Bundesliga using Video Assistant Referees?

MLS began using video assistant referees this month and the Bundesliga, Germany’s top flight began utilising the tech too. All 23 referees within the league will now serve as an assistant video referee during the 2017-2018 campaign. The VAR system is very controversial, slowing down match pace being a huge worry it was used in a penalty situation between Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen.

FIFA technical director Marco Van Basten argues otherwise:

“Football will remain the same….But we’re working so that through the video assistants it will become more honest. All that we want is that the result at the end of a game is achieved in a regular manner.”

Different leagues may employ the VAR differently but Bundesliga can only apply it in specific situations, 4 to be exact, irregularities in goal decisions, penalties, red cards and if there is mistaken identity when a player is given a red card.

Hologram Rock Tour?

Rock Star Ronnie James Dio passed away in 2010, but thanks to holograms the fomer Black Sabbath Frontman will once again start touring Europe on November 30th before going stateside next spring.

The set will change nightly according to Rolling Stone and audio recordings were pulled from his entire career. “He” will also get a backing band each night and some nights “he’ll” have singers Tim “Ripper” Owens (Judas Priest) and Oni Logan (Racer X) alongside him. The stage will go back to thee Sacred Heart and Dream Evil tours, and allegedly the band are booking between 80 and 100 shows.

To see how this may look check out the video above!

 

MS PAINT GOING AWAY?!

There was a lot of furore online recently with a lot of people upset a the prospect that the Windows Fall Creators Update is taking away MS PAINT?!

Well kind of.

The drawing programme that came with every Windows operating system from 1985 is being removed from the OS as a basic feature and will move to the Microsoft store. (so we can still draw a big mess and then fill it in!)

It’s becoming Paint 3D and has a ton of new 3D capabilities and do all of the things the old paint could do and for free!

 

Gun-firing drones

US firm reveals gun-toting drone that can fire in mid-air

 

A tech firm in America has developed drones that are able to aim and fire while flying in mid-air.

The Tikad drone, developed by Duke Robotics, is armed with a machine-gun and a grenade launcher.

The gun can be fired remotely by remote control and have been designed to with the ideal to reduce military casualties  by cutting down the number of troops on the ground.

 

Campaigners have been pretty vocal about the concerns they have about these drones, such as them being mis-used and killing innocent people.

Robotics expert Professor seems to agree with these concerns as he said ‘there have been many legal cases of human-rights violations using the large fixed-wing drones, and these could potentially result in many more.”

 

There has already been a lot interest in the drone from several governments but how it will be rolled out in the future will depend on America.

Biologic

This is a really cool new piece of tech that utilises the natural behavior of certain microorganisms to power objects and interfaces, the same way a motor might.

BioLogic relies on Bacillus subtilis natto—a bacterium, commonly used in Japanese cooking, that reacts to atmospheric moisture, to create clothing that adjust to it’s wearer breathing rhythm as their body heat and humidity increase and decreases, curling upwards allowing it to ‘breathe’ if it gets to 100% humidity the flaps will be 100% open allowing it to breathe freely.

BioLogic have turned natto cells into a film which then was printed on to layers of spandex and turned in to clothing. Different patterns printed onto the cells will create different behaviour patterns. For example, to make the fabric curl it is applied uniformly across the fabric, to make it bend sharply the cells are applied in straight lines.

 

Google WorldSense

Google have recently announced a standalone Daydream VR headset that will utilise the Tango Augmented Reality system, the way it does this is not with cameras around the room like with a HTC Vive, a head on camera like the Playstation VR but with camera’s built into the headset itself.

Calling this tech ‘World Sense’ it allows users to walk around in AR/VR worlds without the fear of walking into walls or falling down the stairs.

“The idea is that you have everything you need for VR built right into the headset itself, there’s no cables, no phone and certainly no big PC. The whole device is designed just for VR……..World Sense enables what’s known as positional tracking and with it your view in the virtual world exactly matches your movement in the real world. It works by using a handful of sensors on the device that look out into your surroundings, and that means it works everywhere, there’s no set-up and no cameras to install.”  (Head of Google VR Clay Bavor)

It does support the Daydream controller but it won’t be visible in the VR world nor will it interact with things that are in the Virtual world like much of the other VR systems available today.

Scotland’s Renewable Energy

During the 1st 6months of 2017 Scotland generated enough power by their wind turbines to power Scotland for more power than they actually need for 6 days straight.

The data was collated by WeatherEnergy and later analysed by WWF Scotland, which concluded that the turbines generated 1,039,001 MWh of electricity in June which is enough energy to power 3M homes!

Dr Sam Gardner, the acting director of WWF Scotland, said in a statement

The first six months of 2017 have certainly been incredible for renewables, with wind turbines alone helping to ensure millions of tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions were avoided.

Scotland is continuing to break records on renewable electricity, attracting investment, creating jobs and tackling climate change.

If we want to reap the same rewards in the transport and heating sectors, we need the Scottish Government to put in place strong policies on energy efficiency and transport in the forthcoming Climate Change Bill.

 

Karen Robinson of WeatherEnergy also released a statement:

It’s great to see this data confirm that Scotland is knocking it out of the park on wind power with total output for June in particular up on the same period compared to the past two years.

There’s no doubt renewables are helping households increasingly avoid fossil fuels for their electricity needs.

 

Self Healing Phones?

University of Melbourne researchers are probably going to save a lot of people a lot of money, by developing a self healing gel that could prevent phone screens from permanent damage.

Melbourne School of Engineering researcher Dr Luke Connal said:

After printing, these objects can heal a crack or even a cut and regain their original strength. This could enable custom printing of coatings that can heal after breakages, potentially as coatings for mobile phones.

The materials we developed can also change shape when triggered by being swollen in a solvent, such as water. This enables printed objects to change shape once printed, which is known as 4D printing.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Disney Laughing Detection

Disney want to know how you enjoy their films, at IEEE’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Disney Research and Caltech highlighted the way they track facial expressions of people watching films.

The tech is so advanced they claim that they can predict the face’s future expressions through the remainder of a film, its called “factorised variational autoencoders” (FVAEs)

To make this possible, researchers used infared cameras to the audiences of 150 showings of 9 films, including a lot of Disney movies! Like Zootopia, Big Hero 6 and the recent Star Wars films.

After compiling this huge amount of data, they went back and tested it on some more moviegoers, after an initial set up period the FVAEs were able to predict when an audience member (remember these are brand new fresh audiences) was about to laugh or smile as tied to significant moments in each of the films. They hope to predict other emotive moments in films such as fear and sadness. How this data will be used is unclear, but it could help them better understand audience reactions than human based market research.

 

A Company Is MicroChipping It’s Employees

A company in the US, Three Two Market based in Wisconsin, is planning to microchip it’s employees, yet the implants are totally voluntary.

Three Two Market are paying for the £230 procedure which is performed by a Swedish Company called BioHax. Todd Westby CEO of Three Two Market sees the implants (which strangely enough, will go between the webbing of the thumb and index finger) to open doors, use of copy machines, logging on to the computers, storing medical info and payment at RFID terminals.

Security is of course a major concern as it could allow hackers to steal data and what’s stopping the companies people work for from snooping on their employees? However it is said that no data is stored or monitored at a company level, but it is unclear if BioHax has access to this data. The chip only communicates with a reader such as a door, or a vending machine. But what happens if someone quits? Leaves?