As reported by Engadget: If you fly a drone, the Department of Transportation'sFederal Aviation Administrationwants toknow about it. The FAA's onlinedrone-registration programgoes live on December 21st, and anyone who's ever operated an aircraft between the weights of .55 pounds and 55 pounds needs to sign on before February 19th. There will typically be a $5 fee for each registration, but the FAA is making it free for the first month, through January 20th. "We expect hundreds of thousands of model unmanned aircraft will be purchased this holiday season," FAA administrator Michael Huerta says in a press release. "Registration gives us the opportunity to educate these new airspace users before they fly so they know the airspace rules and understand they are accountable to the public for flying responsibly."
Registration requires the operator's name, home address and email address, and it's valid for three years. The process results in a certificate that includes a unique identification number, which must be noted on the drone itself. If you don't register a drone, you risk civil penalties of up to $27,500, or criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and/or three years imprisonment. The new online-registration rules apply to hobbyist or recreational drone operators only, for now. The FAA plans to roll out online registration for a wider range of drone operators, including commercial uses, by spring 2016. For now, business-centric drone operators have to register using the paper-based process, the FAA says.
As reported by Science Mag: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. BBC UPDATE: The nuclear fusion experiment has produced helium plasma - a cloud of loose, charged particles - lasting just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius. The stellarator's plasma was created on Thursday using a microwave laser, and just 10mg of helium. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy. Here's a feature we ran on the machine earlier this year: If you’ve heard of fusion energy, you’ve probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion—solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer—but progress with them has been plodding.
Now, tokamaks’ rebellious cousin is stepping out of the shadows. In a gleaming research lab in Germany’s northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1 billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), appears now as a 16-meter-wide ring of gleaming metal bristling with devices of all shapes and sizes, innumerable cables trailing off to unknown destinations, and technicians tinkering with it here and there. It looks a bit like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Inside are 50 6-tonne magnet coils, strangely twisted as if trampled by an angry giant.
Although stellarators are similar in principle to tokamaks, they have long been dark horses in fusion energy research because tokamaks are better at keeping gas trapped and holding on to the heat needed to keep reactions ticking along. But the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state, and they don’t spawn the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately, they are devilishly hard to build, making them perhaps even more prone to cost overruns and delays than other fusion projects. “No one imagined what it means” to build one, says Thomas Klinger, leader of the German effort.
W7-X could mark a turning point. The machine, housed at a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) that Klinger directs, is awaiting regulatory approval for a startup in November. It is the first large-scale example of a new breed of supercomputer-designed stellarators that have had most of their containment problems computed out. If W7-X matches or beats the performance of a similarly sized tokamak, fusion researchers may have to reassess the future course of their field. “Tokamak people are waiting to see what happens. There’s an excitement around the world about W7-X,” says engineer David Anderson of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison.
Adapted from IPP by C. Bickel and A. Cuadra/Science
Wendelstein 7-X, the first large-scale optimized stellarator, took 1.1 million working hours to assemble, using one of the most complex engineering models ever devised, and must withstand huge temperature ranges and enormous forces.
Stellarators face the same challenge as all fusion devices: They must heat and hold on to a gas at more than 100 million degrees Celsius—seven times the temperature of the sun’s core. Such heat strips electrons from atoms, leaving a plasma of electrons and ions, and it makes the ions travel fast enough to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse. But it also makes the gas impossible to contain in a normal vessel.
Instead, it is held in a magnetic cage. A current-carrying wire wound around a tube creates a straight magnetic field down the center of the tube that draws the plasma away from the walls. To keep particles from escaping at the ends, many early fusion researchers bent the tube into a doughnut-shaped ring, or torus, creating an endless track.
But the torus shape creates another problem: Because the windings of the wire are closer together inside the hole of the doughnut, the magnetic field is stronger there and weaker toward the doughnut’s outer rim. The imbalance causes particles to drift off course and hit the wall. The solution is to add a twist that forces particles through regions of high and low magnetic fields, so the effects of the two cancel each other out.
Stellarators impose the twist from outside. The first stellarator, invented by astro-physicist Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University in 1951, did it by bending the tube into a figure-eight shape. But the lab he set up—the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey—switched to a simpler method for later stellarators: winding more coils of wire around a conventional torus tube like stripes on a candy cane to create a twisting magnetic field inside.
In a tokamak, a design invented in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the twist comes from within. Tokamaks use a setup like an electrical transformer to induce the electrons and ions to flow around the tube as an electric current. This current produces a vertical looping magnetic field that, when added to the field already running the length of the tube, creates the required spiraling field lines.
Both methods work, but the tokamak is better at holding on to a plasma. In part that’s because a tokamak’s symmetry gives particles smoother paths to follow. In stellarators, Anderson says, “particles see lots of ripples and wiggles” that cause many of them to be lost. As a result, most fusion research since the 1970s has focused on tokamaks—culminating in the huge ITER reactor project in France, a €16 billion international effort to build a tokamak that produces more energy than it consumes, paving the way for commercial power reactors.
But tokamaks have serious drawbacks. A transformer can drive a current in the plasma only in short pulses that would not suit a commercial fusion reactor. Current in the plasma can also falter unexpectedly, resulting in “disruptions”: sudden losses of plasma confinement that can unleash magnetic forces powerful enough to damage the reactor. Such problems plague even up-and-coming designs such as the spherical tokamak (Science, 22 May, p. 854).
Stellarators, however, are immune. Their fields come entirely from external coils, which don’t need to be pulsed, and there is no plasma current to suffer disruptions. Those two factors have kept some teams pursuing the concept.
The largest working stellarator is the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Toki, Japan, which began operating in 1998. Lyman Spitzer would recognize the design, a variation on the classic stellarator with two helical coils to twist the plasma and other coils to add further control. The LHD holds all major records for stellarator performance, shows good steady-state operation, and is approaching the performance of a similarly sized tokamak.
Two researchers—IPP’s Jürgen Nührenberg and Allen Boozer of PPPL (now at Columbia University)—calculated that they could do better with a different design that would confine plasma with a magnetic field of constant strength but changing direction. Such a “quasi-symmetric” field wouldn’t be a perfect particle trap, says IPP theorist Per Helander, “but you can get arbitrarily close and get losses to a satisfactory level.” In principle, it could make a stellarator perform as well as a tokamak.
The design strategy, known as optimization, involves defining the shape of magnetic field that best confines the plasma, then designing a set of magnets to produce the field. That takes considerable computing power, and supercomputers weren’t up to the job until the 1980s.
The first attempt at a partially optimized stellarator, dubbed Wendelstein 7-AS, was built at the IPP branch in Garching near Munich and operated between 1988 and 2002. It broke all stellarator records for machines of its size. Researchers at UW Madison set out to build the first fully optimized device in 1993. The result, a small machine called the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX), began operating in 1999. “W7-AS and HSX showed the idea works,” says David Gates, head of stellarator physics at PPPL.
That success gave U.S. researchers confidence to try something bigger. PPPL began building the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) in 2004 using an optimization strategy different from IPP’s. But the difficulty of assembling the intricately shaped parts with millimeter accuracy led to cost hikes and schedule slips. In 2008, with 80% of the major components either built or purchased, the Department of Energy pulled the plug on the project (Science, 30 May 2008, p. 1142). “We flat out underestimated the cost and the schedule,” says PPPL’s George “Hutch” Neilson, manager of NCSX.
IPP/Wolfgang Filser
Wendelstein 7-X’s bizarrely shaped components must be put together with millimeter precision. All welding was computer controlled and monitored with laser scanners.
BACK IN GERMANY, the project to build W7-X was well underway. The government of the recently reunified country had given the green light in 1993 and 1994 and decided to establish a new branch institute at Greifswald, in former East Germany, to build the machine. Fifty staff members from IPP moved from Garching to Greifswald, 800 kilometers away, and others made frequent trips between the sites, says Klinger, director of the Greifswald branch. New hires brought staff numbers up to today’s 400. W7-X was scheduled to start up in 2006 at a cost of €550 million.
But just like the ill-fated American NCSX, W7-X soon ran into problems. The machine has 425 tonnes of superconducting magnets and support structure that must be chilled close to absolute zero. Cooling the magnets with liquid helium is “hell on Earth,” Klinger says. “All cold components must work, leaks are not possible, and access is poor” because of the twisted magnets. Among the weirdly shaped magnets, engineers must squeeze more than 250 ports to supply and remove fuel, heat the plasma, and give access for diagnostic instruments. Everything needs extremely complex 3D modeling. “It can only be done on computer,” Klinger says. “You can’t adapt anything on site.”
By 2003, W7-X was in trouble. About a third of the magnets produced by industry failed in tests and had to be sent back. The forces acting on the reactor structure turned out to be greater than the team had calculated. “It would have broken apart,” Klinger says. So construction of some major components had to be halted for redesigning. One magnet supplier went bankrupt. The years 2003 to 2007 were a “crisis time,” Klinger says, and the project was “close to cancellation.” But civil servants in the research ministry fought hard for the project; finally, the minister allowed it to go ahead with a cost ceiling of €1.06 billion and first plasma scheduled for 2015.
After 1.1 million construction hours, the Greifswald institute finished the machine in May 2014 and spent the past year carrying out commissioning checks, which W7-X passed without a hitch. Tests with electron beams show that the magnetic field in the still-empty reactor is the right shape. “Everything looks, to an extremely high accuracy, exactly as it should,” IPP’s Thomas Sunn Pedersen says.
Approval to go ahead is expected from Germany’s nuclear regulators by the end of this month. The real test will come once W7-X is full of plasma and researchers finally see how it holds on to heat. The key measure is energy confinement time, the rate at which the plasma loses energy to the environment. “The world’s waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse,” PPPL’s Gates says.
Success could mean a course change for fusion. The next step after ITER is a yet-to-be-designed prototype power plant called DEMO. Most experts have assumed it would be some sort of tokamak, but now some are starting to speculate about a stellarator. “People are already talking about it,” Gates says. “It depends how good the results are. If the results are positive, there’ll be a lot of excitement.”
As reported by Fleet Owner: TheFederal Motor Carrier Safety Administration(FMCSA) is trying once again to craft a legally-sustainable electronic logging device (ELD) rule after several failed attempts in the past. The agency formally rolled out its long-awaited final rule mandating the use of ELD by commercial motor vehicle operators to record hours-of-service (HOS) data.
“Since 1938, complex, on-duty/off-duty logs for truck and bus drivers were made with pencil and paper, virtually impossible to verify,” noted U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in a statement. “This automated technology [ELDs] not only brings logging records into the modern age, it also allows roadside safety inspectors to unmask violations of federal law that put lives at risk.”
The rule will take effect in two years, but if a carrier installs a compliant advanced onboard recording device (AONRD) prior to the compliance date, it will have the option to continue using that device for an additional two years beyond the compliance data.
FMCSA said its ELD mandate will result in an annual net benefit of more than $1 billion – largely by reducing paperwork – and will also increase the efficiency of roadside law enforcement personnel in reviewing the driver records.
The agency added that, on an annual average basis, use of ELDs should help save 26 lives and prevent 1,844 crashes involving large commercial motor vehicles annually.
FMCSA noted several key elements and impacts from its ELD final rule:
It establishes a two-year compliance window for commercial truck and bus drivers to adopt ELDs.
The agency anticipates that approximately three million commercial vehicle drivers will be impacted by the ELD mandate.
The ELD rule strictly prohibits driver harassment by providing both procedural and technical provisions to prevent harassment resulting from ELD-generated information.
A separate FMCSA rulemaking further safeguards drivers from being coerced to violate HOS regulations, providing the agency with the authority to take enforcement actions not only against motor carriers, but also against shippers, receivers, and transportation intermediaries.
The new rule establishes technology specifications detailing performance and design requirements for ELDs so that manufacturers are able to produce compliant devices and systems.
New HOS supporting document rules within the ELD mandate will help reduce paperwork needs, such as the retention of shipping documents, fuel purchase receipts, etc. In most cases, a motor carrier using ELDs will not be required to retain supporting documents verifying on-duty driving time, FMCSA said.
The ELD final rule permits the use of smartphones and other wireless devices as ELDs, so long as they satisfy technical specifications and are certified. Canadian- and Mexican-domiciled drivers will also be required to use ELDs when operating on U.S. roadways.
Motor carriers that have previously installed compliant automatic onboard recording devices may continue to use the devices for an additional two years beyond the compliance date.
Following publication of the proposed rule back in early 2014, several suppliers of ELDs said the flexibility afford by the rule would lead to innovation and help control costs for fleets.
The rule will require ELDs for all commercial motor vehicle operations that fall under 49 CFR part 395 and for situations where the driver is required to complete a record of duty status (RODS) under 49 CFR 395.8.
Drivers who are exempt from the ELD requirement includes those who use paper RODS for not more than eight days in any 30-day period; those who conduct driveaway-towaway operations where the vehicle being driven is the commodity being delivered; and those of vehicles that were manufactured before model-year 2000.
The rule covers data transfer technologies and requires either a display or printout for backup as a means to access necessary enforcement data. Data can be transferred via a wireless web service and email or through Bluetooth and USB 2.0.
In its cost analysis, FMCSA determined the addition of a printer would increase ELD costs about 40%.
Carriers must retain up to eight supporting documents for every 24-hour period a driver using ELDs is on duty. Those documents must be retained for six months, and drivers must submit supporting documents to the motor carrier no later than 13 days after receiving them.
Those supporting documents must include:
Driver name or carrier-assigned identification number, either on the document or on another document enabling the carrier to link the document to the driver, or the vehicle unit number if that number can be 14 linked to the driver;
Date;
Location (including name of nearest city, town, or village); and
Time.
Supporting documents may come from the following five categories:
Bills of lading, itineraries, schedules, or equivalent documents that indicate the origin and destination of each trip;
Dispatch records, trip records, or equivalent documents;
Expense receipts;
Electronic mobile communication records, reflecting communications transmitted through a fleet management system (FMS); and
Payroll records, settlement sheets, or equivalent documents that indicates payment to a driver.
This is not FMCSA’s first attempt at electronic logs. The supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking back in 2014 tried to dance around concerns over harassment and supporting documents. Those two issues were subjects of litigation, and the harassment issue ultimately scuttled FMCSA’s prior electronic log rule, which was adopted in April 2010.
The agency has tried to address the harassment concern with another rulemaking just announced covering coercion. That rule, set to take effect on Jan. 29, addresses three key areas: procedures for commercial truck and bus drivers to report incidents of coercion to the FMCSA, steps the agency could take when responding to such allegations, and penalties that may be imposed on entities found to have coerced drivers.
“The design of the ELD allows only limited edits of an ELD record by both the driver and the motor carrier’s agents and in either case the original record generated by the device cannot be changed, which will protect the driver’s RODS from manipulation,” FMCSA wrote in the final rule.
HERE's plans for the self-driving future can finally emerge from their autopilot holding-pattern, with the company and its new automaker owners holding a quiet but enthusiastic coming out party in San Francisco today. Representatives from Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler joined HERE execs to talk about the development of high-definition mapping, location-based services, and cars that whisper to the cloud and - eventually - drive themselves.
It's the first time representatives from the four companies have sat down publicly and discussed the deal, the collective mouth having been sealed until the ink was dry on Nokia's contract.
"The acquisition of HERE by three competitors in the luxury sector is unprecedented," Klaus Froehlich, member of the board of management of BMW AG, said today.
"Automated driving will become one of the major trends in the automotive sector … it's always a question of when and not if," he pointed out. "HERE is going to provide a high-definition map for us … the resolution will be up as much as 10x compared to today … we need 99.5-percent [accuracy] to be safe on the roads."
While it may be an acquisition, the deal HERE cut with the consortium of automakers - I'm told there's no official name for the trio - is surprising in its flexibility.
For a start, though they're putting in $2.7bn, Audi, BMW, and Daimler don't walk away with joint control of the mapping specialist. Instead, it'll operate as an independent company, with a new supervising board that will include not only representatives from the automakers but independent nav-industry specialists too.
"HERE will remain open to other investors, and we will invite other partners to join," Froehlich insisted. "We simply wanted to project the company, because when we are realistic about the automotive community we only have three [mapping] providers."
Right now, more than two million cars from the three are already cellularly-enabled, and plans are afoot to supply anonymized data from those vehicles that will help both with existing mapping and the new generation of high-definition maps that will be instrumental in developing smart cities and autonomous vehicles.
HERE already gathers what it calls "probe" data from smartphones running its software and other devices, consisting of nothing more than a unique ID, location, speed, and direction. From that - two billion data points a day, in fact - it can figure out traffic conditions as well as identify new roads based on vehicle flow.
The next step to that, HERE's vice president of reality capture John Ristevski explained to me, is baking in data from the variety of extra sensors in the modern car. Such "rich sensor feeds" could provide details on individual lane closures, weather conditions - like whether the windshield wipers are on, or if the traction control is struggling with slippery roads - and even unexpected issues like animals in the path of traffic.
"Until now," Froehlich pointed out, "the sensors have only been used for driving assistance services within the car."
It's early days, but what's taking shape is a combination of local processing and cloud services - "in the end," the BMW exec said, "each car only has perhaps 99.9 or 99.8 percent availability of the network" - that would maximize performance while minimizing how much data would have to ping through the mobile networks.
"The amount of data is not as high as one might expect," Dr. Peter Steiner, head of Audi electronics venture, explained. "We are not video streaming, we are feeding back or broadcasting what is already a condensed data set."
So, onboard processing would handle basic feature-extraction, transmitting the core details to HERE's cloud, while anything more complex or confusing to the car could be sent as images for the more advanced machine learning to figure out.
Privacy is the looming specter around any connected car service, and it's something all four companies are taking seriously from the outset. Mindful, perhaps, that even the whiff of mishandled data could set smart mobility back decades, the consortium is taking a hard line.
"Privacy will become more important, more premium in the future," BMW's Froehlich argues, "we do not accept partners that compromise the privacy of our customers."
"Data privacy, this is the utmost thing for us," Sajjad Khan, VP of digital vehicle and mobility at Daimler, concurred, "next to data security, which is just as competitive."
True autonomy is still some way out. Froehlich envisages it taking two to three years before a standard for dynamically-updated and maintained mapping data is settled upon, which takes into account sensor information from individual vehicles.
"I think in certain regions, automated driving will be even faster," he predicted, such as ride-sharing services where cars would only need to have HD mapping for a single city or location. For full autonomy, though, "I don't see it within the next eight to ten years, honestly," Froehlich says.
That may seem conservative, but it means full speed ahead for HERE. "We do not have much time to waste," he concluded, "we need this new generation of maps as soon as possible, because the gradient of driving to assisted or autonomous driving is quite steep."
As reported by GizMag: One of the problems for the smart buildings of tomorrow is that they may depend on some very un-smart wires to power them. To cut the cord, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) researcher Hao Gao, as part of his PhD thesis, has developed a tiny transmitting temperature sensor that is powered by radio waves, eliminating the need for wires or batteries. Instead, it picks up radio waves from a special router, converts them into electricity, and uses it to transmit readings. Like many other forecasters, TU/e sees a future where smart buildings are filled with sensors and other devices that gather information and carry out tasks to automate the business of living while making it more sustainable. But as sensors become smaller and are incorporated into more things around the house, the problem of powering them without stringing tiny wires everywhere or spending half the time swapping out batteries remains.
Part of the PREMISS project, Gao's sensor is very much in the lightweight category at 2 sq mm and weighing in at 1.6 mg. Its operating principle is similar to that of the Thing, which is infamous in espionage circles as the Soviet bug that listened in at the US embassy in Moscow for about six years.
In 1946, a carved replica of the Great Seal of the United States was presented by the Soviets to the embassy as a goodwill gift that seemed the picture of innocence. What that Americans didn't know is that under the woodwork was the Thing, which was a listening device with a monopole antenna. Instead of running off batteries or mains current, the Thing was energized by a radio beam directed at it by the KGB and transmitted back when they wanted to eavesdrop on the ambassador. This meant that it could operate indefinitely and was only discovered in 1952 by accident when a British radio operator tuned in on its transmissions.
Based on 65-nm CMOS technology, the new thermometer system uses a special router that targets the sensor, but unlike the Thing the reason is to save power rather than escape detection. At the same time, the sensor itself is designed to use very little electricity. When the sensor is exposed to radio waves, it absorbs the energy until it stores enough to transmit a signal back to the router. The temperature of the sensor alters the frequency of the signal, which the router can decode.
According to TU/e, the tiny size and independent nature of the sensor means that it can be placed in all sorts of unorthodox locations, such as in plaster or concrete. It can even be mixed in with latex and applied directly to walls like paint.
The current version of the sensor has an operating range of only 2.5 cm (1 in), but it's hoped that this will be extended to a meter (3 ft) in a year and ultimately to 5 m (16 ft). With a mass production cost projected at about 20 cents, TU/e sees a wide range of applications for the wireless sensors, including payment systems, wireless ID, smart buildings, and industrial applications.
"We expect hundreds of thousands of model unmanned aircraft will be purchased this holiday season," FAA administrator Michael Huerta says in a press release. "Registration gives us the opportunity to educate these new airspace users before they fly so they know the airspace rules and understand they are accountable to the public for flying responsibly."
