Toggle light / dark theme

In Brief

  • Canada is spending millions to ensure all citizens have access to home internet with download speeds of at least 50Mbps and upload speeds of 10Mbps in the next 10 to 15 years.
  • At a time when so many things we used to do in person or via a physical medium are done digitally, living without the internet inherently puts a person at a disadvantage.

Canada is making some major moves to ensure that every citizen in the country has access to fast broadband speeds. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced this week that it was setting up a fund of $750 million available over the next five years to expand internet access.

The CRTC is implementing a standard of universal availability of home internet with download speeds of at least 50Mbps and upload speeds of 10Mbps with the option of unlimited data. In doing so, the Canadian government is declaring that broadband internet is a basic telecommunications service, akin to phone service.

Read more

He also said there are a lot of opportunities for India but it is China which is seizing them. “India must rise to the role it should be playing for its benefit, for the benefit of science and rest of the world,” he added. India and China have been growing rapidly in the last few decades and both have doubled their GDP. But China, he said, in this period doubled its investment in science and technology while India’s funding reminded at the same level. South Korea, a much smaller country, is also investing a lot in science and the results are showing, he said.


Funding delays and legal challenges preventing the country from achieving greatness, says Nobel Laureate David Gross.

Read more

Farmers have numerous sources of technology and data available to use in their operations, but many producers struggle with what kind and how much technology they need, according to an article on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources website.

Understanding which technologies and data sets are important and how to best use them is the focus of Joe Luck’s work as Nebraska Extension precision agriculture engineer.

“To me, precision ag has become a catchall term, but basically it refers to hardware and software systems that improve knowledge and decision support to make farming more manageable, sustainable and profitable,” said Luck, who also is an assistant professor of biological systems engineering.

Read more

Nice.


Lawrence Livermore scientists have collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of researchers including colleagues from Sandia National Laboratories to develop an efficient hydrogen storage system that could be a boon for hydrogen powered vehicles.

Hydrogen is an excellent energy carrier, but the development of lightweight solid-state materials for compact, low-pressure storage is a huge challenge.

Complex metal hydrides are a promising class of materials, but their viability is usually limited by slow hydrogen uptake and release. Nanoconfinement—infiltrating the metal hydride within a matrix of another material such as carbon—can, in certain instances, help make this process faster by shortening diffusion pathways for hydrogen or by changing the thermodynamic stability of the material.

Read more