Tag: technology

GROWING GLOWING PLANTS

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Technology is yet to give a completely new definition to indoor plants. Now, along with lamps, researchers are able to make even the plants glow. Engineers from the MIT have taken a critical first step to turn such a vision into reality. This is done by embedding some specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of the watercress plants. These particles induce the plants to give off dim light for about four hours. These researchers believe that further optimization in this field will make the plants bright enough to illuminate an entire workspace.

To create the illuminated plants, the team:

Selected luciferase, the enzyme that gives the fireflies their glow.

Luciferase acts on a molecule called the Luciferin, making it illuminated.

Another molecule, called co-enzyme A helps this process by removing a reaction by-product that can inhibit luciferase activity.

The MIT team combined these three components into a different type of nanoparticle. These nanoparticles were in turn used in the plants. These plants could easily emit light and glow for 45 minutes. With some further study, the team progressed in this research to extend the time up to 3.5 hours. The light generated by these plants currently is about one-thousandth of the amount required to read. The researchers still believe that they can boost the intensity as well as its duration.

For future advancements in this technology, the researching team is working to develop nanoparticles spray onto the plant leaves. This spray will make the leaves to emit light, transforming the trees and other large plants into light sources. The team is also working on ways that can turn this light off by adding nanoparticles carrying a luciferase inhibitor. This way, the team could eventually create plants that shut off their light emission in response to the environmental conditions such as sunlight.

New Techniques in Civil Engineering

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Civil Engineering is evolving every day with the changing technology. Civil Engineers are now using innovations such as suspension systems to build bridges and using the GPS to plot new roads. As the technology brings new techniques, the civil engineering field continues to incorporate creative ways. Here, are four new techniques that are likely to change the construction process:

  • Self- Healing Concrete

Cracks in the concrete is a common phenomenon. The cracks impair the durability of the concrete as they provide an easy path for the liquid and gas containing harmful substances to enter. To avoid this situation, researchers at the Bath University are working on a self-healing concrete that will contain micro-organisms inside microcapsules. According to the researchers, these micro-organisms will release limestone as water enters these splits to prevent the materials from breakage.

  • Warm Bridging

Insulation material has become prominent in the construction industry. For this, Nasa developed material, Aerogel for cryogenic insulation. This material is considered as one of the most effective thermal insulation material. The technology is used to insulate studs, which can reportedly increase the overall wall R-value which is an industry measure of thermal resistance by more than 40 percent.

  • Active Footfall

Researchers are now working out ways that can produce energy from footsteps. The technology used is known as Pavegen Floors. These are rubber tiles that have a spring-like action that generates energy when stepped on. This is a brilliant concept to harness the human energy power. The Pavegen tiles can benefit the most when installed in busy city areas to generate energy.

  • Photovoltaic Glazing

Building structures that have the Building incorporated photovoltaic (BIPV) coating that is capable of producing their own power. The technology transforms the entire building envelope into a sun-powered board. An organization, known as Polysolar is providing photovoltaic glasses as the building materials. These Photovoltaic Glasses also do not cost much over the customary glass.

Apart from these, other technologies are also set to change the civil engineering practices such as Kinetic Roads, Cloud Collaboration, and Asset Mapping.

Introducing AutoCAD 2018

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The CAD technology is consistently updating its features to offer you supreme quality designs. The technology will help you to develop aerodynamic bikes, high-speed railways, or energy efficient building. The technology is adding value to the designed products improving the designer’s day to day efficiency. The year 2018 has brought about a lot of features in AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT technology. These added features will help designers to create and share precise drawings using the innovative productivity tools. This tool will also save a lot of time and minimize frustration making things simpler. Below are some of the enhanced features the 2018 version will bring about.

PDF Import Enhancements

The PDF import features, as indicated by the design professionals will help them save a lot of money. The AutoCAD 2018 let you use the SHX text recognition tool to quickly convert the imported PDF geometry to text and Mtext objects. The improvised text and Mtext tools, in turn, lets you convert a combination of single and multi-line text objects into a single multi-line text object automatically predicting the formatting.

Object Selection

The AutoCAD 2018 lets you begin with a selection window in one part of your drawing. You can then pan the zoom to another part while maintaining a selection of the off-screen objects.

External Reference Path Enhancements

The broken reference issue is resolved in the enhanced AutoCAD 2018 version. The new version helps to reduce this issue by saving time and minimizing the frustration. The new integrated tools help you to easily replace the paths of one or more missing references with a new path.

High Resolution (4K) Monitor Support

The 2018 version is enhanced to support high-resolution monitors to ensure the best possible viewing experience. The enhancement will make it possible to view objects and figures on a 4K display or higher versions. To make this possible, the new AutoCAD 2018 has a possibly scaled up user surface elements such as the Start tab, Palettes, Command line, Toolbars, Dialogue boxes, ViewCube, Grips and Pick pox. These elements are appropriately scaled and displayed as per the Windows settings.

 

The AutoCAD 2018 has some promising features to help you develop your designs in the way never imagined before. The new version brings a new set of capabilities to improve the graphics and performance while ensuring the Trusted DWG technology you always have been relying upon. The DWG format is updated to improve the efficiency of open and save operations.

From 3D to 4D Printing: Transforming the way Micro Scale Structures are printed

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Technology has grown up to a large extent in the recent past years. It showed some of the technical marvels that were never imagined before. One of them was the evolution of the 3D printing technology that made it possible to transform computer models into real world objects.

Ever since the dawn of 3D printing, it never left the sky. The technology first started printing with metal alloys and plastic materials. Growth never stopped and now a number of other materials have been used to produce 3D printed objects. Technology made it possible to use a different “inks” that made it possible even to print living cells and semiconductor batteries.

3D printing soon entered the micro scale device manufacturing. Experts, scientists and researchers from the top organizations such as University of Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, UCLA, and Minnesota have been constantly working on this 3D printing technology and soon came up with designing micro scale devices and gadgets that were even smaller than the width of a human hair.

On the way forward, material science experts and Biologists worked together to take things on a complete new level.

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  1. They developed objects that hold properties of both- life science and electronics.
  2. Materials with multivariate characteristics of materials were developed that can be potentially used as a fluid in micro-scale printing.
  3. On the same way, scientists from the University of Princeton developed a fully functional bionic ear blending biology and electronics together.

The Next Step- 4D Printing

Professor Lewis, a researcher from the Harvard University has been working on this technology in her Lewis lab from a while. She has been showing a keen interest on developing 3D printed objects that had features as small as one micrometer. The Lewis lab again gained recognition when they developed objects that actively responded to external stimuli.

Inspired by many plants that responds by the external stimuli, this 4D technology was a big breakthrough.

 

  1. The 4D-printed hydrogel composite structure changed shapes when immersed in water.
  2. Objects now started moving in the fourth dimension when we were only brainstorming around the third one.
  3. Combining both biological as well as electronic properties, researchers soon developed micro scale structures.
  4. 4D printing soon made objects change into any arbitrary shape using any suitable material.

This 4D printing technology is said to be competent enough to print dynamic micro scale structures that can significantly contribute in both industrial as well as medical domains.

3 E-Learning Technologies that Can Jumpstart the Training Programmes

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In this technological era, before getting used to one technology, the next one emerges. However, there are some things that remain the same such as e-learning. Most of the learning technologies have not yet evolved for a long time and finding the hottest solution for the same has become a challenge for the entrepreneurs. So the important question is

“How do we increase the effectiveness of learning through the latest technologies?”

The answer to this question includes three solutions that are not interactive and at the same time popular. They are games, videos, and mobile.

 

  1. Games
  2. Videos
  3. Mobile

 

Gamification

An industrial study found that about 75% of the people working today are “casual gamers.” Some giants such as IBM, Xerox, and Deloitte have taken initiatives to incorporate interactive e-learning. However, when looking for ROI, the implementation of such technology seems difficult due to the following issues

  • Development time
  • License fee
  • Usage and many other factors

The only way to overcome these issues is to leverage several elements of games. For example, achievement-based systems such as leader boards can encourage the learners to reach various certification levels. Thus, the issues of implementing “games” will resolve and at the same time learning will become fun and interactive.

Short Videos

The existence of videos is not new to anyone. Even the short videos have been in existence for the past ten years. The challenging part is adopting an instructional design in a video. Even today there are many videos that fail to adopt such design. There were several constraints while creating a video which make implementation of instructional design difficult such as

  • Purpose
  • Quality
  • Cost

Usually, videos would just contain long lectures or a live event. These videos fail terribly as sitting for 30-60 minutes is not an option. These days people prefer videos that are

  • Short in length.
  • Engaging
  • To the point

Apart from on-job skills, the videos these days also focus on various professional development subjects. Additionally, videos have become even more professional to make them useful across departments.

 

Mobile Learning

The traditional classroom training and learning will always have its value. However, it fails when learners need to access information from anywhere anytime. The only solution for this problem is “mobile”. It is assumed that people will easily have access to the content through the web. However, it is not as easy as it looks from the outside.

5For example, most of the videos are not mobile optimized as they are flash based. There are many other issues but once these issues are covered there is no doubt that mobile learning is the best on-the-go training solution.

While these technologies have the power to change the game of e-learning, there are other technologies such as Big Data, VR and much more that might also have an effect on e-learning and training. However, these technologies will not be implemented unless any business need arises.