These microfactories can also turn many types of consumer waste such as glass, plastic and timber into commercial materials and products.

Using technology developed after extensive scientific research at the SMaRT Centre, the e-waste microfactory has the potential to reduce the rapidly growing problem of vast amounts of electronic waste that cause environmental harm and go into landfills.

The microfactories can use e-waste like computer circuit boards to make metal alloys such as copper and tin, while glass and plastic from e-devices can be converted into micromaterials used in industrial-grade ceramics and plastic filaments for 3D printing.

“Our e-waste (microfactory) and another under development for other consumer waste types offer a cost-effective solution to one of the greatest environmental challenges of our age, while delivering new job opportunities to our cities but importantly to our rural and regional areas, too,” said the Mumbai-born Sahajwalla, who did her B.Tech in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986.

“Using our green manufacturing technologies, these microfactories can transform waste where it is stockpiled and created, enabling local businesses and communities to not only tackle local waste problems but develop a commercial opportunity from the valuable materials that are created,” she said.

According to Sahajwalla, microfactories present a solution to burning and burying of waste items that contain materials that can be transformed into value-added substances and products to meet existing and new industry and consumer demands. She termed microfactories a “truly sustainable solution to our growing waste problem while offering economic benefits available to local communities”.

“We have proven you can transform just about anything at the micro-level and transform waste streams into value-added products. For example, instead of looking at plastics as just a nuisance, we’ve shown scientifically that you can generate materials from that waste stream to create smart filaments for 3D printing,” she said.

“These microfactories can transform the manufacturing landscape, especially in remote locations where typically the logistics of having waste transported or processed are prohibitively expensive. This is especially beneficial for the island markets and the remote and regional regions of the country.”

UNSW has developed the technology with support from the Australian Research Council and is now in partnership with a number of businesses and organisations, including e-waste recycler TES, mining manufacturer Moly-Cop, and Dresden which makes spectacles.

UNSW is one of the world’s leading research and teaching universities and is home to more than 52,000 students from nearly 130 countries. UNSW is ranked 45^th in the world, according to QS World University ranking.

Sahajwalla has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for her outstanding contributions in the field of materials processing for sustainable development (2015), and also the Eureka Prize (2005), Pravasi Bhartiya Samman for outstanding achievement in science (2011).

IANS

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Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in the US said that they achieved this cat-like ‘hearing’ with a device that is tens of trillions times (10 followed by 13 zeros) smaller in volume and 100,000 times thinner than the human eardrum.

“We need transducers that can handle signals without losing or compromising information at both the ‘signal ceiling’ (the highest level of an undistorted signal) and the ‘noise floor’ (the lowest detectable level),” said corresponding author on a paper Philip Feng.

They constructed the device by exfoliating individual atomic layers from the bulk semiconductor crystal and using a combination of nanofabrication and micromanipulation techniques to suspend the atomic layers over micro-cavities pre-defined on a silicon wafer and then making electrical contacts to the devices.

“What we’ve done here is to show that some ultimately miniaturized, atomically thin electromechanical drumhead resonators can offer remarkably broad dynamic range, up to ~110dB, at radio frequencies (RF) up to over 120MHz,” Feng said.

“These dynamic ranges at RF are comparable to the broad dynamic range of human hearing capability in the audio bands.”

Human eardrums normally have dynamic range of about 60 to 100dB in the range of 10Hz to 10kHz, and our hearing quickly decreases outside this frequency range.

Other animals, such as the common house cat or beluga whale, can have comparable or even wider dynamic ranges in higher frequency bands.

The study also revealed that these incredibly small drumheads only need picoWatt up to nanoWatt level of RF power to sustain their high frequency oscillations.

The advances would likely contribute to making the next-generation of ultralow-power communications and sensory devices smaller and with greater detection and tuning ranges.

 IANS

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Titan is the largest of Saturn’s many moons and the second-largest in the solar system.

It is of particular interest to researchers because it is similar to Earth in one important way—it holds liquid.

The Titanian seas, however, are not composed of water, like Earth’s seas, but are seas of liquid hydrocarbons.

The submarine that NASA is designing will have to operate autonomously. It will need to study atmospheric and ocean conditions, move around sea beds, and hover at or below the surface.

The engineering is even trickier because, unlike the nearly homogeneous water in Earth-based oceans, the concentration of ethane and methane can vary dramatically in the Titan oceans and change the liquid’s density properties.

“Those aren’t the friendliest conditions,” said researcher Ian Richardson.

“You have to come up with creative solutions,” said Richardson, who earlier re-created the atmosphere of Titan and tested how a small heated machine might work under such conditions.

He was Washington State University’s first-ever recipient of a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, which included an internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

It was while working as an intern on a separate problem that a NASA scientist approached him with the issue of designing a submarine for Titan.

“My research just took a right turn, and I went with it,” said Richardson.

The research team built a test chamber that housed the liquid mixture at very cold temperatures to simulate the seas of Titan.

They added a two-inch, cylinder-shaped cartridge heater that would approximate the heat that a submarine would create.

One of the biggest challenges for researchers was understanding bubbles in the Titan seas.

Add a submarine powered by a heat-producing machine into the very cold Titan liquid, and nitrogen bubbles will form. Too many bubbles would make it hard to manoeuvre the ship, see, take data and manage ballast systems.

The next big problem, said Richardson, was getting a video in difficult conditions.

Richardson’s group engineered a solution using an optical device called a borescope and video camera that could withstand the low temperatures and high pressures to visualise what was going on within the test chamber.

The researchers succeeded and took video footage of ethane-methane rain and snow.

The group also studied the freezing temperatures for methane and ethane lakes and determined that, because of a small amount of nitrogen in the liquid, the lakes freeze at lower temperatures than would be expected: 75 Kelvin, or minus 184 degrees Celsius, instead of 90.5 Kelvin.

“That’s a big deal,” said Richardson. “That means you don’t have to worry about icebergs.”

The researchers said they were looking to continue the work with NASA to update the submarine design.

IANS

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According to a report in Futurism, the robots could fix minor maintenance issues, keeping up with current orbiters as they age and sustain damage.

The agencies also hope to keep the orbit clear of debris called space pollution which is caused by broken satellites abandoned in the space.

In 2015, there were about 25,000 human-made objects larger than a human fist and roughly half a million larger than a dime orbiting Earth.

Additionally, these satellites could also face off against mechanical foes in orbit meaning it could sabotage enemy satellites in the event of war, apparently by dismantling opponents or forcing them to crash.

They could also play defence, monitoring for tampering, the report highlighted.

IANS

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“As we continue our journey to bring the benefits of MR to everyone, Simplygon is an important accelerant that makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to develop in 3D,” said Lorraine Bardeen, General Manager, Windows Mixed Reality Experiences, in a blog post on Friday.

Simplygon reduces complexity in the creation and extensibility of 3D models through optimisation.

Historically, 3D asset optimisation has taken days or weeks of manual effort and is one of the tasks that artists and developers dislike the most.

“With Simplygon, you can create 3D assets once—at full visual fidelity—and automatically optimise them to render smoothly on any platform—within minutes, saving valuable time and money,” Bardeen added.

“Simplygon Cloud” is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

IANS

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The low-mass exoplanet orbits the red dwarf star Ross 128 every 9.9 days. The star is currently located at a distance of 11 light-years from Earth.

Many red dwarf stars, including Proxima Centauri, are subject to flares that occasionally bathe their orbiting planets in deadly ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.

However, it seems that Ross 128 is a much quieter star, and so its planets may be the closest known comfortable abode for possible life, the study said.

The team found that Ross 128 b orbits 20 times closer than the Earth orbits the Sun.

Despite this proximity, Ross 128 b receives only 1.38 times more irradiation than the Earth.

As a result, Ross 128 b’s equilibrium temperature is estimated to lie between minus 60 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius, thanks to the cool and faint nature of its small red dwarf host star, which has just over half the surface temperature of the Sun, the researchers said.

The discovery was made by a team working with European Southern Observatory, or ESO’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

“This discovery is based on more than a decade of HARPS intensive monitoring together with state-of-the-art data reduction and analysis techniques,” explained study co-author Nicola Astudillo-Defru from Geneva Observatory – University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Although it is currently 11 light-years from Earth, Ross 128 is moving towards us and is expected to become our nearest stellar neighbour in just 79 000 years—a blink of the eye in cosmic terms.

Ross 128 b will by then take the crown from Proxima b and become the closest exoplanet to Earth, the reseachers said.

Red dwarfs are some of the coolest, faintest—and most common—stars in the Universe.

This makes them very good targets in the search for exoplanets and so they are increasingly being studied.

IANS

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Kumar was speaking on the sidelines of the 24^th Session of Asia Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum (APRSAF) here. Heads of space agencies of 10 countries from the Asia-Pacific region, government bodies and industries related to space were at the event.

“The relationship between India and Japan in terms of the space agencies has had a visible change. We are working together for possible future cooperative missions,” the ISRO chief said.

President of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Naoki Okumura said: “India and Japan have been having collaborations in the space sector, which helps us share our knowledge and technologies.

“I believe that India and Japan will lead the space sector in the Asia Pacific region through these collaborations.”

Japan and India had their own lunar missions in the past. In 2009, JAXA’s lunar orbiter spacecraft Selene had impacted the lunar surface after successfully orbiting the moon for a year and eight months.

Japan had also launched Hiten Spacecraft in 1990, the country’s first lunar probe. India had launched its first lunar probe in 2008 through Chandrayaan-1, and is now gearing up for its next lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 in March next year.

The two countries are also having discussions on making use of their space technologies for providing inputs on weather monitoring, and also look to generate inputs together for climate change studies, he added.

The space agency heads of both the countries asserted that working together through collaborations is advantageous for the countries as the resources are shared.

The 24^th session of the space forum held here between November 14 to 17 was attended by over 600 delegates from 35 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Heads of space agencies from India, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, Israel, Thailand, France and Russia had participated in the forum. Space representatives from China were not a part of the conclave.

IANS

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But a new study, published in the journal Nature, challenges known theories about the death of stars. Their observations included data from Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii.

”The spectra we obtained at Keck Observatory showed that this supernova looked like nothing we had ever seen before. This, after discovering nearly 5,000 supernovae in the last two decades,” said study co-author Peter Nugent from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US.

”While the spectra bear a resemblance to normal hydrogen-rich core-collapse supernova explosions, they grew brighter and dimmer at least five times more slowly, stretching an event which normally lasts 100 days to over two years,” Nugent said.

The supernova, named iPTF14hls, was discovered in September 2014 by the Palomar Transient Factory. At the time, it looked like an ordinary supernova.

Several months later, astronomers at Las Cumbres Observatory in the US noticed the supernova was growing brighter again after it had faded.

When astronomers went back and looked at archival data, they were astonished to find evidence of an explosion in 1954 at the same location.

This star somehow survived that explosion and exploded again in 2014.

“This supernova breaks everything we thought we knew about how they work. It’s the biggest puzzle I’ve encountered in almost a decade of studying stellar explosions,” said lead author Iair Arcavi, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at LCO and the University of California Santa Barbara.

The study calculated that the star that exploded was at least 50 times more massive than the Sun and probably much larger.

Supernova iPTF14hls may have been the most massive stellar explosion ever seen. The size of this explosion could be the reason that conventional understanding of the death of stars failed to explain this event.

Astronomers continue to monitor the supernova, which remains bright three years after it was discovered.

IANS

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Thermotherapy has long been used as a treatment method for cancer but it is difficult to treat patients without damaging healthy cells.

However, tumour cells can be weakened or killed without affecting normal tissue if temperatures can be controlled accurately within a range of 42 degree Celsius to 45 degree Celcius.

The newly developed “Zn-Co-Cr ferrite” nanoparticles are self-regulating, meaning that they self-stop heating when they reach temperatures over 45 degrees Celsius, the researchers noted in the paper reported in the journal Nanoscale.

“This could potentially be a game changer in the way we treat people who have cancer. If we can keep cancer treatment sat at a temperature level high enough to kill the cancer, while low enough to stop harming healthy tissue, it will prevent some of the serious side effects of vital treatment,” said Ravi Silva, Professor at UK’s University of Surrey.

Importantly, the nanoparticles are also low in toxicity and are unlikely to cause permanent damage to the body.

For the study, the team created nanoparticles which, when implanted and used in a thermotherapy session, can induce temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius.

“Magnetic induced hyperthermia is a traditional route of treating malignant tumours. However, the difficulties in temperature control has significantly restricted its usage,” noted Wei Zhang, Associate Professor from Dalian University of Technology.

However, “by making magnetic materials with the Curie temperature falling in the range of hyperthermia temperatures, the self-regulation of therapeutics can be achieved. This is a major nanomaterials breakthrough”, Zhang added.

IANS 

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A hybrid Cloud is a computing environment which combines a public Cloud and a private Cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them, according to Microsoft.

Organisations should move towards adopting hybrid Cloud as the debate between private and public Cloud has been put to rest, Arora said at an event organised by Cloud infrastructure and business mobility major VMware.

Starting with the entertainment sector, now retail, banking and even government institutions are moving their data to different Cloud platforms, Vikram K, Senior Director, Data Center and Hybrid Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) India, told the gathering of tech honchos at the ongoing vForum 2017.

“But the whole thing will be hybrid in the future,” he added.

In India, however, the demand currently is mostly for private Cloud,” Arun Kumar, Managing Director, VMware India, told IANS on the sidelines of the event.

“About 90 per cent of our customers want private Cloud,” Kumar said.

“It also depends on the verticals you are working with. Regulated sectors like banking, telecom and governmental institutions want private Cloud as they can’t have their data on public Cloud,” Kumar explained.

The software services provided by VMware and its partnerships with multiple players in the Cloud infrastructure segment, including Amazon, allow organisations to enjoy the benefits of hybrid Cloud, Kumar added.

Hybrid cloud services from VMware are built on the foundation of vSphere, a leading virtualisation platform. Its NSX Cloud delivers consistent networking and security for Cloud-native applications.

What really matters for organisations is to have a multi-Cloud strategy, and manage and secure them in a consistent way, said Raghu Raghuram, Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware.

However, for most organisations the world over, the digital transformation journey begins with getting ready for public Cloud, and to have that one needs to set up private Cloud infrastructure, Raghuram said.

Another important step is to categorise your applications – determining which applications need to be moved to the Cloud, Raghuram added.

“Whether you are using private Cloud, public Cloud or hybrid, the important thing is to manage these in a consistent way,” Raghuram said.

“The reality is it is a multi-Cloud world and our strategy is focused not on running on Clouds, but helping customers thrive regardless of whichever Cloud they are in,” he added.

Starting with the US, VMware has started making VMware Cloud available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand its hybrid Cloud strategy.

VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables one to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services.

IANS

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