Unless you've been living in a book-free cave, you may have heard that retail giant Amazon and book publisher Hachette are having a little tiff. It's all about digital versions of books -- so-called e-books -- and it boils down to this: Amazon wants...
James Cameron emerges from the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER after his successful solo dive to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. (Mark Thiessen/National Geographic)
There came a moment halfway through Deepsea Challenge 3D when I realized James...
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This mosaic of images taken from 2004 to 2013 the shutter-snapping Cassini spacecraft shows the most detailed look at the famous lakes on the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan. Thought to be filled with methane and ethane, the lakes are the only areas filled with standing liquid in the entire solar system except, of course, for Earth. Check out the flyover video for a closer look. [NASA]
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Josh Thomson was next in line for a shot at the UFC lightweight title after knocking Nate Diaz out last April. New champion Anthony Pettis was forced to pull out of his Dec. title defense against Thomson because of a knee injury, however, and now Thomson will fight former champ Benson Henderson in Jan. at the UFC on Fox 10 card in Chicago.
According to Thomson, he not only lost a chance at grabbing UFC gold when Pettis got injured, he was also stuck with a much tougher opponent. "Benson is more of a threat than Pettis was," Thomson told Steph Daniels during a recent interview.
"Not to mention that this is the opportunity to fight someone that has been the champ for the last couple years. For me, I think Benson has the bigger name. Not to take anything away from Pettis, but Henderson has been more active over the last two years, so there was no way I could pass on this opportunity."
A disappointed Thomson also expressed confusion as to why Pettis will not fight him with a torn PCL.
"My focus really was the title, and it sucks that it happened the way it did, especially given that it was a PCL injury," he said.
"I've gone through that same injury myself, and I fought that third fight with Gilbert [Melendez] with a torn PCL, which is why I'm kind of confused as to why Pettis is not fighting. I feel that it's something you can work through, and there's not very much they can do for it."
In the end, "The Punk" says he is excited to fight Henderson. He believes their main event bout will be an exciting one for the fans to watch.
"I feel that with myself and with Benson, we really take the fight everywhere. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, we have the ability to seize it," he said.
"I've told people before, I'm not the best in anything. I'm not the best stand-up guy, I'm not the best grappler, I'm not the best wrestler. The thing is, I have the ability to put a lot of things together and keep you guessing. Ben is the same way, and that makes both of us very dangerous."
Follow Elias on Twitter @EliasCepeda
Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/josh-thomson-ben-henderson-more-threat-ufc-champ-164932472--mma.html
It's always nice to have a little buddy around that's trained to do what you want it to. Some of us get dogs or other furry creatures, but a start-up called Curio is hoping there's a good chunk of folks who would like to have a robotic companion, too. You see, Curio is a cute little bot platform filled with a pair of motors that move its mouth and head, and has a small LCD screen that serves as its face. The toy clips to any smartphone or tablet running the associated app, which in turn allows users to set its facial expression, determine its movements and even tell it what to say.
While the app will come with a bunch of pre-set actions, expressions and sounds, its makers are also working up a programming portion of the app, so tinkerers can create their own custom Curio mods. This programming interface is a series of parallel timelines that allow you to chronologically lay out different facial expressions, movements and audio simply by dragging and dropping them where you like. And Curio's built to be physically customized, too. Company founder Mike Kneupfel thinks that his bots can take advantage of the 3D printing craze by letting folks make their own tails, ears, and other accessories that clip onto Curio. He tells us that he aims to put a bunch of accessory blueprints on MakerBot's Thingiverse to make it easy for folks to print stuff out, but he's hoping that users will get creative and design their own as well.
Does Kawasaki's new electric cycle have two, three wheels or four? Well, it depends. According to the conceptual sketches and a terse explanatory panel, the "J vehicle" concept EV can switch between a lie-down two-wheel Akira / Tron-baiting cycle and a four three-wheel drive mode, with the latter designated as "comfort" mode. The model, revealed at this year's Tokyo Motor Show, is apparently powered by Kawasaki's biggest onboard battery pack, the Gigacell, although (any other) details aren't forthcoming. That's probably because it's from the future and is tearing the space-time continuum apart.
(Update: According to those aforementioned concept images, only the front wheels separate outward in comfort mode, turning it into a three-wheeled vehicle, not a quad-bike. We apologize for the error.)
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Filed under: Transportation
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 13-Nov-2013
ShareContact: Ronald Rösch
[email protected]
49-631-316-004-486
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Concrete is the world's most popular building material: we use it to bridge rivers and valleys, build walls and line tun- nels. The most common form of concrete is steel reinforced a principle that will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a closer look at a building site. Long steel rods, also called rebars, are bent into a dense framework, known as the reinforcement, which is then filled with concrete. But building with steel reinforced concrete is time consuming. It can take days or even weeks before the reinforcement for large buildings is fully assembled, the rebars bound together, and everything ready for the concrete pour.
Steel fiber reinforced concrete is a much quicker alternative, as steel fibers about the length of pine needles are simply mixed in to the liquid concrete. Once the concrete sets, this network of fibers does exactly the same job as traditional rebar reinforcement, increasing the concrete's tensile strength and counteracting cracks. Despite this, SFRC is not very widely used in the construction industry. The reason is that it was always very difficult to determine the quality of the material in the past, as there was no method for simply and reliably analyzing the distribution of fibers in the concrete. And yet it is this distribution that determines the material's load bearing capacity. If there are zones within the concrete where fibers are clumped together, or if certain sections of a slab contain no steel fibers whatsoever, the material is much less able to withstand stresses. This represents an element of risk that many construction companies are not willing to take, causing them to shy away from using SFRC.
Software for evaluating the fiber matrix
Help has now arrived in the form of a new analysis method developed by mathematicians at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern. It uses probability calculations to work out the distribution of all the fibers within concrete samples in a matter of seconds. Project leader Dr. Ronald Rsch and his team of experts use X-ray computed tomography in a way he describes as not dissimilar to how CT scans are used in medicine. "The only difference is that we use it to examine samples taken from finished concrete components, not people," Dr. Rsch explains. Scientists take a core sample about ten centimeters in length from the concrete to be tested. The sample is then X-rayed using an industrial CT scanner at a resolution around a thousand times finer than that achieved by medical scanners. This system reveals even the finest micrometer-sized structures within the material, and generates a high-resolution 3D data set for the concrete sample that contains some eight billion pixels a huge file. Rsch and his team then use their new software to analyze this image data. By assessing differences in contrast, the software is able to assign each pixel to a particular structure within the material, be it concrete, a small stone, a trapped air bubble or a steel fiber. As the software works its way through the data set, all the fibers gradually become visible in the image.
In and of itself this picture isn't much use, however, as the tangled network of fibers is so dense that it's almost impossible to make out individual ones with the naked eye," explains Rsch. This led the experts in Kaiserslautern to develop software that brings order to the chaos by analyzing the system as a whole rather than evaluating each individual fiber. The program simply decides whether a particular pixel represents part of a steel fiber, and calculates the orientation of that fiber.
For each pixel, the program calculates the composition of the material adjacent to it. Is it a fiber, or not? Instances where numerous fibers touch or cross over each other are the most interesting, as to begin with it is unclear which of all the adjacent pixels actually belongs to which fiber. Does that pixel belong to the fiber coming in from the top left, or to the one cros- sing the others directly from above? This is where the probability calculation comes in. It weighs up the location of each pixel, and attributes it to a particular fiber based on what makes logical sense. The results tell the experts everything they need to know, revealing not only the proportion of steel fibers in the sample, but also their orientation. "This is especially important when the concrete component has to absorb forces coming from a particular direction," says Rsch. An example of this is bridges carrying cars and trains at high speed.
It goes without saying that Rsch is aware of the system's current limitations; a CT scanner the size of a small wall closet is simply too big for practical use on a building site. But this is an obstacle we can overcome," he says. "Our colleagues at the Fraunhofer Development Center for X-ray Technology EZRT in Erlangen have already developed a machine the size of a beer crate." A prototype for practical application could be available in five years, Rsch estimates.
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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.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 13-Nov-2013
ShareContact: Ronald Rösch
[email protected]
49-631-316-004-486
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Concrete is the world's most popular building material: we use it to bridge rivers and valleys, build walls and line tun- nels. The most common form of concrete is steel reinforced a principle that will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a closer look at a building site. Long steel rods, also called rebars, are bent into a dense framework, known as the reinforcement, which is then filled with concrete. But building with steel reinforced concrete is time consuming. It can take days or even weeks before the reinforcement for large buildings is fully assembled, the rebars bound together, and everything ready for the concrete pour.
Steel fiber reinforced concrete is a much quicker alternative, as steel fibers about the length of pine needles are simply mixed in to the liquid concrete. Once the concrete sets, this network of fibers does exactly the same job as traditional rebar reinforcement, increasing the concrete's tensile strength and counteracting cracks. Despite this, SFRC is not very widely used in the construction industry. The reason is that it was always very difficult to determine the quality of the material in the past, as there was no method for simply and reliably analyzing the distribution of fibers in the concrete. And yet it is this distribution that determines the material's load bearing capacity. If there are zones within the concrete where fibers are clumped together, or if certain sections of a slab contain no steel fibers whatsoever, the material is much less able to withstand stresses. This represents an element of risk that many construction companies are not willing to take, causing them to shy away from using SFRC.
Software for evaluating the fiber matrix
Help has now arrived in the form of a new analysis method developed by mathematicians at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern. It uses probability calculations to work out the distribution of all the fibers within concrete samples in a matter of seconds. Project leader Dr. Ronald Rsch and his team of experts use X-ray computed tomography in a way he describes as not dissimilar to how CT scans are used in medicine. "The only difference is that we use it to examine samples taken from finished concrete components, not people," Dr. Rsch explains. Scientists take a core sample about ten centimeters in length from the concrete to be tested. The sample is then X-rayed using an industrial CT scanner at a resolution around a thousand times finer than that achieved by medical scanners. This system reveals even the finest micrometer-sized structures within the material, and generates a high-resolution 3D data set for the concrete sample that contains some eight billion pixels a huge file. Rsch and his team then use their new software to analyze this image data. By assessing differences in contrast, the software is able to assign each pixel to a particular structure within the material, be it concrete, a small stone, a trapped air bubble or a steel fiber. As the software works its way through the data set, all the fibers gradually become visible in the image.
In and of itself this picture isn't much use, however, as the tangled network of fibers is so dense that it's almost impossible to make out individual ones with the naked eye," explains Rsch. This led the experts in Kaiserslautern to develop software that brings order to the chaos by analyzing the system as a whole rather than evaluating each individual fiber. The program simply decides whether a particular pixel represents part of a steel fiber, and calculates the orientation of that fiber.
For each pixel, the program calculates the composition of the material adjacent to it. Is it a fiber, or not? Instances where numerous fibers touch or cross over each other are the most interesting, as to begin with it is unclear which of all the adjacent pixels actually belongs to which fiber. Does that pixel belong to the fiber coming in from the top left, or to the one cros- sing the others directly from above? This is where the probability calculation comes in. It weighs up the location of each pixel, and attributes it to a particular fiber based on what makes logical sense. The results tell the experts everything they need to know, revealing not only the proportion of steel fibers in the sample, but also their orientation. "This is especially important when the concrete component has to absorb forces coming from a particular direction," says Rsch. An example of this is bridges carrying cars and trains at high speed.
It goes without saying that Rsch is aware of the system's current limitations; a CT scanner the size of a small wall closet is simply too big for practical use on a building site. But this is an obstacle we can overcome," he says. "Our colleagues at the Fraunhofer Development Center for X-ray Technology EZRT in Erlangen have already developed a machine the size of a beer crate." A prototype for practical application could be available in five years, Rsch estimates.
###
[
| E-mail
Share
]
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.
