Reasons Why Your Two Wheeler Insurance Claim Is Rejected

Two wheeler insurance offers excellent financial cover to protect your vehicle from unexpected events such as road accidents/collision, damages, third party liability, etc. but a denial from your insurer to settle the claim can be the big jolt. Therefore, it is imperative to be careful while buying a plan and you must also re-examine the details of the policy held by you.

Here are five common reasons why your claim can be rejected.

Getting your vehicle repaired on your own after the accident: It is the most common mistake that many of you make. You tend to repair your bike on your own and then inform the insurance company about the settlement. As a result of this, the insurer cannot trace back the accident and the repairs and eventually reject your claim. To avoid such situation, always inform the insurance company before getting the car repaired. The company professional will inspect the damage from their end, evaluate the cost of damage and help you get the best deal for repairing the damage caused to your bike.

Researchers Determine Carnivorous Dino’s Max Size

A fossilized femur bone hidden away in a drawer at The G. Gemmellaro Geological Museum, in Palermo, Italy, has helped researchers discover just how large a feathered, carnivorous dinosaur with diminutive forelimbs grew.

Abelisaurs were a predatory group of dinosaurs that traversed the Earth around 95 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period. According to researchers Alessandro Chiarenza and Andrea Cau, the specimen observed in their study, which was published in PeerJ today, would have called North Africa home. During the late Cretaceous, North Africa was a luscious savannah environment, which boasted rivers and mangrove swamps. There, abelisaur would have fed on other dinosaurs and aquatic animals, such as turtles, crocodiles, and fish.    

Physicist Discovers New 2D Material That Could Upstage Graphene?

Bringing us one step closer to the advancement of digital technology, a physicist has gone the extra mile and discovered a new one atom-thick flat material that could replace the highly popular graphene material.

Madhu Menon, a physicist at the University of Kentucky for Computational Sciences, in collaboration with scientists from Daimler in Germany and the Institute for Electronic Structure and Laser in Greece, worked on the perfect combination for a month, by going beyond the first row of the periodic table and into the second row by taking silicon and seeing if it would combine with other elements in the first row, such as boron and nitrogen.

“People have tried to improve on graphene by substituting carbon with other elements. So we tried to look at what happens when you substitute some of the carbon items with silicon,” Menon told R&D Magazine in a telephone interview.

According to Physical Review B, Rapid Communications, the new material is made up of silicon, boron and nitrogen—all light inexpensive and earth abundant elements—and stable, something that other graphene alternatives lack.

Robots Help Scientists Understand Ocean Biodiversity

Mark Moline, of the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, spent his childhood summers on the beach. He went diving at an early age, learning firsthand of the riches below the waves. Like a fish on a line, he was hooked to the water. And the experiences pointed him towards the path of becoming a marine biologist.

For Moline, understanding how the ocean works is an excellent gage for how well the Earth is functioning. With the planet covered in nearly 70 percent water, it’s staggering to think that 95 percent of those blue depths are uncharted mysteries.

Moline and colleagues are seeking new ways to explore the oceans’ biodiversity. 

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) present researchers with unprecedented access to the waters. When AUVs were first introduced, Moline said scientists primarily used their sensors to measure the oceans’ temperature, currents, and salinity. But about 10 or 15 years ago, additional sensors were added and the usage of the platform expanded to include the distribution patterns of marine organisms. It was an alternative to netting, a technique in which scientists lower a line and attempt to understand distribution by the organisms they reel in.

Ultrasound Tech Helps Scientists Understand Tiger Shark Reproduction

An apex predator, tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) are a widely spread shark species. In addition to their oceanic roving nature, the striped skin creatures also inhabit coastal regions, including coral reefs and atolls. Near Little Bahama Bank, a shallow region of water has become a hotspot for female tiger shark activity, so much so that the area was nicknamed Tiger Beach. Research into the area has revealed that females spend prolonged periods of time in the area (up to 180 days).

Researchers from the University of Miami and the University of New England recently performed a multi-year, multi-season study of the region’s female tiger sharks to understand their gestation habits. The study, published in February in Aquatic Biology, made use of the same imaging technology used by medical professionals on pregnant women.

“Although lethal sampling has historically been considered the most effective approach for collecting reproductive information from elasmobranch fishes, non-lethal approaches such as ultrasonography and analysis of plasma sex steroid hormones have become feasible and/or practical sampling alternatives,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

Would You Trust a Robot in a Burning Building?

A lone robot cuts through a smoky haze, its body reading in bright red letters, “EMERGENCY GUIDE ROBOT.” A buzzing alarm sounds, coupled with the words “Evacuate! Smoke! Evacuate!” The emergency guide robot directs you toward an exit at the back of the building, though you see a separate doorway marked with exit signs.

What do you do? Do you trust the robot and follow its instructions? Or do you go with intuition and follow visual cues to the exit?

Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) put 42 participants through an experiment similar to the aforementioned one. Surprisingly, an overwhelming majority trusted the robot, even though its guidance was faulty.

“Only three of the 42 participants exited through the marked emergency exit,” Paul Robinette, a research engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute, told R&D Magazine. “The rest either followed the robot’s instructions (37) or waited with the robot for further instructions (2).”

The recent study on human-robot trust in emergency situations will be presented March 9 at the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, which is being held in New Zealand.

Researchers are already developing robots and drones for fire emergencies. But machines aren’t perfect. Sometimes they make mistakes, and when such a situation occurs, it could be potentially life-threatening for a human to follow their instructions.

“When we started this project, we were looking for a new way that robots could help people by giving people advice, rather than the more traditional model of telling robots what to do,” said Robinette. “This brought up interesting questions about whether people would accept advice or even guidance from robots in a situation where the wrong guidance could be dangerous. We chose emergency evacuations as our example of a dangerous scenario because this is an area where autonomous robots could help save lives.”

As cities become more densely populated, it is pertinent to have coordinated evacuation plans, especially since the number of buildings of more than 200 m has grown substantially. In 1980, only 21 buildings globally were taller than 200 m, but by 2014 the number had skyrocketed to 935, according to the researchers.

In the experiment, the robot proved to be unreliable prior to the fire emergency simulation. Initially, study participants were under the impression that the experiment simply consisted of following the robot to a conference room, filling out a survey, and reading a magazine article. Even before the fake smoke and emergency alarm sounded, the robot, controlled by a hidden researcher, sometimes led study participants to a wrong room or stopped moving altogether. However, study participants, the researchers reported, only started questioning the robot’s actions when it made mistakes during the emergency portion of the experiment.

“Robots need to be able to tell people when they should not be trusted,” Robinette added. “This means that robots need to understand when they have made an error or when nearby people expect them to perform a task they are not capable of, and then communicate that information to people who need to know.”

Energy Harvesting Subsystems for Wireless Sensors

Nextreme Thermal Solutions has developed two new energy harvesting subsystems for the plumbing and HVAC industries. The subsystems are the latest additions to Nextreme's Thermobility energy harvesting platform that uses thin-film thermoelectric technology to convert available thermal energy into electric power for a variety of autonomous self-powered applications.

Thermobility uses differences in temperature to enable power where there is an adequate heat source. The technology eliminates the need to use traditional wired power sources or replaceable batteries. When paired with wireless transmitters, the Thermobility solution can provide electric power for years of maintenance-free operation, expanding the possibilities for new wireless sensor applications in plumbing, HVAC, industrial control, transportation, automotive, and building management.