Communicating with light may soon get a lot easier, hints recent research* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)and the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), where scientists have potentially found a way to overcome a longstanding barrier to cleaner signals. The findings, which demonstrate for the first time an error rate …
1. Atomic Insights summarizes Dieter Helm who is a Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast As indicated by the subtitle of his book, Helm believes that the world, especially Europe, has achieved very little in the twenty years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. He believes that there is little hope that the process …
Nextbigfuture covered what was four quadcopters that combined for the first manned flight at the end of 2011. This has now evolved into an all electric 18 propped vertical takeoff and landing system. It is the first purely electrically powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft – the Volocopter. The German Ministry of Transportation has …
1. Construction of a new reactor was started this week in China. The Russian-designed model is the fourth to be inaugurated since China resumed approvals for new plants at the end of October The new build is at the Tianwan site in Jiangsu province. An AES-91 VVER-1000 unit designed by Gidropress and supplied by Russian …
Here is the US EPA list of best mileage cars for 2013 by class of car. If the electric cars are excluded then the Toyota Prius models are the best with about 50 mpg combined. The best truck is the Lexus 450h with 30 mpg combined. The best minivan is the Mazda 5 with 24 …
A new Ford Fiesta Van offers businesses an agile and good looking vehicle with class-leading fuel-efficiency – all diesel engines achieve sub-100 g/km CO2 emissions and 3.7 l/100 km (76.4 mpg) or better. The Fiesta Van offers new 75 PS 1.5-litre Duratorq TDCi diesel for the first time; Fiesta ECOnetic Van variant features enhanced fuel-saving …
Caltech has an asteroid capture feasibility study. The feasibility of an asteroid retrieval mission hinges on finding an overlap between the smallest NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) that could be reasonably discovered and characterized and the largest NEAs that could be captured and transported in a reasonable flight time. This overlap appears to be centered on …
Condensed matter physics – the branch of physics responsible for discovering and describing most of these phases – has traditionally classified phases by the way their fundamental building blocks – usually atoms – are arranged. The key is something called symmetry. Using modern mathematics – specifically group cohomology theory and group super-cohomology theory – the …
The V-chip is the size of a business card and can test for 50 measures (like insulin and other blood proteins, cholesterol, and even signs of viral or bacterial infection all at the same time) from one drop of blood. The V-Chip could make it possible to bring tests to the bedside, remote areas, and …
Dr. Matthew Pickett and Stanley Williams have been collaborating on a project at HP Labs to explore the possibility of using “locally-active memristors” as the basis for extremely low-power transistorless computation. We first analyzed the thermally-induced first order phase transition from a Mott insulator to a highly conducting state. The current-voltage characteristic of a cross-point …
Emirates247 – China plans to build the Sky City skyscraper. Standing 838 metres high, 10 metres higher than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest tower, Sky City in Changsha, China, will be built in mere 90 days and completed by March 2013. The tower, the company says, will be able to withstand earthquakes of …