Progress to the Skylon Single Stage to Orbit Spaceplane for 2019

The last time this site had looked at the work of Reaction Engines, the designers of the Skylon Single-stage to Orbit vehicle proposal, they had designed the Mach 5 – A2 commercial Concorde replacement. Reaction Engines has gotten tens of millions of dollars in funding for various engine and cooler subsystem development and testing. They …

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Feb 3rd a $10 Laptop and Future Energy Harvesting Convergence

A $10 laptop (Rs 500) prototype, with 2 GB RAM capacity, would be on display in Tirupati, India on February 3 when the Indian National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology is launched. According to some unofficial reports the laptop will feature 2GB of memory, WiFi, fixed Ethernet, expandable memory, and consume just …

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Carnival of Space 88

Carnival of Space Week 88 is up at the Space Writer This site provided the article on laser array space launch details The Music of the Spheres provides an introduction to electric propulsion rockets. Electric Propulsion rockets were also featured in the latest Popular Science magazine. Orbital Hub looks at the Kepler exo-planet hunter mission …

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Graphene turned from highly Conductive into Insulating Graphane by Adding Hydrogen

Graphane crystal. This novel two-dimensional material is obtained from graphene (a monolayer of carbon atoms) by attaching hydrogen atoms (red) to each carbon atoms (blue) in the crystal. Credit: University of Manchester Researchers at The University of Manchester have produced a ground-breaking new material, graphane, which has been derived from graphene. What is huge:1. Graphene …

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IPhone “Intelligence” Enhancement and An Idea for Advanced Exoskeleton Training and Instant Skills

There is a new $1 iPhone application called CubeCheater which helps you solve the classic Rubik’s Cube puzzle toy using a mix of sophisticated algorithms and simple image-recognition technology. You take six pictures of your mixed up Rubik’s Cube using the iPhone’s camera — one photo per side. If you have an iPod Touch, you …

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Understanding Capacity Factor Improvement at Nuclear Power Plants

Over the past two decades, nuclear power plants have achieved increasingly higher capacity factors with the same or greater levels of safety. The average capacity factor for U.S. plants in operation in 1980 was 56.3 percent; in 1990, 66 percent; and in 2007, 91.8 percent. A 1994 analysis as the capacity factors were being improved …

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Canada s Conservative Government Appears Safe But A new Election likely either Fall 2009 or in 2010

Canada’s minority Conservative government looks to have avoided defeat over its budget, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be able to relax for too long before talk of an election starts to heat up again. This site covered the attempt by the three opposition parties in Canada to bring down the current Conservative government with …

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How Long Until There is a Capable Fusion Neutron Source for Transmuting Uranium

This is a review of the status of fusion tokomaks for steady state continuous operation and suitability as a consistent neutron source for the proposed fusion-fission hybrid nuclear waste to nuclear fuel transmutation system From the 2008 overview of Fusion research by R. Stambaugh of General Atomics: The Fusion Development Facility Mission (FDF): Develop Fusion’s …

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Geoengineering Proposals Analyzed and Compared for Cooling Potential

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have carried out the first comprehensive assessment of the relative merits of different geoengineering schemes in terms of the climate cooling potential. Their paper appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions. [H/T Greencar congress Using a mix of these geoengineering techniques and mitigating production of …

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Polymer Implant Trains Your Cells to Kill Cancer

One of cancer’s cleverest tricks is its ability to hide from the immune system. A new approach to cancer treatment called immunotherapy could spare patients at least some of the grueling battery of chemotherapy treatments by retraining the body’s own defenders–the cells of the immune system–to recognize and destroy tumors. Now researchers at Harvard University …

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Single Atom Silicon Atomic Quantum Dots at Room Temperature

Single atom quantum dots created by researchers at Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology and the University of Alberta make possible a new level of control over individual electrons, a development that suddenly brings quantum dot-based devices within reach. It is demonstrated that the silicon atom dangling bond (DB) state serves as a quantum dot. Coulomb …

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