Variation in math ability at high levels

Via Marginal Revolution: Consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females. Quoting from the study: Greater male …

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Virgin Galactic shows off White Knight 2

WhiteKnightTwo is a dual-hull quad-engine aircraft roughly three times larger than the original WhiteKnight. WK2 is the world’s first all-composite full-sized aircraft. Everything apart from the engines and landing gear is constructed from ultra-lightweight composite materials. Virgin Galactic expects to fly its first commercial space flights somewhere between 2009 and 2011. Virgin galactic pictures The …

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Brad Templeton on Robocars : great minds think alike

This site had published an article one week ago about creating robotic car exclusive zones in cities to enable a faster deployment of robotic cars. Brad Templeton has written up several articles about the advantages of robotic cars for revamping the transportation system. Brad’s robocar mainpage. Brad looks at the myth of green public transit. …

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Deep burn and seriously scaling nuclear power to 2100 and beyond

Current world nuclear power is 611 million tons of oil equivalent. (multiply by 7.1-7.4 for barrel of oil equivalent) This is from 64000 tons of Uranium per year being burned at about 5% efficiency. 3200 tons of Uranium if deep burn reactors were used. Deep burn (50-99%) burn of uranium and thorium for nuclear power …

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Picometer resolution microscope open window to new physics of materials

Using electron microscope methods of a hitherto unknown accuracy, scientists from Forschungszentrum Juelich have succeeded in locally demonstrating polarization in the ferroelectric PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 and measuring it atom by atom. The broken line forms the boundary of two areas with different electrical polarization marked by the arrows. This is due to the fact that the atoms …

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Genetic engineering: DNA scissors go open source

A consortium of eight labs led by molecular biologist J. Keith Joung at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has come up with what they call an “open-source” method of making efficient zinc finger nucleases. The group created an archive of 66 “pools,” or sets, of individual zinc fingers that have been selected to bind different …

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Highly directional semiconductor lasers demonstrated

semiconductor lasers are widely used in everyday products such as communication devices, optical recording technologies, and laser printers, they suffer from poor directionality. Divergent beams from semiconductor lasers are focused or collimated with lenses that typically require meticulous optical alignment—and in some cases bulky optics. Researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a plasmonic collimator, consisting …

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Steam power > Combustion > Jet engines > Advanced Thermoelectric > Carnot limit

Thermoelectrics using nanostructures offers the potential of getting very close to the carnot limit of efficiency using very light weight systems for convert heat to electricity. Early versions of thermoelectrics have been sold for many years but are being rapidly improved. About 90 percent of the world’s power (approximately 10 TW) is generated by heat …

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Stanford study of aging supports developmental drift model: If right gene therapy is the main anti-aging weapon

A Stanford study of the aging of the C elegans worm does not support he accumulated chemical damage model of aging If aging is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the aging process may not be inevitable. It is at least theoretically possible to slow down …

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Very high temperature gas-cooled reactor could burn 65% of uranium

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is planning to build a very high temperature gas-cooled reactor (VHTR) at Idaho National Laboratory, with the prime objective of supplying heat at about 900°C. This heat could be used to generate electricity, or for other industrial processes such as hydrogen production or water desalination at a neighbouring facility. …

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Thermoelectric advance could increase car, truck, power plant and industrial fuel efficiency by 15%

Industrial waste heat is 7 quads in the USA. There is more waste heat from power plants and from cars. Capturing 20% of that waste heat is 1.4 quads every year. 1.4 quads is double all of the wind energy generated in the USA from 2003 to 2006. Further down this article is diagrams and …

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