1. NRC – South Carolina Electric and Gas Company has received approval for combined construction and operating licenses (COLs) from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for two new nuclear units at V. C. Summer Station in Jenkinsville, S.C. In a 4-1 vote the Commission found the NRC staff’s review adequate to make the necessary regulatory …
Inside Science – Several research groups claim to have thin one molecule thick sheets of silicon called silicene (analogous to graphene for carbon), igniting a controversy over who won the race to synthesize this promising new material. According to Lew Yan Voon, electronic devices based on silicene could reliably exhibit the critical on-off function required …
A new technique – dubbed a dynamic sensor-regulator system (DSRS) – can detect metabolic changes in microbes during the production of fatty acid-based fuels or chemicals and control the expression of genes affecting that production. The result in one demonstration was a threefold increase in the microbial production of biodiesel from glucose. The DSRS is …
Science – Hydrocarbon Separations in a Metal-Organic Framework with Open Iron(II) Coordination Sites The energy costs associated with large-scale industrial separation of light hydrocarbons by cryogenic distillation could potentially be lowered through development of selective solid adsorbents that operate at higher temperatures. Here, the metal-organic framework Fe2(dobdc) (dobdc4– : 2,5-dioxido-1,4-benzenedicarboxylate) is demonstrated to exhibit excellent …
The Wealth Report 2012 (68 pages) forecasts the wealthy and the world economy on a purchasing power basis to 2050 They are using the World Bank purchasing power parity statistics as a starting point. The Penn (university of Pennsylvania) World tables of purchasing power parity 7.0 has adjusted PPP as follows. China is estimated at …
1. WSJ – Apple and Foxconn have agreed to reducing work hours to a maximum of 40 hours a week and limiting overtime to a maximum of 36 hours a week—the legal maximum in China—by July 2013. Currently works hours aren’t strictly enforced at the local level, and up to 100 hours a week is …
The Free Exchange blog at The Economist has accepted the Michael Pettis bet, and very cleverly (the bastards!) they have added a second one. Michael Pettis rejected making basically the same bet with me. The two bets. 1. The Economist says that at the then current dollar/RMB exchange rate China will be the world’s largest …
Most experts believe that silicon scaling will end by 2020 at the 10 nanometer node. Although several promising post-CMOS technologies, such as graphene or III-V compound semiconductors or even spintronics might take its place, these technologies will not be deployed before 2025 at the earliest. But if the industry were to adopt and perfect 3d …
Arxiv – Sharpening Occam’s Razor with Quantum Mechanics Researchers have discovered a new way in which computers based on quantum physics could beat the performance of classical computers. The work, by researchers based in Singapore and the UK, implies that a Matrix-like simulation of reality would require less memory on a quantum computer than on …
1. WSJ – Vinod Khosla is a major investor in renewable and alternative energy and Daniel Yergin is an expert on fossil fuels. They were asked – How many years do you think it will be before half of our global energy production comes from non-fossil fuels? MR. YERGIN: World energy probably is going to …
RL Laboratories, LLC, and the University of Michigan have built a type of artificial synapse using memristors The researchers developed a vertically integrated hybrid electronic circuit by combining the novel memristor developed at the University of Michigan with wafer scale heterogeneous process integration methodology and CMOS read/write circuitry developed at HRL. “This hybrid circuit is …