The Government Would Save $400 Million If It Just Switched Font Style

Of the many schemes to make the government more efficient, this is probably the only one that involves typography. A middle schooler in Pittsburgh has calculated that by simply switching the typeface used in government documents from Times New Roman to Garamond, it would save taxpayers $400 million in ink.

Suvir Mirchandani was inspired by an earlier project looking at how to save ink in teacher handouts. He recorded the ink usage of four different fonts—Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans—and found that Garamond's thin strokes would save his school district 24 percent in ink

Then he decided to apply his results to a bigger scale: the U.S. government. He sampled documents from different government agencies and dug through printing budgets. As CNN reports, this is what he found.

Using the Government Services Administration's estimated annual cost of ink — $467 million—Suvir concluded that if the federal government used Garamond exclusively it could save nearly 30%—or $136 million per year. An additional $234 million could be saved annually if state governments also jumped on board, he reported.

These numbers are only estimates, of course, but they show how subtle changes made many times over add up to big differences. (Also, ink is mad expensive. By ounce, it costs more than Chanel No. 5 perfume, as Mirchandani points out.) And our government is still a prodigal producer of printed goods. Every day, for example, we print 2,000 copies of the Federal Register, which regularly runs to hundreds of pages.

The government has to be at least somewhat transparent about its printing practices, but the rest of us—those of us who still print things out, anyway—could take a cue, too. In 2010, the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay changed the default typeface of its email system from Arial to Century Gothic to save ink. And of course, there are special ink-saving typeface with tiny holes in the letters.

Prefer to choose your typeface based on aesthetics alone? By all means, go ahead—just don't print anything out.

Top 10 Engineering Projects

Top 10 Engineering Projects

Ever since man invented fire and the wheel, all of mankind has been achieving bigger and bigger feats of engineering. What seemed impossible yesterday is reality today and the dreams of today pave our way to the future. Here are the top 10 examples of engineering marvels achieved by mankind.

10. New York Subway

With a length of 700 miles, the New York subway system is the fourth largest in the world. It is also one of the busiest stations with 24 hours operation and has a total of 6500 cars. The subway system is one of the world’s oldest public transit systems and has a total of 468 operating stations currently.

9. Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is a cut through the neck that connects North and South America. It greatly reduces the time required by cargo ships to reach their destinations by eliminating the need to go around South America. The canal was started in 1884 by France but digging was stopped due to engineering issues and an epidemic. The US started digging in 1904 and took ten years to complete the canal.

8. Dubai Canal

The Dubai Canal was expected to be complete in 2012, but due to financial difficulties the project was put on hold. With a width of 150 meters and a depth of 6 meters, the $11 billion canal will be suitable for the small ships and yachts. The city to be built around the canal is estimated to cost an additional $50 billion.

7. Boston’s Big Dig

Officially called the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, this project had many goals, one of which was to re-route and build main road arteries and tunnels. The Big Dig project was started in 1991 and completed in 2006. The chief aim of the project was to re-route the chief highway (Interstate 93) into a 3.5-mile tunnel.

6. Three Gorges Dam

This giant wall cuts the Yangtze River near the town of Sandouping, Hubei province, China. It is currently the world’s largest power station, producing about 22,500 MW per year. The facility also prevents flooding in areas that are located downstream. Construction of the dam caused flooding of important archaeological areas and the displacement of 1.3 million people.

5. The World Islands

Located 4 km from the coast of Dubai, this archipelago is made of artificial islands made to resemble a map of the world. The size of each island varies from 14,000 to 42,000 square meters. 321 million cubic meters of sand and 386 million tons of rock were required to complete this massive project.

4. Marmaray

This railway tunnel is being constructed to connect the European and Asian coasts. On October 29, 2013 the first section with four stations was officially opened to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Republic of Turkey.

3. International Space Station

This is a massive work of engineering and the largest man-made creation in orbit around the Earth. The station consists of habitable science modules and has external trusses. Solar panels provide power to the space station. The ISS was first started by the merger between the Russian Mir-2 and the American Freedom space stations. The space station is constantly growing with the addition of new modules and at times is visible from the surface of Earth by the naked eye.

2. Havvada Island

The island is proposed to be created near the Turkish coast. The artificial island will be made up of 6 geodesic domes and be able to house 300,000 inhabitants. The self-sustaining island located off the coast of Istanbul is in the concept phase but the project will be massive when started.

1. Future Cities Concepts

 

This is not a single project, but many engineers and scientists are working on ideas of complete cities made for the future. Havvada Island is a part of this dream while other ideas include space colonies, cities in the sky and even one which involves a single enormous, self-sustaining building that contains a whole city inside.

Transparent Coloured Solar Cells

Transparent Coloured Solar Cells

Transparent Coloured Solar Cells

Imagine a stained glass window in your home that could power your lighting or charge your phone and other devices. That’s the vision of researchers at University of Michigan, who have developed the first semi transparent coloured solar cells. They hope that their invention can go on to be incorporated into the windows of a building, or even billboards and adverts. The cells can be made to any colour and are produced on an ultra thin film.

[photo credit]

Solar cells are generally black, as this allows maximum absorption of energy from the suns rays. Whilst these semi transparent tinted photovoltaics only produce a third of the normal black solar panels, they do have a much wider range of possible uses and locations for mounting. The semi transparent colours can open up a load of new possibilities for designers. The sacrifice in efficiency is made up by the increased range of uses.

“Today, solar panels are black and the only place you can put them on a building is the rooftop. And the rooftop of a typical high-rise is so tiny,” said Jay Guo, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the university. ”We think we can make solar panels more beautiful—any color a designer wants.”

The team have demonstrated the idea with a palm sized American flag. ”All the red stripes, the blue background and so on—they are all working solar cells,” Guo said. The flag operates at 2% overall efficiency which results in an identical meter-square flag having the ability to power small devices and fluorescent light bulbs. The team are currently working to improve this figure and home in on the 10% efficiency found in state of the art cells (that are not coloured).

 [photo credit]

To make the cells, an ultrathin sheet of amorphous silicon is sandwiched between two semi-transparent electrodes, which allow the light to hit the semiconductor, as well as carrying the electrical current generated by the cell. ”This hybrid structure, a combination of both organic and inorganic components, lets the researchers make cells that are 10 times thinner than traditional amorphous silicon solar cells,” said the university.

To get an idea of the thinness of the cells, the thickness is adjusted to produce different colours - 6 nanometers thick for blue, 31 nanometers thick for red, and so on. The varying thickness of the cells reflect different wavelengths of light, and thus, the colour is not produced by dyes or a coloured film that would lower efficiency further.

Another feature worth mentioning is that results have shown that these cells would not operate better or worse based on the suns location as the colour hues do not change with viewing angle. Traditional solar cells however work better when in direct sunlight and thus have to pivot with the location of the sun.

This Material Is Called Frozen Smoke. It Can Support Tons Of Weight And Is Lighter Than Air

First created in 1931 by Samuel Stephens Kistler while studying the properties of liquid in jellies and trying to replace them with gas without causing shrinkage, Aerogel is a slightly translucent, super strong and extremely light solid. Its amazing nature can very well be analysed from its name in the Guinness Records as the World’s lightest solid.

It is basically created by extracting or “supercritically drying” the liquid component of the gel; the idea is to dry off the moisture without causing the solid matrix of the gel to breakdown. Initially aerogels were formed from silica gels but later Kistler used alumina, tin dioxide and chromia to produce them.
Due to aerogel’s amazing properties it is also called “solid smoke”, “frozen smoke”, “solid air” or “blue smoke”. Aerogel comes out as a very light and porous material resulting in low density and low thermal conductivity making it a great insulator. It feels like brittle expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) and looks the same.
Even though it is so light, aerogel outdoes itself for being one of the most powerful materials in the world. Having 99.8% air and being 1000 times less dense than glass, it can support massive weight and can bear intense temperatures and sounds. A single one-pound block can hold half a ton of weight. Also, one inch thick aerogel has insulating properties compared to a ten inch glass window.

Apart from its other unique capabilities, aerogel also has remarkable absorbing abilities. Scientists and engineers speculate that it could be the future answer to big problems such as oil spills and also be used as a slow drug-delivery system for medical patients.

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Brings 360-Degree View of Galaxy to Our Fingertips

Touring the Milky Way now is as easy as clicking a button with NASA's new zoomable, 360-degree mosaic presented Thursday at the TEDActive 2014 Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
The star-studded panorama of our galaxy is constructed from more than 2 million infrared snapshots taken over the past 10 years by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

"If we actually printed this out, we'd need a billboard as big as the Rose Bowl Stadium to display it," said Robert Hurt, an imaging specialist at NASA's Spitzer Space Science Center in Pasadena, Calif. "Instead, we've created a digital viewer that anyone, even astronomers, can use."
The 20-gigapixel mosaic uses Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope visualization platform. It captures about three percent of our sky, but because it focuses on a band around Earth where the plane of the Milky Way lies, it shows more than half of all the galaxy's stars.
The image, derived primarily from the Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire project, or GLIMPSE, is online at:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/glimpse360
Spitzer, launched into space in 2003 and has spent more than 10 years studying everything from asteroids in our solar system to the most remote galaxies at the edge of the observable universe. In this time, it has spent a total of 4,142 hours (172 days) taking pictures of the disk, or plane, of our Milky Way galaxy in infrared light. This is the first time those images have been stitched together into a single, expansive view.

Our galaxy is a flat spiral disk; our solar system sits in the outer one-third of the Milky Way, in one of its spiral arms. When we look toward the center of our galaxy, we see a crowded, dusty region jam-packed with stars. Visible-light telescopes cannot look as far into this region because the amount of dust increases with distance, blocking visible starlight. Infrared light, however, travels through the dust and allows Spitzer to view past the galaxy's center.

"Spitzer is helping us determine where the edge of the galaxy lies," said Ed Churchwell, co-leader of the GLIMPSE team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We are mapping the placement of the spiral arms and tracing the shape of the galaxy."
Using GLIMPSE data, astronomers have created the most accurate map of the large central bar of stars that marks the center of the galaxy, revealing the Milky Way to be slightly larger than previously thought. GLIMPSE images have also shown a galaxy riddled with bubbles. These bubble structures are cavities around massive stars, which blast wind and radiation into their surroundings.
All together, the data allow scientists to build a more global model of stars, and star formation in the galaxy -- what some call the "pulse" of the Milky Way. Spitzer can see faint stars in the "backcountry" of our galaxy -- the outer, darker regions that went largely unexplored before.
"There are a whole lot more lower-mass stars seen now with Spitzer on a large scale, allowing for a grand study," said Barbara Whitney of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-leader of the GLIMPSE team. "Spitzer is sensitive enough to pick these up and light up the entire 'countryside' with star formation."
The Spitzer team previously released an image compilation showing 130 degrees of our galaxy, focused on its hub. The new 360-degree view will guide NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to the most interesting sites of star-formation, where it will make even more detailed infrared observations.
Some sections of the GLIMPSE mosaic include longer-wavelength data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, which scanned the whole sky in infrared light.
The GLIMPSE data are also part of a citizen science project, where users can help catalog bubbles and other objects in our Milky Way galaxy. To participate, visit:
http://www.milkywayproject.org
More information about Spitzer is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer and WISE missions for NASA. The Spitzer Science Center is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Plans to upload the brain of a honeybee into a flying robot by 2015

 Plans to upload the brain of a honeybee into a flying robot by 2015 

It’s every now and again that you hear something that reminds you that today we are in the age of accelerated change and today has been one of those times. Universities in Sheffield and Sussex have just announced that scientists are working on a new project to create the world’s first accurate computer simulation of the brain of a honey bee. They then intend to upload the brain into a flying robot.

[Image Courtesy of ThemeStyles]

Of course if they manage to pull this off it would be a big win for science, but more than that, it could end up saving the world. Researchers are hoping that a robotic insect could either supplement or perhaps even replace the population of honey bees, which are shrinking. These are needed to pollinate essential plant life.

[Image Courtesy of EnviromentalGeography]

On reading this you might think it’s nothing more than an elaborate hoax, however a lot of money is being put into the project. The project has the name of “Green Brain” and has recently received funding of £1 million ($1,614,700) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council along with donations of hardware from NVIDIA.

[Image Courtesy of xct.anu.edu.au]

NIVIDA have provided scientists with high performance graphical processing units, these are called GPU accelerators. They are going to let the researchers simulate all the aspects of the brain of the honey bee via massively paralleled desktop PCs. This is excellent promotion for NVIDIA while at the same time allowing researchers to carry out their project inexpensively, as clusters of supercomputers are not cheap.

[Image Courtesy of MyOpera.com/Mynoel]

While it might look as though insects have simple minds, they do in fact have brains that are extremely complex; therefore a lot of computational power is needed by the researchers.

The scientists are not trying to copy the complete brain of the honey bee; instead they want to copy two complex specific functions in it, vision and sense of smell. If they are able to do this they will then upload the models to a robotic honey bee, which will be able to act autonomously.

“This is an important further advance over current work on brain models because it is becoming more and more clear that an essential aspect of brain function is that the brain is not acting in isolation but in constant interaction with the body and the environment,” they note in their proposal, “This concept of ‘embodiment’ and its consequences for cognition are important insights of modern cognitive science and will become equally important for modern neuroscience.”

The researchers hope that the flying robot will be able to perform basic tasks without the need for sets of pre-programmed instructions. For instance the robotic bee should be able to detect gasses and odours, just as a real bee is able to detect certain types of flowers.

The scientists will work alongside Martin Giurfa of Toulouse, who is an expert when it comes to the brain of the bee and the behaviour of the bee. Should the project be a success it would mark a very important moment in technological history. It would be the first time a robot brain could perform tasks that were complex just as well as the animal that it was copying.

The Green Brain Project could help in our understanding of artificial intelligence along with neuroscientific underpinnings of animal cognition. With the advent of an artificial pollinator, along with the National Science Foundation-funded Robobees project from Harvard University, it could also offer a solution to the honey bee population that is dwindling.

The artificial honeybee may well be just the first of many robots that could be introduced into the environment in order to make up for extinctions, which are widespread.

- See more at: http://interestingengineering.com/plans-to-upload-the-brain-of-a-honeybee-into-a-flying-robot-by-2015/#sthash.MqHivRAg.dpuf