Packers Plus Energy Services Inc., Calgary-based company, says its unique technology can deliver precisely-controlled fracs along a horizontal wellbore at an affordable price. “Without our StackFrac system, the Bakken formation in southeastern Saskatchewan would still be uneconomic for the most part,” says Dan Themig, president of the seven-year-old private firm. Producers had already attempted straightforward …
Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, is producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure three feet by six feet and promising slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer. The first applications will probably be as electrical conductors in planes and satellites to replace copper wire and save weight. Saving weight would save fuel. …
Carnival of Space 43 is up at Starts with a Bang My contribution was on the newly revealed prototypes from NASA funded projects for a new lunar truck and new robotic mining rover Music of the Spheres discusses the work at Stone Aerospace on robotic explorers that could lead to a robotic explorer for Europa’s …
A novel technique for vaccinating against a variety of infectious diseases – using an oil-based emulsion placed in the nose, rather than needles – has proved able to produce a strong immune response against smallpox and HIV in two new studies. The results build on previous success in animal studies with a nasal nanoemulsion vaccine …
Image at left: This robot shares some features with the lunar truck [below after the jump], but is equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling …
Physics professor Jacqueline Hewitt, director of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Science, stands behind a prototype of a radio telescope array. NASA has selected a proposal by an MIT-led team to develop plans for an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the moon that would probe the earliest formation of …
Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth’s people in 20 years. Members of the [NAE Engineering Grand Challenges] panel are “confident that we are not that far away from a tipping point where energy from solar will be …
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers are looking at is configurable processor technology developed by Tensilica Inc. The company offers a set of tools that system developers can employ to design both the SoC and the processor cores themselves. A real-world implementation of this technology. LBNL estimate that a 10 petaflop peak system built with Tensilica …
$7.4 million in funding has been provided for researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to look at issues for exaflop computers They are preparing for the challenges of developing an exascale computer at the new Institute for Advanced Architectures. One such challenge is power consumption. “An exaflop supercomputer might need 100 megawatts of …
Nvidia introduced the Cuda development tool in June 2007 to allow scientists to tap into the GPU’s power. More than 50,000 users have downloaded the software By 2012, three of the top five supercomputers in the world will have graphics processors using parallel computing applications to crunch numbers at a clip that’s not possible on …
Vincent Page, technology officer at GE, wrote a good paper in 2005 about the economics and timeline towards moving to fusion power He had three fusion concepts in a chart which I will extend Time to Small Cost to Achieve Large scale chanceConcept Description Scale net energy Net Energy after small success Funded?Bussard IEC Fusion …