The UAE’s largest telecommunication company Du announced it is testing LED-based Li-Fi or Visible Communication Technology (VLC) capable of transferring data at 1 gigabyte per second, reported The National.

The German Ski Association and the lighting manufacturer Osram have drawn a positive summary of their first season as partners. In this alliance, the German Ski Association applied the latest findings about “biologically effective light” to tap the performance reserves of athletes. The energizing effect of light was effectively used in particular for competitions held at night, overseas and in the Far East. “In world-class sport, we have reached a plateau where it is becoming increasingly difficult for athletes to reach an even higher level of performance. By applying knowledge about biologically effective light, we have been able to mobilize new energy reserves,” said Karlheinz Waibel, the national trainer for science and technology at the German Ski Association. Osram biologist Andreas Wojtysiak added: “We will systematically apply the knowledge we have gained in our partnership and develop new ways to boost the performance of world-class athletes.”

Royal Philips and the Rijksmuseum announced that they have extended their long term partnership for another five years. As part of the partnership, Philips will work closely with the Rijksmuseum to jointly apply meaningful innovations and programs that reinforce the link between art and well-being while enhancing the overall experience for the museum’s visitors.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have determined that light reflectance spectroscopy can differentiate between malignant and benign prostate tissue with 85% accuracy, a finding that may lead to real-time tissue analysis during prostate cancer surgery.

With the industry’s biggest biennial lighting event, Light+Building 2016 running for the whole week at Frankfurt Fair and Exhibition Center in Germany, the show hosted by Messe Frankfurt has resulted in a deluge of new lighting product releases. To make things easier for readers, and those who were unable to attend the show, we’ll pick a few highlights.

One of the top themes at Light + Building 2016 is the balance between design and function. Under the proposed themes in Hall 3, each luminaire designer and manufacturer have their own featuring products and market positions. Digitalization of light and human centric lighting has been a popular topic in recent years.

Top LED material manufacturer Dow Corning showcased a prototype silicone-based material for UV LED applications at the biennial Light+Building 2016, which takes place this week at Frankfurt Fair and Exhibition Center in Germany. 

Tufts University biologists using a frog model have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to prevent tumors from forming and normalize tumors after they have formed by using light to control electrical signaling among cells. The work, which appears online in Oncotarget on March 16, is the first reported use of optogenetics to specifically manipulate bioelectrical signals to both prevent and cause regression of tumors induced by oncogenes.

Heliospectra, a world leader in intelligent lighting technology for crop cultivation and plant research, have together with Gothenburg University and biotech companies CropTailor and OlsAro, successfully grown cereals (oat and barley) in a controlled environment under sole source LED lighting. The report entitled “Growth and development of cereals in a controlled environment with sole source LED lighting” demonstrate the potential to cultivate staple foods in a closed environment anywhere in the world. 

As a late entrant in the LED luminaire market, Sony has been primarily focused on grabbing profits in the budding smart home market, and its recent product pricing strategies and new products launched clearly illustrate this approach of utilizing its experience in the consumer electronic industry to make value-added smart LED products.

Gisborne Council in New Zealand announced it will replace over 950 old high pressure sodium street lights with upgrades to new LED power-saving lighting in the district over the next three years.

The Edinburgh Instruments applications team and Dr Gianluca Accorsi, a Research Fellow at CNR Nanotec in Lecce, Italy, worked on the photo-physical properties of Egyptian blue pigment using our Fluorescence Spectrometers.

Green energy. Everyone wants it, but not in their backyard. An odd thing for a country known for its picturesque windmills dating from the 18th century. How can we once again give green energy the allure it deserves?

NanoLumens and Navori have revealed a new partnership and the development of a unified strategy to provide digital signage networks to end users and system integrators.

It’s important to know how microorganisms — particularly pathogenic microbes — grow under various conditions. Certain bacteria can cause food poisoning when eaten and bacterial growth in medical blood supplies, while rare, might necessitate discarding the blood.

Modern LED outdoor lighting today takes into account all visual levels in an urban space and is not just limited to a norm-standard level of illuminance to light up those elements of the nocturnal cityscape in focus. Rather, this is about placing emphasis on the needs of people in living spaces at night. It's therefore worth brightening up urban spaces with spherical light components to create centres for human communication, creating visual points of attraction, and improving three-dimensional awareness. Moreover, special architectural features should be highlighted and complex space structures brought to life. This increases recognition value for a region and creates reliable guidance and orientation, even at night. In this way, security and wellbeing are significantly improved by lighting quality – always without wasting resources or increasing light pollution.

Delta Electronics, a leading provider of power and thermal management solutions, introduces today, at Light+Building 2016 Frankfurt, a full range of LED lighting solutions featuring the integration of smart monitoring platforms, industry-leading energy efficiency as well as world-class power electronics technology. The DeltaGrid® communication platform, recently installed to support a 5,000+ LED street light project in Taiwan, provides cloud monitoring functionality to improve maintenance productivity of city-scale street lighting networks.  The newly-launched industrial high bay LED lights Staccato series offer industry-leading efficiency of 160 lm/W and wireless connectivity via Zigbee for smart monitoring and control in green buildings and factories.    

On the biennial Light+Building 2016 organized by Messe Frankfurt, Samsung Electronics (SAMSUNG) and Wellmax Lighting (WELLMAX) jointly showcased their collaboration on LED technologies. The smallest 810lm full-beam-angle LED A50 bulb—the Ultron—is firstly released and gained tremendous attention from visitors worldwide.

India will be installing LED floodlights along its border neighboring Pakistan, in the first phase of the project lights in various sections covering districts of Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Granganagar and Barmer in Rajasthan have been replaced, reported Times of India.

Indian city Varansi’s ambitious project to replace old streetlights with LEDs in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency has been delayed, 33,000 streetlight replacements scheduled for completion in September 2015 is long overdue, reported Times of India.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., and Daintree Networks®—the leader in open networked wireless control, sensing and Enterprise Internet of Things™ solutions for smart buildings—are collaborating on joint solutions involving Samsung’s smart lighting module (SLM). Samsung’s SLM, which will be integrated with LED luminaires from lighting OEMs, enables greater intelligence through device-level processing, as well as enhanced connectivity through multiple embedded communications technologies, including the open standard ZigBee® protocol.  Combining Samsung’s SLM technology with the Daintree Networks ControlScope® networked wireless control solution makes new Internet of Things (IoT) applications possible for smart buildings.

The Fegime Group, the European-wide collaboration of 230 electrical wholesalers, has added the Aurora Group, global manufacturer of energy saving LED lighting solutions, as a preferred supplier of Lighting products in Europe. The agreement will see Aurora Group products being made available to electrical contractors via Fegime’s 1,150 sales points across 27 countries.

LG Display announced that it will invest in a new OLED light panel manufacturing facility. The planned facility will be the first 5th generation (1000 x 1200mm) OLED light panel manufacturing plant in the world. It is to be located in the South Korean city of Gumi, where it will produce a range of OLED light panels.

Xenics USA, Xenics North and Latin American office covering the full spectral range of Xenics' advanced infrared imagers, cores and cameras, has signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Laser Components’ North American sales, marketing and distribution office. With this new agreement, Laser Components USA, Inc. will become the partner to sell and market Xenics in-house developed SWIR line-scan imagers with rectangular pixels. This partnership will further extend Xenics position in the North American IR spectroscopy market. The agreement was jointly signed on February 12, 2016 at the Photonics West Trade show held in San Francisco.

Gooee, the IoT platform provider for lighting, has partnered with EnOcean, the world leader in energy harvesting wireless technology, to integrate a BLE based self-powered wall switch module into the Bluetooth Smart Mesh stack; the primary communication protocol in Gooee’s enterprise IoT ecosystem.

Application:  General lighting, Light is quality of life, Medical applications Technology:  LED, Light Management Systems (LMS), Luminaires Target group:  Operators of health care facilities

Essex County Council in UK projects it will be able to save about GBP 24 million (US$ 34.23 million) over 20 years with new LED streetlight installations, but despite energy savings it still plans to implement its part-night lighting scheme, reported local paper Dealer Offers.

With new technology getting smaller and smaller, requiring lower power, University of Cincinnati physics research points to new robust electronic technologies using quantum nanowire structures.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has created a number of useful new resources to help stakeholders understand IES TM-30-15, which describes a new method for evaluating light-source color rendition.

The CLUE has unveiled the three winners of its International Lighting Design Contest, held this year under the theme Lightius Loci. Mr. YeonHo Lee from Seoul, South Korea and his team (WooSeok Jang, DongGyun Ha), have won the first prize of $5,000 for their project DMZ: N38˚; the second prize of $2,500 was awarded to Mrs. Maria-Chrysoula Akrivou from Athens, Greece and her team (Antonis Athanasiou) for Lightening a modern odyssey; and the third prize of $1,000 was awarded to Mrs. Verbeek Kara from Vancouver, Canada, for Salmon Run.