This will be my final post here. As I’m sure you’ll have seen, Intute funding has been cut and only a few of the staff will remain for its final year.
I’ve very much enjoyed the twelve years I’ve spent doing this job both with Intute Engineering and with EEVL before that, and I’d like to thank you all for your interest over the years and for reading this blog.
Russia to kick off construction of a new spaceport (BBC) ‘The future cosmodrome will be built near the town of Uglegorsk in the Far Eastern Amur region, close to the border with China.
It is planned to be mostly used for civilian launches and should be operational by 2015.’
The Tour de France starts on July 3rd.
There’s been concern about technological enhancements to bikes: UCI to introduce motor scanners for Tour de France (BBC) “Scanners to help combat ‘mechanical doping’ are to be introduced for next month’s Tour de France.
Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara has been at the centre of allegations that motors were being placed in bike frames to power the pedals during a race. “
Innovate to Survive : Engineers for a One Planet Future will be held on the 28th-29th June. The event designed to highlight how innovation in civil engineering design and construction can underpin the challenges of a low carbon future.
A conference programme can be downloaded from the site.
”UK CARBON emissions will continue to fall in 2010 after the recession drove dramatic declines in energy use. But the country is likely to miss its targets for cutting emissions and boosting renewable energy by the end of the decade unless the new coalition government urgently puts ambitious low-carbon policies in place.”
The technology behind the World Cup 2010 describes the technology used for the ball, the shirt and the boots as well as a camera system which detects whether a goal has been scored.
Quarks are apparently inseparable elementary particles from which protons and neutrons are composed. They have intriguing quantum properties that are labelled with everyday words, such as colour, strangeness, and up and down that belie their mystery and disguise the mathematical analogues of electric charge for which these words are shorthand. One property that has been notoriously difficult to determine, is the mass of a quark.
A new class of materials formed by combining liquid crystals and metal clusters glow intensely red and in the infra-red region of the electromagnetic spectrum when irradiated over a broad range of wavelengths. The materials, dubbed clustomesogens, could be used in analytical instrumentation and potentially in display technologies.
A study of the shape of pumice from three adjacent submarine lava dome volcanoes in the western Pacific reveal that explosive volatility driven by the movement of molten magma is lower in deeper water. The shape of pumice stones, which are formed by expansion of magmatic volatiles as the magma rises to the sea surface, is different depending on the water depth and so can be a useful indicator of the evolution and eruption of underwater volcanoes.
