Tom Sanders, Vice President/President Elect American Nuclear Society, is promoting “Global Energy Needs: Defining a Role for a “Right Sized Reactor” [32 page pdf] There is some conflicting information in the 32 page presentation and a Sandia press release. The presentation (May, 2009) talks about a variety of reactor technologies include light water, gas cooled, …
Idaho National Laboratory has a portable tunnel detector. This could be used to help detect tunnels under the border between the United States and Mexico and for detection of tunnels around Israel. Here are some highlights. * INL engineers have built a lightweight, portable device capable of detecting tunnels or weapons caches through 75 feet …
Cumbrian Sky has the 118th Carnival of Space. This site contributed the article about the Russian Space Agency and NASA trying to get larger budgets with talks about Mars Missions. The reality seems likely to be no budget increases and more use of companies like Spacex. Weird Warp looks at nuclear fusion and the variety …
EE Times published predictions from Texas Instruments on developments from now to 2020 in computer processors. The predictions are by Alan Gatherer. He is the CTO for the High Performance Multicore Processors group at TI and is responsible for all strategic development of TI’s digital baseband modems for 3G wireless infrastructure 2012: Network-on-Chip (NoC) arrives. …
a, The plasmonic laser consists of a CdS semiconductor nanowire on top of a silver substrate, separated by a nanometre-scale MgF2 layer of thickness h. This structure supports a new type of plasmonic mode16 the mode size of which can be a hundred times smaller than a diffraction-limited spot. The inset shows a scanning electron …
Wired describes the “Good Enough Revolution” Wired makes the following points about the “Good Enough Revolution”. Eventually all markets reach a point where products more gain more “value” by having core features and making those features extremely easy to use, convenient and cheap instead of adding more features. * In 2001, 181 million disposable cameras …
Recent nuclear power cost estimates – separating fact from myth at Brave New Climate by Barry Brook David Walters at Daily Kos What do we know for sure? We know, for sure, that the costs of the material for an AP-1000 is is less than 1.4 billion dollars. How do we know that? Because this …
Latest Developments in Nanotechnology: Singularity University Presentation View more presentations from nextbigfuture. Slides from the presentation made on July 16, 2009 at the Singularity University by Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture. Some other presentations from the Singularity University that are available on slideshare. Singularity University Open Source Panel Singularity University Open Source Panel View more presentations …
The first Singularity University 9 week semester is completing today. A goal of the Singularity University is to catalyze projects that could possibly help 1 Billion People in Under Ten Years. The team projects from the first semester include the following reports: * One Global Voice leverages mobile phone proliferation to accelerate economic development. It …
If Space Programs Were Richly Funded for Decades IEEE spectrum indicates that Russia has unveiled an ambitious three-decade plan for a manned space program this week at the International Aviation and Space Salon, MAKS-2009 The Russian Federal Space Agency’s hope is that its plan will become the basis for a broad international effort to send …
TG Daily reports that Nvidia’s CEO predicted that GPU (Graphical Processing Units) will increase in power by 570 times over six years (up to 2016) from current levels. This would require tripling the speed of the GPU every year. Previously William J. Dally, Chief scientist at Nvidia Corp, predicted Nvidia GPUs in 2015 will be …