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Top 5 sustainable technology trends of 2015

Women constructing solar cookers at the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. Photograph: Alamy

From a smog-scrubbing tower to an affordable water purifier, we have seen bold ideas in 2015 for solving some of the toughest environmental problems. Here are five stories that highlight some of the technologies that promise to advance sustainability efforts by businesses and consumers.

Heavy pollution and fog in Beijing. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Artist Daan Roosegaarde and nanoparticle researcher Bob Ursem co-designed a 23-foot tower, installed in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, that sucks in air, filters air pollutants and expels cleaned air back to the outdoors. The two hope their idea will help cities such as Beijing fight smog. “We’ve installed it in a parking garage here in the Netherlands and it sucks and cleans both the inside and outside air,” Ursem says. “Inside the parking garage, the air became 70% cleaner.”

Wind turbines. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Spain-based Vortex Bladeless is developing a turbine that it says will be less noisy and bird friendly. The cylindrical turbine generates electricity by harnessing the vibration caused by the wind. A generator then converts the resulting kinetic energy into electricity. “Wind turbines now are too noisy for people’s backyard,” says David Suriol, co-founder of the company. “We want to bring wind power generation to people’s houses like solar power.”

The Nest thermostat, created by a Palo Alto, California-based company, is an example of a smart home. The unit uses sensors to track heat and cooling systems in the home, and doubles as a smoke detector. It’s also programmable via smartphone. Photograph: Christian Science Monitor/Getty

Homes of today tend to get their electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants that are miles away. Homes of tomorrow could produce their own, clean energy and while also using less power. That’s the idea behind several prototype homes in the US, Australia and Europe that are built to show and test technology that could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Technologies that are featured in those homes include solar panels to produce electricity, thick windows and walls for better insulation, sensors and software to program lights and cooling or heating automatically throughout the day and night and battery packs to store solar electricity for use at night.

DONG Energy’s power station provides steam, ash and gypsum as waste products to other companies for their use in Kalundborg, Denmark. As pioneers of so-called industrial symbiosis, these companies swap waste and byproducts to cut costs and carbon dioxide emissions profitably. Photograph: STAFF/Reuters

Lowering the levels of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases, is crucial for fighting climate change. A crop of startups are developing ways to capture that greenhouse gas from the air and sell it to companies that use it to make products such as diesel fuel. “Scientists are increasingly convinced that we are going to need large scale removal systems to fight climate change,” says Noah Deich, founder of nonprofit Center for Carbon Removal. “I’m excited about direct air capture. It could be a really important technology to add to the portfolio.”

Kids play in a polluted canal in central Bangkok. Photograph: Guillaume Payen/ZUMA Press/Corbis

A Texas teen, Perry Alagappan, won a water technology design prize in Sweden last August with a filter that he estimates would cost $20 to make. The filter, built with graphene nanotubes, could remove 99% of the heavy metals from water that runs through it. It could be particularly useful in cleaning up rivers contaminated with metals from electronic recycling factories that dotted Asia. The filter could be used again after a rinse with a vinegar concoction to remove the captured metals, which could then be sold to make products such as mobile phones. “I became interested in water purification when I visited my grandparents in India, and saw with my own eyes how electronic waste severely contaminated the environment,” Alagappan says.

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Standout science and technology in 2015

The blistering advance of technology we are experiencing in the 21st century is nothing short of mind-boggling, and the rate of change being exponential, 2015 was by definition the busiest year yet. So before the Gregorian calendar keels over into 2016, let's take a wander through some of the year's most significant, salutary and attention-grabbing examples of scientific achievement, technological innovation and human endeavor.

From the lab

It's been over a century since Einstein postulated the wave/particle duality of light, but it wasn't until earlier this year that was directly observed by EPFL researchers, who captured the phenomena by using a sophisticated electron imaging technique.

Across the Atlantic geochemists discovered that life on Earth started hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, engineers figured out how to make 3D objects from the much-vaunted wonder material graphene, and physicists set a new distance record for quantum teleportation of information over optical fibers.

Audi created a stir with the creations of synthetic diesel from just water and carbon dioxide, as did UAB researchers when they created the first experimental wormhole that links two regions of space magnetically. But perhaps the oddest thing to emerge from the lab in 2015 was an unboiled egg, which may or may not go well with a newly discovered strain of seaweed that tastes like bacon.

Getting quite brainy

While the ability to fully map the human brain may be some way off, if it's even possible at all, our ability to both understand and imitate its complexities took some serious strides forward in 2015. Examples include the development of a brain imaging tool that can see all of the brain's cellular objects and many of their sub-cellular components, a lab grown "brain organoid" equivalent in size and structure to that of a five-week old fetus, intelligence boosting gene therapy (for mice only at this stage), successfully using brainwaves to help a paralyzed man walk again and an array of new approaches to combating cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

Fifty years after Moore's Law was conceived, there were many advances that could ensure computing power continues to accelerate exponentially, including the use of memresistors to create advanced computers that function like the human brain. News of the first biologically-powered computer chip emerged just this month and the long-sought goal of practical quantum computing also crept closer on several fronts, with breakthroughs such as photonic processors, quantum hard drives and silicon-based quantum logic gates.

Celebrating space

2015 saw a string of stunning achievements in space exploration, but it is most likely to be remembered as the year we got to Pluto – at least, the New Horizons probe did, sending back beautiful, invaluable images and data from the dwarf planet and its moons some 3 billion miles away.

Some significant space anniversaries also passed in 2015, namely 25-years since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and half a century since the first space walk.

But the biggest thing in space this year was the biggest thing in space – a newly-discovered ring of nine galaxies 7 billion light years away and 5 billion light years wide that covers a third of our sky.

In skies closer to home, the age of commercial space flight rolled on with SpaceX providing the clear highlight by successfully nailing the first landing of an orbital space booster rocket earlier this month.

Read more in our full 2015 space round-up.

Printing the future

While 3D printing had already moved well beyond plastic trinkets, 2015 saw it begin to show its true potential as an industrial process. Perhaps more accurately described as "additive manufacturing" in this context, we saw this process used to create the first 3D-printed jet engine, the first FAA approved jet engine part, and a jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle that can reach speeds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h). Add in a variety of body parts, including replacement titanium sternum and rib cage, teeth, hair, houses, bricks and cars, and you begin to get the picture of just how far-reaching this technology is set to become.

Our pick for the most thought-provoking object to emerge from a 3D printer this year is Mushtari – a 3D-printed photosynthetic wearable embedded with living bacteria designed to produce sugars or bio-fuel when exposed to light. Conceived as a kind of living spacesuit, this wearable microbiome would act like an organ system to ingest biomass, absorb nutrients, and then eject waste products when exploring other worlds.

Robots evolve

Perhaps the most unnerving news from the world of robotics this year came from the University of Cambridge, where researchers created a mother robot that can not only build its own children, but mimic the process of natural selection to improve their capabilities with each generation.

Despite this slightly depressing news, watching the world's most advanced robots struggle to open doors at the DARPA robotics challenge finals does suggest we have a little way to go before robot armageddon strikes – though we shouldn't dismiss that scenario, as we were reminded in July when over 1,000 robotics and artificial intelligence researchers urged the UN to ban on the development of weaponized AI. We also saw the beginnings of another, somewhat surprising element of AI begin to take shape – the creative potential of robots as painters, musicians, architects and storytellers.

High energy

This year saw renewable energy overtake coal in the UK's energy mix, Portland install water pipes in that generate their own electricity, the Wendelstein 7-x experimental fusion reactor fire up and solar energy – particularly cheap Perovskite cells – continue to advance, but innovations in the energy storage arena also grabbed our attention at Gizmag. Tesla unveiled its home battery storage system, Daimler and Nissan gave used EV batteries a second lease of life and solar energy and a number of promising new battery technologies made headlines, including lithium-air batteries, flow batteries and energy dense hybrid supercapacitors.

Recorded history

Finally, let's see out the year with a quick look at some of the record-breaking feats that 2015 delivered. The world's thinnest light-bulb was created using (surprise, surprise) graphene, the largest astronomical image of all time – at 46-billion pixels – was complied, a robot walked 83 miles in 54 hours, a maglev train hit 375 mph (603 km/h), Stuttgart University students took an EV from 0-62 mph (100 km/h) in a blistering 1.779 seconds, and a Canadian cyclist clocked 85.71 mph (137.9 km/h) to set a new world record for human-powered speed.

Of course, we've only just scratched the surface when it comes to significant moments in science and technology, let alone the biggest news of the year across the many fields that Gizmag covers, so for a closer look at more of the best 2015 had to offer, follow the links below.

Before you go ... we'd like to wish all our readers a happy new year! We very much appreciate the support and feedback you've given us in 2015. Have a safe and innovative 2016!

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Indian technology startups strike pot of gold in 2015

For Indian technology startups, 2015 has proved to be a remarkable year as they raised more than $7 billion in private funding in 789 new deals compared with $5.4 billion in 2014.

According to a report from startup tracker Tracxn, as many as 341 deals totaling $3.17 billion were finalised between January and June in 2015 while 448 deals were concluded for an amount of $4.05 billion from July 1 to December 15.

The most significant funding rounds during the year were by Paytm which scored $500 million; classifieds portal Quikr landed $150 million; restaurant discovery portal Zomato took in $60 million; Flipkart received $700 million; and music streaming service Saavn, mobile advertising firm InMobi, and online furniture retailer PepperFry were funded to the tune of $100 million each.

The top five investors were: Sequoia Capital backing 33 startups, Accel Partners invested in 32 companies, Tiger Global funded 28, SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital took a stake in 19 organisations each, the report added. Of the 4,200 startups, 1,200 were tech startups and majority of them were e-commerce, consumer service, and aggregators, the report said.

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) President R Chandrashekhar said that apart from positively impacting the lifestyles of citizens involved, the start-ups were creating innovative technology solutions.

"These solutions are addressing the key social problems that India was facing and creating significant growth opportunities for stakeholders," he added.

The past year also saw the emergence of ambitious young entrepreneurs with new ideas who are focusing on the strengths and innovation potential of the Indian startup ecosystem, which has matured a lot compared with the last few years.

Executive Director of the Mumbai-based Astarc Ventures, Salil Musale, said that a significant number of investments were made in mobile app based startups from restaurant discovery and food delivery, to home services, and taxi hailing startups during the year.

"The venture capitalists became moderately cautious with focus on unit economics and path to profitability on some of these trends, but disruptive ideas and strong teams continued to attract capital," he told ZDNet.

Terming 2015 as a "hallmark year" for Indian startups, Musale said that higher risk appetites among investors, especially in the seed and series A levels, bolstered the confidence of the entrepreneurs and encouraged them to come up with innovative ideas.

The year also witnessed an increase in the quality of entrepreneurs who were looking at building software and hardware products for the global market besides the emergence of startups in areas such as foodtech, fintech, robotics, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

There was also increased support from the Indian government and the states in the form of incentives, public listing opportunities, and other avenues in establishing the startups.

"We also witnessed how the investors burn their fingers with certain business models in the B2C space," Musale said.

Astarc Ventures has made 7 investment commitments in 2015 and the company is planning to increase the number to 10 in 2016.

"We will look at investing in futuristic disruptive technology startups like our recent investment in Absentia Virtual Reality, and also at companies which are strategic to existing business domains, and those which could be allied [with] instore retail analytics, automotive IoT, store display solutions, home decor, agri-tech," Musale said.

Financial technology and software have been big areas of interest besides consumer media, according to Sudhir Sethi, Founder Chairman and Managing Director IDG Ventures India.

Sethi said that companies like CreditMantri, LetsVenture, Momoe in the fintech space, and NestAway, POPXo, Rentomojo, Tripoto in the consumer media space were funded by IDG Ventures India this year.

"Another noteworthy change has been the emergence of Indian rupee capital as a major force in the form of LPs (investors in funds) and our company led that strategy of raising rupee capital for the venture asset class in India," Sethi said.

Giving details of the investments by IDG Ventures, Sethi said that the company participated in 32 transactions and they included 16 Series A rounds, eight seed deals and three were a follow-on round within the same calendar year.

"We expect a renewed focus on funding around enterprise applications and mobile-first models around content and commerce. Fintech will be a key focus area as well. Business models which are capital efficient will continue to attract capital as they scale," he opined.

NASSCOM, which released the second edition on Indian startups entitled Start-up India - Momentous Rise of the Indian Start-up Ecosystem, wants the government to formulate a policy to promote their overall growth and foster an environment of entrepreneurship. Even infrastructure should be developed across cities for better connectivity, transportation, and basic amenities to spur business growth.

"The government should lay out rules on exit options for entrepreneurs as well as investors to boost cross border M&As," NASSCOM said.

Some states like Karnataka and Rajasthan have already launched state-level policies in the recent past and more states are expected to follow suit in the coming year.

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Explaining Your Math: Unnecessary at Best, Encumbering at Worst

At a middle school in California, the state testing in math was underway via the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam. A girl pointed to the problem on the computer screen and asked “What do I do?” The proctor read the instructions for the problem and told the student: “You need to explain how you got your answer.”

The girl threw her arms up in frustration and said, “Why can’t I just do the problem, enter the answer and be done with it?”

The answer to her question comes down to what the education establishment believes “understanding” to be, and how to measure it. K-12 mathematics instruction involves equal parts procedural skills and understanding. What “understanding” in mathematics means, however, has long been a topic of debate. One distinction popular with today’s math-reform advocates is between “knowing” and “doing.” A student, reformers argue, might be able to “do” a problem (i.e., solve it mathematically) without understanding the concepts behind the problem-solving procedure. Perhaps he or she has simply memorized the method without understanding it and is performing the steps by “rote.”

One distinction is between “knowing” and “doing.”

The Common Core math standards, adopted in 42 states and the District of Columbia and reflected in Common Core-aligned tests like the SBAC and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), take understanding to a whole new level. “Students who lack understanding of a topic may rely on procedures too heavily,” states the Common Core website. “But what does mathematical understanding look like?” And how can teachers assess it?

One way is to ask the student to justify, in a way that is appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true, or where a mathematical rule comes from.

The underlying assumption here is that if a student understands something, he or she can explain it—and that deficient explanation signals deficient understanding. But this raises yet another question: What constitutes a satisfactory explanation?

While the Common Core leaves this unspecified, current practices are suggestive. Consider a problem that asks how many total pencils there are if five people have three pencils each. In the eyes of some educators, explaining why the answer is 15 by stating, simply, that 5 x 3 = 15 is not satisfactory. To show they truly understand why 5 x 3 is 15, and why this computation provides the answer to the given word problem, students must do more. For example, they might draw a picture illustrating five groups of three pencils. (And in some instances, as was the case recently in a third-grade classroom, a student would be considered to not understand if he or she drew three groups of five pencils.)

Consider now a problem given in a pre-algebra course that involves percentages: “A coat has been reduced by 20 percent to sell for $160. What was the original price of the coat?”

A student may show the solution as follows:

x = original cost of coat in dollars 100% – 20% = 80% 0.8x = $160 x = $200

Clearly, the student knows the mathematical procedure necessary to solve the problem. In fact, for years students were told not to explain their answers, but to show their work, and if presented in a clear and organized manner, the math contained in this work was considered to be its own explanation. But the above demonstration might, through the prism of the Common Core standards, be considered an inadequate explanation. That is, inspired by what the standards say about understanding, one could ask “Does the student know why the subtraction operation is done to obtain the 80 percent used in the equation or is he doing it as a mechanical procedure—i.e., without understanding?”

In a middle school observed by one of us, the school’s goal was to increase student proficiency in solving math problems by requiring students to explain how they solved them. This was not required for all problems given; rather, they were expected to do this for two or three problems in class per week, which took up to 10 percent of total weekly class time. They were instructed on how to write explanations for their math solutions using a model called “Need, Know, Do.” In the problem example given above, the “Need” would be “What was the original price of the coat?”  The “Know” would be the information provided in the problem statement, here the price of the discounted coat and the discount rate. The “Do” is the process of solving the problem.

Students were instructed to use “flow maps” and diagrams to describe the thinking and steps used to solve the problem, after which they were to write a narrative summary of what was described in the flow maps and elsewhere. They were told that the “Do” (as well as the flow maps) explains what they did to solve the problem and that the narrative summary provides the why. Many students, though, had difficulty differentiating the “Do” section from the final narrative. But in order for their explanation to qualify as “high level,” they couldn’t simply state “100% – 20% = 80%”; they had to explain what that means. For example, they might say, “The discount rate subtracted from 100 percent gives the amount that I pay.”

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Sclar dot product

Scalar Dot Product:
The scalar product of to vectors A and B is written A . B is define
A . B = AB cos

where A and B are the Magnitude of vectors A and B and Angle between them

dot product of to vectors A and B interpretation for physical, These are brought to origin in common.
then, A.B = (A) (projection of A and B)

A.B = A (magnitude of components B in the direction A)
= A (B cos) = AB cos

Similarly     A.B = B ( A cos) = BA cos

Characteristic of scalar product:
1. since A.B = AB cos and B.A = BA cos.
in other words, scalar product is commutative.
2. The Scalar product of two mutually perpendicular vector is zero A.B = AB cos90 = 0
3. The scalar product of to parallel vectors is equal to the product of their magnitudes. Thus parallel vectors angel = 0
4. The self product of vector A is equal to square of its magnitude.

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Basic Concepts of Vectors (FSC part 1)

Basic Concepts of Vectors:
1. Vectors:
    As we study that some physical quantities which have requires both magnitude and and Direction for their complete description, like as velocity, acceleration and force. They are vectors. usually in writing use bold text for describe the vectors, Let point A, B and C is Vectors we write A, B and C.
    A vectors is represented graphically by by a directed line segments with an arrow head.


2. Rectangular Coordinate System:
    Two reference lines drawn at night angles to each other. Coordinate axes and their point of intersection is known as origin. This system of coordinate axes is called Cartesian of rectangular coordinate system.

3. Addition of Vectors:
    Given two vectors A and B, their sums obtained by drawing their representative lines in such a way that tail of vector B coincides with the head of B. The vector sum is also called resultant and is indicate by R. Thus R = A + B. Similarly the sum
A + B is illustrated by back lines. Therefore, we can say that
    A + B = B + A

4. Resultant Vectors:
    The resultant of a number of vectors of the same kind-force vectors for example, is that signal vector which would have the same effect as all the original vectors taken together.

5. Vector Subtraction:
    The subtraction of a vector is equivalent to the addition of the same vector with its direction reserved. Thus, two subtract vector B from vector A, reverse the direction of B and A it to A.

    A - B = A + (-B)

6. Unit Vector:
    The product of a vector in a given direction is vector with magnitude on in that direction. It is used to represents the direction of a vector.
    A unit in the direction of A is written as A^ , which we read as ' A hat' , thus
        A = A A^ ( A hat)

7. Null Vector:
    Null vector is a vector of zero magnitude and any direction. For example, the sum of a vector and its negative vector is a null vector.

8. Equal Vector:
    Vector A and B are called equal vector if the both vector have same direction and magnitude. This mean that parallel vectors of the same magnitude are equal to each other.

9. Rectangular components of a vector:
    A components of a vector is its effective value in a given direction. It considered as the resultant of the vector components along the specific directions.
    Let there be a vector A represented by OP making angel with the x-axis. The projection OM of vector OP on x-axis and projection ON of vector OP on y-axis. OM being along x-direction is represented by Ax i^d ON = MP along y-direction is represented by Ay ^. By the rule of head to tail.
    A = Ax ^ + Ay j^
triangle MOP, the magnitude of  Ax i^ or x-components A is,
    Ax = A sin (theta)
    Ay = A cos (theta)

9. Position Vector:
    The position vector r is a vector that describes the location of a point with respect to origin, it is represented by r^.
Hence,
    r = a i^ + b j^

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Vector Addition By Rectangular Components ( FSC part 1)

Vector Addition By Rectangular Components:
let A and B be two vectors which are representative by two directed lines ON and OM respectively. The Vectors B is added to A by the head to tail rule of vector additions.
So, the resultant vectors R = A + B is given, in direction and magnitude, by the vector OP.
    In the below fig Ax, Bx, and Rx are the components of the vectors of A, B and R and their magnitude are given by the line OQ, MS, And OR respectively But,
       
        OR = OQ + QR
    or    OR = OQ + MS
or        Rx = Ax + Bx

Similarly the sum of the magnitude  y-components of two vectors of the resultant that is

    Ry = Ay + By
since Rx and Ry are rectangular components of the resultant vector R, hence

    R = Rx i^ + Ry j^
    R = (Ax + Bx) i^ + (Ay + By ) j^
The magnitude of the resultant vector A is given in below fig.

    and the direction of the resultant vector is determined that show in below fig.

The vectors addition by rectangular components consists of the following steps.

(i). find y-components of all given vectors.

(ii). Find x- components Rx of the resultant vectors by adding the y-components of all the vectors.

( iii ). Find the magnitude of resultant vector R using below equation.

(iv). Find the direction of resultant vector R by using below equation.

In the Below Video lecture you can watch helpful contents.

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System International (physics FSC PART 1)

System International:

in 1960, an international committee agree on a contain set of definitions and stranded to explain the physical quantities. A system that accepted and established by all committee members it called SYSTEM INTERNATIONAL.
This system set on three types of unit namely: basic units, supplementary units, derived units.

Base Units:
There are seven units for a various physical quantities, that are length, mass, time temperature, electronic current. luminous intensity and amount of substances (with specialty reference to particles numbers). It called base units.(Table of base units with their symbol are blew).

Supplementary Units:
In General Conference on Weight and Measurement has not yet grouped the certain units of SI under either base units and derived nits. These all SI units called supplementary nits.At that time when grouping of certain units, contain only two units of purely geometrical quantities, which are dived in plane angle and solid angle.


1. Radian:
         The radain is the plane angle between two radii (two segments that draw in circle) of a circle which inter-sectioned  circumference and arc, equal in length to radius. (as shown below)

2. steradian:
The steradin is angle of solid three-dimensional angle subtended the center point of sphere by its surface area equal to the square of radius of the sphere.

Derived Units:
SI units for measuring all other physical quantities are derived from base units and supplementary units. (in below table derived units )

scientific notaion:
Numbers are explained by stranded form called scientific notation, which use by the powers of ten. As internationally accepted practice is that threre should be only non-zero digits left of decimal. So, the number 144.6 should be written in scientific notaion as  1.446*10^2. There use some prefixes in scientific notation to format a stander measure.

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