Op ed in New York Times by Benny Morris, suggests Israel will almost surely strike Iran in the next 4-7 months. Benny Morris is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.” Steve Forbes opinion is online here. The Israelis …
PET scans could detect Alzheimer’s as early as 10 years before people show symptoms of the disease, allowing them to begin treatment earlier. If the disease is detected ten years in advance it provides a lot of time for treatment and lifestyle change to slow or possibly prevent the occurence of the disease. Plus more …
Dwave’s CTO Geordie Rose is showing a picture of a 200mm wafer made of 5mm superconducting adiabatic quantum computing chips. There are about 1000 of the 5mm chips on the wafer. The superconducting adiabatic quantum computing chips need dilution fridges for proper operationUsing a dilution refrigerator is the most powerful way to reach very low …
Via Marginal Revolution: Consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females. Quoting from the study: Greater male …
WhiteKnightTwo is a dual-hull quad-engine aircraft roughly three times larger than the original WhiteKnight. WK2 is the world’s first all-composite full-sized aircraft. Everything apart from the engines and landing gear is constructed from ultra-lightweight composite materials. Virgin Galactic expects to fly its first commercial space flights somewhere between 2009 and 2011. Virgin galactic pictures The …
This site had published an article one week ago about creating robotic car exclusive zones in cities to enable a faster deployment of robotic cars. Brad Templeton has written up several articles about the advantages of robotic cars for revamping the transportation system. Brad’s robocar mainpage. Brad looks at the myth of green public transit. …
Current world nuclear power is 611 million tons of oil equivalent. (multiply by 7.1-7.4 for barrel of oil equivalent) This is from 64000 tons of Uranium per year being burned at about 5% efficiency. 3200 tons of Uranium if deep burn reactors were used. Deep burn (50-99%) burn of uranium and thorium for nuclear power …
Using electron microscope methods of a hitherto unknown accuracy, scientists from Forschungszentrum Juelich have succeeded in locally demonstrating polarization in the ferroelectric PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 and measuring it atom by atom. The broken line forms the boundary of two areas with different electrical polarization marked by the arrows. This is due to the fact that the atoms …
A consortium of eight labs led by molecular biologist J. Keith Joung at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has come up with what they call an “open-source” method of making efficient zinc finger nucleases. The group created an archive of 66 “pools,” or sets, of individual zinc fingers that have been selected to bind different …
semiconductor lasers are widely used in everyday products such as communication devices, optical recording technologies, and laser printers, they suffer from poor directionality. Divergent beams from semiconductor lasers are focused or collimated with lenses that typically require meticulous optical alignment—and in some cases bulky optics. Researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a plasmonic collimator, consisting …
Thermoelectrics using nanostructures offers the potential of getting very close to the carnot limit of efficiency using very light weight systems for convert heat to electricity. Early versions of thermoelectrics have been sold for many years but are being rapidly improved. About 90 percent of the world’s power (approximately 10 TW) is generated by heat …