Top Tech Xplore articles in 2022

It’s been an exciting year for technology research, when a team at Stanford University discovered that the practice charge the car in the evening or at night will overload the grid in the coming years. They suggest that policymakers should establish programs to encourage daytime charging at work or public service stations to prevent future spikes in electricity costs.

A partnership between Reed University, the University of Illinois, and Portland State University this past spring resulted in a review of benefits of ecological roofs. They found them to be worth the cost for urban dwellers. They found that placing gardens on the roofs of buildings or homes not only offsets installation costs, but also saves energy, prevents sewer overflows and increases pollinators.

And a team of engineers at the University of New South Wales designed a new engine system based on diesel retrofit to run on 90% hydrogen. Led by Professor Shawn Kook, the team spent 18 months designing and building a working model. Testing shows it reduces CO₂ Emissions are more than 85% compared to standard diesel engines and this design can be used to retrofit existing trucks.

In addition, a team at Dartmouth College built an AI application can read Reddit chats and report back on the mental state of the people participating in those chats. Testing shows that the app is capable of detecting mental health disorders in a number of situations. The team presented a paper describing their application and their work with it at this year’s International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology.

A team of engineers at the University of Delaware announced last winter that they had designed and built fuel cells can remove 99% of the carbon dioxide in the ambient air sample. Describing their work as a game changer, the team proposes their baby bottle-sized device could be used to remove CO₂ from manufacturing applications and also in enclosed space situations, such as spacecraft or submarines.

A combined team of researchers from the University of Florida, the University of Michigan and the University of Electronic Communications, Japan, has found that directional handheld laser can be used by criminals to attack self-driving vehicles. They found that such attacks can lead to the lidar system becoming blind to pedestrians and confused by the movement of other vehicles around them.

A combined team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and MIT designed and built a new heat engine with no moving parts it’s as efficient as a steam turbine. The motor converts heat to electricity with approximately 40% efficiency and is generated as a thermo-photovoltaic cell, similar to the photovoltaic cell of a solar panel.

A team at Harvard University’s Rowland Institute, working with two colleagues from Stanford University, developed a new kind of 3D printing. Instead of creating objects by placing layers from the top, their new printer adds layers from all sides at once. It does so through the use of a laser focused through a lens onto a viscous resin that solidifies when exposed to blue light.

Last spring, a team at Aston University announced that AI traffic light system could soon turn traffic jams into a distant memory. They developed a system that reads data from live traffic cameras at multiple locations, analyzes the images, and then devises the best approach to timing traffic lights to prevent traffic from rolling back. And because it’s based on reinforcement learning, it improves over time.

Nissan announced last spring that it was working with NASA and the University of California, San Diego, to develop a new type of battery for electric vehicles—one that would be both lighter and safer than those currently in use. In their announcement, Nissan described such batteries as a “game changer” and would involve swapping lithium-ion for other materials that would make them solid and safe enough to use. used in pacemakers.

And a team at the University of California, Irvine, found that Music can be used to trigger the release of deadly pathogens from a negative pressure room used for biological research. They note that someone familiar with using pressure controls for such rooms could embed a tune in a song played on a smartphone that would change the way the pressure control fan works in the room. and thus affect the airflow, potentially blowing air out instead. of keeping it in.

A combined team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University, developed a material can be wound around a hot pipe to convert its waste heat into electricity. This material exhibits a 150% higher energy density than other modern devices. A larger version can maintain the 115% power density advantage.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a supercapacitor device can remove CO₂ from the air during its charge cycle and then release it into a container for capture during its discharge cycle. The device, envisioned and built by Trevor Binford, Grace Mapstone, Israel Temprano and Alexander Forse, resembles a rechargeable battery and is approximately the size of a dime.

In an interview with AFP, Jens Husemann, an entrepreneur who runs an energy conversion business, described a problem related to solar panels disconnected from the grid during the strong daylight hours, when they generate the most energy. This happens when the grid becomes overloaded.

And a group with members from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oslo reported that a mathematical paradox shows some limits of AI. They note that most such systems, because they are built on neural networks, do not understand well when they give the wrong answer. This is due to a paradox first described by Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel regarding being able to prove whether a given mathematical state is true or false.

Milán Janosov, leading scientist at Datopolis with a Ph. in Network Science from Central European University, published what he describes as Social map of “The Witcher”a representational graphic that summarizes the plot and relationships between characters in the popular fantasy series written by Andrzej Sapkowski (and now a Netflix television series).

And a team at the University of Naples Federico II, announced that they have built a bartending robot that’s not just making drinks, but being able to engage in personalized interactions with human patrons. Similar in many ways to Arthur, the android bartender from the movie “Passengers”, the system, called BRILLO, is designed to interact with customers in a personalized way by listening to what they have to say and giving offer unique proposals.

Also reminding movie fans of scenes from some sci-fi films, a team at Zhejiang University worked with a colleague from the Hong Kong University of Science and another from the Institute of Technology and Huzhou of Zhejiang University, created a swarm of drones capable of autonomous flight through a dense forest. Ten quadcopters were shown flying together through a bamboo forest in China without crashing into branches or other bushes.

A team at Stanford University conducted a study involving tracing the origin and popularity of image memes online. They found that internet memes often don’t originate in peripheral communities — instead, they’re extremely centralized. They also found that most image memes were first published on a single site, Reddit, and then shared on other platforms.

A team of computer security experts at the University of Glasgow has developed a system called ThermoSecure has the ability to find out the user’s computer or smartphone password by studying the heat traces left by fingers touching the keyboard or screen. Of course, this system requires direct, unnoticed access to a computer or smartphone keyboard, but it also shows how far thermal imaging technology has come in the past few years.

And a team of researchers at Beihang University, working with colleagues at Imperial College London and the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology, designed and built a quadcopter works in the air and in water and includes a suction cup to hitchhike on the host. The team notes that hitchhiking could allow for even longer deployments.

Additionally, a team of computer scientists at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory announced that they have created a new programming language for hardware accelerators. If adopted by others in the community, the new language (called Exo) could make it much easier for all parties involved in uploading certain parts of the application to an accelerator, helps speed things up for everyone.

Another team at MIT designed and built a mobile desalination unit weighing less than 10 kg can remove particles and salt to make drinking water. The device is small enough to pack in a suitcase, making it easy to move. It can also be powered using a single solar panel and can be sold for as little as $50. Real-world testing shows it is capable of cleaning a cup of seawater in about 30 minutes.

Teams from several research centers around the world participated in the Indy Autonomous Challenge at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Duel event life-size self-driving racing cars together. Cars in a self-driving race over 100 miles per hour. The event organizers have designated all the racing cars in the event as winners.

And finally, a team of engineers at Soochow University, working with two colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and another from the Harbin Institute of Technology, developed a kind of soft robot can be broken down into smaller components to traverse small spaces and then reassembled. A video of tiny robots in action named ours Top tech video of the year.

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