Films made of semiconductor nanocrystals — tiny crystals measuring just a few billionths of a meter across — are seen as a promising new material for a wide range of applications. Nanocrystals could be used in electronic or photonic circuits, detectors for biomolecules, or the glowing pixels on high-resolution display screens. They also hold promise …
New Scientist – Planetary Resources would like to put up at least 10 or 15 asteroid spotting space telescopes into orbit in the next five years, some of them on Virgin Galactic rockets. The Planetary Resources telescopes will be a lot less capable than Hubble, which is a billion dollar space vehicle the size of …
1. Centauri Dreams asks whether a white dwarf star could sustain planets with life, after reading an intriguing new study that makes the case for an 8-billion year habitable ‘window.’ 2. Nextbigfuture – The HiRISE camera is onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) photographed the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory which contained the Curiosty …
Kurzweilai – Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin — before he dies of natural causes. Hayworth’s brain-preservation and mind-uploading protocol Before becoming “very sick or very old,” he’ll opt for an “early ‘retirement’ to the future,” he …
Extreme Longevity – Supercentenarians and transthyretin amyloidosis: The next frontier of human life extension (Preventitive Medicine Journal, 3 pages) Supercentenarians are persons who have lived beyond the age of 110. Currently there are only about 80 such known individuals in the world whose age is verified. In a newly published review Drs. Stephen Coles and …
By 2030 humanity’s urban footprint will occupy an additional 1.5 million square kilometres – comparable to the combined territories of France, Germany and Spain. UN estimates show human population growing from 7 billion today to 9 billion by 2050, translating into some 1 million more people expected on average each week for the next 38 …
Nanoletters – Direct Measurement of Adhesion Energy of Monolayer Graphene As-Grown on Copper and Its Application to Renewable Transfer Process Direct measurement of the adhesion energy of monolayer graphene as-grown on metal substrates is important to better understand its bonding mechanism and control the mechanical release of the graphene from the substrates, but it has …
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Pennsylvania State University have announced breakthroughs in the development of tunneling field effect transistors (TFETs), a semiconductor technology that takes advantage of the quirky behavior of electrons at the quantum level. TFETs are on track to solve power leakage and heat problems of regular transistors and delivering …
Nature Photonics – Optical random-access memory (o-RAM) has been regarded as one of the most difficult challenges in terms of replacing its various functionalities in electronic circuitry with their photonic counterparts. Nevertheless, it constitutes a key device in optical routing and processing. Here, we demonstrate that photonic crystal nanocavities with an ultrasmall buried heterostructure design …
Technologies that I expect to see having a lot of progress in the 2012-2016 timeframe should see each of the technologies enabling more improvement in the other technologies in the 2014-2019 timeframes. The exact timeframes would depend upon how fast leaders in one technological area are able to incorporate advances from other areas. the whole …
The smallest wires ever developed in silicon – just one atom tall and four atoms wide – have been shown by a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University to have the same current-carrying capability as copper wires. Experiments and atom-by-atom supercomputer models of the wires have …