September 25th, China successfully launched Shenzhou 7 for their first space walk and the first module of a space station. The Shenzhou 7 spacecraft blasted off atop a Long March 2F rocket shortly after 9pm (2300 AEST) under clear night skies in northwestern China. The spacewalk by one of the astronauts is expected to take …
From MIT Technology Review, a Canadian company, Carbon Sense Solutions (CSS), says that its curing process can store 60 tons of carbon dioxide inside 1,000 tons of precast concrete products, such as concrete blocks, while saving energy. CSS has plans for a 5000 ton per day plant by 2011 and increasing 25,000 tons per day …
George Church’s lab makes the gene sequencer Polonator G.007 — offered at the low price of $150,000. Church maintains that, while the Polonator isn’t up to whole-genome reads, it is clocking in at about one-third the cost of Applied Biosystems’ estimate ($60,000 for Applied Biosystems. So the Polonator is at $20,000 but needs to improve …
Yuan Kou at Peking University in Beijing, China, and his team have come up with a lignin breakdown reaction that more reliably produces the alkanes and alcohols needed for biofuels. The yield is twice as high as previous work. Under ideal conditions, it is theoretically possible to produce monomers and dimers in yields of 44 …
The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition has computers from the University of Alberta playing some of the biggest names in the online poker world: Nick “stoxtrader” Grudzien, Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko, and IJay “doughnutz” Palansky. On July 6, 2008 Polaris completed a come-from-behind victory by posting a decisive win against Matt Hawrilenko and IJay Palansky. Polaris won …
The Wimax communication technology could be making a breakout in India as reported by Businessweek. Sprint will be rolling out a WiMax network in Washington next month (April 2008), and in other U.S. cities next year {2009). Until now the most advanced use of WiMax has been in Japan and Korea, where Japanese carrier KDDI …
Picture is the 16 qubit prototype. There was a 28 qubit prototype as well. A new announcement seems to imply 2000-4000 qubits by the end of 2008. “low thousands of qubits by the end of the year [2008]”. The die has room for a million qubits. A research paper has results that compare the time …