New York University
Tough, light, inexpensive composite brake rotors could make their way to regular cars
Currently, brakes made from composite materials tend to be expensive, and as such mainly just find their way onto high-performance cars and motorcycles. That could be about to change, however. Researchers from Michigan-based materials company REL and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are developing aluminum composite brake rotors for everyday cars. Not only should they be much easier to produce than existing composite rotors, but they should also be 60 percent lighter than their iron counterparts, and last three times as long. Read More
Although already incorporated into devices such as the Microsoft Kinect gaming console, the ability of computer vision systems to recognize specific body poses is still very much a work in progress. One of the big challenges involves the chaos that such systems encounter in real-world use – while it’s one thing to initially train a computer to recognize a given person standing and pointing against a neutral background, for instance, it’s quite another to expect it to recognize that same stance in visual data where variables such as background, clothing and body type are constantly changing. A new interactive music video from Dutch electronic band C-Mon & Kypski, however, may help address that problem. Read More
