Bloodhound goes green, bionic heart, Ring fears and more: best of the week’s news

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Bloodhound to blast its way into record books with zero-emissions rocket

Having carped about the fundamental raison d’être of the Bloodhound LSR project previously, I was interested to learn about the supersonic vehicle’s plans to use a zero-emissions rocket as part of the next phase of its programme. From what I read, following an E&T visit to see the vehicle and meet the people behind the project, there has been a technological shift in approach from blasting across the flats in a fossil fuel-powered monster to a more environmentally sympathetic, future-facing form of propulsion. 

“Today’s technology means that we can use electric motors and battery packs which will give us the power we need. So out with the old V8, in with the electric motor,” said Ian Warhurst, owner and CEO of Bloodhound. “This now pushes us onto the edge of electric motor technology.”

Sounds great. This also blows away a lot of the reservations many people – myself included – have had about the project. Now, Bloodhound seems better positioned to deliver on its original promise of pushing the boundaries of what is possible, only looking ahead and moving things forward with electric vehicle propulsion and battery systems instead of looking backwards and merely becoming remembered for being the pinnacle of a long-established but ageing technology powered by a toxic fuel source.

Money remains an issue, though, if Bloodhound LSR is to actually get the opportunity to break the land speed record. As Warhurst says in our feature: “Now it comes down to sponsorship. We’ve proved that the car has an amazing following, the project itself has an incredibly good social media engagement. If we start sticking a rocket at the back of the car and going down the desert breaking the record there, then we would have a much bigger engagement.”

Warhurst estimates that around £8m is needed to move the project to the next phase. Hardly chump change in these straitened economic times, but equally nothing like the gargantuan numbers casually bandied around for questionable public infrastructure projects such as HS2. Financial concerns notwithstanding, the appeal of Bloodhound remains the engineering aspects at the heart of the project. With that engineering now looking to the future, it sounds like Bloodhound is back on track.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Engineers develop ‘biorobotic heart’ that beats like a real one

As a cardio patient with a prosthetic (biological) heart valve, I welcome the news of yet another human heart model which appears – from how it is described in this story – to be far superior to the previous ones, including an impressive and highly effective 3D representation by Dassault Systemes that I saw in action at the company’s Paris HQ several years ago.

When faced with the necessity of having a heart-valve replacement, I was offered a choice between mechanical (metallic) valve or biological (bovine or porcine). The former is the most reliable and doesn’t need to be replaced, but from my point of view has two serious disadvantages: the patient has to take a potent anti-coagulant drug Warfarin for the rest of their life and the valve keeps ticking 24/7 – not too loud, yet audibly. I remember hearing an interview on the radio with a little boy, whose father had a mechanical valve in his chest. “Of an evening, our family often sits down to listen to my Dad’s ticking,” he said.

I didn’t fancy becoming a living alarm clock, so opted for a biological valve, preferably porcine, for it was reputedly quite reliable, albeit not quite kosher.

When I woke up after a seven hour-long surgery, I was told that they had run out of porcine valves (my Soviet luck!) and had to use a bovine one, so I should not be surprised if I suddenly start mooing (they didn’t really say that last bit, of course – I’ve just invented it for fun).

A bovine valve is expected to function for 10-12 years, after which it will need replacing, possibly without opening up the patient’s chest (read: mine) again, but with the help of so-called keyhole surgery. This is when the heart models, like the one described above, come into the picture. No two human hearts or heart valves are quite the same, so before proceeding towards a long and – let’s face it – life-threatening surgery, it is important to know that both the heart and the valves, old and new, are going to take it well. A model allows for a thorough simulation of the procedure prior to the operation which should help avoid errors during the actual surgery. The more realistic the model, the higher the success rate!

Although my prosthetic valve is so far functioning well (fingers and ventricles crossed!) and, hopefully, will keep doing so for the next nine years or thereabouts, you will understand why this news story has cheered me up a lot. Glory to the life-saving MIT scientists!

Jack Loughran, news reporter

Amazon’s Ring app riddled with trackers, says EFF

I know someone with a Ring doorbell and it’s totally useless. The ugly, grey plastic housing sticks out like a sore thumb on older houses and, ironically, for a device meant to put off burglars, is one of the easiest items to steal in and of itself. Last year, there was a spate of people ripping the doorbells off houses and selling them on the black market.

Ring’s most egregious failing is that it’s simply a terrible doorbell. It only lasts around a month before it needs to be recharged, but the owner inevitably has no idea when it has run out of power because they’ll never actually ring it themselves. You either end up with a dead doorbell that can’t fulfil its function or you have to faff around charging yet another device while keeping an eye on its charge level over the following month. It’s all too much hassle when traditional doorbells serve their purpose just fine.

This isn’t even mentioning the fact that Amazon are obviously using it for dubious data-collection purposes. A perfect example of a device designed to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist and which ends up creating more problems for its owner than it solves.

Lorna Sharpe, sub-editor

Smart motorways are death traps, MPs warn

It’s nearly six years since I had editorial responsibility for transport, but this story prompted me to go looking through my archives. I recall being at several presentations on what were then called ‘managed motorways’. This concept was always presented as A Good Thing because adaptations to let cars run on the hard shoulder were much cheaper than widening the motorway. If a vehicle broke down in traffic and couldn’t get to a refuge, technology would detect it straight away so the lane could be closed (by showing red crosses in the overhead signs for the affected area).

So far, so good. The trouble is, experience now shows that the detection technology is nowhere near as effective as we were led to believe and there’s at least a suspicion that best practice has been sacrificed to cost-cutting.

One of the earlier documents in my archive is a set of slides from December 2009 covering hard shoulder running (aka HSR) in several iterations of Dutch trials. This concludes that the effect on traffic safety is “mainly positive”, but notes reduced access for emergency services and difficulties at junctions. Other lessons are that these schemes have a significant impact on workload in regional control centres, as well as on maintenance.

In 2011, I wrote a story quoting statistics showing that accidents had halved following the introduction of a pilot scheme on the M42, from an average of 5.08 to 2.25, while fatal and serious accidents fell from 0.82 to 0.17.

A 2014 press release from the Highways Agency (now Highways England) announced a new style of what was now called a ‘smart motorway’ scheme on the M25, saying, “We have built upon our experience of operating the M42 pilot scheme. The design changes have meant that smart motorways are quicker to build, more intuitive for drivers and more efficient to operate, while maintaining safety.” New technology included infrared CCTV to give control-centre staff increased visibility of the network.

I don’t think I realised the significance of that detail at the time. What it was saying is that when a vehicle stopped in a running lane, it would be detected by a person scanning a bank of screens, not the automated technology I had fondly imagined. Of course, regional control centres also collect information about traffic flow, so one would hope that a sudden perturbation would prompt somebody to look at the screen for that area, but it’s not hard to imagine that staff could lose concentration or miss one incident altogether because they are already dealing with another.

I stopped filing this kind of information when I moved to the subs’ desk and technology has probably improved since then, but the more recent accident figures don’t seem to reflect that.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

‘Extortionate’ European roaming fees will probably stay scrapped after Brexit

Well, of course they will. There are no winners if not. Any phone operators that tried to introduce extra tariffs would find the competition rallying against them to squeeze them back down to where we are today. You wonder how much of what we are used to will fundamentally stay the same. Will I still be able to go to conferences in Germany or holidays on the Med? I expect so. Will companies still be able to trade with their European counterparts? Obviously, but it makes no sense to not follow EU standards so, although this is the big headache, will it really turn out to be all that surprising if after a few years everything seems a bit like business as usual?

Or forget ‘a few years’, after having left the EU this week, will we wake up on Saturday to a new, changed, free Britain? Or perhaps the differences might not be that discernible. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it is the Leavers so passionately wanted to change and, if change is not apparent, what it was that Remainers so passionately wanted to protect.

Given the angst, the stagnation, the division that this whole political debacle has caused, it would be quite ironic if it actually didn’t make any difference. Sadly, I doubt that will be the case – there is plenty more angst and division to come and suffering in the business and academic communities – but it’s a nice thought. As long as I can phone home at a reasonable rate when I’m at a conference in Munich, that’s the important stuff!

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Bloodhound to blast its way into record books with zero-emissions rocket

Last Friday, I made my way west to the SGS Berkeley Green University Technical College in Gloucestershire to speak to the team at Bloodhound LSR about their speed tests in South Africa last November. I was also given the opportunity to see the highly recognisable land speed record car in the flesh. It was covered in desert spec configuration to showcase how the dust from the desert was placed on the car during the tests.

The team were enthusiastic about the results they got from their high-speed tests in South Africa, where the car notched speeds of 628mph (1,010km/h). The driver, Andy Green, said that he was delighted with the speeds he had achieved in the car, while owner Ian Warhurst described the experience as amazing. Bloodhound’s engineering director, Mark Chapman, told me that the videos plastered all over the internet of the tests don’t do the actual run of the car justice.

The team also spoke to me about the next phase of their programme to challenge for the land speed record, where they plan to install a zero-emissions rocket to the car to give it the extra thrust need for the record books. In fact, the pictures seen show the position in which the rocket will be placed, underneath its Rolls-Royce engine.

It’s nice to see that the Bloodhound team are considering factors to minimise the environmental impact of the programme, especially given the fact that it has previously been criticised for not being a particularly ‘green’ project.

They did disclose, however, that the only way that they can carry out the next phase of the project is to acquire more sponsors, with hopes of raising over £8m. I do hope that they get the sponsorship needed. It would be a total shame to get this far and not be able to finish it and break the land speed record.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Smart motorways are death traps, MPs warn

‘Death trap’ might be a bit over the top, but we live in an age where moderation doesn’t achieve much in political circles, so this warning might be considered a temperate one.

There does seem to be evidence which – if not compelling – is at least worth considering, namely that so-called ‘smart’ motorways cause more problems than they solve. Letting vehicles use the inside lane that used to be reserved as a hard shoulder for use in an emergency and providing refuge areas at intervals instead seems a good idea. After all, congested roads alone don’t seem to be deterring people from making their journey by car, a problem that isn’t helped by the woeful state of UK public transport, so why not try various ways of increasing road capacity?

One reason might be the 90 per cent of drivers who even ahead of this ‘death trap’ warning told an AA survey that they don’t feel relaxed or safe driving on a smart motorway. Like me, they’ve probably experienced the awful feeling when a car that’s been perfectly well maintained suddenly just stops working as you’re travelling at high speed on a busy road.

When this has happened to me, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to manoeuvre across to the edge of the road and feel relatively safe as I waited for someone to come and help. Every time I drive along a local stretch of the M1 that’s being converted to a smart road, though, I can’t help wondering how different the experience would be if I ended up in what is effectively the inside lane of one of the country’s busiest stretches of road – the one used by a steady stream of lorries – and relying on signalling to warn traffic rapidly approaching from behind of the stationary vehicle up ahead.

Yes, this project has cost a lot of money so far, but whatever impact it’s having on journey times for the many, any decision to roll it out further absolutely has to take into account the safety implications.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Bloodhound to blast its way into record books with zero-emissions rocket

Having carped about the fundamental raison d’être of the Bloodhound LSR project previously, I was interested to learn about the supersonic vehicle’s plans to use a zero-emissions rocket as part of the next phase of its programme. From what I read, following an E&T visit to see the vehicle and meet the people behind the project, there has been a technological shift in approach from blasting across the flats in a fossil fuel-powered monster to a more environmentally sympathetic, future-facing form of propulsion. 

“Today’s technology means that we can use electric motors and battery packs which will give us the power we need. So out with the old V8, in with the electric motor,” said Ian Warhurst, owner and CEO of Bloodhound. “This now pushes us onto the edge of electric motor technology.”

Sounds great. This also blows away a lot of the reservations many people – myself included – have had about the project. Now, Bloodhound seems better positioned to deliver on its original promise of pushing the boundaries of what is possible, only looking ahead and moving things forward with electric vehicle propulsion and battery systems instead of looking backwards and merely becoming remembered for being the pinnacle of a long-established but ageing technology powered by a toxic fuel source.

Money remains an issue, though, if Bloodhound LSR is to actually get the opportunity to break the land speed record. As Warhurst says in our feature: “Now it comes down to sponsorship. We’ve proved that the car has an amazing following, the project itself has an incredibly good social media engagement. If we start sticking a rocket at the back of the car and going down the desert breaking the record there, then we would have a much bigger engagement.”

Warhurst estimates that around £8m is needed to move the project to the next phase. Hardly chump change in these straitened economic times, but equally nothing like the gargantuan numbers casually bandied around for questionable public infrastructure projects such as HS2. Financial concerns notwithstanding, the appeal of Bloodhound remains the engineering aspects at the heart of the project. With that engineering now looking to the future, it sounds like Bloodhound is back on track.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Engineers develop ‘biorobotic heart’ that beats like a real one

As a cardio patient with a prosthetic (biological) heart valve, I welcome the news of yet another human heart model which appears – from how it is described in this story – to be far superior to the previous ones, including an impressive and highly effective 3D representation by Dassault Systemes that I saw in action at the company’s Paris HQ several years ago.

When faced with the necessity of having a heart-valve replacement, I was offered a choice between mechanical (metallic) valve or biological (bovine or porcine). The former is the most reliable and doesn’t need to be replaced, but from my point of view has two serious disadvantages: the patient has to take a potent anti-coagulant drug Warfarin for the rest of their life and the valve keeps ticking 24/7 – not too loud, yet audibly. I remember hearing an interview on the radio with a little boy, whose father had a mechanical valve in his chest. “Of an evening, our family often sits down to listen to my Dad’s ticking,” he said.

I didn’t fancy becoming a living alarm clock, so opted for a biological valve, preferably porcine, for it was reputedly quite reliable, albeit not quite kosher.

When I woke up after a seven hour-long surgery, I was told that they had run out of porcine valves (my Soviet luck!) and had to use a bovine one, so I should not be surprised if I suddenly start mooing (they didn’t really say that last bit, of course – I’ve just invented it for fun).

A bovine valve is expected to function for 10-12 years, after which it will need replacing, possibly without opening up the patient’s chest (read: mine) again, but with the help of so-called keyhole surgery. This is when the heart models, like the one described above, come into the picture. No two human hearts or heart valves are quite the same, so before proceeding towards a long and – let’s face it – life-threatening surgery, it is important to know that both the heart and the valves, old and new, are going to take it well. A model allows for a thorough simulation of the procedure prior to the operation which should help avoid errors during the actual surgery. The more realistic the model, the higher the success rate!

Although my prosthetic valve is so far functioning well (fingers and ventricles crossed!) and, hopefully, will keep doing so for the next nine years or thereabouts, you will understand why this news story has cheered me up a lot. Glory to the life-saving MIT scientists!

Jack Loughran, news reporter

Amazon’s Ring app riddled with trackers, says EFF

I know someone with a Ring doorbell and it’s totally useless. The ugly, grey plastic housing sticks out like a sore thumb on older houses and, ironically, for a device meant to put off burglars, is one of the easiest items to steal in and of itself. Last year, there was a spate of people ripping the doorbells off houses and selling them on the black market.

Ring’s most egregious failing is that it’s simply a terrible doorbell. It only lasts around a month before it needs to be recharged, but the owner inevitably has no idea when it has run out of power because they’ll never actually ring it themselves. You either end up with a dead doorbell that can’t fulfil its function or you have to faff around charging yet another device while keeping an eye on its charge level over the following month. It’s all too much hassle when traditional doorbells serve their purpose just fine.

This isn’t even mentioning the fact that Amazon are obviously using it for dubious data-collection purposes. A perfect example of a device designed to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist and which ends up creating more problems for its owner than it solves.

Lorna Sharpe, sub-editor

Smart motorways are death traps, MPs warn

It’s nearly six years since I had editorial responsibility for transport, but this story prompted me to go looking through my archives. I recall being at several presentations on what were then called ‘managed motorways’. This concept was always presented as A Good Thing because adaptations to let cars run on the hard shoulder were much cheaper than widening the motorway. If a vehicle broke down in traffic and couldn’t get to a refuge, technology would detect it straight away so the lane could be closed (by showing red crosses in the overhead signs for the affected area).

So far, so good. The trouble is, experience now shows that the detection technology is nowhere near as effective as we were led to believe and there’s at least a suspicion that best practice has been sacrificed to cost-cutting.

One of the earlier documents in my archive is a set of slides from December 2009 covering hard shoulder running (aka HSR) in several iterations of Dutch trials. This concludes that the effect on traffic safety is “mainly positive”, but notes reduced access for emergency services and difficulties at junctions. Other lessons are that these schemes have a significant impact on workload in regional control centres, as well as on maintenance.

In 2011, I wrote a story quoting statistics showing that accidents had halved following the introduction of a pilot scheme on the M42, from an average of 5.08 to 2.25, while fatal and serious accidents fell from 0.82 to 0.17.

A 2014 press release from the Highways Agency (now Highways England) announced a new style of what was now called a ‘smart motorway’ scheme on the M25, saying, “We have built upon our experience of operating the M42 pilot scheme. The design changes have meant that smart motorways are quicker to build, more intuitive for drivers and more efficient to operate, while maintaining safety.” New technology included infrared CCTV to give control-centre staff increased visibility of the network.

I don’t think I realised the significance of that detail at the time. What it was saying is that when a vehicle stopped in a running lane, it would be detected by a person scanning a bank of screens, not the automated technology I had fondly imagined. Of course, regional control centres also collect information about traffic flow, so one would hope that a sudden perturbation would prompt somebody to look at the screen for that area, but it’s not hard to imagine that staff could lose concentration or miss one incident altogether because they are already dealing with another.

I stopped filing this kind of information when I moved to the subs’ desk and technology has probably improved since then, but the more recent accident figures don’t seem to reflect that.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

‘Extortionate’ European roaming fees will probably stay scrapped after Brexit

Well, of course they will. There are no winners if not. Any phone operators that tried to introduce extra tariffs would find the competition rallying against them to squeeze them back down to where we are today. You wonder how much of what we are used to will fundamentally stay the same. Will I still be able to go to conferences in Germany or holidays on the Med? I expect so. Will companies still be able to trade with their European counterparts? Obviously, but it makes no sense to not follow EU standards so, although this is the big headache, will it really turn out to be all that surprising if after a few years everything seems a bit like business as usual?

Or forget ‘a few years’, after having left the EU this week, will we wake up on Saturday to a new, changed, free Britain? Or perhaps the differences might not be that discernible. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it is the Leavers so passionately wanted to change and, if change is not apparent, what it was that Remainers so passionately wanted to protect.

Given the angst, the stagnation, the division that this whole political debacle has caused, it would be quite ironic if it actually didn’t make any difference. Sadly, I doubt that will be the case – there is plenty more angst and division to come and suffering in the business and academic communities – but it’s a nice thought. As long as I can phone home at a reasonable rate when I’m at a conference in Munich, that’s the important stuff!

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Bloodhound to blast its way into record books with zero-emissions rocket

Last Friday, I made my way west to the SGS Berkeley Green University Technical College in Gloucestershire to speak to the team at Bloodhound LSR about their speed tests in South Africa last November. I was also given the opportunity to see the highly recognisable land speed record car in the flesh. It was covered in desert spec configuration to showcase how the dust from the desert was placed on the car during the tests.

The team were enthusiastic about the results they got from their high-speed tests in South Africa, where the car notched speeds of 628mph (1,010km/h). The driver, Andy Green, said that he was delighted with the speeds he had achieved in the car, while owner Ian Warhurst described the experience as amazing. Bloodhound’s engineering director, Mark Chapman, told me that the videos plastered all over the internet of the tests don’t do the actual run of the car justice.

The team also spoke to me about the next phase of their programme to challenge for the land speed record, where they plan to install a zero-emissions rocket to the car to give it the extra thrust need for the record books. In fact, the pictures seen show the position in which the rocket will be placed, underneath its Rolls-Royce engine.

It’s nice to see that the Bloodhound team are considering factors to minimise the environmental impact of the programme, especially given the fact that it has previously been criticised for not being a particularly ‘green’ project.

They did disclose, however, that the only way that they can carry out the next phase of the project is to acquire more sponsors, with hopes of raising over £8m. I do hope that they get the sponsorship needed. It would be a total shame to get this far and not be able to finish it and break the land speed record.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Smart motorways are death traps, MPs warn

‘Death trap’ might be a bit over the top, but we live in an age where moderation doesn’t achieve much in political circles, so this warning might be considered a temperate one.

There does seem to be evidence which – if not compelling – is at least worth considering, namely that so-called ‘smart’ motorways cause more problems than they solve. Letting vehicles use the inside lane that used to be reserved as a hard shoulder for use in an emergency and providing refuge areas at intervals instead seems a good idea. After all, congested roads alone don’t seem to be deterring people from making their journey by car, a problem that isn’t helped by the woeful state of UK public transport, so why not try various ways of increasing road capacity?

One reason might be the 90 per cent of drivers who even ahead of this ‘death trap’ warning told an AA survey that they don’t feel relaxed or safe driving on a smart motorway. Like me, they’ve probably experienced the awful feeling when a car that’s been perfectly well maintained suddenly just stops working as you’re travelling at high speed on a busy road.

When this has happened to me, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to manoeuvre across to the edge of the road and feel relatively safe as I waited for someone to come and help. Every time I drive along a local stretch of the M1 that’s being converted to a smart road, though, I can’t help wondering how different the experience would be if I ended up in what is effectively the inside lane of one of the country’s busiest stretches of road – the one used by a steady stream of lorries – and relying on signalling to warn traffic rapidly approaching from behind of the stationary vehicle up ahead.

Yes, this project has cost a lot of money so far, but whatever impact it’s having on journey times for the many, any decision to roll it out further absolutely has to take into account the safety implications.

E&T editorial staffhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/01/best-of-the-weeks-news-310120/

Powered by WPeMatico