Those long dark stretches of highway out in the middle of nowhere without any streetlights might soon be a thing of the past thanks to the engineers and designers at the Netherlands-based Kaal Masten. They've created the Spirit, a standalone solar-powered streetlight that gets all the energy it needs from the sun, so it can be installed and provide lighting anywhere—even remote locations without access to power grids.
Requiring three years to develop and perfect, the Spirit can be customized as required, even soaring almost 60 feet tall making them ideal for even large multi-lane highways. Using a combination of solar cells and high-efficient LEDs, the street light recharges its batteries during the day when the sun is out, capturing enough power—even on cloudy days—to stay lit all night long.
In fact the only maintenance they'd need is a new battery every few years, but even that part's environmentally friendly since their power supplies are completely recyclable. And since power lines don't have to be spliced and connected, installation is simple enough that it's easy for that sketchy part of town to not be so sketchy anymore. [Kaal Masten via Inhabitat]
Beirut (AFP) - A powerful blast ripped through a pickup truck in the southern province of Daraa in Syria early Wednesday, killing 21 people including four children, a monitoring group said.
"Twenty-one people were killed in the Nawa area (of Daraa), among them four children and six women, in a blast that detonated as their vehicle went past Tal al-Jumua," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
A battalion of troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "is positioned there, and is under siege by rebel forces. Activists blamed regime troops for planting the explosives", said the Britain-based group.
Daraa is the cradle of the uprising that broke out against Assad in March 2011.
More than 115,000 people have been killed in the war that broke out after Assad's troops unleashed a brutal crackdown against protesters calling for political change.
Rebels fighting Assad's troops have made significant progress in recent months in Daraa, which is strategically located on the border with Jordan and near Damascus province.
In the northeastern province of Hasake fierce clashes pitting Kurdish fighters against jihadists resumed, killing at least 10 Al-Qaeda fighters, the Observatory said.
Clashes have raged in majority Kurdish areas for months, as the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has sought to expel the Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People (YPG) from areas under their control.
Wednesday's clashes hit the Kharrab Bajar area, and resulted in the killing of at least 10 ISIL fighters and the YPG's takeover of an Islamist checkpoint, said the Observatory.
Analysts say ISIL aims to crush competition from other armed groups active in areas out of the control of Assad's regime, and that its war with the Kurds is part of the strategy for control of territory and resources.
Elsewhere, Assad's loyalists pressed a campaign designed to crush rebels positioned near the capital, as fresh clashes broke out on the edges of rebel-held Douma east of Damascus, said the Observatory.
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel kept up its alarmist rhetoric on talks between world powers and Iran Wednesday, with a cabinet minister comparing the situation to pre-war Europe and the appeasement of Nazi Germany.
"We view the nuclear talks in Geneva with hope and with concern. We see the worrying signs and we don't want Geneva 2013 to turn into Munich 1938," International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz said in remarks broadcast by Israel's army radio.
Steinitz was alluding to the 1938 Munich agreement under which Britain and France agreed to the annexation of large swathes of then Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in a failed bid to avert war.
The remarks came as Iranian negotiators and counterparts from the European Union-chaired P5+1 group -- the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, plus Germany -- met behind closed doors in Geneva to discuss Tehran's controversial nuclear programme.
The Geneva talks, which began Tuesday, ended a six-month freeze in dialogue sparked by Iran's refusal to curb uranium enrichment in exchange for easing the punishing international sanctions that have battered its economy.
The P5+1 and Israel, Iran's archfoe, fear that Tehran's atomic programme is a disguised effort to develop nuclear weapons capability, a claim it denies vehemently.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday urged world powers to avoid a partial deal with Tehran which could see a relaxing of sanctions, saying Israel reserved the right to carry out a unilateral military strike to prevent Iran getting the bomb.
"Pre-emptive strikes must not be ruled out," he told the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
"Such strikes are not necessarily called for in every case... but there are situations in which thinking about the international response to such a step is not equal to the bloody price we would pay" for the existence of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Netanyahu has repeatedly attacked Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani, who has made diplomatic overtures to the West, as a "wolf in sheep's clothing," saying he is no different from his belligerent, Holocaust-denying predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Israel is the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear-armed power.
Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
National Science Foundation awards grant to university researchers working to open new radio-wave spectrum, speed up wireless data transfer
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a grant under its extremely competitive Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program to two researchers working in the ultra-high frequency radio-wave spectrum to create much greater data rates for mobile networks of the future.
Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, the David Lee/Ernst Weber chair of electrical and computer engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), and Shiwen Mao, the McWane associate professor at Auburn University, received the $500,000 grant to help lay groundwork in the relatively newly explored 60 gigahertz band. This is the second recent NeTS grant supporting NYU-Poly research in the millimeter spectrum.
The exponential growth of wireless data traffic is depleting the spectrum and significantly stressing the capacity of wireless networks. The massive unlicensed bandwidth in the 60 GHz range holds potential to meet the surging wireless data demand in coming years. The goal of this NSF project is to gain a deep understanding of the 60 GHz propagation characteristics and to develop effective 60 GHz protocols that can be used in networks of the future.
This work between NYU Poly and Auburn University will develop modeling and control techniques for new antennas that will be used in the millimeter wave bands, including the 60 GHz spectrum. The project will also create new network protocols and multimedia computing techniques for 60 GHz networks.
This project is part of a broad and ambitious global effort to develop novel techniques to exploit the huge license-free spectrum in the 60 GHz band and to make use of millimeter wave frequency bands for cellular networks and the backhaul networks, which connect to the Internet. The research has the potential to accelerate deployment of more powerful, bandwidth-intensive, ubiquitous, and cheaper wireless applications and services and to support more versatile, robust, and rich-multimedia wireless networks.
Momentum has been building for millimeter-wave technology; for example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently modified rules for outdoor 60 GHz devices, including those that could potentially connect broadband networks and Wi-Fi without the need of fiber lines.
Complementary to the research agenda, this project also encompasses a broad range of education and outreach activities, including integrating research findings into wireless engineering courses, developing a textbook, working with underrepresented and undergraduate populations, collaborating with an historically black college, and participating in existing programs at NYU and Auburn for outreach to K-12 students and teachers.
Rappaport is the founder and director of NYU WIRELESS, a rapidly growing research center at NYU and NYU-Poly that is exploring next-generation wireless technologies as well as their linkages to medicine and computing. He is also a member of the faculty of NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Langone Medical Center School of Medicine. Mao is an alumnus of NYU-Poly, receiving his doctorate from the Institute in 2004.
An earlier NeTS grant to NYU-Poly, for $1.2 million over four years, supports research to advance broadband connections through millimeter-wave networks. NYU-Poly faculty involved in the research include Rappaport, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Sundeep Rangan, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Elza Erkip. All three are affiliated with NYU WIRELESS, a new research center that includes more than 20 faculty and 100 graduate students in engineering, computer science, and medicine.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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Laying groundwork for future cellular networks
Public release date: 14-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
National Science Foundation awards grant to university researchers working to open new radio-wave spectrum, speed up wireless data transfer
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a grant under its extremely competitive Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program to two researchers working in the ultra-high frequency radio-wave spectrum to create much greater data rates for mobile networks of the future.
Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, the David Lee/Ernst Weber chair of electrical and computer engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), and Shiwen Mao, the McWane associate professor at Auburn University, received the $500,000 grant to help lay groundwork in the relatively newly explored 60 gigahertz band. This is the second recent NeTS grant supporting NYU-Poly research in the millimeter spectrum.
The exponential growth of wireless data traffic is depleting the spectrum and significantly stressing the capacity of wireless networks. The massive unlicensed bandwidth in the 60 GHz range holds potential to meet the surging wireless data demand in coming years. The goal of this NSF project is to gain a deep understanding of the 60 GHz propagation characteristics and to develop effective 60 GHz protocols that can be used in networks of the future.
This work between NYU Poly and Auburn University will develop modeling and control techniques for new antennas that will be used in the millimeter wave bands, including the 60 GHz spectrum. The project will also create new network protocols and multimedia computing techniques for 60 GHz networks.
This project is part of a broad and ambitious global effort to develop novel techniques to exploit the huge license-free spectrum in the 60 GHz band and to make use of millimeter wave frequency bands for cellular networks and the backhaul networks, which connect to the Internet. The research has the potential to accelerate deployment of more powerful, bandwidth-intensive, ubiquitous, and cheaper wireless applications and services and to support more versatile, robust, and rich-multimedia wireless networks.
Momentum has been building for millimeter-wave technology; for example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently modified rules for outdoor 60 GHz devices, including those that could potentially connect broadband networks and Wi-Fi without the need of fiber lines.
Complementary to the research agenda, this project also encompasses a broad range of education and outreach activities, including integrating research findings into wireless engineering courses, developing a textbook, working with underrepresented and undergraduate populations, collaborating with an historically black college, and participating in existing programs at NYU and Auburn for outreach to K-12 students and teachers.
Rappaport is the founder and director of NYU WIRELESS, a rapidly growing research center at NYU and NYU-Poly that is exploring next-generation wireless technologies as well as their linkages to medicine and computing. He is also a member of the faculty of NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Langone Medical Center School of Medicine. Mao is an alumnus of NYU-Poly, receiving his doctorate from the Institute in 2004.
An earlier NeTS grant to NYU-Poly, for $1.2 million over four years, supports research to advance broadband connections through millimeter-wave networks. NYU-Poly faculty involved in the research include Rappaport, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Sundeep Rangan, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Elza Erkip. All three are affiliated with NYU WIRELESS, a new research center that includes more than 20 faculty and 100 graduate students in engineering, computer science, and medicine.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Angry Birds Go! (their emphasis, not ours) is the next big entry in the Angry Birds franchise, first teased back in June by the Finnish bird-flinging game company. The game takes the "universe" of Angry Birds and applies it to downhill cart racing; it'll even accept new karts in the form of ...
Downtown Erbil, Iraq, where the study's researchers met in 2011 to launch their survey.
About a half million Iraqi people died during the eight-year war in that country, and among those casualties roughly four in 10 perished due to Iraq's decimated infrastructure — from crippled health-care and power systems to interruptions in water and food supplies, according to a study released Tuesday.
U.S. researchers hired Iraqi physicians to go door-to-door at randomly selected homes in 100 Iraqi neighborhoods to ask families what members died between 2003 and 2011 and how they lost their lives, the report states. Among non-violent deaths tied to the war, the most common cause was heart attacks or cardiovascular conditions, followed by infant or childhood deaths other than injuries, chronic illnesses and cancer.
"In a war situation, people can’t leave their homes to get medical care. When they do leave their homes to get medical care, they arrive at institutions overwhelmed with violent injuries. The water is compromised. Stress is elevated. The power is out. The distribution networks for medical supplies are compromised," said Amy Hagopian, associate professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper.
Conducted by the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University and two other colleges, the unfunded study is the first population-based analysis of deaths that covers the full span of the Iraq War. It was published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. The estimated count is in addition to the death rate Iraq would have experienced if not for the war.
The authors urge that public-health practitioners around the world begin to treat war as a major public-health threat, beyond the obvious concerns over bombs and bullets.
"Everybody’s against polio and car crashes and tobacco smoke. But it’s time we got serious about the direct and indirect threats to public health from war, for both the invaded as well as the invader," Hagopian said.
"We (the U.S. government) should have to file health impact assessments before we decide to invade countries. In the whole discussion of what to do about Iran, have you heard any discussion about what the health effects would be on the whole? Not one," she added. "You look around the United States and you see plenty of health affects from the Iraq War. So this is a public health problem of serious magnitude. But there is not a single National Institutes of Health grant to look into this for researchers. Our entire study was done by academic volunteers."
The researchers believe their calculations carry a 95 percent certainty because they applied a meshed grid system to Google Earth software to ensure a fully random sampling of Iraqi households.
Amy Hagopian
Researchers (not named by the study) tally up death-survey counts while in Iraq.
"We're saying a half million dead, and we think that’s a really conservative number," Hagopian said. "We’re pretty sure that we missed a lot (of other deaths) because of the migration effect out of Iraq, and because some people weren’t really willing to talk with us."
Among U.S. troops that served in Iraq, 4,476 service members died in that conflict, including more than 3,500 killed in action, according to the Department of Defense.
When it comes to tracking civilian casualties, however, some experts warn the past attempts to assess non-combatant fatalities in Iraq produced estimates that critics called wildly inflated — five times higher than more commonly accepted death tolls. A paper by U.S. academics published in 2006 estimated that about 600,000 people had, at that point, been killed in the war's violence.
But the new study and its figures seem rooted in reality, said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
"There’s no doubt that infrastructure did decline and that were — like there would be in any war setting — a lot of additional quote-unquote excess deaths from inadequate nutrition or healthcare of stress or what have you," O'Hanlon said. "That point is fair and important and I’m glad they’re making it. The numbers sound more credible" than earlier surveys had claimed.
Muddying the somber tally, however, is the fact that Iraq already was in decline before U.S. forces invaded in 2003. International economic sanctions placed against the country as well as attacks unleashed by Iraq's later-executed leader Saddam Hussein against some of his own people all contributed to a failing state, O'Hanlon said.
"Some of these declines definitely did get worse during the violence that resulted from the invasion. But other trends in Iraqi excess deaths began sooner, first because of Saddam’s brutality and his mismanagement of the country and then because of the sanctions" O'Hanlon said. "All of these things had a human toll. So disentangling all these pieces is a complicated thing."
Even worse, sectarian violence has continued in Iraq since U.S. forces pulled out. More than 1,000 people there were killed in July, the highest monthly death toll in five years, the United Nations reported in August.
Violence has been on the rise in Iraq throughout 2013. The increased attacks have fueled fears that Iraq is again bound for the widespread chaos that nearly ripped the nation apart in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted its ruler in 2003.
Yahoo reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings of 34 cents per share on revenue of $1.08 billion in the third quarter, when traffic-acquisition costs are stripped out.
Wall Street analysts had expected the tech giant to report a profit of 33 cents per share on revenue of $1.08 billion.
In the same quarter last year, Yahoo recorded a profit of 35 cents a share on revenue of $1.09 billion.
Yahoo also said Tuesday it has amended an agreement that reduces the maximum number of shares of Alibaba Group it must sell when the Chinese Internet company goes public.
Yahoo owns 523.6 million shares of Alibaba, and it agreed a year ago to sell 261.5 million at about the IPO price. The new agreement calls for Yahoo to sell only 208 million, allowing the company to benefit more when Alibaba, one of the biggest online retailers in the world, goes public. Analysts estimate that when that happens Alibaba could be worth as much as $120 billion, and Yahoo owns about a 24 percent stake.
Wall Street was bullish on the earnings and the Alibaba agreement, and shares of Yahoo were up as much as 6 percent in the after-hours session after falling 2 percent to $33.38 during regular trading hours.
Yahoo also disclosed that it spent $163 million on acquisitions during the third quarter, buying such companies as Bignoggins, Rockmelt, Qwiki and IQ Engines. The buying binge was far smaller than it was in the second quarter, when Yahoo spent $1.09 billion acquiring companies, though a single acquisition, Tumblr, accounted for the vast majority of that figure.
Yahoo on Tuesday also streamed from its Sunnyvale studio a discussion of its financials. It was a TV-style presentation starring CEO Marissa Mayer answering questions not only from analysts but also from anyone else who took Yahoo up on its offer to tweet or e-mail them ahead of time.
During the video presentation, Mayer entertainment and fantasy sports as big growers, and she said Yahoo boasts 390 million mobile users monthly, up 15 percent.
Yahoo reported that its display advertising revenue fell 7 percent but that the number of ads sold increased 1 percent. Search revenue, after traffic-acquisition costs, was up 3 percent and paid clicks rose 21 percent.
"Now, with more than 800 million monthly users on Yahoo -- up 20 percent over the past 15 months -- we're achieving meaningful increases in user engagement and traffic," Mayer said in Yahoo's earnings release.
Among the business highlights of the quarter listed by Yahoo was that it began offering more premium content through partnerships with ABC News and NBC Sports, and that it launched eight original comedy web shows. Yahoo also highlighted its Saturday Night Live clip archive as well as a deal allowing it to play clips from Viacom's Comedy Central and MTV, including from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.
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Angry Birds Go! (their emphasis, not ours) is the next big entry in the Angry Birds franchise, first teased back in June by the Finnish bird-flinging game company. The game takes the "universe" of Angry Birds and applies it to downhill cart racing; it'll even accept new karts in the form of ...
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