Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/623116
38 The PCB Magazine • January 2016 about in the last few years. Also, very interest- ing for me is the internet revolution from space. You have the OneWeb consortium in con- junction with Virgin media and Qualcomm which is already up and running. OneWeb has a disaster recovery system where, for example, if you have a massive explosion in a city you can put a hub on the ground and you get 4G LTE and 100 megabytes per second WiFi to co- ordinate rescue efforts. Then you have SpaceX, which is funded also by Facebook and Google, who also want to get in on the act. By doing this on a global basis they can add billions of new consumers. The whole world is moving to digital. For me it's very interesting. How do we control it? How do we regulate it? These are all things that really haven't been thought out. In terms of the rate of change, for me, it seems to be mov- ing faster than we can control it and regulate it. Some of the paper is very light-hearted but there is a serious overtone behind it because I don't know how we can control and regulate this stuff. And with the pros- pect of the Internet of Every- thing, I don't think anybody knows yet how this will turn out. I agreed with Robin Tay- lor, sharing his concern that things were moving so quickly that we will struggle to keep them under control, and thanked him for a pre- senting such a thought-provoking, albeit rather frightening, vision of the future. PCB Pete Starkey is technical editor for i-connect007 and based in the u.K. starkey has more than 30 years of experience in the pcB industry, with a back- ground in process development, technical service and technical sales. to contact starkey, click here. robin taylor UCLA Researchers Create Exceptionally Strong and Lightweight New Metal a team led by researchers from the ucla henry samueli school of engineering and ap- plied science has created a super-strong, yet light structural metal with extremely high specif- ic strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. the new metal is composed of magnesium infused with a dense and even dispersal of ce- ramic silicon carbide nanoparticles. it could be used to make lighter airplanes, spacecraft, and cars, helping to improve fuel efficiency, as well as in mobile electronics and biomedical devices. the research was pub- lished recently in nature. "it's been proposed that nanoparticles could really enhance the strength of metals with- out damaging their plas- ticity, especially light met- als like magnesium, but no groups have been able to disperse ceramic nanoparticles in molten metals until now," said Xiaochun li, the principal investigator on the research and raytheon chair in manufacturing engineering at ucla. "With an infusion of phys- ics and materials processing, our method paves a new way to enhance the performance of many different kinds of metals by evenly infusing dense nanoparticles to enhance the performance of metals to meet energy and sustainability chal- lenges in today's society." magnesium, at just two-thirds the density of aluminum, is the lightest structural metal. sili- con carbide is an ultra-hard ceramic commonly used in industrial cutting blades. the research- ers' technique of infusing a large number of silicon carbide particles smaller than 100 nanometers into magnesium added significant strength, stiff- ness, plasticity and du- rability under high tem- peratures. FACING INCREDIBLE TIMES: ROBIN TAYLOR'S VISION OF THE FUTURE Feature