MIT Professor Missy Cummings and the MIT Research in the Humans and Automation Lab have successfully demonstrated how an iPhone could be used to control an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV. Currently soldier carry suitcase-sized controllers. The US military now has 7,000 unmanned aircraft and at least 10,000 ground vehicles. (Part of an 18 page …
From New Scientist, existing sky surveys miss many asteroids smaller than 1 kilometre across, leaving the door open to damaging impacts on Earth with little or no warning, a panel of scientists reports. Doing better will require devoting more powerful telescopes to asteroid hunting, but no one has committed the funds needed to do so, …
Focus fusion experiment and research status is at focusfusion.org simulations in progress. Jeff Schoen and volunteer Henning Burdack are making progress in coding a one-dimensional model of the filamentation process in the DPF, while John Guillory and Lerner are ironing out wrinkles in the algorithm for the model. Luis Manuel Diaz Angulo is continuing to …
Chris Phoenix, of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, has an idea for speeding up DNA Nanotechnology Build a DNA Framework to Position DNA Components When building 100-nm structures out of DNA, the final self-assembly step may [sometimes] require a week. I assume the synthesis of large structures goes something like this: First, use Rothemund staples …
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have devised a new type of superconducting circuit that behaves quantum mechanically –– but has up to five levels of energy instead of the usual two. He explained that in this work they operated a quantum circuit as a more complicated artificial atom with up to five energy levels. The …
Click on the pictures for a larger image G8 climate scorecards from WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature and Allianz have rigged numbers H/T Energy from Thorium Forum WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all …
What if Nuclear Fusion Power became cheap and abundant ? Note: several technologies that could work out for providing commercial nuclear fusion would not lead to cheap and abundant nuclear fusion. They would have power that is about the same price as current 3rd generation nuclear fission. The regular ITER project is such a system. …
There is an 11 year expansion project of the Olympic Dam mine in Australia New capacity would come online in about 2017-2019 assuming a prompt approval and ontime project. The Australian government decision is scheduled to be made July, 2010. Kazakhstan ProductionKazatomprom official opening ceremony for a new in-situ leaching deposit – Irkol [mine]- with …
Wired Magazine has an article “To Pay for Health Care, Treat Aging” As politicians try to reform a health care system that could swallow one-fifth of the nation’s economic output by 2020, they should consider making a small bet with a potentially huge payoff: research that could slow the process of aging In papers published …
Jamais Cascio, Open the Future, claims that ending politics is a delusion and provides the following example. In the early days of the dot-com era, this attitude resulted in the absence of digital tech industry voices in Washington, DC, allowing the incumbent telecom and entertainment industries free rein to write laws and buy politicians without …
IBM this week got an additional $16.1 million from DARPA for its Synapse project to make a computer hardware version of a human brain. The Synapse project : ‘SyNAPSE’ is a backronym and stands for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. The stated purpose is to “investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in …