Last year, the USA started the Brain Initiative. It is a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain. The government initiative grew out of richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated …
Rand Paul proposed legislation creating what he calls Economic Freedom Zones which would see federal income and corporate taxes cut to 5%, and federal payroll taxes reduced to 2% for employers and employees. This would be for areas like Detroit. He proposes reducing federal taxes and regulations in zip codes with unemployment greater than 1 …
The Carnival of Space 345 is up at Dear Astronomer Meridiani Journal – Europa or bust: possible mission to icy moon in fy 2015 budget proposal Universe Today – Astronomers have announced Nobel Prize-worthy evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — providing the first direct evidence the universe underwent …
Ars Technica reviews “STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment” in Appendix D.13 of the Columbia accident report which was NASA’s own detailed assessment of what a rescue mission would have looked like. The scenarios were to assume that a decision to repair or rescue the Columbia crew would be made quickly, with no regard to risk. Columbia’s …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 197 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome ANS Nuclear Cafe – Persistent Prejudice Against Nuclear – Can Anything Be Done? Part 2 The second of a series by guest writer Jim Hopf. Unjustified beliefs and attitudes exist concerning nuclear power, regardless of what the scientific community says. Unjust criticism threatens the …
Researchers have sequenced the whole genomes of 2,500 people from Iceland. They have genotyped about 120,000 Icelanders with an Illumina chip. They can impute whole genome sequence down to variants with less than 0.1% frequency into about 370,000 Icelanders — there are only 320,000 living today. “We basically have the whole genome sequence of an …
Skybox imaging was mentioned by Steve Jurvetson in his talk at the Foresight Nanotechnology Integration. Skybox was founded out of the CubeSat community and they are ardent believers in the power of commodity, commercial electronics to change the cost of doing business in space. Traditional satellites capable of taking imagery at better than 1 meter …
There are an estimated 37 trillion cells in the human body. This is an estimate from Annals of Human Biology journal. They looked back over scientific journals and books from the past couple centuries and found many estimates. But those estimates sprawled over a huge range, from 5 billion to 200 million trillion cells. The …
The Diplomat reports that Chinais the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine. China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. Here is an analysis from the Diplomat by …
James Hanson and co-authors have written a new climate study. Plos One – Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature. Hansen’s conclusion is that we need to build a new generation of nuclear power plants. Nuclear alone, in Hansen’s view, has the potential to produce …
8,500 residents in a rural Alberta community (Olds, Alberta) will get gigabit internet for as little as $57 a month, thanks to a project by the town’s non-profit economic development foundation. The board of O-Net gave approval for residents to get access to a full gigabit (or 1,000 megabits) per second of bandwidth for the …