In a paper titled “The Shale Oil Boom: A U.S. Phenomenon,” [64 pages] Maugeri wrote that the unique characteristics of shale oil production are ideal for the United States — and unlikely to be mirrored elsewhere in the world. These factors include the availability of drilling rigs, and the entrepreneurial nature of the American exploration …
1. Arxiv – Natural Light Cloaking for Aquatic and Terrestrial Creatures Hongsheng Chen at Zhejiang University in China and an international circle of friends have created large-scale invisibility cloaks that work over the entire optical spectrum but can cloak in several directions at once. Most animals cannot detect phase changes in light. Abandoning the requirement …
By using common materials found pretty much anywhere there is dirt, a team of Michigan State University researchers have developed a new thermoelectric material. This is important, they said, because the vast majority of heat that is generated from, for example, a car engine, is lost through the tail pipe. It’s the thermoelectric material’s job …
Wired Danger Room – ” Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the chief of the Office of Naval Research, the Navy’s chief futurist is pushing up the anticipated date for when sailors can expect to use laser weapons on the decks of their ships, and raising expectations for robotic submarines. The US Navy should have laser cannons …
New figures released today by ITU (International Telecommunications Union) show that information and communication technology (ICT) uptake continues to grow worldwide, spurred by a steady fall in the price of telephone and broadband Internet services. The new data, released in ITU’s flagship annual report Measuring the Information Society 2012, rank the Republic of Korea as …
The Blue Brain Project (BBP) and the Human Brain Project (HBP) are unique projects that overlap in some clear ways. This is not to say that the HBP will be a mere extension of the BBP but rather that the proposed HBP will be a large-scale project offering a solid opportunity to coordinate the work …
Imec and Holst Centre announce that they have made a micromachined harvester for vibration energy with a record output power of 489µW. Measurements and simulation show that the harvester is also suited for shock-induced energy harvesting in car tires, where it could power built-in sensors. In a tire, at 70km/h, the new device can deliver …
At Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is a site where the remains of nine 45-foot (14-meter) ichthyosaurs, of the species Shonisaurus popularis can be found. These were the Triassic’s counterpart to today’s predatory giant squid-eating sperm whales. The new thinking is that there was a Kraken (giant octopus) that preyed on the ichthyosaurs. They hypothesize …
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) today said that further increase in key policy rates and the base effect are likely to pull down India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 8.2 per cent in 2011 and further down to 7.8 per cent in 2012 from a double-digit high of 10. 4 per cent in 2010. The …
A new cancer treatment which strengthens a patient’s immune system and enables them to fight the disease more effectively is being trialled on patients for the first time in the UK. The treatment will use a new DNA vaccine, developed by scientists from the University of Southampton, which will treat a selected group of volunteers …
Certain configurations of the filler element barium will be very effective in lowering the materials’ thermal conductivity and thus increasing their conversion efficiency. Today’s state-of-the-art thermoelectric materials are only five percent efficient. Skutterudites, and this new knowledge about how best to arrange their atoms, could help improve their performance to 15- or 20-percent, at which …