In late October 2015, the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party provided a broad preview or “proposal” of what would be contained in the 13th Five-Year Plan (13FYP) for 2016-2020, which was presented in its final form at the People’s National Congress in March 2016.

Action cameras, or simply ‘action cams’, are in the process of creating a mini revolution within the world of videography. We look at some market figures and analyse what the major players are up to in this fast-growth sector.

This is the second part of a two-part article that takes a look at some recent developments in the use of ultrasonics in plastics processing, where the technology can provide tantalizingly precise and cost-effective alternatives to more traditional welding, trimming and sealing techniques.

In this two-part article, we take a look at some recent developments in the use of ultrasonics in plastics processing, where the technology can provide tantalizingly precise and cost-effective alternatives to more traditional welding, trimming and sealing techniques.

Everyone is agreed that China’s rapid economic development has now slowed, but by how much? According to the World Bank, growth in China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stood at 14.2% in 2007, but that has now fallen to 7.4% in 2014.

Robotics is instantly one of those “gee whiz” fields of technology that prod the imagination into the realms of fiction. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ and driverless ‘autonomous’ cars are two recent headline-grabbing developments that seem to push at the limits of the robotically possible.

The dynamic evolution of the global plastics processing industry will be on display and demo-ed on the already sold-out show floor at Fakuma 2015 in October

At the end of July 2015, Intel Corp. and Micron Technology, Inc. announced a jointly-developed non-volatile memory they are calling 3D XPoint™. The claims they are making for the technology (pronounced “Crosspoint”) are quite sweeping. Although several commentators have suggested it’s probably a form of resistive RAM (ReRAM), Intel and Micron’s joint press release of 28^th July 2015 says that 3D XPoint is “…the first new memory category in more than 25 years.” Micron’s website specifically states, “3D XPoint™ technology is an entirely new class of nonvolatile memory.” So much for ReRAM!