Universe Today – Spacex reports more progress with the Grasshopper reusable rocket tests. The Grasshopper has made a second, bigger hop. Over the weekend, Elon Musk quietly tweeted a link to a video, saying, “First flight of 10 story tall Grasshopper rocket using closed loop thrust vector & throttle control.” The reports goes on to say that …
Research firm Strategy Analytics says that shipments of Android tablets surged to a new high in the third quarter of 2012, accounting for 41% of all tablets shipped. Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics’ executive director, says that there’s no one Android tablet responsible for the surge, which is more due to a large influx of devices from a wide variety …
Venturebeat also notes that this is Mac versus PC all over again. Apple is already down to 14.9% marketshare in smartphones. There are about 700 million smartphones shipping in 2012. By about 2018 there will be about 3 billion smartphones shipping. Apple grew by 58%, so they increased their marketshare as overall smartphones grew by …
CNET – Apple has reissued and updated its Samsung “apology” statement on its British Web site after a U.K. Court of Appeal found it to be “untrue” and “incorrect.” It comes off weeks of back and forth from the U.K. courts after Samsung scored a rare legal win over Apple, after the iPhone and iPad …
German researchers are sending stunt kites into the skies to harness the wind and convert the kinetic energy generated into electricity. Compared to conventional wind farm technology that relies on rotors, this technology offers a wide range of advantages. Wind speeds at ground level tend to zero, but they increase dramatically the higher you go. …
BBC News has an opinion piece by Martin Jacques (Economist who wrote When China Rules the World). On Tuesday the next American president will be elected. Two days later, the 18th congress of the Chinese Communist Party will select the new Chinese president and prime minister. Americans in their tens of millions will turn out …
1. Yes Vermont Yankee has Fear and Facts about Nuclear Plants and Hurricanes Meredith Angwin reviews fear-mongering statements about nuclear plants and hurricanes: for example: “we can’t expect to cool these fueling pools.” She describes fact-filled industry rebuttals. The fear-mongerers have the sound bytes, and we have the facts. However, both sides are preaching to …
Channel News Asia – researchers in Singapore have developed one of the world’s thinnest hybrid hard disk drives with storage capacity of over 1 terabyte. Called the “A-Drive”, it is 5mm thick, or 30 per cent thinner than existing hard disk drives, and is targeted for use in tablets, ultrabooks and future data centres. Typically, …
Android Central compares the Google LG Nexus 4 with the Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X, and the iPhone 5. The Nexus 4 beats out the iPhone 5 in screen resolution, and only at a slight cost to pixel density. On local storage, the iPhone 5 has a bit of a lead; neither support …
Arxiv – The memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element which was predicted to exist from symmetry arguments in 1971. It is a two terminal passive device. It is stateful and the internal state is related to past history of the device. Because of the memristor’s ability to learn it has been proposed that the …
Since 1999, Maximum Life Foundation has been dedicated to eradicating aging-related diseases, and the aging process itself. UPDATE – A separate study found that an injection of 20 million stem cells (either the patients own or a third party donor) helped repair 30% of scar tissue from a heart attack. As we age, we see …