The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 206 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome Atomic insights reviews the MIT floating nuclear reactor design Next Big Future – Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) should be launching their crowdsourcing effort in 2014 They need to get their Tungsten electrode and then later switch to a beryllium electrode. If successful with their …
Today’s electric vehicles are typically powered by lithium-ion batteries. But the chemistry of lithium-ion batteries limits how much energy they can store. As a result, electric vehicle drivers are often anxious about how far they can go before needing to charge. One promising solution is the lithium-sulfur battery, which can hold as much as four …
The process of designing, developing, building and deploying satellites is long and expensive. Satellites today cannot follow the terrestrial paradigm of “assemble, repair, upgrade, reuse,” and must be designed to operate without any upgrades or repairs for their entire lifespan—a methodology that drives size, complexity and ultimately cost. These challenges apply especially to the increasing …
UAV Mobile Hotspots program makes progress toward goal of providing 1 Gb/s communications backbone to deployed units. Missions in remote, forward operating locations often suffer from a lack of connectivity to tactical operation centers and access to valuable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data. The assets needed for long-range, high-bandwidth communications capabilities are often unavailable …
DARPA’s new Direct On-chip Digital Optical Synthesizer program seeks to do with light waves what researchers in the 1940s achieved with radio microwaves. Currently, optical frequency synthesis is only possible in laboratories with expensive racks of equipment. If successful, the program would miniaturize optical synthesizers to fit onto microchips, opening up terahertz frequencies for wide …
Wong-Foy has written software to choreograph the movement of over 1,000 tiny robots in a complex circulating pattern. That shows it should be possible to have them work in large teams, he says. SRI’s microworkers are simple: just small magnetic platforms with simple wire arms on top. They can move only when placed on a …
What if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing and matching the “inks” with precision? Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at Harvard University, is developing the chemistry and machines to make that possible. She prints intricately shaped objects from “the ground up,” precisely adding materials that …
IBMs microscopic 3D printer is being licensed to Zurich startup SwissLitho AG, which calls it the NanoFrazor — a play on words between the English word razor and the German word for “milling machine,” frase. The NanoFrazor, which behaves like a nanometer resolution milling machine, outperforms e-beams in many ways but costs a fraction of …
A new five-qubit array from UCSB’s Martinis Group is on the threshold of making a quantum computer technologically feasible to build “Even the best state-of-the-art [quantum computer] hardware is unreliable. Our paper shows that for the first time reliability has been reached.” While the Martinis Group has shown logic operations at the threshold, the array …
After flying to the edge of space, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster successfully returned to Earth, deployed its landing legs, and hovered for a moment. The ability, known as a soft landing, could allow the company to dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight and one day land rockets on Mars. Because it came …
IBM scientists invented a tiny “chisel” with a heatable silicon tip 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point. Using this nano-sized tip, which creates patterns and structures on a microscopic scale, it took scientists just 10 minutes and 40 seconds to etch the magazine cover onto a polymer, the same substance of which plastics …