Iranian Laser Enrichment of Uranium Program

The Washington Post and other sources are reporting the announcement by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran has a program of Laser Enrichment of Uranium It is believed that the laser enrichment is still at experimental quantities and that the main enrichment is still centrifuges. Here is a 14 page pdf of the history of …

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Road Trains and Dynamically Reconfigurable Modular Vehicles

The EU is working on road trains, where cars have electronics to allow them to automatically follow lead vehicles driven by professional drivers. A new EU project SARTRE is being launched to develop and test technology for vehicles that can drive themselves in long road trains on motorways. This technology has the potential to improve …

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Combining Mach Effect Propulsion and Inertial Electrostatic Fusion Generation

An interview with Paul March on using the Mach Effect for propulsion The mach effect propulsion is research which still needs to prove that is has an actual effect which definitely exists as theorized and can be scaled and utilized for propulsion. IEC Bussard fusion has gotten $10 million in funding and it seems that …

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Google Chrome Frame Plugin Makes IE8 9.6 times Faster for Javascript

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer zips through JavaScript nearly 10 times faster than usual when Google’s new Chrome Frame plug-in is partnered with the browser, benchmark tests show. According to tests run by Computerworld, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) with the plug-in was 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite …

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Tunable Electromagnetic Gateway : Light and Electromagnetics Blocked but Corridor is Filled with Air

A simple route to a tunable electromagnetic gateway from the New Journal of Physics (13 page pdf) Transformation optics is used to design a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but allows the passage of other entities. Our conceptual device has the advantage that it can be realized with simple materials and structural parameters and …

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Update on the Oilsands, Bakken, Bakken-Three Forks and Oil and Gas Drilling Technolgy

Oilsand Slower Growth and Lower CostsSuncor expects its [oilsand] capital costs to decline by as much as 20 per cent from the peak of 2008 when it resumes oil sands expansion after its merger with Petro-Canada, which is expected to close this fall. Oil sands producers faced increasing bottlenecks in accessing pipelines and a lack …

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Mainstreaming of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Explosion Risks

The New York Times reported on the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2008-2009 Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures conference. Co-chairs: Eric Horvitz and Bart Selman Panel: Margaret Boden, Craig Boutilier, Greg Cooper, Tom Dean, Tom Dietterich, Oren Etzioni, Barbara Grosz, Eric Horvitz, Toru Ishida, Sarit Kraus, Alan Mackworth, David McAllester, Sheila McIlraith, …

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Carnival of Space 102

Carnival of Space 102 is up the Space Writer. This site provided an article listing eleven highly promising nuclear fission and fusion technologies. This site also provided the Sander Olson interview of Richard Nebel which gave insight into the IEC Bussard fusion project prospects. Centauri Dreams looks at sending an interstellar probe with frozen embryos …

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NASA Developing Fission Surface Power Technology 12-40KW

NASA looks to be developing larger (12-40KW) radioisotope thermoelectric generators for the moon’s surface. Hopefully NASA finishes this work as they have a history of starting big RTG projects and not completing them. Also, it probably would be better to use the Hyperion uranium hydride reactor instead, which has been covered extensively on this site …

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Self-assembling polymer arrays improve data storage potential

In a collaborative effort between academic and industry, chemical and biological engineering professors Nealey and Juan de Pablo and other colleagues from the UW-Madison NSEC partnered with researchers from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to test a promising new twist on the traditional computer memory and storage methods. In the Aug. 15 issue of the journal …

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Permanent nanoscale bubbles created

Engineers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles—bubbles that endure for more than a year—from batches of foam made from a mixture of glucose syrup, sucrose stearate, and water. Future applications of these microbubbles could significantly extend the lifetimes of common gas-liquid products …

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