Pretty much all of the 2008 candidates for president are favorable to nuclear power Each of the top contenders for the Republican nomination and all but one of the major Democratic hopefuls support nuclear power to some extent. Most cite the prospect that atomic energy could help reduce climate change by supplanting power produced by …
The upside is that smog levels declined nationwide between 2003 and 2005, aided by the appearance of more pollution controls on smokestacks, according to the report, called “State of the Air: 2007.” The bad news is that the number of places in the United States reporting unhealthy levels of soot grew over the same period, …
There is a lot of reprocessing of nuclear waste (unburned uranium fuel). More in the UK according to wikipedia. Japan will be reprocessing at about half of the French rate this year. The Russians have an operating 560MW fast breeder and will complete an 800MW fast breeder in 2012. The Russians want to capture a …
As of April 2007, Dr. Robert Bussard, stated that due to the publicity from his 11/9/2006 talk at Google and the 2006 Outstanding Technology of the Year Award, the U.S. Navy sent him a contract extension to continue his fusion research. UPDATE FROM TOM LIGON: Evidently somebody got carried away with some fairly routine bookkeeping. …
A research team at Columbia University has designed a novel viral-based gene therapy they say blasts through a body, targeting both primary and distant tumors, while leaving normal cells untouched. In the 15 mice they tested, injections of the therapy in tumors on one side of the mouse eliminated those cancers as well as tumors …
Japanese scientists have developed an oral vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease that has proven effective and safe in mice. “We hope the Phase I trials go well,” Tabira said. “Animals are able to recover their functions after developing symptoms, but humans are less able to do so. It may be that this only works in the …
Exponential manufacturing is one of the key features that magnifies the impact of molecular nanotechnology Exponential manufacturing is a nanofactory being able to produce another nanofactory. Nanofactories with this capability can double their number in the time it takes to make another copy. When would exponential manufacturing dominate over projected conventional production ? A nanofactory …
Four 71-inch mirrors gathering light for Pan-STARRS would each be hooked up to what would be the four largest digital cameras ever built. The system would be able to survey the entire sky once a week, and would be able to detect asteroids as small as 1,000 feet across. They face opposition from environmentalists who …
The plastic-encased minibot, which measures 2 cm (0.8 inch) in length and 1 cm (0.4 inch) in diameter, can be maneuvered through the body by controlling an external magnetic field applied near the patient. While other types of miniature swallowable robots have been developed in the past, their role has mostly been limited to capturing …
Molecular manufacturing has a building block architecture conceptRecent Superbot work shows that modular building blocks can be highly functional. Wei-Min Shen of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute recently reported to NASA significant progress in developing “SuperBot,” identical modular units that plug into each other to create robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle …
Table top x-rays could improve imaging resolution by 1000 times The X-rays we get in the hospital are limited by spatial resolution. They can’t detect really small cancers because the X-ray source in your doctor’s office is like a light bulb, not like a laser. If you had a bright, laser-like X-ray beam, you could …