NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies. Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever …
Halophytes are salt-tolerant plants that are found throughout the world. Halophytes can be used to grow both fuel and food, and a NASA facility is attempting to use halophytes for large-scale fuel production. The aim is to create aviation-grade biofuels without using any arable land, freshwater, or standard food crops. Dr. Bilial Bomani, the head …
DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages) (Formerly part of Synthetic Biology project) The goal of Living Foundries is to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation. The program seeks to develop the new …
DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages) One of the best funded projects is program to enable military vehicle to be developed and built 10 times faster. The goal of the META program is to develop novel design flows, tools, and processes to enable a significant improvement …
Berkeley Science Review – advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. From flexible displays to disposable RFID tags, these new materials have enabled electronics to end up in places they never have …
Imec, in collaboration with Panasonic, has developed a prototype of a 60GHz radio transceiver allowing to reach data rates of 7Gbps over short distances at very low power consumption. The chip achieves this performance over the 4 channels specified by the IEEE802.11ad standard. Imec’s low-power 60GHz solution is an important step towards adoption of 60GHz …
Virgin Oceanic looks to build on what Walsh, Piccard, and Cameron have done by leagues, true leagues. The Virgin Oceanic Deep Challenger is capable of 12-15 miles of transit on the bottom. The previous trips have been lunar landers, fantastic for getting there at all, and expanding man’s knowledge of a foreign world logarithmically. Our …
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a way to make a low-cost material that might accomplish negative refraction of light and other radiation – a goal first theorized in 1861 by a giant of science, Scottish physicist James Maxwell, that has still eluded wide practical use. Other materials can do this but they are …
We have been closely tracking China’s Broad Group and their prefabricated factory mass produced ‘Can be Built’ skyscraper technology. Six months ago they had earthquake certified a scale model of their 30 story building. now they have built an actual 30 story building in 15 days at the end of 2011. UPDATE – There is …
Gordon G. Chang is a lawyer and author, best known for his book The Coming Collapse of China, in which he argued that the hidden non-performing loans of the “Big Four” Chinese State banks would likely bring down China’s financial system and its communist government and China would collapse in 2006. He has in recent …
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum. The fabrication of the high efficiency Quantum Dot Solar Cells …