Carnival of space 264 is now up on Tomorrow is Here. Centauri Dreams – SETI normally works with radio or optical signals, but the discipline is changing. Could we detect extraterrestrial technology, even a starship in transit? Centauri Dreams examines the question through the lens of a 1995 paper by Robert Zubrin. Some beautiful new …
Central Florida Professor Jayan Thomas is working with gold nanoparticles and studying their properties when they are shrunk into a small size regime called nanoclusters. Nanoclusters are on the small end and nanocrystals are on the larger end of the nanoregime. Nano clusters are so small that the laws of physics that govern the world …
A new “nano machine shop” that shapes nanowires and ultrathin films could represent a future manufacturing method for tiny structures with potentially revolutionary properties. The structures might be tuned for applications ranging from high-speed electronics to solar cells and also may have greater strength and unusual traits such as ultrahigh magnetism and “plasmonic resonance,” which …
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies. Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever …
TheVerge – Samsung officially released the Galaxy Note II. It is thinner and lighter than the first Note. The new Note device comes with a redesigned S Pen stylus, a bevy of new software features layered atop Android 4.1, and an enlarged 5.5-inch display. It has an 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos processor. The physical design and …
Integrated circuits, which are in everything from coffeemakers to computers and are patterned from perfectly crystalline silicon, are quite thin — but Cornell researchers think they can push thin-film boundaries to the single-atom level. Their materials of choice are graphene, single atom-thick sheets of repeating carbon atoms, and hexagonal boron nitride, similarly thin sheets of …
Harvard – Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses. Lens are a major part of cameras that can make them heavier and bulkier. Flat lens could remove a roadblock to making cameras smaller, lighter …
An IEEE paper assessed the increase in highway capacity. The increase in highway capacity when using sensors alone is about 43%. The increase in highway capacity when using both sensors and vehicle to vehicle communication is about 273%. Current maximum throughput is 2200 vehicles per hour per lane of highway. Highway capacity increases was also …
Foreign Policy magazine and McKinsey have a list of the cities that will have the most economic growth between 2010 and 2025 Foreign Policy also features the 29 cities from China that are in the list of the top 75 Although Shanghai had no skyscrapers in 1980, it now has at least 4,000 — more …
Researchers from A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME) have developed the first compact high performance silicon-based cavity-backed slot (CBS) antenna that operates at 135 GHz. The antenna demonstrated 30 times stronger signal transmission over on-chip antennas at 135 GHz. At just 1.6mm x 1.2mm, approximately the size of a sesame seed, it is the smallest silicon-based …
Lunar space elevators are flexible structures connecting the lunar surface with counterweights located beyond the L1 or L2 Lagrangian points in the Earthmoon system. A lunar space elevator on the moon’s near side, balanced about the L1 Lagrangian point, could support robotic climbing vehicles to release lunar material into high Earth orbit. A lunar space …