Ferrari's Innovative New V8—the 458 Italia

The Italia is the latest incarnation of the mid-rear engined Ferrari berlinetta and will be unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September. While it's true that every Ferrari is innovative by definition, it's equally true that in the course of the Prancing Horse's history, certain cars have marked a genuine departure from the current range. This is very much the case with the Ferrari 458 Italia, which is a massive leap forward from the company's previous mid-rear engined sports cars.

The new model is a synthesis of style, creative flair, passion and cutting-edge technology, characteristics for which Italy as a nation is well-known. For this reason Ferrari chose to add the name of its homeland to the traditional figure representing the displacement and number of cylinders.

The Ferrari 458 Italia is a completely new car from every point of view: engine, design, aerodynamics, handling, instrumentation and ergonomics, just to name a few.

A two-seater berlinetta, the Ferrari 458 Italia, as is now traditional for all Ferrari's road-going cars, benefits hugely from the company's Formula 1 experience. This is particularly evident in the speed and precision with which the car responds to driver inputs and in the attention focused on reducing internal friction in the engine for lower fuel consumption than the F430, despite the fact that both overall displacement and power have increased. However, Ferrari's track experience makes its presence felt in the 458 Italia not only in terms of pure technological transfer but also on a more emotional level, because of the strong emphasis on creating an almost symbiotic relationship between driver and car. The 458 Italia features an innovative driving environment with a new kind of steering wheel and dashboard that is the direct result of racing practice. Once again input from Michael Schumacher—who was involved from the very start of the 458 Italia project—played an invaluable part.

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Nissan Unveils All-Electric Sedan Prototype

Nissan gave a glimpse of its plans to make an all-electric sedan that will go 100 miles on a charge and have a suite of online features to aid drivers.

The company on Monday showed off an electric car prototype, based on the Tiida mid-size sedan. It said that an all-electric production car with a unique design will be unveiled on August 2 at its Yokohama, Japan headquarters and go on sale in 2010 in Japan and the U.S.

The electric sedan will connect to Nissan's data centers to provide drivers with information and support, according to the carmaker.

Nissan's EV prototype, an electric power train fitted onto a Tiida/Versa mid-size Versa sedan.
(Credit: Nissan)

The EV-IT system will display on a map how much driving range they have left and can calculate whether a car can make it to a pre-set destination. The system can point drivers to available charging stations within driving range.

The driver can also remotely view a battery's charge and turn on the air conditioner from a Web-connected computer or phone. Charging can be scheduled to take advantage of off-peak rates, too.

The car itself is built around Nissan's electric motor and a 24-kilowatt-hour battery pack which is placed under the car. With generative braking that charges the car during deceleration and braking, Nissan estimates that drivers can get 100 miles on a charge, although it notes that range depends on conditions and driving styles.

Although it lags in hybrids, Nissan has been one of the most aggressive in developing all-electric sedans. It is already testing the EV-02, which is based on the Nissan Cube chassis. It also has a partnership to work with Better Place, which provides consumers with charging points and access to battery-swapping stations in exchange for subscription plans.

Nissan has not announced prices, but a company representative told the Associated Press in Japan that the electric vehicle would be "competitive" with gasoline cars.

Because of the limitations on driving range and the high cost of batteries, other automakers including Toyota and General have said they expect consumers will favor gasoline-electric cars.

Along with Tesla Motors, start-ups Coda Automotive and Detroit Electric are making all-electric cars which they say will have enough range for daily driving for many people.

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Female Robot Takes To The Catwalk

The latest hot model about to grace the catwalks of Japan made an appearance today. Fluttering her eyelids, HRP-4C as she is known, was unveiled by scientists as the most human-looking robot yet.

Rory Cellan-Jones has been taking a look.

Robotic Fish to Mimic Swimming

Researchers at the University of Bath are to build a robot to help understand how fish swim against the flow.

A consortium of five institutions have been awarded £1.5m to create the swimming robot trout.

The Ocean Technologies Lab at Bath will try to mimic the sense organ found in fish which allows them to detect the flow of water and react to it.

It is hoped the robot can be used in future for pollution control and monitoring the world's ecosystems.

It could also be used to study marine life near the seashore.

Complex controls

Dr William Megill, Lecturer in Biomimetics at the University of Bath said: "Currently, most aquatic robots can't manoeuvre very well in the shallow water near the shore because they just get smashed against the rocks by the force of the waves.

"However, even in a tsunami, fish manage to sense and swim against the current so that they stay in the water, rather than ending up on the beach.

"So this project is interesting on two levels - firstly we want to understand more about how the fish manages to react to changes in current, and secondly we want to create a robot that mimics this artificially."

The fish's complex nervous system will be emulated by computer software, developed by the University of Verona, which will allow the robot to interpret changes in flow outside the robot so it can adjust its swimming behaviour to compensate accordingly.

The FILOSE (Robotic FIsh LOcomotion and SEnsing) project is financed by the European Union.

More details at BBC...

Paging Dr. Robot

A revolutionary robot mounted with a high-tech camera is helping physicians treat and save soldiers -- from just about any location in the world.

In three years, army docs have conducted at least 200 medical interventions from remote locations, thanks to the device.

Dr. Kevin Chung, who directs the Burn Intensive Care Unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, is one doctor who has incorporated the cutting-edge technology into the care of his patients.

He is a frequent operator of the robot and regularly uses it to treat patients, including those he cared for when he was deployed to Iraq.

When he was in Baghdad, Chung used the robot to follow up with critically injured soldiers after they had returned to hospitals in the U.S, he told CNN.

The high-tech medical assistant is controlled from afar via a laptop and remote joystick. The robot is able to move easily because sensors located on its "torso" help it identify any obstacles in its path.

The camera on the wireless robot captures images of a patient from just about every angle, and a zoom option allows doctors a close-up view of their distant patient.

Besides the benefit of allowing doctors to be in more than one place at once, the high-tech medical robot can be a confidence booster for those working in combat zones.

On using the robot to see soldiers he had treated in Baghdad when they were back in the U.S., Chung recounted: "To visually see that patient in a bed, with stable vital signs, halfway around the world -- that did wonders just to be able to see that for all the staff."

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Google Indic Transliteration

Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the Urdu characters. This lets you type Urdu words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet
to the other, not their meaning. For example, typing "shukriya" transliterates into Urdu as:

Try it now!

Encrypted CCTV Protects The Innocent

MANY people are unhappy about being filmed by CCTV in case the footage is used against them in some way. Now a surveillance technology company has come up with a method of scrambling the images of anyone in CCTV film who is not a suspect.

3VR, based in San Francisco, says it should reassure members of the public who do not wish to be identifiable to police or lawyers, or even TV crime-stopper shows.

The technology uses 3VR's recently patented face-recognition algorithms to home in on known faces in crowds. An image-scrambling algorithm then blurs the faces and bodies of those who are not of interest and encrypts the blur pattern so that no one but the operator of the technology can unscramble it (see picture).
An image-scrambling algorithm blurs the faces of those in the footage who are not of interest

"This allows you to search for people on watch lists, for instance, but without capturing massive databases of innocent people," says Stephen Russell, 3VR's chairman. The company aims to supply the equipment to banks and retail chains so they can analyse CCTV footage for known suspects who install card skimmers on ATMs, for example.

The idea is unlikely to satisfy all privacy advocates, since scrambled footage is still open to abuse. "A safer approach is to record only when machine analysis detects something suspect- that way for 99.99 per cent of the time there is no recording of anything," says Mike Lynch of data-analysis company Autonomy.

Mercedes' Electric Gullwing

Mercedes and its performance arm AMG gave us a tantalising glimpse of the electric sports car of the maybe-not-so-distant future today with a cryptic outline of a new SLS AMG with electric drive. The Gull-winged electric SLS AMG uses four in-wheel electric motors with a combined peak output of 392 kW and a maximum torque of 880 Nm. By comparison, the current 6.3-litre V8-engined SLS AMG develops 420 kW, so performance will not be lacking.

The four electric motors are positioned near the wheels, substantially reducing the unsprung masses compared to wheel-hub motors. One transmission per axle transmits the power. This intelligent all-wheel-drive system allows dynamically optimised power transmission without any losses by means of Torque Vectoring in other words the specifically targeted acceleration of individual wheels. In its first pilot phase, the SLS AMG with electric drive incorporates a liquid-cooled high-voltage lithium-ion battery of modular design with an energy content of 48 kWh and a capacity of 40 Ah. The 400-volt battery is charged by means of targeted recuperation during braking whilst the car is being driven.

When it comes to dynamics, the electrically driven SLS AMG delivers an unequivocal statement: the swing-wing model accelerates from zero to 100 km/h in around 4 seconds putting it on the same high level as the SLS AMG with a 6.3-litre V8 engine developing 420 kW/571 hp.

"With the SLS AMG with electric drive, we wanted to redefine the super sports car. For us, it is not just about responsibility. We attach just as much importance to excitement and classic AMG performance," says Volker Mornhinweg, Chief Executive Officer of Mercedes-AMG GmbH.

The purely electric drive system was factored into the equation as early as the concept phase when the new swing-wing model was being developed by Mercedes-Benz and AMG. It is ideally packaged for the integration of the high-performance, zero-emission technology: by way of example, the four electric motors and the two transmissions can be positioned near the wheels and very low down in the vehicle. The same applies to the modular high-current battery, whose modules are located in front of the firewall, in the centre tunnel and behind the seats. Advantages of this solution include the vehicle's low centre of gravity and the balanced weight distribution ideal conditions for optimum handling, which the electrically powered SLS AMG shares with its petrol-driven sister model.

The installation of the drive components required no changes whatsoever to the swing-wing model's aluminium spaceframe body. And there were just as few constraints when it came to maintaining the excellent level of passive safety and high degree of long-distance comfort that are hallmarks of Mercedes cars.

The electrically powered SLS AMG sees Mercedes-Benz and AMG continuing to pursue their aim of minimising the amount of time it takes to bring about the electrification of the car. Their strategic involvement in Deutsche Accumotive GmbH & Co. KG, a joint venture between Daimler AG and Evonik Industries AG, will provide the battery technology. Daimler has the leading role in this joint venture for the development and production of batteries and battery systems for automotive applications.

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Tagging technology to track trash

The ebb and flow of thousands of pieces of household rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags.
It is hoped that making people confront the final journey of their waste will make them reduce what they throw away.
Initially, 3,000 pieces of rubbish, donated by volunteers, will be tagged in New York, Seattle and London.
"Trash is almost an invisible system today," Assaf Biderman, one of the project leaders at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BBC News.
"You throw something into the garbage and a lot of us forget about it. It gets buried, it gets burned, it gets shipped overseas."
The Trash Track aims to make that process - termed the "removal chain" - more transparent.
Friends of the Earth's Senior Waste Campaigner Michael Warhurst said the project could be a "useful tool" for highlighting the impact of rubbish.
"[Waste] doesn't simply disappear when we throw it away, and all too often it ends up causing damage when it could be recycled instead.
"People must have much better information on - and control over - where their rubbish and recycling ends up."
Global waste
In order to monitor how the pieces of rubbish move around the cities and beyond, the MIT team has developed a small mobile sensor that can be attached to individual pieces of waste.
"It's like a miniature cell phone with limited functionality," said Carlo Ratti, another member of the project.
Each tag - encased in a protective resin - continuously broadcasts its location to a central server. The results can then be collected and plotted on a map in real time.

Volunteers can apply to have their trash tagged and tracked
"It's like putting tracers in your blood and seeing where it moves around your body," said Mr Biderman.
Because cell phone technology is cheap and - importantly - ubiquitous, the system should be able to track rubbish around the globe.
This could be important when tracking computers and electronic waste, which is often disposed of incorrectly, according to Mr Ratti.
"Some of them are shipped to Africa to pollute," he said.
The team aims to tag different types of waste from computers and cell phones to bags of garden waste.
The group is currently looking for volunteers to donate their trash.
The results of the US studies will be shown at two exhibitions in Seattle and New York during September.
'Zero waste'
The team stresses that it has tried to limit the impact of its study and of the technology, and limit the amount of extra waste it contributes to the "removal chain".
"We are adhering to the highest standards in terms of environmental impact," said Mr Biderman.
"The impact this could have on waste management and removal… could be significant, so these kinds of experiments could be much more useful than harmful for the environment."
The MIT team has previously revealed the movements of people around cities, such as Rome and Copenhagen, by analysing mobile phone signals.
They used a similar method to show how crowds moved around Washington during the inauguration of US President Barack Obama.
The tags used to track the rubbish are a departure from these more passive studies of city movements.
Ultimately, the team hopes that the technology can be miniaturised and made cheap enough that the tags could one day be attached to everything.
"Think about a future where thanks to smart tags we will not have waste anymore," said Mr Ratti. "Everything will be traceable."

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Europe's new space truck takes shape

He knows the near-flawless maiden voyage of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) last year does not mean the second flight is guaranteed to turn out the same way. Attention to detail is everything.

The follow-up ship - dubbed Johannes Kepler - is in the process of being assembled.

Its propulsion and avionics units are being prepared in Bremen, Germany. Its pressurised module which will hold the cargo - air, water, scientific equipment, food, and clothing - to be taken to the space station is being built in Turin, Italy.

The various segments should come together in September, into a single line of assembly that will lead to a launch in November 2010.

Thereafter, ATVs will fly every year for three years. The vehicle is no longer an experimental spacecraft; it is a production spacecraft. And to emphasise the point, if you walk through the cleanroom at EADS Astrium in Bremen, you can already see ATV-3 components.

"The whole integration process, from the first day until launch, is 28 months. So if you want to launch every 12 months, obviously you have to produce in parallel," explained Esa's Mr Dettmann.

The space freighter has huge significance for Europe.

On one level, it is the "subscription" Europe must pay to be part of the International Space Station "club". If Europe can deliver about six tonnes of supplies a year to the platform, it is guaranteed six-month residencies at the ISS for its astronauts.

But ATV has also been a test of European competency. It is the biggest, most sophisticated vehicle the bloc has ever flown in space. Its automatic rendezvous and docking technology allows it to find its own way to the station and attach itself without any human intervention.

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Full article here ...