EIA US Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays, July 2011 (105 pages) The Monterey/Santos oil field in California is estimated to four times the technically recoverable oil as the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. The Monterey field is also estimated to have 500 billion barrels of oil in place …
Arxiv – Researchers demonstrate a proof-of-concept experiment that microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) can be actuated using photoelectrowetting. In order to demonstrate this, a 30 micron thick aluminum cantilever is actuated using an ordinary white light source. A deflection of 56 microns is observed using a light irradiance equal to approx 1000 W m-2 at a bias …
Arxiv – Experimental determination of Ramsey numbers with quantum annealing (16 pages) In an interview that I had with CTO Geordie Rose, he mentioned that published papers lag the actual work by about 2 years. Currently, Dwave Systems is working on their prototype 512 qubit chips which will be commercially available later in 2012. Ramsey …
American Cancer Society – A total of 1,638,910 new cancer cases and 577,190 deaths from cancer are projected to occur in the U.S. in 2012. Between 1990/1991 and 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, overall death rates decreased by about 23% in men and 15% in women. This translates to more …
1. Wired – China’s refitted aircraft carrier is intended as a training aircraft carrier. * It has a modest size (60,000 tons) compared to American carriers * It has an incomplete air wing and escort force * It will sail without the company of allied flattops * It has unreliable engines There will soon be …
Nanoletters – Over the past 30 years electronic applications have been dominated by complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) devices. These combine p- and n-type field effect transistors (FETs) to reduce static power consumption. However, CMOS transistors are limited to static electrical functions, i.e., electrical characteristics that cannot be changed. Here we present the concept and …
UCLA physicists have made nanomechanical measurements of unprecedented resolution on protein molecules. The new measurements, by UCLA physics professor Giovanni Zocchi and former UCLA physics graduate student Yong Wang, are approximately 100 times higher in resolution than previous mechanical measurements, a nanotechnology feat which reveals an isolated protein molecule, surprisingly, is neither a solid nor …
1. Astroblogger – Comet Lovejoy survived its passage over the Sun C/2011 W3 Lovejoy in SOHO C3 (16 December UT), astonishingly, it has left its tail behind (the comet the is bright object to the right of the occulting disk). 2. Weareallinthegutter – Comet Lovejoy covered the expectation before and after the passage. The comet …
It has been 25 years since scientists discovered the first high-temperature superconductors—copper oxides, or cuprates, that conduct electricity without a shred of resistance at temperatures much higher than other superconducting metals. Yet no one has managed to explain why these cuprates are able to superconduct at all. Now, two Caltech chemists have developed a hypothesis …
Washington D.C. went live with the first link of a 100-gigabit network Wednesday. The new network, called the D.C. Community Access Network (DC-CAN), will provide links out to communities east of the Anacostia River, but the ultra-high-speed network will soon serve the entire District. However, the pricing for the service still looks expensive with 1 …
1. Forbes – How China’s Economy Keeps Growing Frank Newman is probably the only American to ever run a Chinese bank and a large American bank in his career. Newman ran the Shenzhen Development Bank for five years, ending in 2010. Prior to that, he worked as a CFO at Bank of America and was …