Hey guys. It's been a while since we've done any of this, but with all of this talk of DaC veterans meeting for random social calls IRL and a desire to breathe more life into the site, it's long past time we all started to contribute to this place. Granted, keeping up with all of the rapid innovations in science is getting progressively harder, but let's talk about some interesting things that've happened this month.
Most of these articles have been taken from Phys.org.
Self-Repairing Concrete
Dr. Diane Gardner has been part of a team at Cardiff University's school of Engineering working on creating concrete capable of sensing damages and repairing them autonomously. This could cut repair costs, pollution, and traffic congestion considerably. The change involves three major functions:
<blockquote><p><em>- The opening of cracks is controlled using fibres which can potentially be made from recycled plastic materials like bottles.
- A bacteria is incorporated into the concrete which starts to rejuvenate when cracks occur. Once damage starts, the bacteria deposits a biological cement which fills in these areas.
- Nano and micro capsules containing a resin or glue healing agent which again is released when damage or cracks start to occur within the concrete structure.</em></p></blockquote>
This could cause drastic changes to locations with infrastructure frequently affected by weather damage from rain and snow.
The article continues and links to related material here.
Similarly, you can read here about the self-healing polymer dubbed the "Terminator" after its resemblance to the T-1000.
Highly-Responsive Exoskeleton Project
The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO is one of the players in the Robo-Mate project which began this month. The project aims at designing a human-guided exoskeleton to improve work safety, provide additional work efficiency, and to serve as a lead-in to the inevitable T-51b technology. While anyone keeping their eye on this particular technology field is aware that this isn't the only exoskeleton project underway, the field is moving slowly enough that any news is good news.
<blockquote><p><em>Set to get underway in September 2013, the objective of the Robo-Mate project is to develop an intelligent, easy-to-manoeuvre, and wearable body exoskeleton for manual-handling work. The project comprises 12 partners from 7 European countries, including key players from industry and academia.
The fundamental idea behind Robo-Mate is to enhance work conditions for load workers and facilitate repetitive lifting tasks, thereby reducing the incidence of work-place related injury and disease. As a consequence, productivity, flexibility and the quality of production will increase. Bringing this concept to fruition involves merging human-guided manipulators with computer-controlled industrial robots in order to create a human-guided and computer-supported exoskeleton for use in various industries.
The development includes modelling and simulating the exoskeleton in a virtual-factory environment at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO. Demonstrations of the prototype will be held at INDRA SAS – a French company in the vehicle recycling sector – and COMPA S. A. – a Romanian automotive components manufacturer. The Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF) will test the exoskeleton in their lab and on the Fiat shop floor.
Putting the Robo-Mate exoskeleton into service will engender practical and far-reaching impacts, including making the industrial work-site safer for skilled personnel, providing a means for workers to apply less physical effort, and facilitating higher-quality outputs resulting in industrial benefit.</em></p></blockquote>
The article continues and links to related material here.
Tianhe-2 Supercomputer - 31 Petaflops
Along with their new breakthroughs in TFET transistors, China has also obtained bragging rights for the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, aka Milkyway-2, measured at speeds of 31 petaflops (30.65) out of a theoretical cap of 49.19, while only running at 90% capacity. The stats were revealed by Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee professor, who helps compile the biannual Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
<blockquote><p><em>"On May 28-29, 2013," he wrote in his report on his visit to China, "I had the opportunity to attend an International HPC Forum (IHPCF) in Changsha China, which was organized by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)."
Regarding the test, Linpack Benchmark Run (HPL), he was sent "results showing a run of HPL benchmark using 14,336 nodes"; using "50 GB of the memory of each node and achieved 30.65 Pflop/s out of a theoretical peak of 49.19 Pflop/s or an efficiency of 62.3 percent of theoretical peak performance taking a little over five hours to complete."
Dongarra in describing the interconnect said that the "TH Express-2 uses a fat tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports at the top level." He called it an optoelectronics hybrid transport technology.
As for operating system, the Tianhe-2 is using Kylin Linux. Kylin is compatible with other operating systems and supports multiple microprocessors. He also listed "Fortran, C, C++, and Java compilers, OpenMP, and MPI 3.0 based on MPICH version 3.0.4 with custom GLEX (Galaxy Express) Channel support."</em></p></blockquote>
I'm not going to lie; I understand just about none of this, but golly, it sure sounds fakkin' neat!
The article continues and links to related material here.
There's plenty more interesting news out there this month, but very little we can talk in lengths about utility or relation to Fallout. What I'm curious to see unfold is the range of genetic modification advancements and whether or not we can domesticate species via gene therapy in short periods of time as opposed to selective breeding over the course of years.
