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano, the Big Island’s Mauna Loa.

The dome has a kitchen, laboratory and bathroom, plus small sleeping quarters for each member. Unlike Biosphere 2, it won’t be airtight.

To maintain the crew’s sense of isolation, bundles of food, including some canned goods and snacks, will be dropped off a distance from the dome, and the team members will send a robot to retrieve them.

The participants will not be confined but will wear spacesuits whenever they step outside for geological expeditions, mapping studies or other tasks.

They will wear instruments measuring their moods and proximity to other team members and use virtual reality devices to simulate familiar and comforting surroundings.—AP

Image: AP

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But the new technology also threatens millions of jobs and raises a slew of ethical dilemmas — prospects that were on the minds of business chiefs and politicians meeting at the World Economic Forum this week.

“Companies are going to have to start thinking about it, governments are going to have to start thinking about it,” said Missy Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in North Carolina.

“The reality is we can’t just keep our head in the sand like an ostrich,” she told AFP in Davos, singling out the coming impact on employment.

In the United States alone, an estimated four million people work as truckers, taxi drivers and in other jobs that are under threat when the driverless vehicles come into widespread use — a matter of years, experts predict.

In October, delivery drivers got an uncomfortable glimpse of the future when a self-driving truck built by Uber’s Otto unit successfully delivered a beer shipment.

Cars with some autonomous functions — such as the ability to adjust the speed — are already on our roads, and more than a dozen automakers including BMW, Kia, Volkswagen and General Motors are racing to get fully self-driving cars to market by 2020.

Champions of the technology point to its potential to reduce the 1.3 million road deaths worldwide each year — too many of them at the hands of a tired or distracted driver, or one who simply did not react fast enough.

The auto industry is already changing fast thanks to the advent of services like Uber and electric vehicles, and carmakers are eyeing both the threats and opportunities.

Renault-Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn summed up the transformations as a “reshuffling of the cards” for the industry.

“There is a new game, let’s see who is going to be able to prevail,” he told an audience in Davos.

The dash for driverless technology is bringing new players into the car business, notably Google, Apple and BlackBerry.

The disruption will create jobs too — engineering posts and roles in any number of new services. There is talk of mobile doctors’ surgeries and moving nail salons.

But the transition will be painful, not least because most cabbies and truck drivers are not qualified to slide seamlessly into new engineering roles.

“We don’t have, at this point, really well designed (plans) for re-education,” said EU transport commissioner Violeta Bulc at a panel in Davos.

“All this massive change that has not been experienced before, because digitalisation is really making dramatic shifts.”

How to regulate the new vehicles is already giving a headache to authorities around the world.

Inga Beale, CEO of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, said in Davos that insurers were having to grapple with the question of liability in case of an accident.

The US government unveiled a regulatory framework in September, but the carmakers are having to deal with ethical and legal dilemmas too.

At the extreme end, if an intelligent car is faced with the terrible choice of killing one person to swerve around a crowd of five, what should it do?

There was some relief for the industry when the US government this week found no safety-related defect in a fatal crash involving a Tesla car on autopilot last May.

In public, auto bosses are focusing on the ways that going driverless is going to change our lives for the better.

Ghosn painted a picture of a world where we are liberated not only to check our emails or watch TV while in the driver’s seat, but also run an entire office on the move.

“You can be in the car and do everything you’re doing in the house or in the office — except that it’s mobile,” he enthused.

Eventually, automated transport systems and innovations such as shared car ownership could free up our congested cities and clean up our air, promoters say.

For now, the approach is safety-first: the beer-delivering Uber truck had a human watching from the cabin, and a police car in tow.—AFP

Image: Reuters

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