Geoffrey Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities in the atmosphere of Venus. It is based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen/Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. In effect, a balloon full of …
David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy makes a new presentation at the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference 2013. He compares molten salt reactors. He repeats that thorium vs uranium is not that important. Many Design choices are possible. * burner vs breeder reactors. * Single fluid vs two fluid. * Fast spectrum vs thermal. * Denatured and …
Applied Materials Adam Brand made a presentation at 2013 Semicon West which laid out a roadmap to get to 3 nanometer lithography. Precision Materials to Meet Scaling Challenges Beyond 14nm (18 pages) Beyond 14nm, as we move to 10 and 7nm, a new fin material will be required — probably silicon-germanium (SiGe), or perhaps just …
The Google Chromecast ($35) is following devices that have already been available in China and Asia for over one year. A homegrown Chinese product could be bought for $40 in 2012 and it was sporting the latest ARM core at the time (Cortex A5). It turned any HDMI TV into a giant streaming display. Chromecast …
At the Def Con hacker conference Saturday, MIT students David Lawrence and Eric Van Albert plan to release a piece of code that will allow anyone to create a 3D-printable software model of any Schlage Primus key, despite the company’s attempts to prevent the duplication of those carefully-controlled shapes. With just a flatbed scanner and …
The Brookings Institute has a study on getting poverty below 3% of population by 2030. The range of poverty outcomes for 2030 is large, implying that the future trajectory of global poverty is highly uncertain. Getting to the “zero zone”, defined here as a poverty rate of under 3 percent, by 2030 is unlikely to …
Elon Musk, CEO if Tesla Motors, said the electric-car maker is considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles and discussing the prospects for such systems with Google. Musk believes that technology that can take over for drivers are a logical step in the evolution of cars. He has talked with Google about the self-driving technology …
Cancer painfully ends more than 500,000 lives in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scientific crusade against cancer recently achieved a victory under the leadership of University of Missouri Curators’ Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s team has developed a new form of radiation therapy that successfully …
Japan is already making headway with autonomous heavy duty trucks. In order to save fuel, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) has programmed a convoy of four trucks to drive just four meters (about 13 feet) apart. That cuts down on air resistance, reducing drag (and thus improving fuel efficiency) similar to …
In China, men overwhelmingly outnumber women. The ratio of men of marriageable/dating age (15-30 years old) to every woman is 1.15 — an unusual imbalance that’s created a rat race of bachelors vying for the affections of a limited pool of young women. Many may want to marry, but never will. Men started outnumbering women …
1. Business Insider – A Great Graphic comes from Also Sprach Analyst. The first chart shows various modes of goods transportation and China’s GDP. The best fit is with freight traffic. The second chart focuses on the simply the rail cargo volume. The volume of China’s rail freight in October was 3.2% lower on a …