China’s GDP growth for 2013 was at 7.6%. China’s currency is ending 2013 at 6.0539 to the US dollar The exchange rate at the end of 2012 was 6.31. Official 2013 GDP will be reported in a couple of months, but if it comes in at about 58 trillion yuan then China’s economy will be …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 189 is up at Atomic Power Review Canadian Energy issues – Reducing carbon pollution from electric power generation: What works? In the nearly 17 years since the Kyoto Protocol, many countries, especially Germany, have embarked on major efforts to reduce their national carbon footprints. How have those efforts paid off? …
Singapore researchers came up with the one-step method to grow and transfer high-quality graphene on silicon and other stiff substrates. This promises the use of graphene in high-value areas where no technique currently exists to grow and transfer graphene with minimal defects for use in semiconductors. Prof Loh, who is also a Principal Investigator with …
Benjamin Longmier, Michigan University, is developing the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), a new rocket propulsion system powered by the Sun and propelled by water, which will push small spacecraft like CubeSats around and far beyond the Earth. They received a $200,000 private donation and have raised over $96,000 on Kickstarter. What can be enabled with …
National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Engineering has developed a new Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) technology that will boost information storage in electronic systems. The innovative technology will drastically increase storage space and enhance memory which will ensure that fresh data stays intact, even in the case of a power failure. The team …
The Carnival of Space 334 is up at Urban Astronomer Universe Today – For the past five years, I’ve been constructing this list of all things astronomical for the coming year, lovingly distilling the events transpiring worldwide down to a 101 “best events of the year”. A Triple transit of three of Jupiter’s moons on …
the U.S. Census Bureau today projected that on Jan. 1, 2014, the United States population will be 317,297,938. This represents an increase of 2,218,622, or 0.7 percent, from New Year’s Day 2013. In January 2014, one birth is expected to occur every 8 seconds in the United States and one death every 12 seconds. The …
Samsung has a 110 inch TV with a resolution of 8 million pixels is four times the level of detail found in standard HDTVs. The price has been revealed at $150,000 LG and Samsung have 55 and 60 inch TVs with 1 millimeter bezels. There are 55 inch OLED TVs that are nearly bezel free …
Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Information: An Outlook – The performance of superconducting qubits has improved by several orders of magnitude in the past decade. These circuits benefit from the robustness of superconductivity and the Josephson effect, and at present they have not encountered any hard physical limits. However, building an error-corrected information processor with many …
The scientific community accepts two models for building qubits and keeping them in quantum states—gate and adiabatic. D-Wave’s is adiabatic, and so is the 20-qubit model Christopher Monroe, the Bice Zorn Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, has in his lab. Adiabatic quantum computers apply quantum …
Commissioning is about to start at Russia’s forthcoming fast reactor, Beloyarsk 4. After a lengthy construction period, engineers are preparing for criticality in April 2014. The unit will be a 789 MWe fast-neutron reactor of the BN-800 design, fuelled by a mix of uranium and plutonium oxides arranged to produce new fuel material as it …