The U.S. military’s investments in unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have proven invaluable for missions from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) to tactical strike. Most of the current systems, however, require constant control by a dedicated pilot and sensor operator as well as a large number of analysts, all via telemetry. These requirements severely limit the …
There were some meetings and papers considering how to scale and test geoengineering. The papers did not consider iron sequesteration in the ocean. The 120 ton experiment of placing iron sulphate in the ocean was an Eddy scale experiment off of the coast of British Columbia Canada. Ocean mesoscale Eddies are 10 to 500 kilometers …
Terrestrial Energy is rethinking energy. In this video, members of the Terrestrial Energy team explain the benefits of IMSR technology, and explore the business itself. Atomic Insights took a recent look at Terrestrial Energy The main technical description from Atomic Insights is below. Terrestrial Energy believe there are fundamental choices that can alter the competitive …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 205 is up at the Atomic Power Review. Canadian Energy Issues – IPCC, meet Johannes Kepler; like you, he faced dogma, peer pressure, and criticism. Here’s how he responded. On the occasion of the discovery of the planet Kepler 186f, Steve Aplin urges the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to …
James Conca at Forbes reports that the International Institute for Sustainable Development estimates that the CO2 and climate benefits from replacing petroleum fuels with biofuels like ethanol are basically zero (IISD). They claim that it would be almost 100 times more effective, and much less costly, to significantly reduce vehicle emissions through more stringent standards, …
Mexico’s GDP growth has risen by only 2.3 percent a year, on average, since 1981 and Mexico lags behind countries whose GDP per capita it once surpassed, despite more than 30 years of market-opening measures. The country has an urgent need to reconcile the two Mexicos because its demographic dividend—the rapid labor-force expansion that has …
Inspired by natural materials such as bone — a matrix of minerals and other substances, including living cells — MIT engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots. These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce …
A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale. NEIL leverages recent advances in computer …
Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues. The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early moon. …
Arxiv – Inertia from an Asymmetric Casimir Effect. The property of inertia has never been fully explained. A model for inertia (MiHsC or quantised inertia) has been suggested that assumes that 1) inertia is due to Unruh radiation and 2) this radiation is subject to a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. This model has no adjustable parameters …
The Quantum Wave Fund has raised over $30 million to invest and aims to collect $100 million. Quantum physics does indeed offer some intriguing ideas about how fiber optic data links, the Internet’s backbone, could be made more capacious and secure. New ways to handle individual or small groups of photons could allow existing fiber …