Swedish product designers teenage engineering have released a set of 3D printed accessories for the modular IKEA frekvens speaker and light system. They even offer the 3D printer files available for download on their website. This is the best example of a prcatical application for 3D printing that I've seen in while.
Low Tech Magazine descibes the fascinating possibilities of small scale compressed air energy storage (CAES), which are more sustainable than chemical batteries and robust enough to be suited to off-grid living. Parallel use of storage tanks can even allow for variable energy discharge to meet different energy requirements.
Zero Mass Water is a tech company based in Arizona that have developed Hydropanels which use solar power to extract water from captured air vapour. The award winning technology is being rolled out in a consumer product called rexi this summer by the company, at a retail price of $2,500.
Balena is an IoT framework for Linux devices. They have published a new project called balenaSense with instructions on how to build an air quality monitor using a Raspberry Pi and Docker.
Researchers in the U.S. have created the first organic robots which measure at less than 1mm long. The living programmable organisms are first simluated using evolutionary algorithms to create random designs using combinations of different stem cell types. Successful xenobot designs are then created in real life using frog stem cells.
The Verge posted an interesting article on the story of how, for a few years, Playstation 3 games consoles were used by researchers and the U.S. Airforce as supercomputers to work on black hole calculations, win cryptography contests and process images from surveillance drones.
Atlantic Philathropies, the organisation setup by Chuck Feeney to give away his huge fortune, has published their final report titled Zero Is The Hero. The report gives an overview of the amounts invested around the world in different industries. The fascinating story of Chuck Feeney is told excellently in the book The Billionaire Who Wasn't (affiliate link) by Conor Clery.
Toyota are planning to build a prototype city of the future called Woven City on 175 acres at the base of Mt. Fuji. The city will be fully powered by hydrogen fuel cells and it will feature segregated transport links for different type of autonomous zero emissions vehicles and state of the art robot filled smart residences made of wood using traditional Japanese wood joinery. The first population set of 2000 people will be employees, retirees and industry partners. Ground breaking is due to start in 2021.
Researchers and MIT and IBM have created a new image dataset to use in the training of computer vision models. The new dataset, called ObjectNet, includes images of obscure objects at obscure angles among cluttered environments. The purpose of the new dataset is to help train algorithms on more real-world style scenarios.
