Mostafa Ronaghi, one of the inventors of this sequencing chemistry, group at Stanford is working on an inexpensive superscaler pyrosequencer. It would use $10 CMOS imaging instead of $100,000 CCDs. The objective is to run 400 million sequencing reactions in parallel that can produce between 60 and 100 gigabases of data per run with 200-base …
The World Future Society makes forecasts which show that the forecasters do not seem to really understand some of the technology that they are forecasting. Forecast #2: The era of the Cyborg is at hand. Researchers in Israel have fashioned a “bio-computer” using the DNA of living cells instead of silicon chips. This development may …
Walmart targets selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs each year by 2008 If it succeeds in selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008, total sales of the bulbs in the United States would increase by 50 percent, saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and 3 million tons of greenhouse gas per …
The first in a new generation of nanotechnology-based cancer treatments will likely begin clinical trials in 2007, and if the promise of animal trials carries through to human trials, these treatments will transform cancer therapy. One of these new approaches places gold-coated nanoparticles, called nanoshells, inside tumors and then heats them with infrared light until …
three Stanford researchers proposed that a new state, called the quantum spin Hall effect, could be realized without applying an external magnetic field. Since quantum wells in mercury telluride/cadmium telluride sheets can be readily fabricated, it is possible to experimentally test the theoretical predictions of Zhang, Bernevig and Hughes. A research group at the University …
The race to build an exotic material with a negative refractive index for visible light has been won by a team of researchers in Germany. The demonstration could open the door to a new generation of optical devices such as superlenses able to see details finer then the wavelength of visible light. Dolling’s metamaterial is …
India is targeting 24 GW on nuclear power by 2020 and 50 GW by 2030. Two thirds of the nuclear fuel should be thorium. As per the present plan of the Bhabha Atomic Research Corporation (BARC) and the Nuclear Power Corporation, the capacity by 2020 is expected to be increased to 24,000 MW. ‘There is …
Stephen Hawking told a BBC radio audience that if the human race were to survive, it would be necessary to go to another star. Hawking talked about using antimatter powered spaceships to go at about 86% of light speed. This is the second part of my analysis. In the first part, I talked about going …
The New Scientist, examines the efforts to reduce ship drag using tiny bubbles, slippery polymers and trapped sheets of air. As a ship moves through water it encounters three types of drag: wave drag, pressure drag and frictional drag. Wave resistance is mainly a problem at high speed, and can be minimised with a carefully …
The Chinese government supports university research and gives them money to pay for the use of the service [supercomputer grid]. That is better than to spend money on buying thousands of separate smaller systems and none of them can do significant work. China only has two supercomputer centers now. Steve Chen is recommending and apparently …
