Canada is in fifth place among OECD members for attracting immigrants, based on data collected up until 2012, even though it attracted 258,000 new permanent residents, or a gain of 4%, in 2012 alone. Compare that to the U.S., which drew in 1.03 million more people in the same year, although 3% fewer than in …
Researchers had the idea of giving wounded muscle cells a healing boost with a substance that normally surrounds cells — the extracellular matrix. “The matrix can be thought of simply as the glue that holds all of the different cells in different tissues together,” Badylak says. “However, in addition, there are all these hidden signals …
Human hopes of reaching stars other than the Sun are currently limited by the maturity of advanced propulsion technologies. One of the few candidate propulsion systems for providing interstellar flight capabilities is nuclear fusion. In the past many fusion propulsion concepts have been proposed and some of them even explored in high detail (Project Daedalus), …
Mix together air, fuel, and heat and you get combustion, the chemical reaction that powers most engines in planes, trains and automobiles. And if you throw in some ionized gas (plasma), it turns out, you can sustain combustion even in conditions that would otherwise snuff out the reaction: at low air pressure, in high winds …
SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D. We are integrating breakthroughs in sensor and visualization technologies to view and modify designs more naturally and efficiently than we could using purely 2D tools. We are just beginning, but eventually hope to build the fastest route between the …
By lowering the expression of a single gene, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have extended the average lifespan of a group of mice by about 20 percent — the equivalent of raising the average human lifespan by 16 years, from 79 to 95. The research team targeted a gene called mTOR, which is …
China doubters believe that China will get old before they get rich. This will be a close race as China is still increasing per capita GDP by about 6% to 7.5% per year for several years and has a currency that will likely get a lot stronger. As is often the case the China critics …
China needs to make a major urbanization plan work for a strong economy in 2025. A new urban blueprint to be unveiled this year is supposed to break an urbanization logjam by guaranteeing some central-government support for such programs, according to economists who advise the government. But the exact formulas are still unclear. Granting full …
Scott Aaronson has commented upon the recent Dwave quantum computer speed tests. Scott has talked to the USC authors [when they visited MIT] of a paper which found quantum annealing in 100 qubits but did not find a speedup over classical systems for the 128 qubit processor. There were eight authors and Scott went with …
A computer science professor at Amherst College who recently devised and conducted experiments to test the speed of a quantum computing system against conventional computing methods will soon be presenting a paper with her verdict: quantum computing is, “in some cases, really, really fast.” Dwave’s quantum computer system is capable of solving problems thousands of …
Accelerating neutral atoms, contrary to laser-based as well as conventional particle accelerators, is a formidable feat, given the inert, ‘neutral’ response of these atoms to accelerating fields. Our recent studies provide a crucial breakthrough in the generation of accelerated neutral atoms, with energies as large as an MeV, as a result of the interaction of …