Steven Chu said on Tuesday that he would push as the new energy secretary to help the nuclear energy and clean coal industries jump-start their contributions to battle the nation’s energy crisis. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during his confirmation hearing that he’d help streamline nuclear loan guarantees …
1. Super carbon nanotube batteries MIT Technology Review reports researchers at MIT have made pure, dense, thin films of carbon nanotubes that show promise as electrodes for higher-capacity batteries and supercapacitors. Dispensing with the additives previously used to hold such films together improved their electrical properties, including the ability to carry and store a large …
The January 2009 issue of Popular Science has several pages on General Fusion. 32 page patent for acoustic generator for nuclear fusion. 24 page patent for magnetized target fusion generator Popular Science indicated that General Fusion has raised $7 million of their $10 million second round which would fund an almost full scale version (2 …
Here is a picture of the 128 qubit silicon chips on a wafer. The quantum computer chips are shown in a stage before they have metal applied because at a later stage they look more like a mirror. So this is a more visually interesting point. The main point is that 128 qubit quantum computer …
Dharmendra S Modha’s, IBM Almaden, talk on his brain emulation project was one of the highlights of the 2008 Singularity Summit. The Brain Emulation Roadmap was not presented at the Singularity Summit but was recently published online and relates to the brain emulation work. IBM’s brain emulation project is able to carry out rat-scale simulations …
1. Dr. Xiangwu Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, hydroentangling treats the stack of unentangled fibers as a whole to produce strong fabrics or membranes, and hence it is an excellent method to assemble carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are too small to be manipulated individually. The continuous …
Natural Gas production is going up by a lot in the United States. This was noted at Peak Oil Debunked about a month ago. The peak oil people such as Mike Ruppert and Matt Simmons were saying in 2003 and since then that natural gas production was heading for a sharp decline. Now even some …
China is buying the newest manufacturing equipment. In China (now the third largest Asian robot market), robot investment is still booming, with 5,800 units installed in 2006, an increase of 29% on the previous year. Here, alongside the automotive sector, demand is increasing in the electronics and rubber and synthetics industries. At the end of …
WhiteKnightTwo is a dual-hull quad-engine aircraft roughly three times larger than the original WhiteKnight. WK2 is the world’s first all-composite full-sized aircraft. Everything apart from the engines and landing gear is constructed from ultra-lightweight composite materials. Virgin Galactic expects to fly its first commercial space flights somewhere between 2009 and 2011. Virgin galactic pictures The …
Caption: A scanning electron micrograph, taken with an electron microscope, shows the comb-like structure of a metal plate at the center of newly published University of Florida research on quantum physics. UF physicists found that corrugating the plate reduced the Casimir force, a quantum force that draws together very close objects. The discovery could prove …
In a study published today in Nature, researchers led by Brown University geologist Alberto Saal found evidence of water molecules in pebbles retrieved by NASA’s Apollo missions. Mars magma contained as much as 2 percent dissolved water. For the past four decades, the limit for detecting water in lunar samples was about 50 parts per …