A 5.2% stake in the controversial Victorian Desalination Project has been sold off by Pacific Partnerships to AMP Capital…

Baidu is using Xilinx FPGAs to accelerate machine learning applications in their data centres in China.

Read full article: Baidu adopts Xilinx ICs for FPGA acceleration

Mentor Graphics is reported to be exploring options for selling the company after it has been receiving the attentions of activist investor hedge fund Elliott Management.

Read full article: Mentor for sale

The application processor (AP) market grew 3% on year to $10 billion in H1 2016, while the tablet AP sector declined 34% to $889 million.

Read full article: Apps processor market grows 3% while tablet AP market sinks 34%

Researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School have developed a bio-compatible stretchable optical fibre, which might one day deliver therapeutic light within the body or sense disease said the team. A particular use of the fibre, which is made of bio-polymer hydrogel, could be within jelly-like brain tissue. To keep light in the fibre, the core must …

Read full article: Stretchy floppy optical fibre could sense strain inside living tissue

Fujitsu Labs reckons its voice recognition technology can determine whether someone is happy or sad. Using a method that takes into account the average pitch of the voice, the degree of variation and the characteristic changes at relative points within voice data that covers multiple words – namely at the start or end of speech …

Read full article: The Cheerfulness Detector

I don’t often type my contact details into the web for something free, but in the case of Pickering Relay’s two technical guides it was well worth it as they are packed with information. For example, for portable equipment, you can get relays that can be directly driven by CMOS and only draw a couple …

Read full article: Talking reed relay sense

In the category of ‘things I am glad someone invented’, I now add chemical fixing sleeves. I live in a 60 year old house whose inner skin is a random mixture of what I would call breeze blocks and hollow terracotta blocks (aka ‘pots’, aka clay blocks). The terracotta blocks have all of the hopeless …

Read full article: Fixing into walls made of fragile stuff

If you thought there was nothing much left to do with switches, think again, and Elma has bought real-time variable feel to a rotary encoder. Dubbed Cyber One, as a switch it combines a 384 clock/rev rotary encoder and push-button. Then, for user experience, as an experience, its firmware offers various pre-set ‘feels’, including: 0-6 Ncm torque …

Read full article: Force feed-back beings variable feel to rotary and push switch

Thanks to Digitimes Research for this one – the top ten Chinese smartphone vendors in Q2: Huawei 18.8% Oppo 11.5%, Vivo 9%, Xiaomi Technology 9%, TCL 5.3%, ZTE 5.3%, Lenovo 4.7%, GiONEE 4.5%, Meizu 2.5% Coolpad 2.1%.

Read full article: Top Ten Q2 Chinese Smartphone Vendors