Researchers at Boston College and MIT have used nanotechnology to achieve a major increase in thermoelectric efficiency, a milestone that paves the way for a new generation of products – from semiconductors and air conditioners to car exhaust systems and solar power technology – that run cleaner. UPDATE:Info from the Technology Review on how this …
Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an article where he promotes the World Transhumanist Association discussion topic: Is Star Trek a Fascist Society? I have seen the 726 episodes across 6 TV series and 10 (and soon 11) movies and many of the books, two Vegas rides, etc… Their continuing mission (not always successful) is …
Carnival of Space 46 is up at riding with robots My contribution was the premature report of room temperature superconductors. There is a new class of superconductors made under high pressure which could lead to room temperature superconductors. Centauri Dreams talks about David Brin’s speculation on eleven reasons for no contact with aliens (fermi paradox) …
Buckyballs (carbon 60) can be loaded with hydrogen up to a few times smaller than the pressure [up to 140GPa] when the hydrogen turns metallic (400GPa) This is a detailed computational analysis, they did not perform a physical experiment and there is as yet no clear strategy for performing the actual loading of hydrogen into …
NEC AND the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed the technology for a ten-Petaflop supercomputer. The foundation of this beast is a network of optical interconnections between nests of chips. The Japanese government says it could be ready by 2010. The optically connected chips can talk to each other at 25 gigabits per second, so …
Stanford electronics researchers, lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing such a camera that makes a 2-D photo with an electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D. They it built around their “multi-aperture image sensor.” They’ve shrunk the pixels …
A way to carry out genetic surgery [more precise gene therapy] has been devised by a British Nobel prizewinner that is already under test on diabetic patients and being readied for use to treat Aids, blocked blood vessels and chronic pain. Safety and precision problems and concerns have been holding back wider use of gene …
A full-scale, fully cantilevered electromagnetic railgun developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has successfully launched a full-sized projectile, with size and weight similar to a 120mm mortar, at speeds of 430 meters-per-second. 430 meters/second would be a little faster than the 101-318 meter/second speed of regular mortar firings. The railgun is the …
Charles Barton has an informative interview with Ralph Moir posted at Nuclear Green and Thorium energy.Dr. Ralph Moir was an extremely distinguished scientist at Lawrence-Livermore Laboratory, and a personal associate of Dr. Edward Teller. He first discusses fusion/fission hybrid reactors and then molten salt fission reactors. Fusion holds the promise–yet to be fulfilled–of providing a …
BM Researchers Develop World’s Tiniest Nanophotonic Switch to route optical data between cores in future computer chips. If light can be used instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat. The report on this work, entitled “High-throughput …
Side and top views of the NIST molecular resistor. Above are schematics showing a cross-section of the full device and a close-up view of the molecular monolayer attached to the CMOS-compatible silicon substrate. Below is a photomicrograph looking down on an assembled resistor indicating the location of the well. NIST team demonstrates that a single …