Day: January 31, 2018

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Teen Builds an Electric Celica

Teenager adam lansing has converted a 1980 toyota celica into an

electric car

he spent four years building his homemade

EV

. A 30-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack gives the toyota a 130-mile range. Lansing has now started his own company, hawkeye innovations llc a company that performs gasoline-to-electric conversions.

Transcript: ELECTRIC CELICA BUILT BY TEEN ***
HAS 130-MILE RANGE

TEENAGER ADAM LANSING HAS CONVERTED A 1980 TOYOTA CELICA INTO AN ELECTRIC CAR

HE SPENT FOUR YEARS BUILDING HIS HOMEMADE EV
WORKING UP TO 20 HOURS A DAY ON THE CAR.

ADAM SAYS HE REBUILT THE CELICA 52 TIMES

CORE IV AND PLASMA BOY RACING SPONSORED THE REBUILD

THE SPONSORS GAVE ADAM A 30-KILOWATT-HOUR LITHIUM IRON PHOSPHATE BATTERY PACK NEEDED TO PROVIDE THE 130-MILE RANGE

LANSING HAS NOW STARTED HIS OWN COMPANY, HAWKEYE INNOVATIONS LLC

A COMPANY THAT PERFORMS GASOLINE-TO-ELECTRIC CONVERSIONS

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Researchers treat ear defect by growing implants from cells

While scientists have been working on growing organs and body parts like ears for some time, researchers in China have taken it one important step further. They’ve grown new ears for five children with microtia — an ear defect that results in small, underdeveloped ears and often affects hearing — grafted them onto the children and continued to observe the development for over two years. The work is important because it’s the first study of its kind and shows that these sorts of methods stand to be a viable option going forward.

First, the scientists built scaffolds based on the children’s healthy ears using CT scanning and 3D printing. Those scaffolds were then seeded with cells from the children’s underdeveloped, microtia ears and cultured for three months. The team then implanted the ears in the five patients, who have been continuously monitored ever since. Now, the researchers have over two years of follow-up data and the results are promising. None of the children rejected the new ears, four of the five ears developed cartilage after the implantation and though two showed slight distortion after the surgery, three were healthily shaped.

There are some things to note. First, this concept isn’t new. "For many years, we have tried to harvest cells from people and expand those cells on polymer to grow kind of a new structure," Tessa Hadlock, chief of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, told CNN, "and we’ve done it in animals for a long time." Hadlock, who wasn’t involved with the work, said that what is new here is the extensive follow up and the multiple patients. But there are still a few unknowns. The scaffold used in the study is made of a material meant to degrade over time. So far, it appears to be degrading as expected and the grown ears are still holding their shape. But longer term effects of the material still need to be studied. Additionally, such a treatment will likely be expensive and because it’s complicated, hard to scale up.

However, this is still a big step. The researchers plan to follow the five cases for a couple of more years and their study lays out a few directions this type of work could go in the future. "This work clearly shows tissue engineering approaches for reconstruction of the ear and other cartilaginous tissues will become a clinical reality very soon," Cornell University biomedical engineering Professor Lawrence Bonassar told CNN. "The aesthetics of the tissue produced are on par with what can be expected of the best clinical procedures at the present time."

You can check out the study, published this month in EBioMedicine, here. But fair warning, some of the images and videos may be a little graphic for some.

Image: Guangdong et al. EBioMedicine

Via: The Verge

Source: EBioMedicine

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NVIDIA proves the cloud can replace a high-end gaming rig

A year ago, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now game-streaming service let me play The Witcher 3, a notoriously demanding PC-only title, on a MacBook Air. This year, NVIDIA finally unveiled the Windows version of the service, and it was even more impressive. I was able to play Rainbow Six: Siege and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on underpowered PCs that sell for $200 to $300. If NVIDIA’s Mac demo was a revelation, playing high-end PC games on discount hardware felt like a miracle. Now, after testing the GeForce Now beta release on PCs for a week, I’m even more intrigued by the possibilities of game streaming.

To put it simply, the service lets you remotely tap into the power of an expensive gaming rig from any computer. It runs on remote servers powered by NVIDIA’s GTX 1080Ti GPUs. While the company isn’t divulging further specifications, you can bet they’re also stuffed with more than enough RAM and CPU horsepower. (NVIDIA claimed they were the equivalent of a $1,500 gaming PC a year ago.) When you launch GeForce Now, you’re actually watching a video streaming to your PC. But since there’s very little latency between what you’re seeing and your keyboard and mouse inputs, it feels as if the games are running right on your computer.

You don’t need a very powerful PC to run the GeForce Now client. At the minimum, NVIDIA recommends using a 3.1GHz Core i3 processor and 4GB RAM, along with either Intel HD 2000, GeForce 600 series or Radeon HD 3000 graphics. Those are all specs you’ll find in PCs four to six years old. But of course, solid internet access is a must. You’ll need speeds of at least 25Mbps, but NVIDIA advises a 50Mbps connection for the best experience. You’ll also have to make sure your computer has a reliable link to your router — which means you’ll either need to use an Ethernet cable or a 5GHz Wi-Fi network.

At the moment, GeForce Now on Macs and PCs only lets you play games you already own on Steam, Blizzard’s Battle.net or Ubisoft’s Uplay. Anything you don’t own can be purchased through the streaming platform. That’s a major difference from GeForce Now on NVIDIA’s SHIELD tablet and set-top box, which includes a handful of titles as part of its $7.99 monthly fee as well as games for purchase. Both versions of the service support popular titles like Overwatch, Call of Duty WWII and The Witcher 3, but you’ll probably have to wait a bit for them to work with lesser-known games. NVIDIA isn’t specifying what it takes to make a game compatible with the service, but I’d wager it has to test them out to make sure nothing breaks in the streaming process.

Setting up GeForce Now is as easy as downloading and installing the client and choosing a title to play. Then you just need to provide your login information for whichever service hosts the game. If you’re launching a Steam title, you’ll end up seeing the service’s familiar Windows interface, where you can either buy the game or download it to your library. One big downside with GeForce Now is that you’ll have to install games every time you want to play them, since you’re thrown onto a different server whenever you log in. It’s not a huge problem, though, since the remote machines are plugged into a fat network pipe and offer unlimited storage. PUBG, which weighs in at 12GB, installed in around four minutes while The Witcher 3 (31.7GB) took more than 10 minutes.

Devindra Hardawar/AOL

On the Surface Laptop — a great ultrabook marred only by its weak integrated graphics — running over our office’s WiFi, PUBG felt almost as smooth as it does on my dedicated gaming rig. It ran at a steady 60 frames per second, even though I cranked the graphics settings to "Ultra" and the resolution to 2,560 by 1,400. After a few minutes of running around the game’s apocalyptic European town and taking out other players, I almost forgot I was playing something that was running on a server hundreds of miles away.

The game’s excellent audio design also survived — I had no trouble pinpointing people sneaking around a house while wearing headphones, and the bomb strikes in "Red Zones" still rattled my skull. Mostly, though, I was surprised that I didn’t feel any lag while I was using the Surface Laptop’s keyboard and a Logitech wireless G903 gaming mouse. Moving the camera around and aiming my weapons felt incredibly responsive, and I was surprised that I was able to outgun some players in some heated shootouts.

That lack of latency as even more impressive with Overwatch, an even faster-paced game. Characters like Tracer and Genji, both of whom would be tough to play with any noticeable lag, felt as nimble as they do on my desktop. I didn’t even have trouble landing shots with snipers like Hanzo and Ana. I was simply able to enjoy playing the game as I normally do. And, even more so than PUBG, I was impressed by how well GeForce Now handled Overwatch’s vibrant and colorful graphics. Gorgeous maps like Ilios and Dorado appeared as detailed as ever, and the same goes for the game’s imaginative character models and costumes.

GeForce Now easily handled graphically intensive titles like Destiny 2 and The Witcher 3, which felt even more impressive to play on the Surface Laptop. Both games managed to run at 60 FPS at a 2,560 by 1,400 resolution (the service supports up to 2,560 by 1,600), with all of their graphics settings turned all the way up. Even though Destiny 2 isn’t exactly a fast-paced shooter, it still benefited from the service’s low latency, which helped me mow down waves of enemies without much trouble. And with the Witcher 3, I was impressed that its graphically rich world didn’t lose any fidelity while being streamed. Perhaps because these games are particularly demanding, I occasionally experienced connection hiccups while playing them. They only lasted a few seconds, but if I were fighting against tough bosses, they could have easily led to my doom.

Those disruptions also made it clear that your experience with GeForce Now will depend largely on your internet connection. I had a mostly trouble-free experience in our office and at home, where I have 100 Mbps cable service. But if you don’t have a steady 25 Mbps connection, Ethernet access or strong wireless reception, you’ll likely see more gameplay-disrupting issues. I wasn’t able to run any games at Starbucks locations around NYC, and based on my terrible experiences with hotel WiFi, I’d wager you’d have trouble using GeForce Now while traveling, too. (The service is only supported in the US and Europe, at the moment.)

Devindra Hardawar/AOL

The big problem with GeForce Now? We don’t know what the service will look like once it leaves beta. You can request access now, and if you’re lucky enough to get in, you can test the service for free. NVIDIA isn’t giving us a timeframe for an official release, or how much it’ll eventually cost. Based on what we typically see with streaming services, I’d also expect GeForce Now’s smooth performance to take a hit once it’s open to the hordes of frag-happy gamers.

For now, though, it’s a glimpse at the true future of gaming — a world where we don’t have to worry if our video cards are fast enough, or if we have enough hard drive space for a massive open world game. Well, as long as you have an internet connection fast enough to handle all of that gaming goodness.

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Fujifilm To Acquire Photocopying Pioneer Xerox In A $6.1 Billion Deal

The logo of Fuji Xerox Co., the joint venture between Fujifilm Holdings and Xerox, is displayed outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo.

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images


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Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The logo of Fuji Xerox Co., the joint venture between Fujifilm Holdings and Xerox, is displayed outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo.

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Xerox is one of the United States’ most recognizable companies — its name is synonymous with “photocopy.” Now, the company that pioneered the computer mouse and other office technology will shed its independence, and come under the Japanese company Fujifilm’s control in a $6.1 billion deal.

Fujifilm and Xerox established the Fuji Xerox joint venture in 1962. Fujifilm owns 75 percent of that joint venture. In the deal announced Wednesday, Fuji Xerox will buy back that stake from Fujifilm, and Fujifilm will use those profits to purchase 50.1 percent of Xerox shares.

The new $18 billion company, also named Fuji Xerox, will have dual headquarters in Norwalk, Conn., and Tokyo, and trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Xerox has been under pressure to find new sources of growth as email and digital sharing services such as Dropbox have hurt the demand for printing and photocopying.

As then-Xerox CEO Ursula Burns told NPR in 2012, “The world is changing. We all know this. And as that world changes, if you don’t transform your company, you’re stuck.”

Fujifilm also said it will cut 10,000 jobs as part of the joint venture’s restructuring. The joint venture had over 47,000 employees, according to its website — meaning the layoffs would slash its workforce by more than a fifth.

“The market environment surrounding the company’s subsidiary Fuji Xerox has grown increasingly severe,” Fujifilm said in a statement. A spokesperson from Fujifilm told NPR that the job cuts will be in the Asia Pacific region only.

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Windows Defender to start removing “optimizer” scareware

PC Power Speed is a historic example of the kind of program that Microsoft will start removing. The "registry errors" that these programs detect are rarely—if ever—a legitimate problem.
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PC Power Speed is a historic example of the kind of program that Microsoft will start removing. The “registry errors” that these programs detect are rarely—if ever—a legitimate problem.

Windows Defender, the anti-malware software that’s built in to Windows, is going to start removing utility software that tries to scare users into upgrading, starting in March.

The Windows software ecosystem has a large variety of software of dubious merit that claims to detect and diagnose faults. These programs often offer a free version that purports to find problems and a paid version that can supposedly repair those problems. Frequently, the problems detected by this software are either nonexistent or misleadingly described, spuriously blamed for crashes or poor performance.

Under Microsoft’s new policy, any software that the company deems to be coercive will be a candidate for removal. Coercive elements include software that’s particularly alarming or exaggerates the risks, software that says the only way to repair the problem is to upgrade, and software that tells users they must act within a limited time. Direct payments will be penalized, but so too will apps that require people to take surveys or sign up for newsletters.

This is a welcome move, if a bit late. This kind of scaremongering crapware has been around for literally decades and has rarely had much legitimacy to it. Bad actors have instead preyed on the trust and lack of knowledge of Windows users, exploiting fears around security and stability to sell software that at best does nothing useful. At worst, these programs actually cause problems, deleting required registry entries or removing useful files. The decision to brand such programs as unwanted has been a long time coming.

Microsoft’s first action against such software took place in 2016, when it started penalizing software that either misclassified files (for example, by deeming desirable system files as “junk” to be removed) or provided no meaningful information about the “errors” that it detected. Under the new policy, even software that should happen to accurately diagnose and describe genuine problems will be penalized if its upsell effort is too aggressive.

Listing image by Karl Herler

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Samsung is now making cryptocurrency chips, while Intel looks on

This autonomous van could move lots of goods—but not a single person

If you’re going to build a self-driving delivery vehicle from scratch, why include space for a dumb human? Well, that’s what Silicon Valley startup Nuro thought.

What is it? A van. That drives itself. And hauls loads. But seriously, it’s designed to… Read more

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Finally, an excuse to cancel all your plans: staying in is good for the environment

Ellen Crupi lives in Bethesda, Maryland, but works for a startup company in Minnesota. She does everything online from sales pitches to video conferences. Working at home means she doesn’t have to dress up, wear makeup, buy new work clothes or go out to lunch. When she’s not working, she also shops online, and streams movies and concerts. “Not having to drive or get on an airplane saves me über amounts of time, and that lets me spend it doing more important things,” she said.

Crupi, 52, is one of a growing number of Americans embracing the great indoors. While the rise of streaming video services and online shopping is driving down movie theater attendance and hurting retail stores, there is an upside: America’s couch potatoes are putting a serious dent in energy use outside the home.

“We had no idea that the energy savings were going to be so enormous,” said Ashok Sekar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a new paper that looks at the link between staying home and energy use outside the home. “It shows the profound influence that technology has had on our lifestyles and how environmental good can come out it.” The authors, including Eric Williams and Roger Chen, sustainability researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, published their findings in the journal Joule.

At at time when climate change demands societies use less energy, “the notion of spending more time at home never before really entered the conversation, but I think now it will assume more importance as we recognize the impact it has on energy savings,” Sekar said. “However, we also will need to practice more energy efficiency in the home.”

Energy efficiency has become an important player in the fight against climate change. For decades, people have burned fossil fuels to generate power, pumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating the Earth while wreaking havoc on nature and threatening human health. Measures to slow these damaging effects include energy conservation and the increasing use of clean renewable energy, such as wind and solar.

Researchers analyzed a decade of American Time Use Surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor and found that Americans spent about eight extra days at home in 2012, compared to 2003, including one day less in travel and one week less in an outside office or other non-home setting.

Less travel, along with less time in the office, prompted a net 1,700 trillion British thermal unit (BTU) in energy savings for the United States in 2012, a figure that represents 1.8 percent of the national total, according to the study. The breakdown includes 1,000 trillion BTU and 1,200 trillion BTU decreases in non-residential and transportation energy use, respectively.

Home energy use has increased as a result — by 480 trillion bTU — although it was dwarfed by the savings. “It’s important that consumers also reduce energy consumption at home,” Sekar said, for example, “getting a home energy audit [or] upgrading their old appliances, recycle the old freezer in the basement, and better insulate their homes.”

Williams agreed, saying, “Networked thermostats are a standout example. We turn off our heating or A/C when going on a trip and turn it on remotely a few hours before we arrive back. IT also gives us tools to reduce energy use, but we need to buy and use them to get the benefits.”

Online shopping made up only a small portion of the stay-at-home analysis and did not take into account the energy involved in producing and shipping products, only the energy used by brick-and-mortar shops and then energy shoppers used to get to the store. Sekar, however, believes that online shopping is less energy- and carbon-intensive than “people driving to the store to get the same product.”

However, Anne Goodchild, director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study, said that a head-to-head comparison of online versus brick-and-mortar shopping is difficult to do. “It’s complicated,” she said. “If the goods still have to get from where they were made to you, it’s still making the trip. But [it is more environmentally friendly] if there are a lot of shipments in one truck making the trip. The more carpooling, the less impact and the more energy conservation.”

In a way, the carbon footprint really depends on the nature of the service, she said. If you order food delivered from a restaurant, “you’re just paying someone to bring dinner to your house, and trading one trip for another,” she said. But streaming is another thing. “In the old days, you would have to go to the video store,” she said. “Now you still get to watch the movie, but you don’t have to drive to get there.”

The practice of spending more time at home cut across all age groups, except among those older than 65, according to the study. But the most striking change occurred among young people ages 18-24. They spent 70 percent more time at home compared to the general population. “Younger people are more technology savvy, and it’s natural for them because they grew up in the world of technology,” Sekar said.

Williams agreed, adding that young people these days “tend to prefer socializing online more — that is, texting, Snapchat, etc. — at the expense of getting out and meeting face-to-face,” he said. “Also, I think there are a lot of younger people who really, really like video games and spend hours a day at home playing them.”

Those older than 65 were the only group who spent more time outside the home than they did in 2003, according to the study. “We speculate the retirement age is slowly increasing, and better health care is enabling them to travel more,” Sekar said.

To be sure, technology may be good for the environment, but will it ultimately be bad for the waistline? And for local businesses? Will encouraging people to stay home create a nation of couch potatoes? Williams doesn’t think so. “Your couch is a major energy saver, and not just for you,” he said. “It encourages you not to drive. Tragic empty malls and movie theaters do have an upside — less energy use.”

Crupi isn’t worried either. She’s found a way to stay home and stay fit at the same time. “I stream video workouts,” she said.

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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