AMD’s FireStream 9170 chipset includes 660 million transistors and 320 processing units and will be made by chipmaker TSMC. The FireStream 9170 is a step on the way to AMD’s Fusion project, which the company says will combine a graphics processor and general processor on the same piece of silicon. AMD hopes to release Fusion …
China is looking at increasing the number of nuclear plants built by 2020. Cao Shudong, director of system engineering with the China Atomic Energy Agency, said that although the country’s 40,000-MW nuclear capacity target only covers projects located on the eastern and southern coast, ‘from the point of view of economic development, interior provinces and …
As noted by the facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) society, myostatin inhibitor clinical trials have begun on humans. The first trials on humans actually started in Feb, 2005. UPDATE: MYO-029 development has been dropped as it is safe but not effective. Boosting follistatin seems to be the better pathway to proceed for more effective results ith …
Planetary.org has the latest carnival of Space. My contribution is about the overall lessons that should be taken from the recent Technology prize competitions (robotic cars, space elevators and lunar landers). The carnival had a response to a Guardian op-ed. The carnival article indicated that there is no need to keep the moon pristine. I …
CNN reports on a claimed breakthrough for speech-to-speech applications with Virtual Dictation. “Virtual Dictation” can process voice dictation in real-time from over 7 languages including: Chinese (simplified and traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. In addition, you can have the text generated from your voice, automatically converted into over 25 different languages. …
We have just completed the main technology prize competition season for 2007. The DARPA robotic driving competition had winners for the second year in a row. The winning Carnegie Mellon robot car, Boss The lunar lander challenge was close to a winner again, but again it was only one serious competitor Armidillo Aerospace. Lunar lander …
Two teams have independently succeeded in placing a cloud of chilled rubidium atoms within an optical cavity, which traps light between two opposed mirrors. The combination could one day form a quantum memory element. Colombe, Jakob Reichel and colleagues have put a BEC between two mirrors, which form an optical cavity trapping photons of a …
Controls on the capital account are “virtually ineffective” and speculative funds keep pouring in, betting on the yuan’s appreciation, Guo Jianwei, a senior bank official for monetary policy, said in a policy paper. The report urges reform of the current exchange rate regime. The rate, set Wednesday at a record high of 7.4476 to the …
Researchers at the Delft University of Technology’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) have succeeded in controlling the spin of a single electron merely by using electric fields. This clears the way for a much simpler realization of the building blocks of a (future) super-fast quantum computer. An …
Toshiba Corporation today announced important breakthroughs in key technologies for magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), a promising, next-generation semiconductor memory device. Cell Structure. A material with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, which is used for recording media and a type of cobalt-iron, is employed in the magnetic layer, with magnesium oxide in the insulating layer and cobalt-iron-boron …
Submarines could be made less visible to sonar using metamaterials There are still many challenges to overcome including the variability of the surrounding water and enabling lack of sonar reflection from more than one direction (ie another submarine at the same depth unable to detect but one above or below could) Brian WangBrian Wang is …