There has been a renaissance of renewed construction for nuclear fission. Hundreds of nuclear fission reactors were built in the 1970s in the US and then in the 1980s in France and other places. Now there is renewed activity in China, Russia, India, South Korea and other places. This is a good thing and there …
Biological parts: Ginkgo BioWorks, a synthetic-biology startup, is automating the process of building biological machines. Shown here is a liquid-handling robot that can prepare hundreds of reactions. Credit: Ginkgo BioWorks MIT Technology Review reports that startup Ginkgo BioWorks aims to push synthetic biology to the factory level. Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup that aims …
The World Bank projects that the number of people living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.25 a day) will fall slightly in 2009, declining from 1,203 million in 2008 to 1,184 million. The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is also expected to decline by a small amount, from 21.3 percent …
HPC Wire speculates that the Oak Ridge National Lab Nvidia supercomputer will be ready in 2011 with 20-25 petaflops. The plan for an exaflop supercomputer is for 1 exaflop by 2019. ORNL’s Fermi machine will be built by Cray. At the “Breakthroughs in High Performance Computing” session on Wednesday evening, Cray CTO Steve Scott basically …
HPCWire reports: Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled a seriously revamped graphics processor architecture representing the biggest step forward for general-purpose GPU computing since the introduction of CUDA in 2006. The new architecture, codenamed “Fermi,” incorporates a number of new features aimed at technical computing, including support for Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory and greatly enhanced …
Friedwardt Winterberg has an update on this microfusion rocket. There is a lot of interesting material in his advanced deuterium rocket, but this will focus on the Appendix where he considers the possibility of replacing the nuclear fission trigger of a nuclear fusion bomb with an alternative. It is the nuclear fission bomb part of …
Geordie Rose, CTO of Dwave Systems answered some of my questions in the comments of his blog. 1. Is the 128 qubit system being sold as a service or product yet ? We are talking with some folks about hosting 128 qubit systems so the answer to #1 is “yes”. 2. Is that happening by …
Muon-catalyzed nuclear fusion. (1) A beam of negatively charged muons is produced and injected into a mixed fuel of deuterium and tritium, (2) resulting in the creation of many muonic tritium atoms (tµ). As muons are 207 times heavier than electrons, the muon orbits the nucleus at a much closer distance to the nucleus than …
Here is an interview of Geoffrey Fox by Sander Olson. Dr. Fox is an Indiana University Professor of informatics who is the head of Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute and Director of the Community Grids Laboratory at Indiana University. He is also the director of the FutureGrid Program. The FutureGrid project is a four year, …
University of Toronto researchers, Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, have made a cancer diagnostic breakthrough. Kelley said a five-year time frame would be a “conservative estimate” to get the device on the market. U of T researchers have used nanomaterials to develop an inexpensive microchip sensitive enough to quickly determine the type and severity of …
Accelerating Future has the Saturday program for the Singularity Summit in New York on October 3rd and 4th, 2009. The full two day program is here Stephen Wolfram, the British polymath known as the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha and the author of A New Kind of Science, will be attending the Singularity Summit …