US Daily Crude Oil Production for the week of Sept 21, 2012 was 6.509 million barrels per day. This is almost 150,000 barrels per day more than the peaks of 6.34 million barrels reached this summer. The US was last producing at this level in 1994-1996 when there was a plateau at about 6.3 to …
Arxiv – Optical black hole lasers (14 pages) You can amplify light by bouncing it between the horizons of a black hole and a white hole. Now physicists have worked out how to build such a device in the lab. Their real triumph, however, is in showing how such a device could be made in …
World Nuclear News – A ceremony has been held to mark the formal acceptance for commercial operation of unit 4 of the Kalinin nuclear plant by its owner, Rosenergoatom. Rosatom director general Sergey Kiriyenko noted that Kalinin 4 was completed on schedule and for 7 billion rubles ($240 million) less than the 76 billion rubles …
A small African mammal with an unusual ability to regrow damaged tissues could inspire new research in regenerative medicine, a University of Florida study finds. For years biologists have studied salamanders for their ability to regrow lost limbs. But amphibian biology is very different than human biology, so lessons learned in laboratories from salamanders are …
1. Business week – Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) expects sales of its new Galaxy Note 2 smartphone to get off to a stronger start than its predecessor even after Apple Inc. (AAPL) sold a record number of the latest iPhone in its debut weekend. The model will probably sell three times faster than the previous …
The UT^2 game bot, created by computer scientists Jacob Schru, Igor Karpov and Risto Miikkulainen, won the Humanlike Bot Competition at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012). “The idea of the competition is to evaluate how we can make game bots, non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as …
Rice University researchers determined in a new study that a process called chemical vapor deposition, which is used industrially to make thin films, could yield a glass that withstands tremendous stress without breaking. Wolynes, a senior scientist with the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative, and Wisitsorasak reported their results this …
We have had extensive coverage of the solar electric sail and the planned test projects. The Electric Solar Wind Sail (E-sail) was invented by Pekka Janhunen, Finnish Meteorological Institute. He first published “Electric sail for spacecraft propulsion” in the AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power. (2004) * Uses solar wind momentum for producing thrust * …
Bloomberg – GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s (GEH) Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) today announced receipt of its license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to build a groundbreaking laser enrichment facility on the 1,600-acre site of the company’s global headquarters in Wilmington, N.C. While a commercialization decision must still be made by the company, the …
Chemistry World – Can graphite treated merely with water become a superconductor at room temperature? This is the extraordinary claim made by scientists in Germany. Unsurprisingly, this has been met with scepticism – from measured to outright – by other experts in superconductivity. Nextbigfuture covered the research which finds indication of superconductivity up to 230 …
Wired has coverage of Broad Group of China and their CEO Zhang. Broad has built 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun. They are fabricated in sections at two factories in Hunan, roughly an hour’s drive from Broad Town. From there the modules—complete with preinstalled ducts and plumbing for electricity, water, and other infrastructure—are …