Following the announcement of a proposed combination of GE’s Oil & Gas business with Baker Hughes, GE has confirmed it is exploring options for selling the Water & Process Technologies business. 

By switching to zinc-coated, V-Bio encased ductile iron pipe, WSSC expects to put that pipe in the ground and not come back to replace it for 100 years or more.

Graphcore, a Bristol-based AI start-up headed by Nigel Toon formerly of Icera, picoChip and XMOS, has raised $30 million in VC money. Backers include Samsung, Bosch and Hermann Hauser. Graphcore is developing processors specifically for machine learning – an approach which, it says, will deliver up to 100x more performance than off-the-shelf GPUs. Graphcore calls …

Read full article: Bristol start-up Graphcore raises $30m

Imec has demonstrated the generation and detection of spin waves in sub-micron-sized magnetic waveguides with wavelengths smaller than 350nm traveling over 10 micrometer in a 500nm wide waveguide, and has proposed models for majority operation in nanoscale spin-wave structures. Spintronic majority gate devices promise alternatives to CMOS technology for certain applications, for example for arithmetic …

Read full article: Imec ‘Beyond CMOS’ programme demoes spin waves in majority devices

ARM has launched two Mali cores – the V61 with VP encode and the Vulkan-enabled G51. The cores are aimed at 14/16nm finfet processes for phones coming out in 2018. The target is the emerging VR and AR functionality. These are seen as handset capabilities which are coming, but still to come. “We have delivered …

Read full article: ARM edges towards VR and AR on the handset with G-51 and V-61 Mali cores

If foreigners can come to Britain and use any of the wireless networks, why shouldn’t we be able to use all the UK networks? A jolly good question. It was asked by a group of MPs who call themselves the British Infrastructure Group. We all know the mobile coverage is shit. And we know why. …

Read full article: Why Should Foreigners Get UK Roaming When Brits Can’t?

Peratech, the Yorkshire-based sensor materials firm, is collaborating with several notebook computer manufacturers to incorporate its 3D force-sensing technology. The firm is developing its QTC force sensors for use in notebook PCs. The sensors, which consist of nanoparticles printed and encapsulated in ultrathin (down to 50 µm) polymer membranes, can be configured to sense an …

Read full article: Yorkshire firm adds 3D force sensing to notebooks

Eurotech is offering IoT designers a development kit that bundles all the hardware and software needed to prototype as sensor-based IoT device with data support in the cloud. The ECDK 4001 development kit is intended to allow designers to model specific IoT applications based on a template that includes the various elements typical of an industrial IoT chain – gateway, PLC, …

Read full article: Industrial IoT node comes in kit-form

Microchip adds ‘core independent peripherals’ (CIPs) – that inter-operate whilst the core is sleeping – to its high-end 8bit PIC18F MCUs.

Read full article: Autonomous peripherals for PIC18F MCUs

I was puzzling over tilt switches, which, in these mercury-free days, tend to be a ball bearing in a metal tube with a contact at one end. Tilting the tube lets the ball bearing roll down and short the contact to the tube wall. Updated below (and if only I had heard of ‘tip-over’ switches) …

Read full article: Updated: Tilt switch contemplation