TT Electronics of Woking has introduced a compact, infrared LED emitter with a spot diameter of 7mm for super-reliable optical sensing and position encoder applications. With up to 10mW total radiated power at the maximum drive current of 100mA, and 2.25° angle of half intensity, the OP207CL couples optical flux extremely efficiently onto the receiving ...
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Apple has placed a series order for Foundation, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of science fiction stories and novels.
Deadline reported earlier this year that the show was in development, but this was just the latest of several attempts to adapt Foundation, including a version developed by Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan for HBO.
Now, however, it looks like Foundation really will happen at Apple, with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman as showrunners. (Like Nolan, Goyer was one of the writers on The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, while Friedman created Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) The series will be produced by Skydance Television, and Asimov’s daughter Robyn will be one of the executive producers.
The Foundation series (initially a set of stories published in the 1940s, then collected into book form in the ’50s and followed up by long novels that Asimov wrote in the ’80s) focuses on the fall of a long-lived Galactic Empire, with a small group of scientists at the edge of the galaxy working to preserve knowledge and minimize the period of chaos.
Elements of that plot description might make it sound like the ingredients for Apple’s version of Star Wars— and indeed, Asimov’s work is seen as a big influence on George Lucas’ films.
But in its print form, at least, Foundation is far from your typical space opera, focusing more on debate and political intrigue than action, and taking place over hundreds of years, with often interchangeable characters swapped out between stories. In other words, Goyer and Friedman will probably have to make some significant changes.
These are my favorite books by my favorite author, so I’m more excited about this than any of the other original shows that Apple’s planning (even the company’s other space opera, which is being developed by Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore). I sure hope they don’t screw it up.
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Paper can be turned into an actuator by applying a thin layer of conducting thermoplastic by 3D printing, or even by hand, according to Carnegie Mellon University. When current is fed through the thermoplastic – off-the-shelf graphene polyactide composite – it heats and expands causing the paper to bend or fold – an process which ...
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The University of Minnesota has sputtered a ‘topological insulator’ – a solid that conducts on its surface but not inside – avoiding the single crystal growth process or molecular beam epitaxy normally needed. Bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3) is the material, magnetron-sputtered into a thin film of particles <6nm across in hetero-structures with CoFeB – “Using the sputtering ...
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The UK government has published the first tranche of guidance should the UK leave the EU with ‘no deal’. They can be found on here on the Department for exiting the European Union website. According to the Department in the introductory document: “This document puts the government’s technical notices in context, explaining the current progress ...
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Canadian firm D-Wave Systems has calculated its way through a ‘topological phase transition’ using its 2,048-qubit ‘annealing quantum computer’. Several huge organisations have bought D-Wave computers – including Google and NASA (Lockheed-Martin even up-graded its D-Wave system) – but, in a world where folk are having trouble quantum-coupling a handful of qubits, there remain questions ...
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Toshiba has introduced a bipolar driver for two-phase stepping motors up to 44V 5A that includes 1/128 micro-stepping. TB67S128FTG, as it is to be known, also supports full, half, quarter, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64 step operation – micro-stepping is by PWM, using sine-wave derived on-off ratios – output chopping frequency can be adjusted by external ...
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