Charlie Stross has a 21st Century FAQ which tells people to forget about space colonization and the Singularity. 99.999% of the human species who will never get off the planet are concerned. There’ll probably be a Mars expedition too. But barring fundamental biomedical breakthroughs, or physics/engineering breakthroughs that play hell with the laws of physics …
We are looking at faster computing developments based on recent breakthroughs. There are now several ways that we can get computing down to 1-2 nanometer feature or element size. These manufacturing methods could be scaled up and delivering computer hardware products within 4-10 years. Many thought that computer hardware might permanently stall at 10-20 nanometer …
1. Music of the Spheres has Europa Visitor FlyingSinger brushes up his space navigation skills and prepares for his April IYA podcast with a flight from Europa to Callisto, simulated in Orbiter. 2. On February 16 we celebrated Galileo’s 445th birthday: “Yet It Moves” from A Babe in the Universe. During this International Year of …
By harvesting the energy wasted by ordinary shock absorbers, a prototype device aims to take over much of the work now performed by alternators. In hybrid vehicles, the GenShock also could boost mileage by 10 percent. The GenShock design has been patented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students who formed a startup, Levant Power …
NASA has found three discrete regions where Mars is releasing methane at this time. Methane can only survive a short time in the atmosphere until it is destroyed by sunlight, and so its continued presence means it is being replenished. “The production (of methane) is likely due to only one of two possibilities. The first …
The large scale cost of getting a lot more oil is currently $200-400 billion to get each 100 billion bbl. 100 billion barrels is about a 14 year supply of oil for the United States. It is about a 3.5 year supply of oil for the world. The Oil industry’s 2008 -pre-crash global exploration and …
What is poverty ? The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts. What is global poverty ? From the World Bank: Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school …
1. Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, a company belonging to the Toshiba group, achieved a quantum key data transmission speed of 1.02Mbps at a distance of 20km, which is 100 times faster than conventional speeds. Also, a speed of 10.1Kbps was demonstrated at a transmission distance of 100km, according to the company. This was made possible …
Theorists propose that for certain types of superconductors, contact with a metal layer could greatly increase the transition temperatures of these materials—in some cases by as much as an order of magnitude. This relates to recent research which suggests that superconductors do not achieve their best performance because of quantum traffic jams with electrons The …
Aubrey de Grey interview on longevity, life extension and Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) at betterhumans.com Estimate of the timing of results: I [Aubrey] think there’s a 50% chance of getting the first-generation SENS therapies working within 25-30 years. But that’s only an estimate, and it’s a highly speculative one: I think there’s at …
Areva and the University of Idaho have signed an agreement to develop technology for recovering uranium from incinerator ash at Areva’s uranium fuel plant in Richland, Washington state. The process also reduces the amount of ash classified as radioactive waste. Chien Wai, a chemistry professor at the University of Idaho, has developed a process that …