Alphabet, the parent company recently created to keep Google’s core business separate from wilder enterprises such as self-driving cars, is preparing to ramp up spending on its most far-out projects. That’s what Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said Thursday on the company’s first quarterly earnings call. The most significant increase will come from the …
Engineering backup copies of mitochondrial genes to place in the nucleus of the cell, aiming to prevent age-related damage and restore lost mitochondrial function. This is attacking one of seven kinds of known aging damage. Each cell in the body is dependent on the efficient generation of cellular energy by mitochondria to stay alive. Critical …
There is a Molten Salt Reactor Review by Energy Process Developments Terrestrial Energy – Integrated MSR (IMSR) The Integral MSR is also based on the MSR Experiment but has been modified to have a more sealed, passive approach. The design team is based in Canada with international involvement and support. An 80 MWth prototype reactor …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 279 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome Neutron Bytes – The Chicken and Egg Conundrum of Forging a Future for Advanced Nuclear Reactors The bad news is that anyone who is paying attention to the barriers to market entry for advanced nuclear reactors knows what they are. The good news is …
Demand for specialized integrated circuits for military electronics continues to surge exponentially with no end in sight. Systems that synchronize the activity of unmanned aerial vehicles; real-time conversion of raw radar data into tactically useful 3-D imagery; and instant access to high-resolution sensor feeds on the battlefield are only three examples of this reality. Despite …
The European Union SR2S project not only investigates the principles and the scientific problems (of magnetic shielding), but it also faces the complex issues in engineering. Superconducting magnets, commonly found in MRI scanners, produce stronger, more efficient magnetic fields using smaller and lighter magnets than magnets made using conventional materials such as copper or aluminium. …
Plasmonic metamaterial geometry may enable fabrication of an aluminum-based metamaterial superconductor with a critical temperature that is three times that of pure aluminum. Recent theoretical and experimental work has conclusively demonstrated that using metamaterials in dielectric response engineering can increase the critical temperature of a composite superconductor-dielectric metamaterial. This enables numerous practical applications, such as …
Yan Li’s research team sampled water from a salty aquifer under the Tarim basin – a desert in north-west China – and from a glacier and river that supply it. Using carbon dating, they were able to produce a timeline showing the rate of carbon’s arrival in the groundwater over human history. They found that …
DVDs and Blu-ray disks contain so-called phase-change materials that morph from one atomic state to another after being struck with pulses of laser light, with data “recorded” in those two atomic states. Using ultrafast laser pulses that speed up the data recording process, Caltech researchers adopted a novel technique, ultrafast electron crystallography (UEC), to visualize …
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has agreed on the definition of fifth-generation (5G) networks, a key technological requirement and its schedule to commercialize the technology by 2020. The union has decided to define 5G as a network which is capable of transmitting data at up to 20 gigabits-per-second. This means that users can download one …
Teams of European missile maker MBDA’s young engineers and managers drawn from five European countries were challenged to come up with concepts and technologies that might be available in the 2035 timeframe to give warfighters a way to assemble missiles in the field from a suite of components designed to meet specific threats. One concept …