In 2013, Positron Dynamics had seed funding from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs. Initial simulations show that as much as 10 micrograms of positrons could be produced each week with a linear accelerator,” says co-founder Ryan Weed, PhD, a physicist and former cryogenic engineer for Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin. Now they …
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles have demonstrated a new, efficient way to accelerate positrons, the antimatter opposites of electrons. The method may help boost the energy and shrink the size of future linear particle colliders – powerful accelerators that could be …
The main movies and TV shows that get analyzed for accurate predictions of the future are usually Star Trek or Minority Report. Those usually have technology predictions which turn out to be accurate. Many movies with social or news media predictions have turned out to be accurate. The movie Natural Born Killers had a reporter …
DARPA awarded Virgin Galactic and two others contracts to investigate how spaceplane could slash cost of putting satellites into space. DARPA aims to build a reusable vehicle that it hopes will provide “quick, affordable and routine” access to space, which it says is “increasingly critical for both national and economic security”. Darpa has now awarded …
The foundations of what was planned to be the world’s tallest building are being used as fish farm in China two years after the project stalled, according to a Xiaoxiang Chen Bao newspaper report. Construction of the 838-metre tall “Sky City” in Changsha started in July 2013 when billionaire Zhang Yue, the president of Broad …
Instead of concentric rings, UB researchers formed tiny slivers of gold and PMMA (a transparent thermoplastic) into a radial shape for hyperlens function across a wider range of wavelengths with lower losses. The design of this metamaterial hyperlens, which looks like a Slinky suspended in motion, overcomes the diffraction limit in visible frequency range. Moreover, …
BBC News has called the Scotland independence vote for the NO. The vote was 55% No and 45% Yes with 85% of the vote counted. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with …
The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE is a $2 million global competition that challenges teams of engineers, scientists and innovators from all over the world to create pH sensor technology that will affordably, accurately and efficiently measure ocean chemistry from its shallowest waters… to its deepest depths. There are two prize purses available (teams may …
The US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a new study that finds the price tag for motor vehicle crashes in the US in 2010 carried a cost of $871 billion (6% of GDP) in economic loss and societal harm. This includes $277 billion in economic costs—nearly $900 for each person …
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 …
The Carnival of Space 344 is up at the Chandra X-Ray Space Telescope blog. Universe Today – Hubble Telescope Watches Asteroid Disintegrate in Space Asteroid P/2013 R3 appears to be crumbling apart in space, and astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently saw the asteroid breaking into as many as 10 smaller pieces. The best …