Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on “watchful vigilance from underneath”. The idea is that citizens should be working together to watch society and government to prevent abuse of power and to help detect and defend against terrorists and others who would act against society. An interesting new development is …
Next-generation memories–such as FRAM, MRAM, PCM and others–are supposed to replace today’s DRAMs and flash memory technologies. Current memory devices are expected to hit the wall, as the floating-gate reaches its physical limits. Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics Inc. reached a milestone, as they begin shipping prototype samples of their previously-announced phase change memory (PCM) line. …
Carnival of Space #40 is up at orbiting frog I contributed my article on SpaceX’s progress on the Falcon 9 rocket Hobby space updates the activites of Bigelow Aerospace who are making an inflatable space hotel Centauri Dreams lives up to its siet name with a talk about the Longshot space mission. It was a …
A picture from the patent filing for what General fusion is trying to build with backing from Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital. GF will build a ~3 meter diameter spherical tank filled with liquid metal (lead-lithium mixture). Rams use compressed steam to accelerate pistons to ~50 m/s. Make compression wave in the liquid metal. Microsecond of …
From the designers of Skylon, a fairly practical spaceplane designs, comes the Mach 5 A2 commercial Concorde replacement. The A2 and the Scimitar engine are more affordable and longer lasting versions of the Skylon spaceplane and Sabre engine. Analysis of the Development, Production and Operating costs suggests that the average ticket price would be comparable …
University of Arizona optical scientists have broken a technological barrier by making three-dimensional holographic displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes. Currently 4 inch by 4 inch red displays, but soon life size color displays that could still be rewritten in minutes. If they can increase the writing speed 5000 …
The source of this post is this 10 page IEEE paper, Launch to Space With an Electromagnetic Railgun byIan R. McNab, Senior Member, IEEE The cost of electricity for a launch will be negligible, as shown below. Barrel life is central to the successful economics for this system. A system might cost $1.3 billion and …
Photograph taken from a high-speed video camera during a record-setting firing of a seven-pound bullet fired from a truck-sized electromagnetic railgun at seven times the speed of sound and sent a visible shockwave through the air before crashing into a metal bunker filled with sand. UPDATE: New article written on using railguns for space launch. …
Nanoscopic DNA pyramids that change shape when sent different chemical signals, have been demonstrated by researchers in the UK and Germany. Such structures could act as the motors of nanoscale robots, they say. The researchers demonstrate the operation of reconfigurable DNA tetrahedra whose shapes change precisely and reversibly in response to specific molecular signals. Shape …
During the fourth quarter of 2007, Marathon Oil completed the acquisition of more than 70,000 net leaseholdacres in the Bakken Shale play in North Dakota. The acreage brings Marathon’s total Bakken Shale leasehold to more than 320,000 net acres. Marathon currently has six rigs running in its Bakken program and ended 2007 with a net …
Dwave Systems closed a $17M financing round as of the end of January 2008. These funds will be used primarily to push the level of integration of our chips into the low thousands of qubits by the end of the year. In parallel with this central effort we will be working on running experiments on …