The Carnival of Space 201 is up at Starry Critters At Centauri Dreams Mark Millis (x-NASA now at the Tau Zero project) gives his response to the 100 Year Starship [Organization] Study Tau Zero’s practitioners are making progress. In 2010 they produced 2 books, 13 journal articles (or book chapters), 22 conference presentations, 22 media …
Xinhua Hu and colleagues at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, have come up with a way to create shield against water waves that, unlike Enoch and Guenneau’s set-up, could also double up as a wave-energy plant. Hu’s team proposes using a rectangular array of stationary cylinders fixed to the sea floor in coastal waters. “The …
Boeing is expected to deliver twenty 787 Dreamliners in 2011 China Southern, one of China’s leading airlines, will receive its first 787 Dreamliner aircraft from the Boeing company in the fourth quarter of this year Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft are designed to use 20 percent less fuel than other aircraft of similar size. The aircraft …
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is proving itself to be a prolific planet hunter. Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft …
Scanning electron micrograph image showing platinum wires being lifted away from the surface of the UNCD electrode. Inset: Higher magnification image showing a single ring of platinum removed from the UNCD surface. Argonne National Labs – Scientists from CNM’s Nanofabrication Group, working with users from the University of Wisconsin-Stevenson Point, discovered a fast, simple, scalable …
NY Times – Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that roughly 70 percent of the core of one reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan had suffered damage. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, suggested that the worst moments of the crisis appeared to be receding, saying that the best information the United …
Nucnet – Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) says it has identified a source of a leak of highly radioactive water leaking into the ocean from unit 2 at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant. The power company said today (Saturday) that water has been seeping from a 20 cm crack in the wall of a two-metre-deep pit …
Two Pieces of thin plastic tube of 2 cm (a little less than one inch) diameter and length 1.2 meters (4 feet long) each were filled with Sea water and a twin wire plastic transmission line was electrically connected to the sea water contained in the two plastic tubes as shown. A TV set was …
Elena Semouchkina and colleagues are experimenting with ways of using magnetic resonance to capture rays of visible light and route them around objects, rendering those objects invisible to the human eye. They designed a nonmetallic “invisibility cloak” that uses concentric arrays of identical glass resonators made of chalcogenide glass, a type of dielectric material–that is, …
Korea is deploying Wibro Evolution (a version of WIMAX), which is expected to provide speed 10 times fasters than the apparent 3G networks. This version of Wimax is expected to provide 120 Mbps downlink and 60 Mbps uplink. Yota and Samsung will begin the trail of 802.16m Wimax in the end of 2010. The current …
A solar cell’s ability to convert sunlight to electric current is limited by the band gaps of the semiconductors from which it is made. For example, semiconductors with wide band gaps respond to shorter wavelengths with higher energies (lower left). A semiconductor with an intermediate band has multiple band gaps and can respond to a …