Well, this is it, my very last Matt’s Favorites with WWJ Newsradio 950 and CBS Detroit. It’s been a blast, really, the past 12 years, bringing you the latest tech news on a (mostly) daily basis. And now it’s time to move on. I’ll still be involved with some of WWJ’s tech coverage as a freelancer, and I’ll be doing plenty of tech blogging for my new gig at the Engineering Society of Detroit. So it’s not goodbye, it’s just sayonara to this particular format. And it goes like this…
* One of the nicest people I ever met covering Michigan technology is Walter Breidenstein of Gas Technologies LLC, the northern Michigan company that’s working on technology to turn waste gas that’s often just burned, a process called flaring — think those little torches burning outside landfills like the one on Michigan Avenue in Canton Township or in a bunch of oil wells Up North. That gas is just burned off because it’s not economical to pipe it someplace to be used as fuel. Well, Walter has invented the GasTechno process, where that gas can be converted to usable liquid fuels in a proprietary single-step process — that doesn’t cost a lot, and fits into a standard semi trailer. Walter is out with a new YouTube video of last summer’s test run of a GasTechno unit at a remote oil well in northern Michigan. You can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvOGhyPWIdY.
* Michigan State University’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science will hold its annual ChEMS Resaerch Forum Wednesday, May 14 at the Huntington Club at Spartan Stadium on the MSU campus in East Lansing. Register at http://www.chems.msu.edu/forum2014/Registration. More information at http://www.chems.msu.edu/forum2014. A detailed agenda is at http://www.chems.msu.edu/system/files/forum/Forum_2014_agenda.pdf. The event begins with registration and coffee at 8:30 a.m. The program runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The 11th annual event will showcase Departmental research advances in the areas of energy and sustainability, nanotechnology and materials, and biotechnology and biomedical engineering. The program will feature plenary speakers, posters and oral presentations describing the latest Department research. Registration, lunch, and refreshments are complimentary. Featured speakers include Matthew Tirrell, Pritzker director and professor at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering; Chad Bouton, research and development leader for neurotechnology and molecular imaging at the Battelle Institute; and Lawrence Drzal, university distinguished professor of chemical engineering and materials science and director of the Composite Materials and Structures Center at MSU. Sponsors of the event include Battelle, Chemtura and Dow Chemical Co. Parking is available at Lot 79 just south of Spartan Stadium. For more information, contact the ChEMS department at (517) 355-5135.
* A team from Lawrence Technological University was the winner in the integration category of a national student design competition sponsored by the Architectural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Charles Pankow Foundation Annual Architectural Engineering Student Design Competition was held at the AEI’s annual student conference in Philadelphia on March 29. It attracts the top students from the country’s leading architectural engineering programs. Lawrence Tech took first place in integration, the only required category in the competition. The team also earned two runner-up awards in the optional categories of mechanical design and electrical design. This year’s challenge was to address the design, integration and construction issues for a high-rise office building in San Francisco. Focusing on the integration of the engineered systems for a high-performance building, students worked in multidisciplinary teams to integrate the engineered systems with building architecture while emphasizing sustainable design. The Pankow competition calls into play many of the practices that students have studied in LTU’s five-year master’s degree program in architectural engineering, which has an architectural design core along with the engineering curriculum. This multidisciplinary approach places emphasis on optimizing building design through the integration of engineered systems. Lawrence Tech’s program is one of about two dozen in the country. The members of the winning team were Rachel LaCasse, Zachary Lahrman, Kevin Lambert, Breanne May, Michael McMurphy, Francesca Montana, Elizabeth Ozzello, Michael Paciero, and Timothy Truitt. The nine students are in the first cohort of the LTU program and expect to receive their master’s degrees in May. Almost all of the students already have full-time or part-time jobs in the field. The LTU students entered the Pankow competition as their master’s degree capstone project. They set up three-person teams to focus on the electrical, structural, and mechanical parts of the design process. Through an intense collaborative effort, all team members contributed toward the winning entry in the integration category.
* The University of Michigan Office of Campus Sustainability, which serves as the focal point for sustainable campus operations, is coordinating a three-day electronic waste disposal event open to the public, local businesses and nonprofits. The general public collection will be Saturday, April 26 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Pioneer High School, 601 W. Stadium Boulevard. Enter from Main Street at the corner of West Stadium Boulevard. For businesses and nonprofits, the collection will be Thursday, April 24 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday, April 25 from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the UM State Street Commuter Parking Lot, 2694 S. State St. To register, visit http://michigan.poweron.com/p/register. Following collection, equipment is properly disassembled, shredded and recycled into raw materials by a fully licensed recycling facility in North America, and manufactured into new items. According to data provided through an e-waste initiative led by the United Nations, the U.S. is the world’s largest generator of electronic waste and created nearly 9.4 million tons in 2012; an average of 65 pounds per person. Additionally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates only 25 percent of electronics ready for end-of-life management are collected for recycling. This is the seventh year the university and Ann Arbor Public Schools have sponsored the event. Since 2008, the event has filled a combined total of 106 semitrailers and diverted a total of 1,374 tons of electronic waste from local landfills. For a complete list of accepted materials and additional information, visit: http://www.ocs.umich.edu.
And now the national, global, interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic tech news, from our pals at CBS News, News.com and elsewhere…
* The “heartbleed” bug may have put millions of passwords, credit card details and sensitive information in the hands of nefarious hackers. Before you change your passwords, security experts suggest making sure the website is now secure, and provide tips for creating stronger passwords.
* CEO Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders offers a glimpse into Amazon’s internal workings and what it is aiming for in the future, including more grocery services and the much-discussed drone delivery. In the letter released Thursday, Bezos outlined Amazon’s offerings, including its fresh grocery business called Prime Fresh, which it has offered for five years in Seattle and expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco. For $299 a year members get same-day and early morning delivery on groceries and other items rangingfrom toys to electronics and household goods. Bezos said the goal is to expand to more cities over time.
* A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite roared to life and climbed away from Cape Canaveral Thursday, a spectacular public start for a clandestine mission. The towering 19-story rocket’s Russian-built RD-180 first-stage engine fired up at 1:45 p.m. EDT (GMT-4), followed a few seconds later by ignition of four solid-fuel strap-on boosters that instantly began pushing the rocket away from launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
* Aerospace giant Boeing is designing a new type of aircraft capable of taking off, hovering and landing vertically, the company says. Such vehicles are essentially hybrids of helicopters and fixed-wing airplanes, and could one day be used by the military to transport troops, weapons or cargo to and from the battlefield. Boeing was one of four companies recently selected to receive funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the arm of the U.S. Department of Defense charged with developing new technologies for the military — to design new, unmanned vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. Boeing will receive $17 million as part of the agreement, which is part of DARPA’s VTOL Experimental Plane, or X-Plane, program. (Looks to me like a miniature version of the aircraft in Avatar.)
* Here’s a great reason to get involved in efforts to boost STEM education among youth: The story of a troubled New York City teen who turned her life around through robotics.
* A Russian Progress supply ship loaded with 2.9 tons of supplies and equipment bound for the International Space Station blasted off and streaked into space Wednesday, chased down the space station and glided to a picture-perfect docking.
* Just as wireless giants AT&T and Verizon have moved into the television business with their U-verse and FiOS digital TV services, the cable company Comcast is reportedly thinking of moving into the wireless business. According to tech news publication The Information, Comcast, the country’s largest cable operator, is quietly laying the groundwork for a Wi-Fi-based mobile phone service. It would rely on a combination of Wi-Fi and leased capacity on cellular networks. Simply put, calls would be made over Wi-Fi, switching over to cellular when no Wi-Fi is available.
* First Twitter, now Instagram — social media is colonizing outer space. American astronaut Steven Swanson marked a small tech milestone this week with the first Instagram selfie in space. Swanson took not one, but two pictures of himself on the International Space Station and posted them to the ISS Instagram account.
* A new company has found a way to fund its start-up operations, and, you might say it was able to print money to the tune of $1.7 million in just two days. That’s because M3D, which makes a relatively inexpensive 3D printer, launched a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter, and was able to ride a growing wave of public interest in 3D printers. So far almost 5,500 people have wanted one.
* While Amazon may have been trying to turn Prime Instant Video, its streaming service, into a major player with the unveiling of the Fire TV last week, it may have already have done so, according to a recent analytics report. Amazon’s traffic, as measured by Qwilt in March 2014, increased by 94% compared to a year earlier. In some U.S. operator networks, Amazon’s streaming video traffic increased by nearly 300% during that time period, according to the analytics provider.
* A total lunar eclipse next week could spell the end for a NASA probe now orbiting the moon. It was near the end of its mission anyway, and is scheduled to be purposely crashed into the moon next week.
* Aereo announced Thursday that it’s bringing its online over-the-air broadcast TV steaming and recording to Google’s Chromecast dongle on May 29. The feature will be available via an Aereo app for Android on Google Play. This Aereo app brings back a novel idea: it means users can tune into television on their televisions — rather than just on a laptop, smartphone, or tablet.
* Computers keep getting smaller and sleeker, but printers, not so much. There’s been a fundamental flaw in the thinking about printers that’s kept them from becoming truly mobile: till now, they’ve operated on the idea that you have to feed a sheet of paper through them. Normally, this means the device has to be at least 8.5 inches wide. Students from the Jerusalem College of Technology have flipped that notion on its head by creating a supersmall printer that sits on top of the paper and rolls around using inkjet technology to create words and images — no matter how big the page or what device you’re printing from. They’ve fittingly called their device the Pocket Printer, and they’re seeking to raise $400,000 to bring their idea to life through a just-launched Kickstarter campaign.
* “Game of Thrones” often feels like it’s set in a real world. Feed the illusion with these fascinating geologic maps created by Stanford researchers.
* Facebook said Thursday that it has once again massaged the formula that promotes or ignores content, in an effort to get rid of “spammy” stories in News Feed. The changes specifically affect misleading links, request-for-like stories (aka like-bait), and reshared content. Ultimately, they’re designed to penalize Pages and marketers who attempt to manufacture the spread of their content either by soliciting likes and comments, or by trying to pull a bait-and-switch with links that direct people to Web sites that are primarily ads.
* Facebook also said U.S. regulators have cleared its $19 billion acquisition of mobile messaging service WhatsApp, even as the Federal Trade Commission warned the two Internet companies on Thursday that they must not backtrack on commitments to user privacy.
