1. Mirrored drones can make jet mounted lasers more effective. [H/T alfin and Tom Craver] The flying laser cannon could be accompanied by a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fitted with mirrors. These relay UAVs would be harder to spot and more disposable than a 747, and could bounce the high-energy beam onto targets …
Free piston engines could achieve efficiencies of 50% which is almost double a regular gas combustion engine. However, new super efficient diesel engines could be even better, plus diesels would be more familiar to the market place. Some small companies are working on free piston engines and there are researchers around the world at Sandia …
The Hyperion Power Generation uranium hydride reactor will weigh fifteen to 20 tons, depending on whether you’re measuring just the reactor itself or the cask—the container that we ship it in—as well. It was specifically designed to fit on the back of a flatbed truck because most of our customers are not going to have …
Bridgewave Communications, the leading supplier of gigabit wireless solutions, has been selling the SLE100 point-to-point bridge that delivers highly reliable, low latency, wire-speed 100 Mbps full-duplex, half-mile (800-meter) connectivity since July 15, 2008. Built around BridgeWave’s field-proven 60 GHz radios, the SLE100 enables enterprise network managers to seamlessly extend LANs and achieve carrier-class performance at …
An 80-base-pair piece of DNA to be sequenced (shown here in purple) is first inserted into a circular template of DNA, along with four stretches of synthetic DNA, called adaptors (pink and blue). A specialized enzyme then makes hundreds of consecutive copies of the DNA circle. Thanks to chemical properties engineered into the adaptor sequences, …
1. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on October 1st, 2008 introduced legislation that would pave the way for thorium nuclear-fuel reactors in the United States. The Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act of 2008 would establish offices at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy to regulate domestic thorium …
Zyvex is getting funded by DARPA for $9.7 million to develop atomically precise manufacturing. This follows earlier funding of $15 million for Zyvex’s Atomically Precise Manufacturing project. Zyvex Labs today announced the award of a $9.7M program funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Texas’ ETF (Emerging Technology Fund). The goal of this …
Extra wearable robotic arms would be helpful. Above is a statue of Vishnu. If Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics goal of low cost worker robots and robot arms were merged with the new bionic arm work at John’s Hopkins, then able bodied people could wear or use robotic arms that would function as an extra helping …
Nanodiamonds, a revolutionary class of nanomaterials, are 2 nanometers in diameter in single-particle form, and can be manipulated to form clusters with diameters in the 50-100nm range. This makes them ideal for drug delivery by shielding and slow releasing drugs trapped within the cluster of Diamond aggregates. Dean Ho, Northwestern University, has created a thin …
The cleaved form, MUC1*, is expressed on undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells while the full-length, uncleaved protein (MUC1-FL) is expressed on differentiated stem cells. These studies represent a big step forward for human stem cell research and the future of stem cell transplantation. Previously Minerva Biotechnology reported that the MUC1 protein exists in the same …
One of my 156 predictions made in March 2006 was that gigapixel cameras would be common in the 2009-2015 timeframe. The Seitz Roundshot that takes 470 Megapixel images in 3 seconds and costs $36,500 is getting very close. There are other gigapixel scanning cameras and cameras for satellites and space applications but those will not …