The scandal over the targeting of Britons of Caribbean origin is the latest twist in Europe’s recent politics over immigration, denting the continent’s image as being open, liberal and tolerant. The development comes at an awkward moment for London, which hopes to negotiate trade agreements with the countries of the British Commonwealth as it withdraws from the European Union. The Windrush generation, named after one of the many vessels that ferried some half a million people from the Caribbean islands to the U.K. in the late 1940s, has fallen victim to a ruthless policy that stipulates annual net immigration objectives. In its wake, people with cultural links to the region but who have lived all their lives in the U.K. are having to provide proof of residence for every year of their stay of up to 60-70 years. Inability to furnish such evidence has been met with job losses, threat of deportation, withdrawal of welfare benefits and even denial of critical medical care. For Britons of West Indies origin, the enormous emotional trauma of being regarded as aliens in a country that had invited their families to rebuild its economy must be hard enough to endure. Knowledge that they are at the receiving end of a policy devised by Prime Minister Theresa May when she was in charge of the Home Office only adds to their anxiety. In the event, Ms. May’s apology to the heads of Commonwealth governments over the mistreatment of people from Britain’s former colonies, and the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary, brought too little comfort and too late. The Windrush saga is a reminder of the grotesque response from some central European governments in 2015 to prevent desperate Syrian migrants from entering their territory.
The Centre’s excuse for being unable to submit a draft scheme on the Cauvery issue is so poor that it will convince nobody. That it was extremely reluctant to take a decision which could have electoral repercussions in Karnataka, which goes to the polls on May 12, is well known. But the Attorney General’s explanation that the draft scheme could not be readied because the Prime Minister and other ministers were busy “travelling” in Karnataka is laughable. While the world of politics is sometimes ruled more by expediency than law, the Centre has cut a sorry figure by admitting in court that its leaders are too preoccupied with an election campaign to fulfil a court directive — one over which it could be punished for contempt. That the Attorney General asked for the contempt petition to be taken up a day after the Karnataka election gives the game away. There are several reasons why the Centre’s stand is legally untenable and morally wrong. First and foremost, the framing of a scheme to implement a river water tribunal’s award is the Centre’s statutory obligation, and it is not open to the government to weigh its political or electoral implications in the face of such a deadline. Besides, the plea that the Prime Minister and the Union Minister concerned were unavailable is questionable — a day before the submission was made, the Cabinet had met and announced important decisions.
In its verdict on February 16, 2018, the apex court granted six weeks’ time to the Centre for framing the scheme. It added for good measure that no extension of time would be granted on any ground. Yet, on the eve of the expiry of the deadline, the Union government chose to file an application seeking three more months. Tamil Nadu filed a contempt petition. In its application for more time, the Centre had mentioned that it had convened a meeting of representatives of the four States and had also cited the differences of opinion among the States over the composition of the proposed mechanism. There was at least a ring of truth to this, given that consulting the parties over the composition of the scheme was necessary to frame it. Even then, the Supreme Court was unimpressed; it had asked the Centre to prove its bona fides by submitting a draft scheme on May 3. That it not only failed to do so, but also chose to cite the Prime Minister’s preoccupation with the campaign is bound to raise questions about its commitment to impartial governance and its disdain for judicial orders. The Centre’s attitude suggests that it hopes to persuade the court that a degree of political expediency in the light of the election is normal and acceptable. Clearly, it is not as keen on proving its own bona fides as it is on improving its prospects in Karnataka.
At least 22 persons were killed and over 100 injured in different parts of Rajasthan as a high-speed dust storm followed by thundershowers wreaked havoc on Wednesday night, leaving behind a trail of destruction. Trees and electricity poles were uprooted and houses collapsed in the high-intensity squall.
According to preliminary figures released by the State Disaster Management and Relief Department, 11 people died in Bharatpur district, 4 in Alwar, 5 in Dholpur and one each in Jhunjhunu and Bikaner.
Relief and rescue teams have been pressed into service amid fears that the death toll may rise. The power discoms launched action on a war-footing to restore electricity supply in the affected areas, while the administration ordered survey for damaged properties.
Major destruction was reported from Alwar district, where trees were uprooted and power cables snapped. The entire district plunged into darkness due to disconnection of power supply.
Vasundhara expresses grief
Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje expressed grief over the calamity and directed the Ministers and officers concerned to begin the relief work immediately and restore utilities. Ms. Raje said the government was working with the local authorities to mitigate the situation.
Senior Congress leader and former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot cancelled his birthday celebrations on Thursday in view of the disaster, saying he was extremely grieved at the loss of lives and expressed solidarity with the victims.
Mr. Gehlot said blood donation camps and other public interest programmes marking his birthday would, however, continue.
Rubber electronics and sensors that operate normally even when stretched to up to 50 percent of their length could work as artificial skin on robots, according to a new study. They could also give flexible sensing capabilities to a range of electronic devices, the researchers said.
Like human skin, the material is able to sense strain, pressure and temperature, according to the researchers.
"It's a piece of rubber, but it has the function of a circuit and sensors," said Cunjiang Yu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. Yu and his team describedtheir innovation in a study published online Sept. 8 in the journal Science Advances. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]
usaid the rubber electronics and sensors have a wide range of applications, from biomedical implants to wearable electronics to digitized clothing to "smart" surgical gloves.
Because the rubbery semiconductor starts in a liquid form, it could be poured into molds and scaled up to large sizes or even used like a kind of rubber-based ink and 3D printed into a variety of different objects, Yu told Live Science.
One of the more interesting applications could be for robots themselves, Yu said. Humans want to be able to work near robots and to coexist with them, he said. But for that to happen safely, the robot itself needs to be able to fully sense its surroundings. A robot — perhaps even a soft, flexible one, with skin that's able to feel its surroundings—could work side by side with humans without endangering them, Yu said.
In experiments, Yu and his colleagues used the electronic skin to accurately sense the temperature of hot and cold water in a cup and also translate computer signals sent to the robotic hand into finger gestures representing the alphabet from American Sign Language.
Electronics and robots are typically limited by the stiff and rigid semiconductor materials that make up their computer circuits. As such, most electronic devices lack the ability to stretch, the authors said in the study.
In research labs around the world, scientists are working on various solutions to produce flexible electronics. Some innovations include tiny, embedded, rigid transistors that are "islands"in a flexible matrix. Others involve using stretchy, polymer semiconductors. The main challenges with many of these ideas are that they're too difficult or expensive to allow for mass production, or the transmission of electrons through the material is not very efficient, Yu said.
This latest solution addresses both of those issues, the researchers said. Instead of inventing sophisticated polymers from scratch, the scientists turned to low-cost, commercially available alternatives to create a stretchy material that works as a stable semiconductor and can be scaled up for manufacturing, the researchers wrote in the study.
Yu and his colleagues made the stretchable material by mixing tiny, semiconducting nanofibrils — nanowires 1,000 times thinner than a human hair — into a solution of a widely used, silicon-based organic polymer, called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS for short.
When dried at 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), the solution hardened into a stretchable material embedded with millions of tiny nanowires that carry electric current.
The researchers applied strips of the material to the fingers of a robotic hand. The electronic skin worked as a sensor that produced different electrical signals when the fingers bent. Bending a finger joint puts strain on the material, and that reduces electric current flow in a way that can be measured.
For example, to express the sign-language letter "Y," the index, middle and ring fingers were completely folded, which created a higher electrical resistance. The thumb and pinky fingers were kept straight, which produced lower electrical resistance.
Using the electrical signals, the researchers were able spell out "YU LAB" in American Sign Language.
Yu said he and his colleagues are already working to improve the material's electronic performance and stretchiness well beyond the 50 percent mark that was tested in the new study.
"This will change the field of stretchable electronics," he said.
In spy novels and superhero films, the ability to see through walls has always been a handy — not to mention, impressive — trick. And now, this tech could be available to people in real life, with smartphone cameras that can help detect moving objects even if they are hidden around corners, according to a new study.
This futuristic-sounding tech could one day help vehicles see around blind corners, the researchers said
We may eventually be able to use this idea to alert drivers to pedestrians or cars that are about to dart out from behind buildings into a driver's path. Perhaps a few seconds of notice could save lives," said study lead author Katie Bouman, an imaging scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[Mind-Controlled Cats?! 6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real]
"Search and rescue, or helping to understand what is going on behind a wall in a hostage situation, are also potential applications," Bouman added.
Researchers have taken many different approaches in trying to make the "superpower" of seeing around corners a reality. For example, in 2015, researchers showed they could use lasers to see objects around cornersby firing light pulses at surfaces near the items. Those surfaces could act like mirrors, scattering the laser pulses onto any hidden objects. By analyzing the light that was reflected off the objects and other surfaces back onto the scanners, researchers could reconstruct the shapes of the hidden items.
Although most strategies for seeing around corners "are really great ideas," they also "usually require complex modeling [or] specialized hardware, or are computationally expensive," Bouman told Live Science. The 2015 study's technique, for example, required both extremely fast lasers and extraordinarily sensitive cameras.
But Bouman and her colleagues' method for seeing around corners simply uses a smartphone camera.
"We use light naturally in the scene and do not have to introduce our own light to probe the hidden scene," Bouman said. "This allows us to use common consumer cameras and not specialized equipment to see around corners."
The new system, known as CornerCameras, analyzes light that is reflected off objects hidden around corners and that falls on the ground within the line of sight of the camera. This light is called the "penumbra."
he system analyzes this penumbra over several seconds, stitching together dozens of distinct images, according to the study. This data helps the system measure the speed and trajectory of objects around corners in real time. (It does not see any identifying details about those objects — just the fact that they are moving.)
"I think the biggest surprise was that the system worked well in situations that I would not have expected," Bouman said. "For instance, once, during filming, it started raining. This caused big raindrops to start appearing on the ground, changing the color of the concrete floor."
Because CornerCameras is trying to analyze light signals that are just 0.1 percent of the total brightness of the ground, "I thought these raindrops would wipe out any signal we had," Bouman said. However, CornerCameras analyzes the data of a scene across dozens of images, so "the effect of the raindrops was essentially averaged out."
One current limitation of CornerCameras is that it requires a stationary camera that's held very steady. "In many situations, such as in a collision-avoidance system on a car, you do not have the luxury of a stationary camera," Bouman said. The researchers are now focused on getting the system to work first on a moving wheelchair and eventually on a moving car, she said.
Future research will also aim to make CornerCameras work in a variety of lighting situations, or in changing lighting conditions, such as when clouds overhead constantly move in front of the sun. "Getting the system to work in these scenarios would open up the possibility of it being able to be used by a person with a handheld smartphone," Bouman said.
Bouman and her colleagues will detail their findings on Oct. 25 at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Venice, Italy.
Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study.
Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well.
But the new study's researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of Invisibility in Pop Culture]
Complex materials such as sugar cubes are opaque because their disorderly structures scatter light around inside them multiple times, said study senior author Stefan Rotter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna.
"A light wave can enter and exit the object, but will never pass through the medium on a straight line," Rotter said in a statement. "Instead, it is scattered into all possible directions."
With their new technique, Rotter and his colleagues did not want to reroute the light waves.
"Our goal was to guide the original light wave through the object, as if the object was not there at all. This sounds strange, but with certain materials and using our special wave technology, it is indeed possible," study co-author Andre Brandstötter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna, said in the statement.
The concept involves shining a beam, such as a laser, onto a material from above to pump it full of energy. This can alter the material's properties, making it transparent to other wavelengths of light coming in from the side.
"To achieve this, a beam with exactly the right pattern has to be projected onto the material from above — like from a standard video projector, except with much higher resolution," study lead author Konstantinos Makris, now at the University of Crete in Greece, said in a statement.
The pattern that is projected onto an object to render it invisible must correspond perfectly to the inner irregularities of that item that usually scatters light, the researchers said.
"Every object we want to make transparent has to be irradiated with its own specific pattern, depending on the microscopic details of the scattering process inside," Rotter said in a statement. "The method we developed now allows us to calculate the right pattern for any arbitrary scattering medium."
Rotter and his colleagues are now carrying out experiments to see whether their idea will actually work. "We think that an experiment would be easiest to perform in acoustics," Rotter told Live Science. For instance, loudspeakers could generate sound waves to make a tube "transparent" to other forms of sound.
"For me, personally, the most surprising aspect is that this concept works at all," Rotter said. "There may be many more surprises when digging deeper along these lines."
Eventually, similar research could also experiment with light, he said. Such work could have applications in telecommunication networks, Rotter said. "It is clear, however, that considerable work is still required to get this from the stage of fundamental research to practical applications," Rotter said.
