Int Automate

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/revolutionary-new-magnetic-sideways-running-elevators-hit-hong-kong-1477315

Hong Kong is set to see revolutionary new lifts in its skyscrapers.

German lift manufacturer ThyssenKrupp is to introduce maglev technology to power the city's lifts. The system, called "Multi", does not use cables. Instead, magnets move lifts both horizontally and vertically. The company claims that waiting times for its lifts will never exceed 30 seconds.

The new system uses the magnetic levitation, or "maglev", technology which powers high-speed trains that hover over tracks. Several lifts will be able to use a single shaft at speeds of five metres per second.

So far the lift design has taken two years of research and development. According to a spokesperson the company is "setting up talks with building developers in Hong Kong to explore possibilities for the new technology".

"The system is dedicated to mid and high-rise buildings, which makes Hong Kong a primary market for Thyssenkrupp," he told Hong Kong's Sunday Morning Post.

Hong Kong has more than 60,000 lifts, more than double the number in New York and the most in the world for a city of its size, according to the city's Electrical and Mechanical Services Department. The city's 1,300 skyscrapers use a high proportion of them.

ThyssenKrupp says that the design, which it hails as the "the holy grail of the elevator industry", will increase lift capacity by half. Moreover, the design uses smaller shafts than current lifts.

The first installation in Hong Kong is some way off, however. ThyssenKrupp says that a prototype will be operational by 2016, sited in a 245-metre test tower which is under construction in Germany.

Revolutionary New Magnetic Sideways-Running Elevators To Hit Hong Kong New cable-free technology enables lifts to move vertically and horizontally

An engineered scallop that is only a fraction of a millimeter in size and that is capable of swimming in biomedically relevant fluids has been developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart.
Designing robots on the micro or nano scale (like, small enough to fit inside your body) is all about simplicity. There just isn’t room for complex motors or actuation systems. There’s barely room for any electronics whatsoever, not to mention batteries, which is why robots that can swim inside your bloodstream or zip around your eyeballs are often driven by magnetic fields. However, magnetic fields drag around anything and everything that happens to be magnetic, so in general, they’re best for controlling just one single microrobot robot at a time. Ideally, you’d want robots that can swim all by themselves, and a robotic micro-scallop, announced today in Nature Communications, could be the answer.

When we’re thinking about robotic microswimmers motion, the place to start is with understanding how fluids (specifically, biological fluids) work at very small scales. Blood doesn’t behave like water does, in that blood is what’s called a non-Newtonian fluid. All that this means is that blood behaves differently (it changes viscosity, becoming thicker or thinner) depending on how much force you’re exerting on it. The classic example of a non-Newtonian fluid is oobleck, which you can make yourself by mixing one part water with two parts corn starch. Oobleck acts like a liquid until you exert a bunch of force on it (say, by rapidly trying to push your hand into it), at which point its viscosity increases to the point where it’s nearly solid.

These non-Newtonian fluids represent most of the liquid stuff that you have going on in your body (blood, joint fluid, eyeball goo, etc), which, while it sounds like it would be more complicated to swim through, is actually an opportunity for robots. Here’s why:

At very small scales, robotic actuators tend to be simplistic and reciprocal. That is, they move back and forth, as opposed to around and around, like you’d see with a traditional motor. In water (or another Newtonian fluid), it’s hard to make a simple swimming robot out of reciprocal motions, because the back and forth motion exerts the same amount of force in both directions, and the robot just moves forward a little, and backward a little, over and over. Biological microorganisms generally do not use reciprocal motions to get around in fluids for this exact reason, instead relying on nonreciprocal motions of flagella and cilia.

However, if we’re dealing with a non-Newtonian fluid, this rule (it’s actually a theorem called the Scallop theorem) doesn’t apply anymore, meaning that it should be possible to use reciprocal movements to get around. A team of researchers led by Prof. Peer Fischer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, in Germany, have figured out how, and appropriately enough, it’s a microscopic robot that’s based on the scallop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ05z6ebKDQ

As we discussed above, these robots are true swimmers. This particular version is powered by an external magnetic field, but it’s just providing energy input, not dragging the robot around directly as other microbots do. And there are plenty of kinds of micro-scale reciprocal actuators that could be used, like piezoelectrics, bimetal strips, shape memory alloys, or heat or light-actuated polymers. There’s lots of design optimizations that can be made as well, like making the micro-scallop more streamlined or “optimizing its surface morphology,” whatever that means.

The researchers say that the micro-scallop is more of a “general scheme” for micro-robots rather than a specific micro-robot that’s intended to do anything in particular. It’ll be interesting to see how this design evolves, hopefully to something that you can inject into yourself to fix everything that could ever be wrong with you. Ever.

Swimming Robotic Micro-Scallop A team led by Prof. Peer Fischer from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany [http://www.is.mpg.de/fischer] has developed an ...

How Google Uses Machine Learning And Neural Networks To Optimize Data Centers
Google has released some new research about it efforts to maximize performance and minimize energy use at data centers through machine learning today. Long story short: Google is building superintelligent server farms that can learn from their past performance and improve themselves in the future.
Google’s AI data centers are a 20 percent project – the result of an employee, Jim Gao, working on something he found interesting that falls outside of his standard job description. Google is famous for allowing its employees 20 percent of their work time to come up with passion projects and things that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to work on. Thinking, learning data centers happened to be Gao’s main area of interest.
Gao researched machine learning and then worked on building models that take in a huge amount of data Google was already tracking about its data centers including how much energy is being used at any given time by servers and other equipment, outside air temperature and more. Computers then crunch all this data, analyzing the interplay that may be impossible for a human mind to grasp, and predicting Power Usage Effectiveness, or how to use available power most efficiently for maximum computing return.
The model means that where once Google had to shut down entire server banks in order to perform service or for other reasons, it can now temporarily tweak another variable like cooling in order to maintain a much higher general level of output, saving time, energy and money.
Sourse: http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/how-google-uses-machine-learning-and-neural-networks-to-optimize-data-centers/

How Google Uses Machine Learning And Neural Networks To Optimize Data Centers | TechCrunch Google has released some new research about it efforts to maximize performance and minimize energy use at data centers through machine learning today. Long..