Agency hopes results will drive improved performance.

Group builds new plant for temperature measurement production and extends Raman analyzer production.

A 30 metre Hyperloop test tube is being built in Holland. The tube is being put together by the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft), the Dutch national railway NS, and the construction company BAM. The company set up to commercialise the Hyerloop technology developed by TU Delft – Hardt Global Mobility – has raised …

Read full article: Dutch building Hyperloop test tube

Camera-based object recognition could help blind users navigate their environment, according to researchers at MIT, who have created an automatic body-worn system. Images are gathered by a chest-worn 3D camera, while the user gets navigation information via a belt with five vibrational motors spaced across the front, and object information from an electro-mechanical Braille interface. …

Read full article: Camera-based object recognition aids navigation for the blind

Raspberry Pi has been named as one of this finalists for this year’s coveted MacRobert Award, the innovation prize awarded each year by the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Raspberry Pi credit card-sized microcomputers is being used to inspire students to learn coding as well as becoming a IoT embedded systems development platform. It will …

Read full article: Raspberry Pi named a finalist for national engineering award

To look just below the skin of psoriasis patients, German researchers have developed a subtle techique using lasers to excite ultrasound waves. The technique, dubbed RSOM (raster-scan optoacoustic mesoscopy), uses a weak laser pulse which excites the tissue of interest. Absorbed energy heats the tissue slightly, causes momentary expansion, which generates mechanical vibrations at ultrasound …

Read full article: Novel technique looks beneath the skin

Artificial intelligence has analysed CT scans of the organs in the chests of 48 patients, and predicted who would die within five years with 69% accuracy – comparable to predictions by clinicians, according to the University of Adelaide which led the research. The most confident predictions were made for patients with severe chronic diseases such …

Read full article: Big data will predict your death

RS Components is selling an Intel development kit for prototyping gesture recognition and augmented reality systems. Based on Intel’s RealSense technology, the kit features the SR300 webcam, which integrates an audio subsystem together with the SR300 Intel RealSense front-facing camera. The camera has a short-range coded-light imaging system and supports 1080p full-HD video image quality at up to 30 frames per second …

Read full article: RS sells Intel augmented reality development kit

40 years ago this month a computer was launched which was to revolutionise the computer industry. The computer stayed in mass production for 16 years. However, the computer’s CPU is still selling in hundreds of millions of units a year. Moral: Applications fade but tech lives on.

Read full article: Fable: The Immortal CPU

The day before President Trump hurt green technology development in the US by abandoning the Paris agreement, Angela Merkel was lobbying China’s prime minister Li Kegiang for favourable treatment for German electric vehicles in China. China is the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles with 507,000 sold in the country last year – about 1.8% …

Read full article: Trump hits US green tech while Merkel backs German EVs.