U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said in Washington on Wednesday that all the water was gone from the spent fuel pools at Unit 4 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, but Japanese officials denied it. Hajime Motojuku, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., said the “condition is stable” at Unit 4. U.S. …
This is a summary of how the smartphones of 2015 and 2020 could change. 1. More AI and speech recognition and better gesture control 2. Context awareness and more integration with sensors and other phones 3. Different display options (rollable displays, better picoprojectors and more) 4. Increased processing power and better energy efficiency and management …
1. Canadian Energy Issues – Nuclear subsidizes gas and renewables in Ontario: an inquiry into the price of political correctness Natural gas has been cheap so far this year, and the wind and sun are “free.” In spite of this, Ontario gas-fired and wind/solar generators still can’t operate without enormous cost recovery payments from Ontario …
Imagine if all the data traveling throughout the world right now—on long distance networks and between and within computers and other hardware—could be sent through a single fiber the width of a human hair. The University of California at Santa Barbara had a presentation on the vision and current research being performed under a newly …
Ad Support : Nano Technology Netbook Technology News Computer Software In an Italian video below, the next Kitegen (kite powered wind generator) is under construction at Berzano San Pietro, and at first it will produce less than 3 Megawatts. It will be equipped with a smaller-than-required kite of 100-150 square meters. The Stem will be like …
There is a 208 page EMP (electromagnetic Pulse)Commission report which discusses the interconnections between critical infrastructure and specific steps to increase robustness and recoverability The Department of Homeland Security has responsibility in the USA to get these kinds of plans implemented. There is an office of infrastructure protection. The plans and documents that are on …
Spaceward has a page on space elevator feasibility that looks at tether strength and power to weight ratio for the power system for the space elevator climber. Based on a gradual convergence of experimental and theoretical results, the specific strength of raw CNTs will not exceed 50 MYuri [1 Mega-Yuri = 1 N/Tex = 1 …
Chris Phoenix has considered RepRap and cheap 3D desktop manufacturing devices and iterative improvements there as a path evolves into molecular manufacturing. The Reprap can produce its own circuit boards and desktop manufacturing can produce prototypes. I believe that in the near to mid-term the financial and societal impact will be with things like the …
Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University researcher Hao Yan is making DNA based nanostructures inside a living cell. “Cells are really good at making copies of double stranded DNA and we have used the cell like a copier machine to produce many, many copies of complex DNA nanostructures.” DNA nanotechnologists have made some very exciting …
Technology Review discusses the work of Gerald Pao, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, to perform a detailed genetic analysis of the axolotl salamander’s DNA and the precise molecular processes of successful regeneration. Pao and his collaborators won one billion bases’ worth of free sequencing from Roche Applied Science, based in …
More teraflop chips are being introduced by AMD and Nvidia. AMD FireStream 9250 will be available at the end of Sept 2008 for $1999. The FireStream chips can perform “double precision” floating-point calculations at 1 teraflop of performance. A 4x Crossfire X configuration is good for almost 5 TFlops, which means 1.2 TFlops per RV770 …