You’re soaking in it. This phrase was popularized by a television commercial campaign for Palmolive dish washing detergent. Madge, a manicurist, would comment on the dry, rough appearance of her client’s skin as she worked on one hand while the other soaked in a bowl of light green liquid. The client would ask her advice; …
Carnival of Space week 45 is up at missyfrye.net Centauri Dreams talks about replication machines and space colonization Centauri Dreams was examining the issue based on another article at George Dvorsky’s sentient developments on seven ways to control the galaxy with self replicating probes. I recently took a look at these visions and came up …
Charles Barton reports that the US Geological Service will be announcing huge new reserves of Thorium in the United States. Charles also discusses the needs and issues of a comprehensive national energy policy. This information is crossposted at thoriumenergy “Thorium Power, Inc. has told me that they already have the technology to “switch over” from …
The Wimax communication technology could be making a breakout in India as reported by Businessweek. Sprint will be rolling out a WiMax network in Washington next month (April 2008), and in other U.S. cities next year {2009). Until now the most advanced use of WiMax has been in Japan and Korea, where Japanese carrier KDDI …
The Volvo ReCharge Concept can be driven approximately 62 miles on battery power alone before the car’s four-cylinder 1.6 Flexifuel engine takes over to power the car and recharge the battery. As the vast majority of us drive less than 60 miles a day, the ReCharge is effectively a permanent electric car with an acceleration …
David Brin has his defense of the Transparent Society up at Wired. This was in response to a critque by Bruce Schneier that centered around unequal power. My tiny involvement was emailing David Brin to make him aware of the Schneier article. A common problem with attacks on the 1997 book “The Transparent Society” is …
The image demonstrates the design of an artificial brain built using a nano-brain reported in this issue of PNAS. Several molecular nano-brain are arranged in a way to work as powerful as our central nervous system. Numerical digits and alphabets float across the architecture demonstrating a matrix generated during a real-time operation similar to the …
China will be building nuclear power at a faster rate than previously projected. Zhang Guobao, a vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission long involved in energy planning, said he now expected installed nuclear power capacity of 60 GW by that date. Previously it was mentioned that China would have 40GW completed and …
In a major step forward for computational protein design, University of Washington scientists have built from scratch a handful of enzymes that successfully catalyze a specific chemical reaction. These proteins have no naturally occurring counterparts, and the reaction–which breaks down a man-made chemical–has no natural catalyst. David Baker and his colleagues at the University of …
MIT has developed a simple, inexpensive system to sort different kinds of cells a process that could result in low-cost tools to test for diseases such as cancer, even in remote locations. The method relies on the way cells sometimes interact with a surface (such as the wall of a blood vessel) by rolling along …
Electron transport through a structure of nanoparticles (left) and more ordered nanotubes (center) is shown. At right, different wavelengths of light can be absorbed by different-sized quantum dots layered in a “rainbow” solar cell. Image credit: Kongkanand, et al. ©2008 ACS. Solar cells made of different-sized quantum dots, each tuned to a specific wavelength of …