In the 2009 H1N1 pandemic alone, estimates suggest that around 5 to 7 million more people got the flu from someone who came to work sick, and that an additional 1,500 people died. It is also more costly in lost productivity and other costs to require people to work while sick Some employers have, of …
India’s recently launch of a spacecraft to Mars with a mission cost of $75 million. Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the …
On June 11th 2013 Eric Lerner and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. were invited to share the latest achievements in the field of nuclear fusion energy research at Google’s Solve for x Brainstorming conference. Eric explains aneutronic fusion, which produces no radioactive waste, and the device, called the Dense Plasma Focus, which could produce eco-safe, green, …
By depositing atoms on one side of a grid of the “miracle material” graphene, researchers at Stanford have engineered piezoelectricity into a nanoscale material for the first time. The implications could yield dramatic degree of control in nanotechnology. Piezoelectricity is the property of some materials to produce electric charge when bent, squeezed or twisted. Perhaps …
OmniTouch, a wearable projection system developed by researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, enables users to turn pads of paper, walls or even their own hands, arms and legs into graphical, interactive surfaces. OmniTouch employs a depth-sensing camera, similar to the Microsoft Kinect, to track the user’s fingers on everyday surfaces. This allows …
The structure of the new carbon allotrope, T-carbon, is shown from different directions. T-carbon is obtained by replacing each carbon atom in diamond with a carbon tetrahedron. Image credit: Sheng, et al. ©2011 American Physical Society. Physical Review Letters – T-Carbon: A Novel Carbon Allotrope Previous work had used computational chemistry to propose T-carbon A …
1. The Register UK – The total non-story of the Fukushima nuclear powerplant “disaster” – which has seen and will see no deaths or measurable health consequences for anyone anywhere – has received a shot in the arm today with the news that Japanese authorities have upgraded the incident to a Level 7 on the …
The experimental realization of extended, two-dimensional sheets of silicene, the silicon counterpart of graphene, has been elusive so far. Researchers have demonstrated that such a two-dimensional, epitaxial honeycomb Si layer forms through surface segregation on a metallic zirconium diboride (ZrB2) Film grown itself epitaxially on Si(111). The honeycomb Si layer uniformly covers the ZrB2(0001) surface …
It is unlikely that radiation released from the nuclear reactors in Japan will harm anyone in the United States, President Obama said in a press briefing this afternoon. In Japan, engineers have laid a power line that can connect reactor 2 of the Daiichi facility to the off-site power grid, the International Atomic Energy Agency …
Arxiv – Holographic unification of dark matter and dark energy Using a new version of the holographic principle, a constant term was introduced, which conduces to the description of the standard cosmological LCDM model, and unifies under the same concept the dark matter and dark energy phenomena. The obtained model improves the results of previously …
Scanning electron microscope images of the suspended structures of single crystal diamond, (a) cantilever, (b) bridge, and (c) 3-terminal NEMS switch. Air gap structure has been formed in the substrate side. Dr. Meiyong Liao, a Senior Researcher of Sensor Materials Center, National Institute for Materials Science (Japan), and his colleagues, succeeded in the batch fabrication …