Transatomic Power (TAP) is developing an advanced molten salt reactor that generates clean, passively safe, proliferation-resistant, and low-cost nuclear power. This reactor can consume the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) generated by commercial light water reactors or use freshly mined uranium at enrichment levels as low as 1.8% U-235. It achieves actinide burnups as high as …
Starfire Scientific is an ambitious new space launch company. They are currently developing an 8″ gun propulsion launcher for high altitude sounding flights and to orbit small satellites. Operational tests of the Starfire multi-chamber gun propulsion launcher began in 2011 and will continue throughout 2012 with commercial flights beginning soon after. They currently have a …
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced today that it will begin taking steps to enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology for light vehicles. This technology would improve safety by allowing vehicles to “talk” to each other and ultimately avoid many crashes altogether by exchanging basic safety data, such as …
Yes, Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility in 2011. Yes, the company intends to sell much of it to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. But the simple math that yields a $9.59 billion loss is missing a few details. First, when Google bought Motorola, it wrote off an existing loss against tax, yielding a benefit …
1. Nuke Power Talk – Last week, Gail Marcus reported on a couple of pieces of good news for the nuclear community coming from Europe in her blog, Nuke Power Talk. This week, she turns to the other side of the world and reports on some mostly positive signs from Asia, particularly South Korea and …
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The Carnival of Space 339 is up at the Venus Transit Urban Astronomer – The Frontier Fields program is an ambitious attempt to combine the power of NASA’s three flagship space telescopes (Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer) to peer deeper into the universe than ever before and learn about the structure of the first galaxies to …
There are an estimated 37 trillion cells in the human body. This is an estimate from Annals of Human Biology journal. They looked back over scientific journals and books from the past couple centuries and found many estimates. But those estimates sprawled over a huge range, from 5 billion to 200 million trillion cells. The …
There was an internet rumor of two Star Trek TV shows with plots related to future police shows. These rumors are not credible to me. J.J. Abrams has said CBS Is ‘Not Interested’ in a new Star Trek TV series. Sparked by the success of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, Abrams wasn’t optimistic about Star …
Lockheed Martin has shown that fully autonomous convoys can safely navigate road intersections, oncoming traffic, stalled and passing vehicles, and pedestrians. A series of advanced tests in the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) program for the US Army and US Marine Corps were completed. The testing, Lockheed said, showed that fully autonomous convoys can operate …
The Diplomat reports that Chinais the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine. China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. Here is an analysis from the Diplomat by …