I will explore how a series of dome shells over cities could be made with molecularly precise materials that would be resistant to nuclear weapons. Note: This is only a speculative thought experiment. Even if you had the required nanotechnology, making the defense system would be a wasteful and provocative act. The economic abundance that …
A novel Fast Thorium Breeder Reactor (FTBR) being developed by V. Jagannathan and his team at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai has received global attention after a paper was submitted to the International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems (ICENES) held June 9-14 in Istanbul. They believe their FTBR is one such …
Monolithic dome structure The dome structures can be built quickly and are very strong. digg_url= ‘http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/monolithic-domes.html’; digg_skin =’compact’;reddit_url=’http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/monolithic-domes.html’reddit_url=’advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/monolithic-domes.html’ The Monolithic Dome is the most disaster resistant building that can be built at a reasonable price without going underground or into a mountain. A wind of 70 miles per hour blowing against a 30 foot tall …
I had an article about USA and California’s population projected in Q1 of 2007. There is a new San francisco Chronicle article about California expected population. In the new report, state demographers used the latest county population estimates as a baseline to make assumptions about future migration patterns. The formulas they used accounted for undocumented …
IBM and Sun have announced petaflop supercomputers. They indicate that there are no barriers to more computer power but the most important issues going forward are to manage and reduce power usage and to improve software. “The hardware speed [of supercomputers] will not reach a plateau,” said Simon See, Sun Microsystems’ director for Advance Computing …
Toronto, Canada is introducing an air pollution index that is correlated to health risk This is a good way to make the health risks of air pollution something that people can be aware of on a daily basis. If this is used globally it could help movitivate replacing or cleaning up coal and fossil fuel …
DNA Synthesis – Productivity of DNA synthesis technologies has increased approximately 7,000-fold over the past 15 years, doubling every 14 months. Costs of gene synthesis per bases pair have fallen 50-fold, halving every 32 months. At the same time, the accuracy of gene synthesis technologies has improved significantly. If these technologies continue to improve at …
Synthetic biology used to make viruses to combat harmful ‘biofilms’ This diagram shows how an engineered virus,T7, destroys a biofilm composed of E. coli bacteria. Graphic courtesy / Timothy Lu and James Collins In one of the first potential applications of synthetic biology, an emerging field that aims to design and build useful biomolecular systems, …
Synthetic biology and synthetic life are about to make several major milestones Note: the synthesis of 580,000 base pairs of DNA is significant. 3 million base pairs make up a ribosome. Being able to synthesize 580,000 base pairs in 2007 suggests that we could be 1 to 2 years from synthesizing our own ribosomes. It …
A New York Times review of THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. By Michael J. Sandel. When norms change, you can always find old fogeys who grouse that things aren’t the way they used to be. In the case of football, Sandel finds a retired N.F.L. player to support his …
Goldman Sachs strategists predict the People’s Bank of China will let the currency advance 7.5 percent in the coming year, while JPMorgan predicts the yuan will climb 10.6 percent by March. The yuan appreciated 1.5 percent last quarter as prices for items such as food, rent and transportation increased the most in 27 months. Goldman …