Eskom could have avoided punishing South Africans with its rolling blackouts three years ago — but it snubbed proposals from business that would have made up the shortfall of 3000MW in its electricity generating capacity.

Increased cogeneration — the use of private industrial resources to generate power for the national grid — was proposed by the steel and engineering industries in 2005, The Times has learnt.

Cogeneration involves using heat generated in manufacturing, most of which would otherwise be wasted, and by-products, to generate electricity — for example, using agricultural waste as a fuel for the boilers that generate the steam that drives the turbines that produce electricity.

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 TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - A fish-shaped robot and propeller-driven helium balloons competed for the title of fastest, lightest flying robot in an event featuring engineering students from all over Asia.

Competitors were required to build remote-controlled flying machines of under 150 grams that had to pass through goal posts and film objects on the ground in a three-minute race.

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Microchips stolen from factories , or made from stolen blueprints, account for billions of dollars in annual losses to chipmakers.
A series of new techniques could stop pirates by allowing chip designers to lock and remotely activate chips with a unique ID tag, said researchers at Rice University in Houston. When they lock the chip with the new technology, only the patent-holder can decipher the key and activate the chip, which means knockoffs and stolen chips are worthless.

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Although there are differences in emphasis between electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and signal integrity (SI), there are major similarities in design at the circuit board level. A few years ago, the IEEE EMC Society added a committee on SI, recognizing the commonality of these two issues. We like to say that a board that is well designed for SI will go a long way toward being a good performer for EMC. But there are differences, as well. This article compares the two disciplines, examining their differences and similarities. It also reviews some of the common stumbling blocks.

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LONDON — Imperas Ltd., a young company developing multiprocessing development tools , has announced that it has donated technology for an open-source infrastructure to support developers who want to simulate software running on system-on-chip designs.

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Actively cooled heatsinks aren’t exactly new, but electricity is so last year - what about powering those fans by the heat generated from the chip it’s trying to cool?
Engineers at MSI have done exactly that with the new ECOlution heatsink – it features a "Stirling Engine" - an engineering masterpiece originally patented by Scottish engineer, Robert Sterling.

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Mumbai, Jan 20: Areva T&D , the Indian subsidiary of Areva France, is putting up a research and development centre for instrument transformers at its upcoming Hosur plant besides having set a target to double its activities in the next three years.

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With the expansion of digital media now accessible by mobile devices, consumers need the convenience of larger displays.  3M scientists have developed a breakthrough ultra-compact, LED-illuminated projection engine designed for integration into virtually any personal electronic device.

The improvement in LED technology is happening on several fronts as researchers strive to improve out put, reduce power consumption and bring down costs

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The advanced assembly-line robotic arms , made by industry specialist Fanuc, have beaten a robotic firefighter and a walking android to win the Robot of the Year award in a Japanese government-run competition.

The arms have been built for accurately sorting items on conveyor belts in the food and drug industries.

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The "older" and the "newer" players in IT consider a business arrangement -  In connection with its Technocity project, Technopark in Kerala (India) is in talks with Japanese External Trade Organisation (JETRO) on co-operating on embedded software-related industries. The 14-member JETRO business delegation was from Fukuoka city in Japan, better known as `Sillicon Island' .

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Up until recently motion capture for people has required expensive systems being used in controlled environments.  This is soon to change thanks to Rolf Adelsperger and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,  researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.  They are creating a new system that makes use of a combination of cheap accelerometers and gyroscopes and ultrasound.  The system still has a few glitches but overall is very accurate,  and as the products they are using improve they hope to alleviate those problems.

Smaller, faster, more efficient: BASF research scientists are helping to revolutionize the future world of telecommunications – with the aid of three-dimensional photonic crystals. In a three-year project, BASF is researching into the development of these crystals together with partners such as Hanover Laser Center, Thales Aerospace Division, Photon Design Ltd., the Technical University of Denmark and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne. By the end of 2008, the partners in the "NewTon" project expect to have developed the first functional components of this new technology. The long-term goal is to use three-dimensional photonic crystals as construction elements in telecommunication. Half of the project is being funded by the European Union.

Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.
A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics and engineering that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales.

For nostalgia buffs, it was sixty years ago that two scientists  started a month of experiments which would come to shape the modern world.

The period of work by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain , working under William Shockley, would become known as the "miracle month" and resulted in the world's first working transistor.

"They engineered something that became the basic mechanism for our entire electronic industry," said Dr Art Ramirez of Bell Labs, the location of the 1947 invention.

"They're in aircraft, automobiles, digital cameras and microwave ovens," said Jeff Katz, a guide at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

On Saturday 10 November KTH engineers in Sweden will do a direct TV transmission jointly with Keio University from the Kyoto Prize ceremony in Japan, using picture format 4096 x 2160 pixels. This resolution is far better than that employed in commercial HDTV, and the first time such a transmission is done live into Europe.

This is the start of a global joint effort to exchange events between both countries and continents, says Mats Erixon at KTH´s Centre for Sustainable Communications, who is responsible for the Swedish part of the transmission. Seeing this event in an absolutely genuine manner, when and where it is actually taking place, is a fantastic experience!