1. Researchers at Rice University have developed a lithium-ion battery that can be painted on virtually any surface. The rechargeable battery created in the lab of Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan consists of spray-painted layers, each representing the components in a traditional battery. The research appears today in Nature’s online, open-access journal Scientific Reports. Technique …
3D Nanoscale optical cavities from Berkeley Lab should enable better Nanolasers, LEDs, Optical Sensors and Photonic Communications. The world’s smallest three-dimensional optical cavities with the potential to generate the world’s most intense nanolaser beams have been created by a scientific team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory …
Lawrence Berkeley Labs – CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are …
Arxiv – Space-time crystals of trapped ions (6 pages) One of the basic properties of spatial crystals is that they form when a system drops to its lowest possible energy state. They are not the result of adding energy to a system, but of taking it away. All of it. Another basic property is that …
1. The U.S. Department of Energy is quietly collaborating with China on an alternative nuclear power design known as a molten salt reactor that could run on thorium fuel. China plans to have a 5 megawatt molten salt reactor in 2015. DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy Peter Lyons is co-chairing the partnership’s executive committee, …
Here is a 6 page progress report on the Dense Plasma Focus fusion work at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) Every doubling of current means 30 times power. So some relatively simple modifications which are being developed should boost power levels by 300 times. Total elimination of arcing, which they are working on now, may drop …
Forbes – Based on 2011 salaries, some Chinese workers are earning as much as their American counterparts. Position Annual Salary (US$) Engineering supervisor 25,000 – 42,000 General manager 130,000 – 330,000 R and D director 100,000 – 167,000 Procurement director 67,000 – 150,000 Quality director 67,000 – 150,000 Chief technology officer 167,000 – 330,000 Marketing …
IEEE Spectrum – A robot (from the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Toyko) is unbeatable at rock, paper scissors. It’s one of those high speed hands that works with a high speed vision system. And when we say ‘high speed,’ we mean fast enough that you can’t really tell that the robot is …
Technology Review – Leap Motion will launch a $70 superaccurate gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works. If you’ve seen the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you know what it does. More importantly, if you’re familiar with the touch modality — and at this point, most of us are …
CNN Money – Google’s science-fiction-like virtual reality glasses will start shipping next year with a price tag of $1,500 — but most buyers won’t be able to get their hands on a pair just yet. The under-development glasses, a stealth project hatched in the company’s mysterious Google X lab, are still buggy, Google co-founder Sergey …
Researchers used a novel computational method to demonstrate that the properties of what had previously been thought to be only a hypothetical structure of a superhard form of carbon called “M-carbon” – constructed by Oganov in 2006 – matched perfectly the experimental data on “superhard graphite.” M-carbon is almost as hard as diamond. Another result …