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Upload Spring 2018

What is the future of technology on Earth (and in space)?

Metamaterials CrISPR Self-driving cars Virtual reality Different types of computers Interstellar travel

Dear Reader,

Thank you for opening our Ezine! We worked all semester on creating this, and hope that you learn more about the future of technology after reading our magazine. We’ve tried to cover all the basics that you need to know about technology in the future-- metamaterials, new types of computer, CRiSPR, self driving cars, virtual reality, and interstellar travel, but this is certainly not a comprehensive coverage of those topics. We hope, however, that this magazine will wet your appetite for more, and that you will go and learn more about the topics that interest you the most more. Happy reading!

-Sam Christian

Upload Travel in space: The Bussard Ramjet Page 5

Why this design seems more promising than other methods of interstellar travel, and why it might not be afterall.

What is a “Metamaterial�

Page 8

A Metamaterial can bend light in ways not seen in nature.

Discover how and what this means for the world.

Non-classical computers Page 12

From Biological computers to Quantum computers, the industry is expanding

Where renewable energy is going Page 16

Oil doesn’t seem like its running out anytime soon, but global warming is still a problem. So how will renewable energy play a role in the future of survival on Earth?

An overview of CrISPR Page 20

This amazing technology has the power to alter genes.

Discover what this means for the world.

The future of autonomous vehicles Page 22

Self-driving cars seem to be very powerful, yet dangerous.

Where is the industry going?

Different types of VR Page 26

The VR industry is expanding rapidly, what are the popular brands, and which one is better?

Tobias Dobbs Tobias plays video games in ezine, and is always striving to be first on the leaderboard. When he grows up, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with ezine, and especially not *censored*. In his freetime, Tobias likes to mess with the ctrl f button, particularly to replace every instance of ‘car’ with ‘cat,’ such that self-driving car reads self-driving cat, something that annoys his group.

Asa Horn Asa might work hard, but surely not on writing team descriptions. Asa likes photography, we think, and really likes to use the “clone tool” on adobe photoshop even for no apparent purpose.

Asa, although loving photoshop, doesn’t really have an affinity for Adobe Stock, lightroom, illustrator, indesign, XD, Premier, After effects, Dimension, or Dreamwaver. Asa also likes to edit endsigns and folios.

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Lily Trentham Lily is the “Artist” of the group, taking several days to make bad knock-offs of picasso paintings while accomplishing little else. In addition to creating art, she enjoys playing both piano and cello.

Lily often spends much of her weekends volunteering at Austin Pets Alive and the Austin Animal Center, walking and photographing dogs.

Sam Christian Sam is “smart” and claims he knows everything and is really good at writing excessively long articles. However, if you need to enter in a nerdy conversation about something stupidly complicated, he is your man.

The Bussard Ramjet

See next page for more!

With human population ever increasing, and recourses becoming increasingly rare every year, the human mind naturally turns to life beyond Earth as a possible solution. Our solar system has a plethora of planets and land in its own right, but none of them possessing the goldilocks proportions of recourses as Earth does. Not too cold, not too hot. The perfect combination of gases, promoting the formation of liquid water and thus human life. So in the future, interstellar travel might be a staple of human life; to get to those perfect planets that contain the right proportions for us to comfortably live on.

Such journies would require massive amounts of fuel. If such journies would be undertaken in human life times, yet undiscovered methods of propulsion for rockets would be necessary, such as fission, fusion, or even antimatter. One of the current forerunners of interstellar travel is the Bussard Ramjet. This design is so appealing because, unlike other designs such as the nuclear propulsion rocket, doesn’t actually carry its fuel with it, but rather collects it along the way. Such a design uses a massive magnetic field, on the scale of miles wild, to slowly bring in interstellar hydrogen, slowly compressing it untill fusion begins. If such a device could accelerate at a consistent speed of 1G, the acceleration of gravity felt on Earth, then we could reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in 7 years. Of course, such a constant acceleration is unreasonable to think of at the present moment, but still, such normal acceleration, felt at all times, applied in interstellar space bringing us to realize that interstellar travel might actually be a reality in the far (or near) future. Even better, due to special relativity, the astronauts would experience a journey mearly 3.6 years long. the difference between passenger time and observer time is represented through the purple curve from the sun to Proxima Centauri. The passenger and the observer would disagree about the time that had passed during the journey, but they would agree on the difference between the time they are seeing pass outside their frame of reference, hence the curve.

In the overleaf, the Bussard Ramjet is shown rocketing towards Proxima centauri (the closest star in alpha centauri), with a lone passenger on board. In the front, the purple magnetic field lines stretch vast, yet relatively small distances in space. The hydrogen is pressed untill a critical temperature is reached-- where the internal pressure is great enough for fusion to begin. The energy expelled by this process is controlled and expelled out the end of the rocket, as more hydrogen is fed into the reaction chamber, keeping the process running smoothly. The rocket would take a year to accelerate to 0.5 c, and after that would travel at a more or less constant speed of 0.75 c (speed of light). Halfway through, the rocket would have to turn around and decelerate, so by the time it reached proxima centauri, it wasn’t speeding at nearly the speed of light. Even better for the person on board, the farther they travel, the larger the difference between their time and the observer’s time would be, granting relatively easy access to the galaxy as a whole.

However, all these great benefits hinge on the constant 1 G acceleration of the rocket, something that might not be posssible. First off, the density of hydrogen in interstellar space has actually been found to be less then originally projected, giving less fuel to the ship for propulsion. Additionally, as the ship acclerated to greater speeds, it would find ever increasing compression (different from friction) from the interstellar space that it is flying through. Lastly, we’ve only been able to fuse materials in our most powerfull laberatories, by flashing two enormously powerfull lasers at a microscopic sample of hydrogen ions for a trillionth of a second. Such a process would have to be majorly improved before the development of a Bussard Ramjet is feasible. But with the ever increasing rate of technological advancment, only time will tell what the future of the Bussard Ramjet is.

Information from askmar.com

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A Journey to With new advances in space travel and fusion, a journey through interstellar space might be a real possibility in the future. One such design, the Bussard Ramjet takes advantage of the presence of hydrogen in interstellar space so it doesnĘźt have to bring fuel with it

Magnetic Field Lines to attract ionized hydrogen

7- Number of days to reach the edge of the solar system

3.6- The number of years an astrnaut would experience 6

Proxima Centauri

By Sam Christian

7- Approx. number of years to get to Proxima Centauri at a constant acceleration of 1 G

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MetaMetamaterial: a material not found in nature.

But these materials are so much more, and with the rapid advances in the field, metamaterials might be an intimate part of the world in the future

(Above) An example of a very advanced metamaterial, where the light bends around the metamaterial in such a way that the metamaterial is not visible. Graphic by Sam Christian

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materials

By Sam Christian These fascinating materials have properties not found in nature, such as the ability to bend light in ways not found in nature. The name “metamaterial” sounds strange at first, but these unnatural substances might be an important piece in the future world.

A metamaterial is, effectively, any material not found in nature. While this might on face value seem to be something like plastic-- a useful material with strength and feel that is not present in any other material-- a metamaterial can be even weirder. A metamaterial can play with light in ways that has never been thought possible before.

“The properties you will [get from the metamaterial will] be very different from the properties of the formal materials,” said Alexandra Boltasseva, a professor who studies metamaterials at Purdue University.

In fact, so different that metamaterials have been designed with the ability to bend light.

This is called a negative refraction index. In normal materials, due to light flowing at different rates in different materials, there appears to be a sudden break in an object split between two different materials. Imagine a pencil in water. The pencil appears to be broken, due to the index of refraction. But a metamaterial would seem to defy the laws of optics.

“Not only would the pencil look broken, it would look like it’s pointing the opposite direction,” said Joe Pacheco, a former member of the MIT lincoln laboratory and professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas.

It wouldn’t really be possible to have an entire bucket of metamaterials (at least, at now), said Pacheco, due to the solid form of metamaterials and the small, fragile quantities they are currently made in, but still, that’s the power of these amazing objects.

Their puzzling abilities derive from Maxwell’s equations, a set of formulas describing how electromagnetic (light) waves propagate. There are two properties that can be found in the equation, permittivity and permeability, that are particularly important to metamaterials.

“If you have a negative permittivity, you have a positive permeability,” said Pacheco.

But in metamaterials, you have to have a negative index of refraction, so both permittivity and permeability have to be negative. Permittivity is the ability of the material to resist an electric field, and permeability the ability to support a magnetic field.

This is something that never shows up naturally, giving rise to the name metamaterials. What happens in gases and some metals is that a negative permittivity can form at certain frequencies,

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but very large ones. Negative permeability does not form in nature. But with both negative permittivity and permeability, light is again can be bent in ways that other materials (with positive permeability and maybe positive permittivity) cannot. This is the reason that metamaterials have never been found in nature; a material has never been found

metamaterials are advancing.

Metamaterials were just a theory until 1999, with the invention of the “split ring resonator,” a device that achieves the negative permeability necessary that can be combined with previous devices that can produce negative permeability. This led to the first metamaterial. But since metamaterials have to be smaller than the wavelength of the light they are “bending,” the challenge was always to make these metamaterials at the necessary scale. However, advances in the past decade have eliminated this challenge.

“We are able to work with the whole visible spectrum,” said Boltasseva.

Soon, these metamaterials could become an essential part of our society that could have implications in many areas of daily life.

“In the 60s plastic was going to change everything, and In fact it has,” said Lucente. “There’s plastic everywhere now it’s the reason why everything is so inexpensive and lightweight ... and metamaterials are going with a negative permeability and to do the same thing. It’s quite negative permittivity. possible that in Maybe 20 or 30

years almost everything around One of the major setbacks in you will have some kind of this process though is to get the metamaterials in them.” metamaterial to have the exact But metamaterials is a relatively optical properties to bend the broad term, and there are specific light in just the right way for the types of metamaterials that can desired application. be more immediately applied to “You have to have these micro many areas of science. features that are smaller than “We can… create a single layer the wavelength of light,” said Dr. of metamaterials, or artificial Lucente, the principal scientist of atoms like a coating,” said Nanohmics Inc. Boltasseva.

Despite this hindrance, These “metacoatings” in

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particular can revolutionize many aspects of technology, from mirrors to solar panels, or basically anything that takes the shape of a plane.

One application that immediately stands out is replacing traditional solar cells. Boltasseva said ceramic metamaterials can be made that can survive high temperatures that can collect incident light and radiate in a way that can be converted to electricity, making very efficient metamaterials.

Another property that quickly arises out of these metasurfaces is a “perfect lens.” Traditional optical lenses can only resolve individual points that are a certain distance apart from each other. This “diffraction limit” is usually the wavelength divided by two, which is usually not significant, but can mean a lot when it comes to atomic imaging, said Pacheco.

“Perhaps you’re the FAA you’re trying to distinguish two different aircrafts that are close together when you’re trying to use you know a low frequency radar because it propagates better through the atmosphere and travels further along the surface of the earth,” said Pacheco.

Then, this metamaterial can help you resolve much better than any traditional lens, for the wavelength of radar is usually measured in meters.

Metamaterials are essential to high resolution radio photographs. Another field of metamaterials is optical communication.

“There are these photonic or optical devices that help you cram

channels onto the beam of light and then separate them out at the receiving end,” said Lucente.

“You could make an entire device like that using a metamaterial.”

The internet is growing, but

sky is very cost inefficient and, in some cases, wastes valuable size and weight.

“So instead of a big lens or a big mirror [aerospace companies] want an object that

“You can figure out exactly what pattern you need,” Lucente said. “To make some kind of optical Device. maybe a lens, maybe a mirror that focuses light … and you can stamp that out

In the 60s plastic was going to change everything. And In fact it has. Thereʼs plastic everywhere now itʼs the reason why everything is so inexpensive and lightweight and metamaterials are going to do the same thing. Itʼs quite possible that in maybe 20 or 30 years almost everything around you will have some kind of metamaterials in them.”

-Dr. Mark Lucente, Cheif Scientist of Nanohmics, a company that designs and researches metamaterials growing larger is people’s desire for high data speeds, something that can be met the more beams of light that can be crammed onto cables in fibre optics and other similar industries.Yet another

weighs basically nothing...From UAVs, drones up to Commercial airliners. All those things have various optics on them, and the optics can all be replaced with these specially made

for pennies a piece. Or that lens on your cell phone. That’s just a piece of standard plastic. That costs a penny.”

With these possible applications, the lure of metamaterials is great, and thusly, the field receives lots of funding from government and private sources to try to develop a commercially feasible metamaterial; one that can be effectively copied for extremely cheap costs as described above.

Lucente says his company is getting funding from NASA to develop such metamaterials for future space travel. So metamaterials might at first An example of a classic metamaterial arangement. Negative permittivity is sound like a “far-out” idea, derived from rods at the intersection points, and negative permeability comes but many companies and from the ring-like structure, called “Split Ring Resonators.” Graphic by Sam government agencies are taking Christian it as a reality in the future and application could be simply metamaterials,” Lucente said. rushing to find a commercially reducing bulkiness, through These applications can stretch feasible version to use. taking advantage of the size of to effectively any field that involves “Any kind of sensor can these metamaterials. transportation, but as mentioned theoretically be replaced by “A radar dish, it’s very very before, these metamaterials metamaterials” Lucente said. focused on pointing you up in are made of tiny, nanoscale, “An example would be the ones the sky at one particular satellite, manufactured particles to get the that are on cars that help them Pacheco said. “So it’s got what we exact properties desired in each drive more safely or self driving call a pencil beam.” respective metamaterials. And cars. But really, all the sensors But for such a large radar dish this can be very cost prohibitive, that scientists use can be replaced to focus on one little spot in the at least at first by metamaterials.”

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Future Computing

By Tobias Dobbs

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A standard computer, like PC or laptop uses thousands of little electronic switches. They hold the simple data, representing either zero or one. This has been very productive, and computer scientists have worked on making this smaller and smaller.

However, there is a limit in computer chips size.

The first computer that’s important to consider is a quantum computer, but the are so hard to understand.

To understand how it works is whole other level.

Instead of just a simple switch, a quantum computer uses magnetic rotation. Rotating one way is zero, and the other is one. In order for this to happen, the electrons need to be cooled down a lot to enter a state in which it can do that. We did not know an actual quantum computer could exist until the first one was built and tested, and on February 13, 2007, that happened. The D-wave one was built by D-wave systems. To do this, the computer needs to function at a very low temperature. For the D-wave, that is 0.01 degrees kelvin.

“Quantum bits are very fragile and easily disturbed by the environment” said Helmut Katzgraber. He works at 1QBit and is a professor at A&M University.

This though is now not the only quantum computer, nor the most powerful one. IBM has recently come out with a 50 qubit quantum computer. It has the highest computing power out of any of the quantum computers built yet. But even with all these steps, the quantum computer doesn’t look like it’s ready for everyday use. It requires high amounts of energy for the cooling, and is very expensive to build The second option is the biological computer. As of right now most of it is purely theoretical. The basic concept is to store information into a cell or DNA. This isn’t impractical, because DNA can store information, and it’s possible to change what information is stored.

MIT has already taken steps to try to do this. They have created a way to store information through DNA. This device is called the minION. Currently, it’s not that practical, and the prices to purchase this is extreme. But it is a first, and very important step to take towards Biological computing.

These computers are purely experimental. But they did just start. Since the first programmable was made in 1936, and these computers are just getting started, its impossible to see what the future might be like. So for now, it would be smart just to stick with the computers we have today.

Photo courtesy of D-wave

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Graphics by Tobias Dobbs

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A Renewable Future What it’s going to take to popularize the use of renewable energy sources Story by Lily Trentham

Solar panels. Photos courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.

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A bird’s eye view of the world’s larget solar farm. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy

“If you want a high percentage of...renewable energy, then one way to do that is to consume less energy in total, but the same amount of renewable energy.”

-Carey King, Assistant Director of the Energy Institute at UT Austin

Although it’s not an entirely new concept, renewable energy has gradually become more accessible and less expensive.

Solar panels have never been more inexpensive, and yet fossil fuels remain the go-to energy source.

Even though energy plays such a large role in our lives, it’s not often that we stop to consider our energy use. It tends to go

unchecked; we take energy and its many forms for granted.

Certain forms of energy, such as fossil fuels, do have the potential to be helpful. However, they can also be detrimental to the world around us. We often rely on these damaging forms of energy in day-to-day activity such as transportation, but this results in environmental concerns such as pollution.

“My answer to this is usually pretty simple: conserve, which is different than be efficient,” said Carey King, assistant director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you want a high

percentage of...renewable energy, then one way to do that is to consume less energy in total, but the same amount of renewable energy.”

However, this is only one of many commonly proposed suggestions causing ongoing discussions and debates.

“Companies growing in size… are probably consuming more, probably because people are buying whatever your product is more,” said

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King. “So it all equals more. How are you supposed to conserve in the aggregate?”

It’s a subject that is difficult to approach. We have developed an extreme

suggestions highlight the use of smaller steps to eventually reach a larger goal.

One such step is a system referred to as Pay-As-You-Go Solar has gained popularity in the last three years. First appearing in rural communities in Africa, the idea was originally intended to benefit areas that

down,” said Gregory Kiluva, who is involved in a United Nations project that encourages the use of solar energy in rural regions of Africa.

Solona Genarating Station, a solar farm outside of Pheonix, Arizona. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.

dependence on certain forms of energy that may not be very cost effective or clean; a shift to any other forms of energy would be difficult to make. For this reason, some

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did not already have easy access to other forms of energy.

Mid-sized solar panels bring affordable electricity to their homes and allow for the use of technology in places where this was previously limited or nonexistent.

“Over the years, we are seeing because of developments as well as use of these productssolar panelsthe prices are going

“In the 1990’s, the cost was about one dollar a watt,” said Kiluva. “And now they have really gone down to about 40-45 cents, which is a clear indication t h a t

Newly installed solar panels on the roof of a single-family home. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.

countries and people have started to embrace solar and renewable technology.”

United Nations’ “cold chain” program targets communities in disadvantaged, hard-toreach areas with little access to medical care, such as remote communities in Kenya. They use refrigerators that run solely on solar energy to transport lifesaving vaccines, especially to young children who have not previously received

immunization.

“The challenges were that these systems have to be very accurate because we have vaccines that lose their potency when they’re exposed to higher temperatures,” said Kiluva.

He pointed out that the costs of using solar energy to run their cold chain are actually lower than they would be if they were using the alternative option, petroleum.

Renewable energy is still finding its place in the global economy. The US, for example, plans to increase coal and oil usage to remain competitive. In other countries, such as Germany, the manufacturing industry lobbies

for exceptionally low electricity tariffs to reduce production costs so as to remain competitive in the global market. The growth of forms of renewable energy depends largely on industries and governments; industries still need support from governments in terms of financial help such as subsidies, soft loans, etc.

But growing initiatives that encourage society to adapt renewable energy and innovation are creating room for them in the future.

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Crispr What Is it?

Crispr, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a relatively new genome editing tool. It was designed to be more efficient and accurate than similar tools. Additionally, it has proved to be more cost effective than alternative genome editing systems.

Because it is so new, Crispr is still being experimented with; animals are often used as test subjects. The capabilities of this system are in the process of being explored, but in simple terms, it is generally used to make specific changes to the genomes of living cells through the addition or subtraction of sections of DNA.

How Does it Work?

The system is comprised mainly of two important components: gRNA, or guide RNA, and Cas-9. These two aspects work together to create a mutation in a DNA sequence, The gRNA accurately targets a specific section of DNA and binds to it via an RNA scaffold, directing Cas-9, an enzyme, to the correct area. The enzyme’s function is to cut out and remove the specified sequence in the DNA. It cuts across both strands of the double helix so that new sections of DNA can be added or removed.

Information provided by Feng Zhang

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Cas-9

By Lily Trentham

Where Can it Be Implemented?

Currently, there are some disputes over where Crispr should be used.

Questions over ethics have risen. For example, when editing reproductive cells, changes do not apply solely to the original test subject; chnages can be passed on to future genarations. However, the system shows promise in the future of altering conditions that can be influenced through genetics. Cancer and high cholesterol are just two examples of the more common conditions being studied. As far as current use goes, scientists in China have tested Crispr on two dogs, altering the genes that regulate myostatin levels. Myostatin controls muscle growth; without it, the dogs become extremely muscular and bulky. This condition is naturally ocurring in some dogs such as whippets, but with the help of Crispr, there are now beagles that share the same condition.

All graphics by Lily Trentham

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Volvo and Uber’s autonomous drive vehicle. Photo courtesy of Volvo car group.

Driving the Future

By Asa Horn.

How autonomous vehicles are shaping the future of infrastructure

Sensors used by Tesla “Autopilot” technology. Photo courtesy of Tesla.

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Imagine never having to drive again, sounds great doesn’t it.

Never having to deal with traffic and being able to check emails on the way to work sounds nice.

Well this dream is becoming a reality through the development of autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles can also reduce the number of major accidents by 90 percent according to estimates by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. They lack the human

intersections and driving on highways. They also are coming from big companies like WAYMO (way forward in mobility automation), that originated from Google’s self driving car project, Tesla, who include autopilot in every one of their vehicles, and Volvo, who is developing a autonomous vehicle with Uber to replace the company’s human drivers.

However some questions of cyber security have been raised.

student of computer science at UT Austin, advised caution while developing the computer systems on these autonomous vehicles.

“Ideally if you have a connected car, the system that is connecting with the rest of the world, it is somehow separate from the actual controls of the car so that a hacker couldn’t take over the car and drive it somewhere else remotely,” Hanna said.

“Roadside communication devices that help warn vehicles of issues that other vehicles have communicated downstream and make sure that message is heard upstream.”

-Kara Kockelman error factor which can cause accidents and can use advanced interconnected systems to increase efficiency and safety of vehicles while going through

Think if any one anywhere in the world could take control of your car and drive it off the road, or change the destination.

Josiah Hanna, a graduate

An one system that the car could have to connect with which Hanna went on to talk about is a new type of intersection for use solely by autonomous

Data visualized from a Waymo vehicle encountering a school bus. Photo courtesy of Waymo.

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Diagram of cameras used to collect data from test users of Volvo’s “Drive me”. Photo courtesy of Volvo car group. vehicles. A vehicle approaching this intersection would give a central computer information about where it wants to come out of the intersection as well as speed and heading information. The computer would then take all of the information it is getting from every vehicle and make a block of space and time for the vehicle to move through.

The job of the vehicle would be to simply to stay inside of it block of space to progress

through the intersection. Upon leaving the intersection it would disconnect from the center computer, while moving the intersection the vehicle would

remain connected incase of emergency the intersection could adjust it´s route or tell it to stop Kara Kockelman, a professor

Volvo and Uber’s autonomous drive vehicle. Photo courtesy of Volvo car group.

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of transportation engineering at UT Austin proposed another interconnected device.

“Roadside communication devices that help warn vehicles of issues that other vehicles have communicated downstream and make sure that message is heard upstream.”

She gave the example of an icy patch, if one vehicle slips it could

Ice is not the only obstacle these vehicles could face, according to Michael Albert of DUKE university, they may also have to exercise caution around us.

“I think when there are a mixture of autonomous vehicles and traditional vehicles on the road, there could be instances of decreased efficiency and greater

increase efficiency. For example if a vehicle approaching an intersection were it has no stop sign but the vehicles entering from its side do have a stop sign it can currently not be assumed a human driver will stop 100 percent of the time. However if the vehicle is autonomous and the previously mentioned roadside devices report no

Volvo and Uber’s autonomous drive vehicle. Photo courtesy of Volvo car group. send out a message to other cars in the area with the location and severity of the patch. This could prompt ether a human response to lay down salt in the area or an automated one. Either way in the time it takes for a response to occur other vehicles would have this information and would be unlikely to slip in the same spot.

Either because they avoided it or carefully maneuvered through the patch with pre-programed responses to icy roads.

likelihood of accident.” Albert said.

This is mainly because humans are incredibly unpredictable compared to automated programs. We don’t follow the laws and we make decisions that are illogical due to distraction or just making a mistake or both. This is one of the major problems for people designing these vehicles as every assumption that can be assumed to be the norm will

issues with it then it can be assumed it will stop extremely close to 100 percent of the time.

Because of this Albert has an optimistic about the adoption of this technology in big cities.

“I strongly suspect that human driving will be outlawed in certain cities in the next 15 years,” Albert said. “I suspect that humans will be permitted to drive in less populated areas for much, much longer.”

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The Financial Reality of VR

By Asa Horn

The numbers of the virtual reality

More and more people are buying virtual reality (VR) headsets as there cost moves down and their number of uses goes up. Current consumers seem to value the price of a headset. This is understandable as many of these handsets require the consumer to already have hundreds of dollars of personal computer hardware already set up to run VR. Currently the Playstation VR (PSVR) is

dominating the market at almost 50% of the market share. Next, at about 20% of market share is the similarly priced Oculus Rift (RIFT) which needs more in terms of computing power to run. Lagging behind the other two at about 15% of market share is the relatively expensive HTC Vive (VIVE) which requires the most in computing power and is the most expensive to directly purchase.

Market Share PSVR

RIFT

“Misc� represents all other small manufactures that make VR headsets. There are hundreds in this catagory but the next most major competotor is the google cardbord at 5 percent of market share. As with the above paragraph these values are rough esimites that are rounded to the nerest 5 percent.

VIVE

MISC

?

?

One head = 10% maket share.

Data from Canalys.com

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Cost

One head= $100 USD on Amazon. com.

PSVR

RIFT

VIVE

All graphics by Asa Horn

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Metamaterials Crossword 1

2 3

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Permeability Permittivity Negative split-ring resonator Maxwell’s diffraction wavelength ceramic radio plastic

1. A metamaterial consists of ____ that induce negative permeability 2. The ability of a material to support a magnetic field 3. Most metamaterials have a ___ index of refraction 4. A metamaterial increases the _____ limit of a lens 5. ____ laws dictate how electromagnetic radiation propagates: 6. The resistance of a material in supporting an electric field 7. Metamaterials could be especially useful in increasing the resolution of ____ wavelengths 8. Metamaterials can be compared to the advent of ___ in the 1960s 9. A material that can survive high temperatures

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