The Australian government announced on Thursday it had barred foreigners from buying a company that owns the world’s largest cattle ranch and other Australian farmland greater in area than South Korea.

The company, S. Kidman & Co. Ltd., owns 10 cattle ranches, a bull breeding stud and a feed lot covering 101,411 square kilometers (39,155 square miles) in four states. That’s an area bigger than South Korea and almost as big as the U.S. state of Virginia.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said that Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board, or FIRB, found that the sale to foreign investors would be contrary to the national interest.

Kidman owns the world’s biggest cattle ranch, Anna Creek Station, which covers 23,677 square kilometers (9,142 square miles) of arid central Australia. Half of it is inside the 122,188 square kilometer (47,177 square mile) Defense Department-controlled Woomera Prohibited Area, or WPA, the world’s largest rocket firing range.

“The WPA weapons testing range makes a unique and sensitive contribution to Australia’s national defense and it is not unusual for governments to restrict access to sensitive areas on national security grounds,” Morrison said in a statement.

“Given the size and significance of the total portfolio of Kidman properties along with the national security issues around access to the WPA, I have determined, after taking advice from FIRB, that it would be contrary to Australia’s national interest for a foreign person to acquire S. Kidman and Co. in its current form,” he added.

Morrison left open the possibility of the company being split up and partially sold to foreign interests without Anna Creek.

Don Manifold, a director of Ernst and Young who is managing the sale, was not immediately available for comment on Thursday.

He said last month that he expected between six and 12 bidders would lodge formal offers. He would not say how many were foreigners. From that list, a preferred buyer was to be chosen before the end of the year.

Media speculated that the company would sell for more than 300 million Australian dollars ($210 million).

At least three Chinese bidders were reportedly interested in buying the Adelaide-based company which was founded by beef baron Sir Sidney Kidman in 1899 and is now largely owned by his descendants.

The Defense Department blocked two Chinese investments in mines on security grounds in 2009 because they were within the Woomera range.

The FIRB rarely intervenes in corporate sales. But increasing foreign ownership of Australian farmland has become a politically sensitive issue.

The Australian beef industry is emerging from years of low profitability due to drought and a high Australian dollar inflated by a mining boom that has now passed.

Despite the size of Kidman’s land holdings, its ranches are largely semi-desert and carry only an average herd of 185,000 cattle, which is a fraction of a percent of the total Australian herd.

Source: Australia Bars Foreigners From Buying World’s Largest Ranch – ABC News

University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router — a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments — to power devices.

The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine’s annual “Best of What’s New” awards announced Wednesday.

The technology attracted attention earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet.

The final paper will be presented next month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on emerging networking experiments and technologies.

“For the first time we’ve shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices,” said lead author Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. “We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source — it doesn’t degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it’s powering devices.”

PoWiFi could help enable development of the Internet of Things, where small computing sensors are embedded in everyday objects like cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, air conditioners, mobile devices, allowing those devices to “talk” to each other. But one major challenge is how to energize those low-power sensors and actuators without needing to plug them into a power source as they become smaller and more numerous.

The team of UW computer science and electrical engineers found that the peak energy contained in untapped, ambient Wi-Fi signals often came close to meeting the operating requirements for some low-power devices. But because the signals are sent intermittently, energy “leaked” out of the system during silent periods.

The team fixed that problem by optimizing a router to send out superfluous “power packets” on Wi-Fi channels not currently in use — essentially beefing up the Wi-Fi signal for power delivery — without affecting the quality and speed of data transmission. The team also developed sensors that can be integrated in devices to harvest the power.

In their proof-of-concept experiments, the team demonstrated that the PoWiFi system could wirelessly power a grayscale, low-power Omnivision VGA camera from 17 feet away, allowing it to store enough energy to capture an image every 35 minutes.

It also re-charged the battery of a Jawbone Up24 wearable fitness tracker from zero to 41 percent in 2.5 hours.

The researchers also tested the PoWiFi system in six homes. Users typically didn’t notice deterioration in web page loading or video streaming experiences, showing the technology could successfully deliver power via Wi-Fi in real-world conditions without degrading network performance.

Although initial experiments harvested relatively small amounts of power, the UW team believes there’s opportunity for make the PoWiFi system more efficient and robust.

“In the future, PoWi-Fi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

Source: Powering the next billion devices with Wi-Fi | Science Codex

Teck Resources Ltd closed up Wednesday by $0.06 or 0.96% to $6.29. Although unchanged over the last five days, shares are down 60.39% for the last year to date. This security has underperformed the S&P TSX by 55.42% during the last year.

Source: The Globe and Mail – Stock Quote