According to trials, a new obesity drug, Tesofensine, which may be launched on the world market in a few years, can produce weight loss twice that of currently approved obesity drugs. The drug works by suppressing hunger, leading to an energy deficit which burns off excess body fat. This randomised, placebo-controlled phase II study was …
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are reporting a new way of creating computer chips that could enable commercial speed 5 nanometer optical lithography. It can also mean higher density hard drives and optical disks with 20 times the density of Blu-ray. The 5 page research paper: Flying plasmonic lens in the near field …
Venture beat has coverage of the Rowan University study of Blacklight Power -Rowan University Prof Jansson gets supplied the Raney nickel from Blacklight Power, which it in turn obtains from an industrial supplier. -Mills said it doped with a very small amount of another common material, sodium hydroxide, in a process that others could replicate.-Jansson …
Dwave Systems will have a new 128 qubit quantum computer in about two weeks. This was first discussed four days ago on this site along with a review of the background on the Dwave adiabatic quantum computer. In the systems Dwave builds, the maximum number of connections per qubit is constrained by noise. In order …
1. Alan Boyle at msnbc reports that the IEC fusion project is still in limbo awaiting a review of their results and for word on follow up funding. [EMC2 Fusion] is waiting for guidance from a peer-review panel and his funders on whether to proceed to the second phase. “We’ve been pretty busy, but it’s …
1. Around half of all women possess a gene shown to link breast size to coffee in take according to a swedish study of 270 women. The study was published in the British Journal of Cancer. Woman with an average weight but big breasts and a high number of mammary glands run an above average …
The Army has given a grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as D’Zmura puts it, “that little voice in your head.” The second part is to send that message to a particular individual or …
1. Italy will make 8-10 nuclear reactors starting in 2013. Correcting a 50 billion euro mistake of ending nuclear power in Italy. The long term aim, according to Scajola, is to ‘rebalance the power generation in Italy’. By 2030 the Italian government would like to see nuclear power taking a 25% share in generation, with …
Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in visible sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them 7 million times easier to capture. Note: there is other work for capturing the infrared spectrum of sunlight. Researchers and companies …
Transformation optics is a field of optical and material engineering and science embracing nanophotonics, plasmonics, and optical metamaterials. Transformation optics may enable invisibility, ultra-powerful microscopes and computers by harnessing nanotechnology and “metamaterials.” The list of possible breakthroughs includes a cloak of invisibility; computers and consumer electronics that use light instead of electronic signals to process …
1. Dr. Xiangwu Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, hydroentangling treats the stack of unentangled fibers as a whole to produce strong fabrics or membranes, and hence it is an excellent method to assemble carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are too small to be manipulated individually. The continuous …