EU awards €2.48m to innovative Irish SME - Exergyn

Exergyn, an Irish SME, has been awarded €2.48m in EU funding to commercialise its Exergyn Drive engine, which turns waste hot water into electricity.

The specially-designed engine has been created with the application of using waste hot water created during the cooling process of manufacturing and, rather than letting it go to waste, or wasting valuable energy cooling it down again, they can use it to power their engine to create electricity.

The company, which was founded in 2012 by Alan Healy, Barry Cullen and Kevin O’Toole, has expanded to 15 staff and is targeting the European bio-gas sector as they believe that it represents an attractive commercial prospect for power generation.

The Exergyn Drive has already undergone trials and, as of the beginning of Q1 this year, the company is seeking partners to trial five 10kW engines in the bio-gas and power generation industries.

NASA successfully tests engine that violates the law of physics, uses no fuel

This is great news. NASA has successfully tested a space drive that uses no fuel and so does not use propellant. The drive called 'Cannae Drive' is apparently based on the work of a British scientist named Roger Shawyer called the EMDrive. It is said to work by bouncing microwaves in an enclosed chamber and thus creating thrust.

According to NASA :

"Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma."

Earliest human species found in Ethiopia

An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say.

This find also sheds light on the kind of landscape where humans first originated, scientists added.

For decades, scientists have been searching Africa for signs of the earliest phases of the human family, during the shift from more apelike Australopithecus species to more human early Homo species. Until now, the earliest credible fossil evidence of the genus Homo was dated to about 2.3 million or 2.4 million years ago.

Now researchers have found a human fossil in Ethiopia about 2.8 million years old. 

Line Following Robot

Beehive that Automatically Extracts Honey

The Flow Hive is a new beehive invention that promises to eliminate the more laborious aspects of collecting honey from a beehive with a novel spigot system that taps into specially designed honeycomb frames. Invented over the last decade by father and son beekeepers Stuart and Cedar Anderson, the system eliminates the traditional process of honey extraction where frames are removed from beehives, opened with hot knives, and loaded into a machine that uses centrifugal force to get the honey out.

A Solar panel on your arm (To monitor your vitals !!)

How wonderful !!

A team of engineers has developed a solar-powered, plastic armband that measures the wearer’s body temperature. You can set a threshold temperature for the device, so that an alarm goes off when your temperature rises too high. It works both inside and outside of clothing. The armband could be adapted to detect other vital signs, too, such as heart rate, the armband’s lead engineer, University of Tokyo professor Takao Someya, said in a statement.

Earthquake in Indonesia: India withdraws tsunami warning

Courtesy : NDTV

India has withdrawn the tsunami warning issued after the massive earthquake measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale in Indonesia this afternoon, Press Trust of India reports.

A second round of tremors was felt in India in cities like Kolkata and Chennai at 4.25 pm, but there was no tsunami threat from these aftershocks. India's Nicobar Islands, closest to the epicentre of the quake, is still on alert.

The original earthquake struck Indonesia at 2.08 pm, and first reports said it measured 8.9 on the Richter scale. It spurred warnings of a possible tsunami. The quake was later downgraded to 8.6 magnitude.

A little over two hours after the first earthquake, Indonesia reported an aftershock that hovered around 8.2 on the Richter scale.

Officials in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are prepped for emergency processes. People have been asked to move away from the coast and the government evacuated some people from South Andaman as a precaution.

The Indian Air Force has kept ready for relief ops; six teams of 40 people each from the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) have been positioned at Hindon near Delhi, and at Chennai and two C-130 J heavy-lift aircrafts of the Indian Air Force are leaving for Port Blair with NDRF teams and 10 tonnes of relief material.

Before the strong aftershocks, the Home Secretary RK Singh said, "As of now there are no signs of a tsunami." But he said the union government was in constant touch with officials in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Odisha.

The minutes after the first quake saw emergency drills in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. On the beaches at Chennai, policemen used megaphones to ask people to leave, with little effect. Mobile phone networks were jammed in the city till 4 pm. In Andhra Pradesh, fishermen were asked to return from sea. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, civilians were asked to move to higher ground. In Kolkata, metro trains were stopped at 2.40 pm for nearly an hour; as a precaution, passengers were evacuated.

The quake was felt in Singapore, Thailand and India. High-rise apartments and offices on Malaysia's west coast shook for at least a minute.

In India, tremors were reported in Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and the southern part of Chennai. The tremors lasted for a few seconds. In Bhubaneshwar, people were seen running out of their homes and offices. No damage has been reported so far.

NDTV viewer AG Kalidass emailed from Bangalore to say, "We were feeling our building shaking." Another viewer Shyam Agarwal writes, "I am from Kolkata. Just now a few minutes back heavy stroke of earthquake has been observed here."

Indonesia's disaster management agency said power was down in Aceh province and people were gathering on high ground as sirens warned of the danger.

"The electricity is down, there are traffic jams to access higher ground. Sirens and Koran recitals from mosques are everywhere," said Sutopo, spokesman for the agency.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the powerful quake was centred 20 miles (33 kilometres) beneath the ocean floor around 308 miles (495 kilometres) from Aceh's provincial capital.

Indonesia straddles a series of fault lines that makes the vast island nation prone to volcanic and seismic activity.

A giant 9.1-magnitude quake off the country on December 26, 2004, triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 230,000 people in 13 Indian Ocean countries, including Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.