New Florence. New Renaissance.

5G - the rural advantage?

People living in six major cities are now able to access the UK's first 5G network for the first time.

But the latest superfast technology has already been available for months - to islanders in Orkney, farmers in Shropshire, and some cows in Somerset.

They have been taking part in a trial, part funded by the UK government, which is designed to make the case for investment in areas without lots of customers.

5G Rural First is being delivered by a consortium of more than 30 partners, including tech companies, universities and the BBC.

In Shropshire, researchers have been running what's known as a hands-free hectare, with a drone and a tractor operating autonomously using data sent over 5G to farm a field.

BBC.com

 

 

 

Are shipwreck discoveries becoming easier?

Coupled with other underwater survey systems and GPS, this allows explorers to quickly and accurately map the scene below. Mapping data can then be run through software to detect anomalous undersea structures, like ship hulls, superstructures, and gun turrets, identifying possible wrecks. If the software finds something interesting, the crew can send an AUV equipped with a camera down to investigate up close.

Armed with these tools, explorers can close the book on mysteries decades long, writing a final chapter in the history of a ship, its crew, or sea battle. They can also bring closure to families of lost sailors, particularly those of the San Juan, who now have a location for their loved ones’ final resting place.

Popular Mechanics

The wreck of the Japanese battleship Hiei, sunk on November 14, 1942, was located in the Iron Bottom Sound by R/V Petrel. Watch video from more than 1000 meters below the sea.

 

 

AR for Walking Directions

Augmented reality is coming to Google Maps.

The point of the new feature is to help you orient yourself when you're following a walking map. It also helps to solve a common annoyance in many big cities: You get out of a subway and you have no idea which way you're facing, so you wait for the little blue dot on the Maps app to point you in the right direction.

CNET

Smart Cricket Ball

The chip inside the core transmits information from the ball back to a smartwatch, phone or tablet app. So a bowler will be able to derive a lot of information about the delivery as soon as the ball is bowled. It promises to give not only fundamental information like the speed or degree of turn but minute details like the revvs the bowler has imparted (in case he is a spinner), besides speed at the time of release, when it’s pitching and after it has pitched. As of now, the speed-guns can only measure the speed at which the ball lands and not the momentum it gains or losses after it has bounced. The smart-ball would, according to the makers, give the exact degree of bounce, drift, swing, and dip. Currently, there is one speed and revolution figure that is used when a ball is bowled — and that comes from a fixed stationary radar that sees a speed reading recorded at the same point regardless of the height of the bowler or their delivery plane. Such details would considerably help data analytics and coaching, besides enhancing the viewer experience.

The manufacturers believe that it could benefit the umpires as it could register even the faintest of nicks. Though Snicko and Hotspot are commonly used, there have been instances of the Snicko not registering any spike despite apparent deviation and vice versa. Another contentious issue pertains to low catches, where even the ultra-magnifier can’t definitively clarify whether the catcher had his fingers wrapped under the balls or has grassed it.

Indian Express

 

 

 

Self-healing Maps

Keeping maps updated in over 200 countries is hard—so the team had to pivot from just making maps to something more meta. “We needed to start making the machine that makes the map,” Lookingbill explains.

The way this is happening is through machine learning algorithms that are good enough to take imagery—like the pictures produced by those street view cars, or from satellites—extract the information they need from them, and then update the map. That information is likely data such as the name of a road, a house number, or the shape of a building seen from above. Google has boasted about this topic before: a 2017 blog post describes their efforts creating an algorithm that can read street names in France and mentions that algorithms like that could update addresses on the map.

Popular Science

another version of self-healing from Here HD for autonomous cars

 

 

The mesmerizing world of optical sorting

Optical sorters, using digital cameras, lasers, sensors and AI are increasingly used in the food, farming, pharma and increasingly waste management sectors to automate the tedious tasks of sorting, anomaly detection and quality assurance.

While the tasks are tedious, when you watch them at high speed, the motions and colors become, well - works of art

Here's a tomato color sorting machine from Weco

Here is anomaly detection in a variety of use cases using equipment from Tomra

Turn any smartphone into a satellite phone

For those who truly want to go off-grid, there's also a special package that includes not only the Iridium GO! base station and AC travel charger with international adapter, but also comes with a solar charger, two batteries additional, and a desktop charger. This is priced at a heftier $1,095.

ZDNet

 

 

Orbital Ads

Oh no, you may say, but they are headed our way. From Slate

"Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, satellites have been a mostly invisible part of our daily lives, allowing us to make phone calls, monitor the weather, and map our locations. We can sometimes catch them in the night sky, but they’re hard to spot, even if you’re looking for them. Satellites like StartRocket’s Orbital Display are meant to be watched, and as satellites are becoming easier to launch, our skies could become the biggest screen of all.

StartRocket isn’t alone in the for-profit entertainment satellite game. ALE is the Japanese startup behind Sky Canvas, a project to launch a series of satellites that release shooting stars on demand—“a whole new level of entertainment,” its website boasts. Its first show will take place over Hiroshima in spring 2020."

 

Amazon's flock of sateliites

Amazon has plans to establish a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to patch up areas with poor or no internet connectivity.

Amazon's planned push into satellite-delivered broadband is taking shape under Project Kuiper, details of which appear in three documents filed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the existence of Amazon's satellite broadband ambitions, noting that it was a "long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet

ZDNet

 

 

 

Smart Boot

Jimmy Choo teamed up with ZhorTech to create the Voyager Boot, a smart boot that currently allows the wearer to control temperature from an app. ZhorTech’s newest insole, which debuted at CES in Las Vegas this month, will also measure cadence, speed, impact force, pronation and other metrics as the person walks to detect diseases. A date has not yet been set for new insole’s addition to the Jimmy Choo smart boot.

“There are more than 7,000 nerve endings in each foot directly connected to the brain,” said Karim Oumnia, chief executive and founder of ZhorTech and Digitsole. And medical studies show a direct relation between gait analysis and neurological diseases, he said. “We can even detect the severity level of the diseases” and track progression over time, he said. 

New York Times