I will be speaking at the Undergraduate nanotechnology conference tomorrow (Saturday, March 8, 2008) in Toronto, Canada The list of speakers is here and includes Ralph Merkle, Dr Hadi Mahabadi, Dr Rboert Wolkow and myself. There are also workshop speakers. This is my 2000th post and add some of my talk “Only Accept an Extraordinary …
According to a recent article in Energy and Environment News, the Air Force is planning to build a 100-225 megawatt nuclear power reactor. Wired blogs mentioned air force interest in nuclear power for bases back in late 2007 Inside the Air Force: headline: Air Force to sign Letter of Intent for Nuclear plant by late …
Michael Anissimov has another article related to the defence of transhumanism from misguided attacks. Transhumanism (sometimes symbolized by >H or H+), a term often used as a synonym for “human enhancement”, is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, …
February’s sale of oil and natural gas drilling rights in Saskatchewan have smashed the record for single-sale revenues, bringing in a whopping $197 million in bonus bids, more than double the previous record of $85 milllion set in 1994. The overall Bakken oil play is across North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Manitoba and Saskatchwan. It …
Carnival of Space week 44 is up at Bad Astronomy My contribution was my article on large sheets of carbon nanotubes being produced this year which could be used for high performance solar sails. Several of the posts are about Mars. Why the Mars avalanches were interesting Creating a early warning system for future Mars …
WhalePower, based in Toronto, Ontario, is testing this wind-turbine blade at a wind-testing facility in Prince Edward Island. The bumps, or “tubercles,” on the blade’s leading edge reduce noise, increase its stability, and enable it to capture more energy from the wind.Credit: WhalePower I have talked frequently about nuclear power uprating (changes in fuel design …
Michael Anissimov has a picture of a progression from World War 2 soldier to a mech. The hypothetical Mech has a hypothetical price tag of 500k-700K. Military hummers cost $150K armored and $60-75k unarmored Of course they are not autonomous, although with the DARPA program for self driving cars..we could add yet (and tack on …
Forbes has its latest survey of the Worlds’s billionaires Warren Buffet is back to being the world’s richest man. 2007 2006 2005 2004 Wealth Amount 8 5 3 2 US$30B+ Forbes list (which mainly catches owners 77 67 49 32 US$10B+ of public assets, can underestimate some 203 167 124 102 US$5B+ like CTO of …
Seed magazine has a 9 page review of the Blue Brain project. Blue Brain is the IBM project to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. Currently they have simulated one column of a neocortex (of a rat) with 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses using a 22.8 teraflop supercomputer. (A human neocortex column has …
There is the possibility that single molecular nanomagnets or nanoparticle nanomagnets could be used to create powerful quantum computers. If quantum tunneling could be controlled in nanomagnets then they could create quantum computer gates or devices. The current work identifies that quantum tunneling can be turned on and off in nanomagnets. According to quantum mechanics, …
Here is a research paper that discusses using adiabatic quantum computation using liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computers for pattern recognition. UPDATE:Pattern recognition is a critical aspect of artificial intelligence. I have a new article “Artificial Intelligence: You are soaking in it”, which discusses mostly ignored penetration of artificial intellience and its future with …