Category Archives: Evolution

In the past three decades, Australias HVAC industry has seen a quantum evolution, but according to University of Wollongong professor Paul Cooper, theres a real risk of a talent deficit looming in the near future.

Cooper was awarded the James Harrison Medal for Lifetime Achievement at this years AIRAH Awards, for his industry-leading research in the HVAC space and contribution to advancing sustainable building practice as one of the founders of the UoW Sustainable Buildings Research centre.

He told The Fifth Estate that when he first came to Australia 30 years ago from the UK, the whole idea of energy-efficiency and emissions reduction wasnt on the radar.

There were no building code energy efficiency provisions for Australian housing until the early 2000s, for a start.

But in the past decade these ideas have become mainstream. Weve seen advances in technologies such as advanced building management systems that decrease energy consumption, and government policies such as mandatory disclosure and tools such as NABERS have led the commercial property sector to lift its game.

HVAC has become a very innovative field, and this has been attracting increasing numbers of the best and brightest graduates. Technologies in the areas of controls and automation are proving exciting for PhD and post-graduate students and researchers, and also creating alignments with other sectors such as advanced manufacturing.

However, Cooper says that without the right encouragement for the current primary school and high school cohorts, in five to 10 years that flow of talent could slow to a trickle.

TAFE is also an important part of the picture. The SBRC has been collaborating with TAFE since the outset, and creating partnerships with industry, students and institutions that are mutually beneficial.

Students get to see the products and practices experienced industry tradespeople bring to projects such as the award-winning Desert Rose and Illawarra Flame homes. Industry gets to leverage the latest research.

The two homes and the SBRC have also been a vehicle for sharing ideas about improving energy efficiency with the general public.

We have [also] trained a lot of very capable young people.

There is increasing integration between HVAC and other elements of the built environment, he explains.

One of the really heartening changes in recent years has been a more holistic approach to design, delivery, commissioning, operation and maintenance of buildings.

Cross-disciplinary research work is also extending into areas such as the impact of indoor environment quality on older people and people with dementia.

More great leaps lie ahead, he says..

The advent of cheaper renewable energy systems has really driven the start of a revolution of thinking about power use and engineering for optimisation of the grid.

A building is no longer an isolated block with HVAC keeping the temperature comfortable.

The SBRC has also contributed to significant industry shifts, such as undertaking the modelling for ASBECs net zero trajectory and future changes to the National Construction Code to align with the net zero ambition.

Its been a short trajectory and steep curve for the sector in terms of impact, Cooper says.

He says the single most important challenge for the industry is recruiting capable people.

Without significant numbers of the best and brightest undertaking the right learning during primary and high school, there could be a shortage of new entrants into the appropriate tertiary study pathways.

The key according to Cooper is to help young people see the exciting possibilities of the sector, and how worthwhile it is. Older workers also have immense value, as they hold an immense store of knowledge.

They have such an important role to play in mentoring, Cooper says.

The net zero transition and the new technologies such as advanced BMS systems are all going to need people to design, research, install and operate the HVAC of the future.

The future is bright so long as we engage the best and brightest young people.

Tags: AIRAH, energy efficiency, HVAC, Paul Cooper, sustainable buildings, university of wollongong

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HVAC's evolution and why it needs to look to the next generation - The Fifth Estate

Photo: Evening Standard / Stringer (Getty Images)

You know in a bookstore there are always gift books of glossy photos with titles like Barack Obama Through The Years and Kate Middleton: From Diapers To Duchess or things like that? Well, this is kind of like that, but funnier, more endearing, and instead of photos, its a TikTok whiz doing impressions in wigs.

TikTok user Maris Jones, a director and photographer, has filled her feed with, among other things, evolution videos: the evolution of the telephone, the TV, sharing media, jeans, sunglasses, you get the idea. But as a Beatles fan on Twitter pointed out, shes also done the Fab Four, and they are pretty great, honestly! Heres Paul:

The Hey Jude bit is especially good there. John:

Dont Let Me Down, indeed. George:

That cardboard sitar is very charming. And of course, Ringo:

Also very good. Overall, a very good effort! The head wiggles! The wigs! The also-evolving instruments! The mustaches, my god, the mustaches! Way to go, Maris Jones. And way to go, @BEATLESOUTSOLD, the Twitter account that pointed us Maris way, and which is also responsible for this piece of eternal wisdom:

Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com

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The evolution of The Beatles, as performed by a TikTok user and many wigs - The A.V. Club

(Photo by Emily Gonalves)

Nervous smiles. Darting eyes. Clustering in small groups. Watching new members, mainly first-years, file in nervously showing many of the aforementioned traits to meetings earlier this year was a striking reminder that Im no longer the youngest anymore. There have been certain times this year where its been particularly apparent that my first-year without formal leadership roles in clubs has passed, and that I need to take up certain responsibilities as an organization leader to help guide and lead others.

This is not to say that age is always indicative of maturity; usually, guiding and leading underclassmen takes the form of class advice or club leadership. Whether its taking the initiative to engage with others to make them feel welcome, or being considerate of meeting times and places so first-years arent far away from Commons too late at night, Ive been surprised by the many little ways upperclassmen are called upon to lead a new generation of Commodores.

In light of recent leadership adjustments and events in an organization Im in, Ive spent a lot of time thinking about leadership. More specifically, Ive been thinking about how our leadership goals, style and execution should mature as we grow older. Were all here at Vanderbilt partially because of the leadership abilities we demonstrated in high school. Whether it was being the president of student orgs, or a leader in the community, most of us are no strangers to leadership.

However, lately Ive been questioning whether we, now college students, really understand what leadership means. Sometimes I feel like some of us are still leading at the high school level. What I mean by this, is that I think many of us havent learned to mature in our leadership. Ive seen peers trying to dodge responsibilities they knowingly signed up for when they ran for executive board positions, and others failing to communicate in a professional and timely manner.

Now, you might be wondering, what is mature leadership? To me, mature leadership means taking full responsibility for your actions, decisions and the well-being of your fellow club members. Mature leadership means learning to have an unbiased, unselfish goal for your club that keeps its long-term success in mind. Mature leadership means doing everything you can to train and mentor your peers to carry on the torch and be successful after youre gone.

Oftentimes, we strive after leadership because of the power, prestige or clout it gives us, and forget that we have also signed up to shoulder substantial responsibility for others. Ill admit that Ive been guilty of this, and have sometimes been hit by a much more hefty workload that I was expecting. However, leaders, even student leaders, often have to make tough calls. Sometimes these tough decisions create consequences that reverberate throughout an organization, and even an entire school. Mature leaders know not to take decisions lightly, or to make short-sighted choices that dont consider the wider well-being of the organization.

Editors at Northwesterns The Daily have recently come under national fire from professional journalists for apologizing for their coverage of a protest. The tough decision to apologize for their journalistic coverage or not was ultimately in the hands of the editors. The papers editor-in-chief, who was one of many editors who signed off on this decision, was called out by name in the article.Im not using the editors at The Daily as an example of bad leadership per se, but rather to stress the fact that leaders in student organizations have real responsibilities that can affect not only their schools, but the fields they are exploring. In one of my clubs, Ive felt like a bad leader for being inevitably tangled up in some similarly tricky, debatable decisions that I did not fully support. When these decisions seemed to harm rather than help, I felt guilty, and that I had failed my team members, especially the first-years.

The event at The Daily and my own recent experiences were a great reminder for me. They reminded me that our decisions as student leaders can have a significant effect on the reputation and success of the organizations we lead, and that we will be held accountable for the choices we make. I hope that youll take the time to reflect on whether your leadership has evolved and matured in college as we near the end of yet another semester. We could all use strong, empathetic, selfless, caring mature leaders. Im hoping youll become one of them.

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Sophomore Spotlight: Evolution of leadership - The Vanderbilt Hustler

Is Evolution Predictable? This study of Heliconius butterflies says that it isnt.

An international team of scientists working with Heliconius butterflies at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama was faced with a mystery: How do pairs of unrelated butterflies from Peru to Costa Rica evolve nearly the same wing-color patterns over and over again? The answer, published in Current Biology, forever changes the way evolution is understood.

Our team is the first to report that although evolution of similar color patterns in Heliconius may be driven by similar forceslike predators avoiding a particular kind of butterflythe pathway to that outcome is not predictable, said Carolina Concha, lead author of the paper and a post-doctoral fellow at STRI. This really surprised us because it reveals the importance of history and chance in shaping the genetic pathways leading to butterfly wing-pattern mimicry.

Heliconius bright wing colors signal to bird predators that the butterflies are toxic. Flashy male wing patterns signal to females that they are choosing the right species to mate with. Somehow these two forces, predation and mating, lead to similar wing patterns in groups of butterflies isolated in the mountain valleys and foothills of the Andes. By knocking out a single gene called WntA in 12 different species and their variants, the molecular biologists on the team could tell whether the butterflies in a pair with the same wing patterns were using the same genetic pathways to color and pattern their wings. They were not.

Imagine two teams given the same Lego blocks are asked to build the same device, said Arnaud Martin, co-author and head of the Butterfly Evo-Devo Lab at George Washington University. Each team goes about the task in a different way, but in the end, the result is the same. Butterflies face much more serious challenges: they build structures made of wing scales that are essential to their survival and ability to reproduce.

Questions regarding butterfly mimicry have intrigued biologists for decades, but the technology to selectively remove a single gene in a live organism did not exist until about five years ago. Now, with CRISPR/Cas 9 gene editing, it is getting much easier to tinker with the genetic code. When researchers knock out a major patterning gene like WntA, it changes the microscopic structure and color of the scales that compose the butterflys wing and, as a result, the pattern changes. The study raises a number of questions, such as how WntA interacts with other genes to end up with an area that is red or black. Now the team wants to know how the WntA gene is controlled.

We learned that while a developmental gene (WntA) can have a broad role in the evolution of most butterfly wing color patterns, its precise use to color a butterflys wing is not completely predictable, said Riccardo Papa, co-author and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Distinct species with identical wing-color patterns, such as co-mimetic butterflies, can evolve using different molecular strategies. Imagine the same notes played on different instruments!

Some people say that Panama was an indigenous word meaning abundance of butterflies, said Owen McMillan, staff scientist and head of the ecological genomics lab at STRI. The Smithsonian labs in Gamboa are certainly one of the best places in the world to understand how butterflies evolve, and we hope that inspired researchers will join us here as we continue to ask questions about these incredibly beautiful creatures.

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Twenty-five authors from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the University of Oxford, George Washington University, Mississippi State University, University of Cambridge, University of Puerto Rico, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Universidad del Rosario, University of Chicago and North Carolina State University contributed to this study.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The institute furthers the understanding of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.

Reference: Concha, C., Wallbank, R.W.R., Hanly, J. et al. 2019. Interplay between developmental flexibility and determinism in the evolution of mimetic Heliconius wing patterns. Current Biology.

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Is Evolution Predictable? Important Implications for the Way We Undertand Life on Earth - SciTechDaily

The Coach app from Verizon Connect Coach app lets drivers track their progress towards individual safety goals and notes areas in need of improvement.

Do your drivers have an opportunity to elevate their status at your workplace by using a system that tracks their performance with metrics they directly control?

If not, it is fairly easy to create a driver scorecard with the amount of performance and safety data that is available. By making scorecard information easily accessible to drivers, many will work on improving their skills voluntarily.

Driver scorecards are common features in mobile fleet management systems, and fleets can also bring together data from multiple sources to create their own custom versions. Increasingly, the trend is to use technology that gives drivers instant feedback and coaching rather than reporting on past performance.

Coaching apps

Driver coaching apps, common among fleet mobility platforms, are widely used to give drivers feedback on their daily performance.

Verizon Connect offers an option for its Fleet platform, the Coach app, that drivers use to track their progress towards individual safety goals and note areas in need of improvement. Fleet managers see the driver scorecard data on a higher level to identify areas of focus through the web-based Fleet portal or with a mobile app called Spotlight, says Kevin Aries, head of global product success.

A leaderboard feature in Coach will show drivers where they rank among their peers for different safety metrics. Verizon Connect also has various driver productivity metrics that can be added to separate driver scorecards from its suite of routing and fleet management applications, he says.

Coaching apps are evolving to become real-time feedback mechanisms that interact with drivers during their workday.

Were now at the point in the technology evolution where we have video and sensors to assess driver behavior on a continuous and consistent basis, says Jason Palmer, president of SmartDrive.

SmartDrive has a driver app and dash display for its video-based telematics system that fleets can use to provide feedback to drivers, automatically.

Smart sensors can ascertain driver performance and deliver constructive feedback in real time through audio, video and text-to-speech to provide in-cab feedback for self-correction, he explains.

Technology now provides iconography that tells drivers what issues to improve, measures performance improvement over time, and provides information as to how theyre performing to their peer group, he says.

SmartDrive offers a video-based telematics and driver safety system that includes a driver app and dash display that fleets can use to provide prescriptive feedback to drivers, automatically, and not blanket warnings with annoying beeps that drivers turn off or learn to ignore, he says.

Scoring fatigue

Fatigue is an underlying factor in driver performance and safety behaviors. New developments can make fatigue scores part of the equation for driver monitoring and coaching.

Trimble Transportation has a Safety Analytics dashboard that it offers as an optional subscription to fleets using its mobility platform for electronic logs and other applications. Currently, the fleets who subscribe to Safety Analytics operate more than 100,000 drivers combined.

The dashboard identifies high-risk drivers based on safety behaviors for speeding, harsh braking, lane departures, hours-of-service violations and other areas. The dashboard integrates with third-party systems to bring in CSA data from Samba Safety and speed monitoring from SpeedGauge.

Trimble Transportation recently added a new option to monitor driver fatigue levels through an integration with Pulsar Informatics. The electronic logging data of fleets can automatically go to Pulsars data models for predicting fatigue based on drivers work and rest activities over the last seven days.

PeopleNets Safety Analytics dashboard segments drivers into green, yellow and red profiles of risk. A new feature adds predictive fatigue monitoring.

A driver that changes from the day shift to the night shift is one example of what would elevate fatigue, explains Jim Angel, Trimble Transportations vice president of Video Intelligence.

Fatigue notifications appear in the Safety Analytics dashboard, and the text-to-speech feature of the in-cab device could be used to trigger an automatic message to drivers to contact the office, he says.

The risk scores in the Safety Analytics dashboard are elevated for drivers who have fatigue levels and exhibit other risky behaviors such as speeding or hard braking. The data may show a driver is spending less time on cruise during periods of fatigue to keep themselves busy or have higher fluctuations in speeds or an increase in sudden stops.

By making fatigue part of a driver scorecard system, we are trying to make the data easy and effective and actionable, he says.

If fleets want to use any or all of the data in Safety Analytics as part of a separate driver scorecard, the data is available for download from the Analytics dashboard, Angel says.

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Instant feedback: the evolution of driver scorecards - Commercial Carrier Journal

Pokmon Sword and Shield doesnt have a department store so where do you get your evolution stones? There are a few places to find individual stones strewn across the Galar region, but theres one place in particular with a massive cache of different stones.

To get it, youll need your bike and its Rotom upgrade that allows you to ride on water. Youll find the upgrade on Route 9, from the same NPC who gave you the bike originally. Once youve got the water-friendly bike, youll be able to glide across water with ease.

Start at Hammerlocke Hills, right outside the steps to Hammerlocke. Ride right and follow the ridge until youre able to cross the small lake. Once youve entered the Lake of Outrage, youll see a circle of large stones. If its your first time here, each large stone will have an evolution stone behind it. There are eight stones total, and each will have an evolution stone. Once you pick up the original evolution stones, theyll respawn occasionally meaning you can keep collecting evolution stones for free.

Here are the stones weve picked up there:

Stones are scattered individually across Galar, but this is the quickest way to collect a ton of them at once. Evolution stones are handy for evolving certain Pokmon, like Eevee into Leafeon (Leaf Stone), Glaceon (Ice Stone), or Flareon (Fire Stone).

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Pokmon Sword and Shield guide: Where to find evolution stones - Polygon

On December 7, the team of Dash developers will hold a special event devoted to the Evolution update. The new version of the platform shall be deployed to the testnet Evonet in December.

The event hosted by Dash Core Group will take place in Scottsdale in Arizona. The team will provide details on the functionality of the platform and the cryptocurrency wallet with Dashpay support. Also, the developers will explain how to participate in testing.

Dash Core Group positions Dash Evolution as a flagship product; however, the release has been postponed several times. Thus, initially, t was expected to go online in 2018.

Dash Evolution was envisaged as a decentralized payment system for a broad customer base. However, the concept was modified several times, and eventually, Dash Platform transformed into a technological stack for decentralized applications (dApps).

According to Dash Core Group developer Ivan Shumkov, the platform will include communication protocol between users and applications, payment requests and access rights to Drive data.

To ensure the operability of the services, Dash Platform will rely on the master nodes network. According to Shumkov, this is a more scalable solution that the Dash network itself as master nodes will have a high economic motivation to provide quality services.

Read more:

Dash developers announced the timeline of Evolution platform release - FXStreet

To learn how galaxies change over time, scientists have created the most complex ever simulation of a galaxy, called TNG50. The data from this simulation were used to create the video above, which shows the evolution of a massive galaxy from near the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang right up until today.

In the main panel of the video, denser gas is represented in lighter colors and thinner gas in darker colors, while the inserts at the bottom show dark matter in the lower left, and star and gas distributions in the lower right.

The full simulation is a universe in a box, according to the Royal Astronomical Society, combining both the scale of cosmological simulations with the level of detail usually only seen in studies of individual galaxies.

The total space simulated is more than 230 million light-years across, though it can show phenomena that are a million times smaller. With this simulation, astronomers can look back to the earliest formation of galaxies and see how they have changed over the universes 13.8 billion year history.

To crunch the massive amount of data required for this project, researchers couldnt use just any old computer they need the Hazel Hen supercomputer located in Stuttgart, Germany, and they used over 16,000 cores working 24/7 for more than a year to build the simulation.

A key part of simulating the movements of galaxies is the modeling of dark matter, which we know must exist but have never directly observed. Particles representing dark matter are included in the simulation, as are representations of stars, cosmic gas, magnetic fields, and supermassive black holes. In total, there are more than 20 billion particles in the simulation.

Numerical experiments of this kind are particularly successful when you get out more than you put in, Dr. Dylan Nelson of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement. In our simulation, we see phenomena that had not been programmed explicitly into the simulation code. These phenomena emerge in a natural fashion, from the complex interplay of the basic physical ingredients of our model universe.

A particular finding relates to disc galaxies like our Milky Way. By looking at the simulation, scientists could see how orderly disc galaxies emerged from the young universe which was chaotic and disorganized. As the universe aged, the gas within it settled and new stars were born into increasingly circular orbits.

In practice, TNG50 shows that our own Milky Way galaxy with its thin disc is at the height of galaxy fashion: Over the past 10 billion years, at least those galaxies that are still forming new stars have become more and more disc-like, and their chaotic internal motions have decreased considerably, lead author Dr. Annalisa Pillepich explained in the same statement. The Universe was much messier when it was just a few billion years old!

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Watch the evolution of a galaxy, from the Big Bang til today - Digital Trends

5G network wireless systems and internet of things with modern city skyline. Smart city and ... [+] communication network concept .

So, lets be clear from the start. 5G is not a fixed standard, nor is 5G service something that will simply replace 4G and then continue to exist in a consistent way for the next decade. In fact, 5G is much like an organic entity that will evolve and change over time. This is important to understand when thinking about 5G. It explains why certain developments are happening now, while others will happen later. More importantly, it should also give you the perspective to recognize that even though there are some challenges in the initial deployments of 5G, a lot more promise is still to come.

By the way, 4G followed a similar evolutionary path. As with 5G, it started with a core baseline of technical standards that were defined by the telecom industry, and then improvements were added to that baseline over time. You can think of it visually as a plateau that may start out flat, but then features a number of uphill climbs and, every now and then, a steep cliff that must be scaled to get to the next level.

In the case of wireless network generation standards, the baselines are defined by an industry organization called the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), which, as its name suggests, was first put together to help define worldwide standards for 3G cellular networks 20 years ago. The 3GPP creates what are called Release Documents every few years that define some of the core capabilities of next generation wireless networks. The current release document is called Release 15, and it came out in June 2019 with many important new advances, including the full definition of the 5G NR (New Radio) standard, which forms the foundation of 5G service. 5G NR is the protocol used to send and receive wireless signals from devices like smartphones to the cellular network infrastructure (i.e., cell towers).

The next 3GPP document, Release 16, is already near completion and is expected to be formally released in June of 2020. Chief among its additions is, essentially, the completion of 5G specifications, as well as enhancements to many early capabilities for 5G standalone mode, including URLLC (Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication), V2X Phase 3 for automotive applications and more. Note that there can be as much as a year, or even longer, lag between when a Release document comes out and when the technology is available to the public because of the time it takes for companies to build products and services that fully support the new standards. The telecom industry is always looking ahead, however, and theres already been a great deal of work done for Release 17, which will likely incorporate enhancements for IoT and many of the other more advanced, non-smartphone applications that have been discussed for 5G. Its tentatively scheduled for formal release sometime in 2021. (If you really want to learn more about where 5G is headed, you can find out more about 3GPP Release documents here.)

While its not critical to know the details of the Release documents and what each one includesthough you may occasionally see references to them if you follow the industry at allwhat is really important to know is that from Release 15 on, they are all 5G. Now arguably, they could use nomenclature like 5G version 1. 0 and then 5G version 1.1 (or 2.0) to clarify this, but they dont. Instead, they chose to make things very simple, so its all just called 5G. Behind the scenes, however, youre going to see new capabilities come to the 5G standard and to the devices and infrastructure that support these new versions of the standard.

Unfortunately, its not always easy for existing devices and infrastructure to support these new versions of the standard. In some casesparticularly with smartphones, devices, and the critical components that power them (such as modems, radio frequency (or RF), front ends, antennas, etc.)you cant upgrade them to get the new capabilities. Youll just have to get new versions of them. (Fortunately, many infrastructure components can be upgradedas was discussed in The 4G-5G Connection column.) Again, this situation is no different than what happened with 4G. Initial versions of the standard (based on Release 10), for example, didnt define LTE Advanced Pro, which is the latest iteration of the 4G LTE standard. So, in order to get the large speed benefits LTE Advanced Pro enables, chip companies like Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek, and others had to build new modems that added support for the technology (which was officially introduced in Release 14). Before users could take advantage of it, network infrastructure companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Cisco had to add support for it to their equipment, and smartphone vendors, like Samsung, Apple, LG, Motorola, etc., had to integrate those new modems into new generations of their devices. The exact same situation will be happening with 5G as it evolves over the next decade or so.

In addition to evolving and improving standards, another reason 5G is evolving is because of the nature of the infrastructure and how telco carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are expected to improve and densify their cellular networks. In particular, the usage of millimeter wave (mmWave) technology in 5G (see The 5G Landscape, Part 2: Spectrum and Devices for more on millimeter wave) puts a unique demand on cellular networks. The big plus side of mmWave is that it enables very fast download speeds, but the big downside is that its signals dont travel very far, cant go through buildings and other objects, and can even be negatively impacted by atmospheric conditions like rain.

In order to compensate for these challenges, the carriers have to put up a lot more cell sites (many of which are relatively tiny compared to traditional cell towers, hence the term small cells) to spread the signal. Of course, thats expensive to do, so the telcos are doing it on a step-by-step basis. Over time, they all plan to increase the number of small cells (and larger sites) they have installed and, therefore, increase the density of coverage, which in turn, should improve the range of millimeter wave service. In the near term, however, mmWave 5G service is still very spotty and subject to a lot of inconsistencybut its great if you can get it. (Dont forget, you need to have both a phone that supports mmWave and a carrier that offers it to get the signal at allnot all 5G devices nor all 5G data plans currently do.)

In the case of sub-6 5G service, the situation is much better, because much of the existing network equipment already supports the frequencies necessary to carry these signals. Again, however, the cell towers have to be upgraded to support 5G, but not all 5G phones support all types of sub-6 service. In particular, while many 5G phones support the mid-band 2.5GHz frequencies, some dont support the low-band (600 MHz) frequencies that T-Mobile announced it plans to roll out to debut its 5G service in December.

The bottom line is that were still in the early days for 5G devices, networks, and service plans, and there are still a number of challenges in making it all work. However, its clear that theres a great deal of evolution and enhancements being made to the 5G standards and 5G networks. Practically speaking, that means some of the best capabilities of 5G are going to require new devices and upgraded networks that support some of the capabilities coming in Releases 16 and 17. Even existing devices, though, should see noticeable improvements in coverage and performance over the course of the next year. As with most technologies, you can always make the argument to wait for something better, but at some point, you just need to jump in.

Continued here:

The Evolution of 5G - Forbes

What is a neobank?

Neobanks, digital-only banks that aren't saddled by traditional banking technology and costly networks of physical branches, have been working to redefine retail banking in major markets around the world.

The top neobanks in the US and EU include:

That's largely because of an onerous regulatory regime, which has made it very difficult to obtain a banking license, and the entrenched position incumbents hold in the financial lives of US consumers. Navigating the tedious and costly scheme for obtaining a banking charter and appropriate approvals has been a major stumbling block for the country's digital banking upstarts. However, developments over the past year suggest these startups are finally poised for the spotlight in the US.

Consumers', particularly millennials', growing frustration with legacy banking service providers, combined with their increased appetite for digital solutions, has accelerated the shift to digital-only banking. Startups and tech-savvy players are redefining the retail banking space and forcing incumbents to either evolve or lose out on this key business segment.

In The Evolution of the US Neobank Market, Business Insider Intelligence maps out the factors contributing to this shifting tide, examines how key players are positioning themselves to take advantage, and explores how incumbents can embark on their own digital transformations to stave off disruption.

The companies mentioned in this report include: Aspiration, Chime, Goldman Sachs' Marcus, JPMorgan Chase's Finn, N26, and Revolut.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here are four ways to get access:

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE US NEOBANK MARKET: Why the US digital-only banking space may finally be poised for the sp - Business Insider India