Foreign Affairs – Last summer, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon’s Joint Program Office for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (JPO-MRAP), a $45 billion program to design, manufacture, and deploy 27,000 heavily protected vehicles into Iraq and Afghanistan, had saved “thousands and thousands of lives.” The Joint Program Office drilled down a more …
Northwestern – A team led by a physician-scientist and a chemist — from the fields of dermatology and nanotechnology — is the first to demonstrate the use of commercial moisturizers to deliver gene regulation technology that has great potential for life-saving therapies for skin cancers. The topical delivery of gene regulation technology to cells deep …
New Scientist – Silkworms may provide a novel way to store vaccines. Preventable infections kill millions of children in poor countries, partly because reliable refrigeration for vaccines isn’t always available. Fibroin, a protein in silk, forms stable sheets that contain tiny pockets lined with molecules that repel water. You can trap a biological molecule within …
A new 3D printing process developed at the University of Glasgow could revolutionise the way scientists, doctors and even the general public create chemical products. Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry at the University, believes his research could lead to the development of home chemical fabricators which consumers could use to design and create …
Following the completion of NASA’s flight readiness review, the second SpaceX demonstration launch for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program is scheduled for Monday, April 30. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule will liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. There is a single …
Alpha Galileo – A consortium of universities, research institutes, equipment vendors and one telecom operator joined forces in the ‘Scalable advanced ring-based passive dense access network architecture’ Sardana project to develop pioneering techniques to dramatically improve the scalability and robustness of the fibre-to-home networks that already serve millions of European internet users. Supported by EUR …
Economist Tyler Cowen makes the case that the pace of innovation has slowed, and that we are now on a “technological plateau” that makes further growth challenging. There is a detailed review by Chuck Crane. The USA has eaten low hanging economic fruit since the 1700s. 1. Free land (Homestead Act, etc.) 2. Technological breakthroughs …
Computer World – Rossi has another demonstration scheduled in Bologna, Italy, for Oct. 28 for which he has partnered with a U.S. company, AmpEnergo, to build what is claimed to be a 1MW plant in a shipping container. Mainly the article reviews what is already known, but it indicates that some attention is being paid …
Oxford University philosophers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson worry that enabling people to become smarter via drugs, implants, and other biological (or genetic) interventions will speed up scientific and technological progress which in turn will increase the ability of smart evil people to make and deploy novel weapons of mass destruction. The issue of advancing …
Bigelow Aerospace, who make inflatable space hotel modules, are in talks with NASA to put an inflatable expansion module onto the International Space Station. The Bigelow demonstration proposal has been received and is being evaluated, said NASA’s Jason Crusan, chief technologist for space operations within the Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, …
BBC News reports the launch of a new 4G communication satellite. The mesh structure on the Skyterra-1 spacecraft is 22m (72ft) across. It will relay signals for a new 4G-LTE mobile phone and data system for North America run by Lightsquared. Callers whose networks are tied into the system will be automatically switched to a …