A new system for delivering a drug to organ transplant patients, which could avoid the risk of harmful side effects, is being developed by scientists at Strathclyde. The drug, cyclosporine (CsA), is widely used in transplant operations and helps prevent the patient’s body rejecting the organ but it can cause adverse drug reactions, of which …
iRobot CEO Colin Angle shows off the company’s latest robot designed to help people with home health care needs. AVA is a robot with a tablet for head. Tablet provides cameras, sensors and compute power. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is …
Reason has a feature on the key people driving New Space Elon Musk of Spacex Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic Jeff Greason of XCOR Peter Diamandis of the Xprize Charles Simonyi who has paid twice to be a passenger to the Space Station Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace who is making inflatable space stations John …
New Journal of Physics – Experimental verification of three-dimensional plasmonic cloaking in free-space (14 pages) They optimized the cloak design for the 3 GHz range. They have hidden a cylinder from microwaves, demonstrating cloaking of an object in free space, rather than a two-dimensional image. The group has not been able to scatter visible light, …
Eurekalert University of Massachusetts Amherst – The total cost of asthma due to pollution is much higher than past traditional risk assessments have indicated and there is growing evidence that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is a cause of asthma and a trigger for attacks, so it should be included. They conducted the study in …
Arxiv – Gaming is a hard job, but someone has to do it! (12 pages) We establish some general schemes relating the computational complexity of a video game to the presence of certain common elements or mechanics, such as destroyable paths, collecting items, doors activated by switches or pressure plates, etc.. Then we apply such …
World Nuclear News – The US Department of Energy (DoE) is to help push forward the manufacture of small modular nuclear reactors through new cost-sharing arrangements with private industry to support design and licensing activities. The DoE intends ultimately to fund up to two designs for small modular reactors (SMRs) through a cost-shared partnership which …
A first-of-a-kind reactor system has been set up in Belgium by coupling a subcritical assembly with a particle accelerator. The equipment, known as Guinevere, is a demonstration model that supports the project for a larger version that will be called Myrrha (Multipurpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications). The overall project is supported by 12 …
Elon Musk announces a milestone towards a reusable rocket Twitter – Design completed for bringing rocket back to launchpad using only thrusters. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers …
The Nextbigfuture nuclear launch gun has been described several times. It is a one pulse variant of a project orion external pulse propulsion system. It is simple though dramatic: Dig a kilometers deep shaft—a salt layer would be easiest to penetrate (some exist 3.5 kilometers thick) —build at the bottom a giant shell, from components …
New Energy and Fuel – “super fracking” as its becoming named is based on three basic improvements. This is a follow up from this article 1. Schlumberger’s “HIWAY” idea is an innovation in the material forced into the rock. (The linked page has a good animation to explain the process in detail.) Schlumberger’s Flow-Channel Fracturing …