There was an internet rumor of two Star Trek TV shows with plots related to future police shows. These rumors are not credible to me. J.J. Abrams has said CBS Is ‘Not Interested’ in a new Star Trek TV series. Sparked by the success of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, Abrams wasn’t optimistic about Star …
2014 will see commercial neural network deep learning chips and commercial neuromorphic chips. Deep Learning chips can outperform graphic processors by 150 times for some tasks and new neuromorphic chips can tolerate, adapt and learn from mistakes. Purdue University’s deep learning co-processor design is specialized to run multilayered neural networks above all else and to …
The Economist published their World in 2014 Here is their list of the top economies in the world (actually they published per capita GDP and per capita GDP PPP and population.) The total GDP and ranking was calculated from those numbers. China, India and Indonesia will have their GDP Purchasing power parity adjusted to be …
Superconductors.ORG reports the discovery of two new room-temperature superconductors with record high transitions near 48 Celsius (118F, 321K) and 44 Celsius (111F, 317K). The chemical formulas of these materials are Tl6Ba4SiCu9O18+ and Tl5Ba4SiCu8O16+ respectively. These are the ninth and tenth superconductors found to have transition temperatures above room temperature. Since dozens of new superconductors have …
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of …
David Le Blanc’s extra slides for his Molten Salt reactor talk had breakdowns of the fuel cycle costs for each of the major types of nuclear reactors. LWR (Light Water Reactor) Fuel Cycle Costs All assume 100$/kg Uranium and 150$/kg SWU (enrichment) • Light Water Reactor(per Gwe) • 20M$ Uranium(200 Tonnes, 100$/kg) • 20M$ Enrichment …
1. At comic-con the title of the second Avengers movie was revealed as the Age of Ultron. Ultron is an evil robot that has been a primary enemy of the Avengers for decades. Age of Ultron was a ten issue series that just completed. There are too many differences between what characters and events have …
A major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham, which enables all of the world’s crops to take nitrogen from the air rather than expensive and environmentally damaging fertilizers. Nitrogen fixation, the process by which nitrogen is converted to ammonia, is vital for plants to survive and grow. However, only a very …
Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it’s not entirely clear – of a “world’s tallest” tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis. Careful statistical study has found that the height of buildings …
The largest building in the world is the New Global Century center in Chengdu China. It is 1600 feet long (500 meters) X 1300 feet wide (400 meters) X 300 feet tall (100 meters). It the world’s biggest building measured by floor space. The Boeing Everett Factory in Everett, Washington has the largest volume, and …
The use of graphene in telecommunications could dramatically accelerate internet speeds by up to a hundred times. Ordinarily optical switches respond at rate of a few picoseconds – around a trillionth of a second. Through this study physicists have observed the response rate of an optical switch using ‘few layer graphene’ to be around one …