Carbon dioxide (CO2) conversion and use

Long-promised technologies for the capture and underground sequestration of carbon dioxide have yet to be proven commercially viable, even at the scale of a single large power station. New technologies that convert the unwanted CO2 into saleable goods can potentially address both the economic and energetic shortcomings of conventional CCS strategies. One of the most promising approaches uses biologically engineered photosynthetic bacteria to turn waste CO2 into liquid fuels or chemicals, in low-cost, modular solar converter systems. Individual systems are expected to reach hundreds of acres within two years. Being 10 to 100 times as productive per unit of land area, these systems address one of the main environmental constraints on biofuels from agricultural or algal feedstock, and could supply lower carbon fuels for automobiles, aviation or other big liquid-fuel users.

Scientists are working on creating artificial trees, that can remove carbon dioxide from the air to be stored underground. It works with a specific plastic material that absorbs the CO2. Then by using water to douse the material, the CO2 is deposited (underground) where it can stay for thousands of years. Very exciting stuff! This could be the next big technology to reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.

Carbon Nanotubes! Stronger than steel!

A Carbon Nanotube is a tube-shaped material, made of carbon, having a diameter measuring on the nanometer scale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or about one ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair. The graphite layer appears somewhat like a rolled-up chicken wire with a continuous unbroken hexagonal mesh and carbon molecules at the apexes of the hexagons. 

This (left) is what each individual carbon nano-tube would look like, strings of carbon fused together in a hexagonal pattern. Below is the structure of the nano tubes once they are made into thread (like in the video). The tubes hook onto one another and form tight bonds, like if you were to join 2 books page over page and try to pull them apart. Carbon Nanotubes have so many functionalities; being incredibly strong, very, very, very thin AND being a great conductor! 

Carbon nano-tubes are also being used to grow human organs! They provide an important scaffolding, when coated with a growth medium, that mimics the processes that goes on around our organs as they grow. Their conductivity is essential to this mimicry.  

Being used to make human hearts:http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/148526-carbon-nanotubes-make-it-possible-to-grow-human-hearts

Google Now

Google Now is an emerging technology for the android platform that was released with the update jelly bean. This allows users to find all the information around them at the appropriate time, I personally use this everyday to see the upcoming weather, when I have to leave for class and if traffic is congested and I have to leave early.

One of the biggest benefit is that it will also find out any information from where you are and what you have been doing recently. When you start searching for movie times it displays the time on your phone and where the closest cinema is. If you are near a train or bus station your be shown the time table from the app. If you have the lock screen widget all of this information is easily available without even unlocking your phone!

I highly suggest anyone who has an android phone to try this fan tasting application out!

http://www.google.com.au/landing/now/

QR Code

You may have seen these recently in various places, you may have heard people talking about them in the realm of mobile and wondered what the heck they are. Quick response codes (known as “QR” codes) are a very convenient way to display a small bit of information that is easily scanned and processed typically by mobile devices. Allowing physical items to almost become interactive, by providing information that is easily scanned like a website URL.
To make a simpler analogy, most people are familiar with Universal Product codes (known as UPC codes). Everything you buy at the grocery store (and almost any store these days) has one of those that the cashier will scan. The computer then immediately knows what the product is based on the code that it picked up.
Does anyone remember the days of grocery shopping and the cashier had to punch in the prices and codes for every single item you purchased. They had to memorize most of these in their head and if they forgot? They had to pickup the loud phone, make an announcement in the store asking for someone in that department to help them out.
Think of QR codes as UPC codes but instead they’re used in a much broader spectrum, not just to ‘identify’ products but to convey ‘information’ of some kind.

Basic QR Code Usage

The most basic (and popular use) of QR codes is to display website information (a website address). Lets say you’re at a trade show and you’re walking by my booth. You want to find out more information about my company, so you open up your phone and start fumbling away trying to type in some long URL (that is on my display) into your browser, and off you go.

The other option would be for me to display a QR code (on my display), you take your phone and scan it just like cashiers scan items at the grocery store, and your phone automatically starts loading my website, how is that for convenience?
What about billboards outside on the street, or bus shelters while waiting for public transportation. You can place these little codes anywhere. People with free scanners on their phones (iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Nokia, etc.) can quickly scan the QR code and find out more information, like opening up a website.



Whole Foods Market (popular in the US/Canada) uses these in their stores. I was recently sitting down to have a bite to eat at the one in Yorkville Toronto, and on the table where I was sitting was a table tent with two QR codes.
It was obvious where they would take me if I scanned them, one would take me to their twitter account, the other would take me to their facebook page.
If I was interested in checking out their twitter or facebook page, rather than opening up each respective app and going to the search function and typing in their name etc. (I likely wouldn’t, too much effort) I could pick up my phone, scan the QR code and automatically open each page!
You can find a lot of examples of QR codes online, here are a few more

 How does  it works?

To read a QR code, a smart phone set up with a camera and a QR code reader is required. The QR code reader is an application (to install on your smart phone) which uses the camera to capture the code and decode it.

A wide range of QR code readers is available, below are the main ones.

i-nigma
NeoReader
ScanLife
BeeTagg

These QR code readers are freely available on iPhoneOS/iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and the Blackberry and Nokia devices. To upload them, you need to use the platform associated to your smart phone.

 

3D Printing and Gun Control

3D Printing:

This emerging technology brings more than just excitement and anticipation. The above video displays the ability to manufacture, with CIM (computer aided manufacturing), gun parts with 3D printing. He talks about making the designs open source, and what that could bring; if anyone with the right equipment could potentially become an arms manufacturer. Thuis opens a can of worms with this technology. How accesible is too accesible? There will surely be policies and regulations created to keep up to pace with new technologies (as there always has been) and to what extent they will control this market is the question that is on my lips. I wonder how the open source distribution of designs (for potentially anything) will affect society and how the population will react.

Emerging internet connections.

The inside of a fiber optic cable.

The most common  connection around the world according to Netindex.com is 13.76Mbs with Australia having and average of 13.04Mbps and ranking overall 42nd place in the world. To combat this the Australian government has created the national broadband network to increase the speed with a theoretical 1000 gigabit download and upload speed, this would put us at the frontier of the world for internet speed.

This is created by using fiber optic connection, this technology works by light being sent down a cable which has total internal reflection. Because the cladding absorbs none of the light, it can be used over extreme distances and not lose energy unlike copper. It will still degrade because the glass is not 100% pure so it will have to be renewed over a long distance.

What does this mean for you? This means you will be able to watch your favorite YouTube videos in higher quality and be able to watch high resolution movies on demand without having to buy physical media. When the higher resolution TV's (4k) come out, cable will not be able to produce full HD because of its maximum speed, while fiber optics will be able to, showing crisp footage from your favourite stations.                                                                                                                                          

3-D printing and remote manufacturing

Some interesting emerging technologies that I(Monica) have researched would be 3-D printing and remote manufacturing. Imagine a future in which a device connected to a computer can print a solid object. A future in which we can have tangible goods as well as intangible services delivered to our desktops or high-street shops over the Internet. And a future in which the everyday "atomization" of virtual objects into hard reality has turned the mass pre-production and stock-holding of a wide range of goods and spare parts into no more than an historical legacy. 

The idea of three-dimensional printing allows the creation of solid structures from a digital computer file, potentially revolutionizing the economics of manufacturing if objects can be printed remotely in the home or office. The process to achieve this involves layers of material being deposited on top of each other in to create free-standing structures from the bottom up. Blueprints from computer-aided design are sliced into cross-section for print templates, allowing virtually created objects to be used as models for “hard copies” made from plastics, metal alloys or other materials.

I found researching this technology interesting and I'm excited to see it come to life.

Organic electronics and photovoltaics

Hey everyone, this post is about Organic electronics. It is a cost saving emerging technology that I(Monica) think will benefit society.

What is it?
Organic electronics is a type of printed electronics. It's basically the use of organic materials, for exmaple, polymers, to create electronic circuits and devices. Comapred to the traditional  semiconductors (silicon-based) that are fabricated with expensive photolithographic techniques, organic electronics can be printed using low-cost, scalable processes such as ink jet printing, making them extremely cheap compared with traditional electronics devices, both in terms of the cost per device and the capital equipment required to produce them.


I think that although organic electronics would be slower than the traditional silicone electronics, they have the potential to provide a massive decrease in cost and versatility. The cost implications of printed mass-produced solar photovoltaic collectors, for example, could accelerate the transition to renewable energy.

4k resolution

4k resolution is the newest advancement in screen techology dubbed as Ultra HD this technology has a resolution of 3840 pixels × 2160 pixels this is double the resolution of current "HD ready" televisions that are shown today with a resolution of 1920 x 1080. This allows higher definition footage to be watched from supporting media such as movies and videos, the technology for recording video is already available with many videos on YouTube already allowing for the videos to be viewed under the original format.

For a work environment this will allow for work to be separated on wider screens essentially having to screens combined into one with ultra wide screens. This will allow for workers to reference two works on the screen at high resolutions instead of having to shrink them down. Another idea is that you can split the screen in two for watch multiple sports channels so that you can check both scores in high definition without missing any small details.

Here is a picture demonstating the difference in screen technology.

OnLine Electric Vehicles (OLEV)

Hey everyone,

So for the first topical post of this blog I (Monica) would like to discuss OnLine Electric Vehicles which is an emerging technology. Today, Wireless technology has the ability to deliver electric power to moving vehicles. It is expected within next-generation electric cars, there will be pick-up coil sets under the vehicle floor that receive power remotely through an electromagnetic field that broadcasts from cables installed under the road.

The current will be used to charge an onboard battery that is utilized to power the vehicle when it is out of range. As the electricity will be supplied externally, these vehicles need only a fifth of the battery capacity of a standard electric car, and can achieve transmission efficiencies of over 80%. Online electric vehicles are currently undergoing road tests in Seoul, South Korea.

Gumin (a city in South Korea) will have the world's first wireless electric bus in operation from July 2013 developed by KAIST (the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).

I think the emergence on these electric powered vehicles would impact greatly on society as they are effiecient and a lot more cost friendly.

QR Code Reader & Barcode Scanner

                                 
Originally designed for industrial uses, QR codes have become common in consumer advertising. Smartphone users can install an app with a QR-code scanner that can read a displayed code and convert it to a URL directing the smartphone's browser to the website of a company, store, or product associated with that code providing specific information.

QR codes can be used in Android operating system and iOS devices (iPhone/iPod/iPad), as well as by using Google Goggles, 3rd party barcode scanners, and the Nintendo 3DS. The browser supports URI redirection, which allows QR codes to send metadata to existing applications on the device. mbarcode is a QR code reader for the Maemo operating system. In Apple's iOS, a QR code reader is not natively included, but more than fifty paid and free apps are available with both the ability to scan the codes and hard-link to an external URL. Google Goggles is an example of one of many applications that can scan and hard-link URLs for iOS and Android. With BlackBerry devices, the App World application can natively scan QR codes and load any recognized Web URLs on the device's Web browser. Windows Phone 7.5 is able to scan QR codes through the Bing search app.

QR Code Reader iPhone App Review

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRq8qnlLqmA

Week 6 and we're off!

Welcome!

So today we are starting the work for our assignment 2. We have created a Gmail account along with a twitter, a wikispaces and (obviously) a blogger account.

We have 5 group members: Cole, Edwina, Julian, Marwan and Monica!

We will most likely be blogging about our own topics. BE WARNED; these could potentially get pretty random.

We have sort of landed on the idea that we will be focusing the general idea of our writings around emerging technologies. I (Julian) think this was a wise decision as the topic is pretty broad; we can discuss numerous ideas on our blog in relation to the topic.

Our design follows something that is nice to look at with good colours that make headings stand out and text easy to read. The blue headings are an inviting blue colour
Happy reading!

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