Two thirds of the rural population in developing countries are without electricity. This leaves limited options for lighting. Many turn to kerosene or paraffin oil. It is estimated that 88 billion liters of kerosene are burned purely for light. One liter of kerosene is estimated to produce 3kg CO2 when burnt. Research has shown that …
Nature – Complex shapes self-assembled from single-stranded DNA tiles Programmed self-assembly of strands of nucleic acid has proved highly effective for creating a wide range of structures with desired shapes. A particularly successful implementation is DNA origami, in which a long scaffold strand is folded by hundreds of short auxiliary strands into a complex shape. …
IEEE Spectrum – Aaron Ohta’s lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has come up with a novel new way of creating non-mechanical microbots quite literally out of thin air, using robots made of bubbles with engines made of lasers. This project involves the manipulation and the assembly of micro-objects using an optically controlled …
Getting to net gain over the next year or two Focus Fusion Forum – Feasibility to become a net power producer fusing pB11 aneutronic fuel…. as outlined by Eric Lerner in the May 1st 2012 Agrion Webinar. To gain higher yield and to attain “feasibility” the following steps are being done over the course of …
ETH Zurich – Researchers led by Raffaele Mezzenga, a professor in Food and Soft Materials Science, have created a new nanocomposite made of graphene and protein fibrils: a special paper, which combines the best features of both components. The circular sheets that Raffaele Mezzenga gently lifts from a petri dish are shiny and black. Looking …
NanoInk announced today the availability of High Density (HD) Tip Arrays for Polymer Pen Lithography (PPL). These high-density elastomeric pen arrays are ideal for high-throughput deposition of ink materials. Similar to standard Dip Pen Nanolithography® (DPN®) with regular silicon nitride pens, High Density Tip Arrays can be used for the deposition of molecules with well-controlled …
Atomic metallic hydrogen, if metastable at ambient pressure and temperature could be used as the most powerful chemical rocket fuel, as the atoms recombine to form molecular hydrogen. This light-weight high-energy density material would revolutionize rocketry, allowing single-stage rockets to enter orbit and chemically fueled rockets to explore our solar system. To transform solid molecular …
Optics Express – Transformation thermodynamics: cloaking and concentrating heat flux We adapt tools of transformation optics, governed by a (elliptic) wave equation, to thermodynamics, governed by the (parabolic) heat equation. We apply this new concept to an invibility cloak in order to thermally protect a region (a dead core) and to a concentrator to focus …
Mixing a little dry ice and a simple industrial process cheaply mass-produces high-quality graphene nanosheets, researchers in South Korea and Case Western Reserve University report. Graphene, which is made from graphite, the same stuff as “lead” in pencils, has been hailed as the most important synthetic material in a century. Sheets conduct electricity better than …
Nature Nanotechnology – Electrical control of a solid-state flying qubit Solid-state approaches to quantum information technology are attractive because they are scalable. The coherent transport of quantum information over large distances is a requirement for any practical quantum computer and has been demonstrated by coupling super-conducting qubits to photons1. Single electrons have also been transferred …
So there are plans proposed by Al Globus to achieve results with a few hundred million. There is already a megawatt(s) or so of space solar power for satellites in space. 200 kw or so on the space station. Japan is willing to spend a few billion on it. Planning 2 megawatt demo around 2020. …