Jonathan Markley provided a report on the Starship conference to Transterrestrial. Futurist Peter Schwartz Schwarz sees 4 possibilities for interstellar ships: 1. Generation ships 2. sleep ships 3. relativistic ships 4. download ships Forgotten types 5. Radically life extended crew 6. Breakthrough physics Freeman Dyson Freeman Dyson sees bio-tech as the way of the future …
Currently, there is no treatment to remove HIV from the cells; a group of researchers from Aarhus University Hospital and Aarhus University in Denmark has found exceptional ability to reactivate HIV in a substance otherwise being developed for cancer treatmentWhen HIV activated the cells habouring the virus become visible and vulnerable to the body’s immune …
Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reached an important milestone today, publicly releasing the first installment of data from the 500 terabytes so far collected in their pathbreaking project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse. The data consist of gigapixel images (each close to 1 …
Here is the english translation of a recent post from Kitegen. Success with Kitegen could lead to radical improvement in the cost and amount of energy from wind. The original page in italian is here Nextbigfuture’s coverage from May 2011. This is the preproduction sample of Kitegen (3 Megawatt prototype) that was being developed in …
World nuclear news – EDF’s nuclear power plants in France and the UK generated 421.1 TWh and 55.8 TWh respectively, beating targets and up on 2010 performance by 13 TWh. The UK’s Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor fleet posted its best performance for six years. One factor in the year-on-year increase in nuclear generation was the reduction …
Scientists from Kansas State University, University of Nebraska, and PNNL used two native functional sequences from spider flagelliform silk protein and a trans-membrane motif of human muscle L-type calcium channel to design a self-assembling peptide, h9e. The h9e peptide formed two novel hydrogels in Ca2+ solution and acidic pH conditions—h9e Ca2+ hydrogel and h9e acidic …
The Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology presents solar panels, which are printed with special inks with electrical properties on standard paper. The technology known as 3PV (3PV stands for printed paper photovoltaics) uses conventional printing methods and standard substrates, like those used for magazines, posters or packaging. Special inks …
Forbes – After more than a decade of battles with Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft sits atop the console business, where its entertainment and devices unit squeezed out operating income of just $32 million on $1.5 billion in sales for the quarter ending June 30. And that’s a success story. Now analysts are betting Amazon will …
Shanghai Daily – Safey fears have been raised over the newly opened cross-sea bridge, the world’s longest, that links Qingdao City in east China to the island of Huangdao. There is concern that the tight schedule ahead of the official opening left important work undone or incomplete. Several gaps were found in the crash barriers …
NY Times – By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States. A …
Robert Freitas analyzed the statistically the challenge of life extension. Part of his analysis is shown in the table above The longest life expectancies is about 86 years for Japanese women. This is almost as good as a 10% reduction in medically preventable conditions versus an 80 year life expectancy, which would result in 88 …