This article will go over some basic background about tensile strength of material and then discuss historic material strength improvement to understand what industrial production of new carbon nanotube tethers relates to past improvements in strength of materials. Understanding Tensile Strength of Material and the Measurement UnitsA Gigapascal is unit of measure for strength of …
Terry Grossman is a doctor who runs a longevity health clinic and co-wrote “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” with Ray Kurzweil. Terry spoke at the Convergence08 conference. Heart and Cardio HealthHeart and coronary disease is the number one killer in North America. Two tests are very good for early detection of heart …
Carnival of space 65 is up at 21st century waves Music of the spheres talks about solar power satellites This site contributed an article about the latest and future thermoelectrics which has a space related angle for better RTGs Colony Worlds talks about likely iron on Mars There is a LOT more. Go check out …
The $80 billion european wind powered electrical supergrid would make wind energy more practical I think this project makes sense and a similar power grid build out would be good for North America as well. It would work in combination with nuclear power and anything that is not coal or oil. The average price of …
At nanotech-now.com, Jamais Cascio, CRN’s new Director of Impacts Analysis, discusses factors that will describe the ecosystem for nanofactories. The factors are:1. Designs2. Distribution methods for nanofactories3. Distribution methods for products4. Distribution methods for “toner”5. Physical reliability6. Physical safety7. Health and safety evaluations8. Knowledgeable users9. Ways to avoid abuse10. Political support11. Economic support12. Market acceptance …
Hitachi is making current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive heads (CPP-GMR) for hard disk drives to enable 4 terabyte drives in 2011 and/or 1 terabyte notebook drives. The CPP-GMR drive essentially changes the structure of drive heads. Current drives come with a tunnel magnetoresistance head. In these, an insulating layer sits between two magnetic layers. Electrons can …
Using enzymes from E. coli bacteria, Duke University chemists and engineers have introduced a hundred-fold improvement in the precision of features imprinted to create microdevices such as labs-on-a-chip. Their inkless microcontact printing technique can imprint details measuring close to 1 nanometer, or billionths of a meter, the Duke team reported in the Sept. 24, 2007 …
Stanford physics Professor Shoucheng Zhang says a new generation of semiconductors, designed around the phenomenon known as the Quantum Spin Hall Effect, could keep Moore’s law in force for decades to come. Using special semiconductor material made from layers of mercury telluride and cadmium telluride, the experimenters employed quantum tricks to align the spin of …
The Register discusses the CRN conference, where I was one of the presenters I need to correct some misunderstanding from a lack of clarity in one of my presentation slides. Register person had stated I was saying molecular manufacturing would happen in 2015. My prediction for a nanofactory level of capability in molecular manufacturing is …
Ponoko is an attempt at an online network of people and companies of the total manufacturing chain Currently this version of the concept seems targeted at small producers. There are other attempts to leverage the internet to source components and alternative suppliers. hat tip to futurismic Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and …
The German team that developed the stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope is reporting layer-by-layer light microscopic nanoscale images of cells and without having to prepare thin sections with a technique called optical 3D far-field microscopy. They use a chemical marker for fluorescence nanoscopy that relies on single-molecule photoswitching. They report …