The purchase price was $4.60 million.

Funding comes from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, as well as a $400,000 local match.

It’s been a turbulent year and, like all turbulent times, it has been been very revealing about the truth of how things are. Brexit revealed that the Euro-elite are ideologues who think it more important to keep the four freedoms intact than to ensure the prosperity and safety of Europeans. The US election campaign revealed …

Read full article: Revelations

This is a belated Christmas gift for SEPAM though I expect he’s seen it already – the Amazon patent for a flying warehouse unearthed by Zoe of CB Insights. The airship-borne warehouse flies at up to 45,000 feet and drones go back and forth delivering stuff to and from it. Filed in 2014, the patent …

Read full article: Amazon’s Flying Fulfilment Centre

Although the semiconductor industry was flat in terms of revenues, the Philadelphia SOX is up 34% on the year from 88 in January to 124 yesterday. The SOX has been driven by continued M&A, continued growth in data centres and increasing demand for automotive ICs as cars get increasingly automated and connected. Other potential drivers …

Read full article: SOX up 34% in a no-growth year

Scientists at Stanford University and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a way to use diamondoids to make electrical wires which are three atoms thick. “What we have shown here is that we can make tiny, conductive wires of the smallest possible size that essentially assemble themselves,” says Stanford’s Hao …

Read full article: Stanford researchers make nanowires three atoms thick

Automation will kill off 15 million jobs in the next 20 years says a report from the indtitute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). The report says that 2 million jobs in retail will disappear by 2020, and 600,000 will go in manufacturing. Robot-owners will get rich and displaced workers will get poorer – much like …

Read full article: Automation to kill 15m jobs in 20 years

Life on the Silicon Frontier in the 60s was pretty wild as Phil Ferguson, co-founder of MOS pioneer General Microelectronics, told National CEO Charlie Sporck, recounted in Sporck’s book SPINOFF: “There was a lot of partying. there was a party one time we had with people who shall remain nameless. A bunch of them flew …

Read full article: Party-Time On The Silicon Frontier

Foxconn has ten ‘lights out’ fully automated production lines at its Chinese factories and is increasing automation levels on other lines by deploying 10,000 new robots a year, reports Digitimes. Foxconn makes its own robots which it calls Foxbots. It has already installed 40,000 at its factories. Foxconn’s eventual aim is to automate entire factories …

Read full article: Foxconn automating its production lines

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now supports the ability to customize the placement of tasks on container instances. Previously, you would have to write custom schedulers to filter, find, and group resources if you needed to place a task on a container instance with certain resource requirements (e.g., a specific instance type).