The protein matrix and hard tissues of insects, worms, ants and spiders naturally incorporates metals, such as zinc, manganese and copper. This leads to mechanical hardening of teeth, jaws, mandibles, ovipositors and to an enhancement of silk toughness. Thus, the artificial incorporation of metals, or even insulating or semiconducting materials, into these protein structures could …
DARPA has its 2016 budget. High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) HELLADS program had funding of 26.6 million in 2014 and 14.1 million in 2015. Description: The goal of the HELLADS program is to develop a high-energy laser weapon system that will provide an order of magnitude reduction in weight compared to existing …
In 2013, MIT forecasted that holographic televisions could be in living rooms in the next 10 years at the price of today’s two-dimensional sets. Technology being developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, said Michael Bove, head of the lab’s Object-Based Media Group. The lab, known for inventing the technology behind electronic ink, has …
Researchers from the Broad Institute and MIT have created a new mouse model to simplify application of the CRISPR-Cas9 system for genome-editing experiments in living animals. The researchers successfully used the new “Cas9 mouse” model to edit multiple genes in a variety of cell types, and to model lung adenocarcinoma, one of the most lethal …
“Cement is the most-used material on the planet,” Pellenq says, noting that its present usage is estimated to be three times that of steel. “There’s no other solution to sheltering mankind in a durable way — turning liquid into stone in 10 hours, easily, at room temperature. That’s the magic of cement.” In conventional cements, …
What power is needed to get to mach 3 constant velocity for a supercativating submarine ? A Supercativating submarine could in theory achieve about 3600 miles per hour but powering the propulsion is a technical challenge. Goatguy provides the energy for water displaced, times its density, times ½, times its outward radial velocity squared would …
The Chinese company hired to build key parts of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had never built a bridge. Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. Ltd., after all, was a manufacturer of giant cranes for container ports. The California Department of Transportation agreed to contract the company known as ZPMC in 2006 because it had established …
C Spire is using the Google Fiber plan as a blueprint for building its own fiber-to-the-home network that the company hopes will eventually blanket Mississippi. C Spire is a regional wireless operator that owns its own infrastructure. Since 2003, the company has invested more than $1 billion in network infrastructure improvements, including upgrading its cellular …
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface — and industrial-scale desalination has operated successfully around the world for many years. Desalination costs are still high, and not everyone lives near a seacoast — so getting the water where it’s needed, when it’s needed, can be prohibitively expensive. Policymakers, farmers, business leaders, and ordinary people around …
SpiNNaker (a contraction of Spiking Neural Network Architecture) is a million-core computing engine whose flagship goal is to be able to simulate the behaviour of aggregates of up to a billion neurons in real time (1% of the human brain). It consists of an array of ARM9 cores, communicating via packets carried by a custom …
The “neurocam” is a wearable camera system that detects your emotions. It automatically records moments of interest based on an analysis of the users brainwaves. It is a mood camera. This is an extraordinary experiment that challenges the way future cameras can evolve and how humans may interact with such devices. The “neurocam” allows humans …