The Economist reports on a science paper, Sudden Infant death Syndrome (SIDS) may have a genetic cause. Dr Audero’s results suggest that some upset of the serotonin system may be a necessary, but not always sufficient, part of the pattern that leads to SIDS. It will be enough to kill some children, but needs an …
A special purpose supercomputer, Anton, is being made to accelerate the modelling of protein folding and provide a thousandfold increase in performance for complex molecular simulations. The effort is being led by David E. Shaw, a billionaire computer scientist. In the 1990s, Mr. Shaw was one of the most successful of an elite group of …
Dr Nebel is talking about is a 1.5 meter 100 MW net power fusion reactor Dr Nebel has said he is getting good data from the WB7 test device. He is under a publishing embargo and cannot discuss the data, (neutron counts) but he has said the next device might as well be a 100MW …
The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition has computers from the University of Alberta playing some of the biggest names in the online poker world: Nick “stoxtrader” Grudzien, Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko, and IJay “doughnutz” Palansky. On July 6, 2008 Polaris completed a come-from-behind victory by posting a decisive win against Matt Hawrilenko and IJay Palansky. Polaris won …
China wants to have 100 of Westinghouse Electric Co.’s nuclear reactors in operation or under construction by 2020 — more than double what was anticipated. The Westinghouse AP1000 are being scaled up to 1700 MW and some of the ones already being built for China are 1250MW designs, which will be followed by 1400MW designs …
Jensen Li and John Pendry of Imperial College London have come up with a theory for how to create a carpet that would cause anything swept under it to seem to disappear. This is a different approach to the approximate invisibility work. Regular silica and silicon can be used to make such a carpet. According …
Dwave Systems is a company that is trying to make commercial quantum computers is solidifying the theoretical and experimental evidence that they have in fact created quantum computers. Dwave should be releasing quantum computers with thousands of qubits before the end of 2008. A successful implementation of a true quantum computer will make certain classes …
The traditional picture of how liquid water behaves on a molecular level is wrong, according to new experimental evidence collected by a collaboration of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, RIKEN SPring-8 synchrotron and Hiroshima University in Japan and Stockholm University in Sweden. Nilsson and colleagues probed the …
On July 4th, regular direct weekend flights began between Taiwan and five Chinese cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangzhou and Nanjing. For six decades, the political standoff between Taiwan, a self-governed democracy, and Beijing, which maintains the island is one of its provinces, has meant no regular flights between Taiwan and mainland China. Travel-weary tech …
Back in 2006, then Los Alamos researcher Yuntian Zhu was making 4 centimeter long strands of carbon nanotubes and was talking about forming Superthreads out of it with 100 times the strength of steel. The actual GPa strength was not mentioned in the online article. Yuntian Zhu is now at NC State and is now …
Chemical structures and synthesis of artificial DNA. (a) Chemical structures of two types of natural and nonnatural base pairs. (b) Synthetic strategy for the artificial DNA Japan makes artificial DNA H/T nanowerk and Alfin This is separate from the GNA that was created glycerol nucleic acid (GNA, —a synthetic analog of DNA). It was made …