CNN – Embattled Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko announced Monday he is resigning. Jaczko, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has been under fire after complaints from Democrats and Republicans on the commission about his management style surfaced last year. NY Times – Dr. Jaczko, chairman since May 2009 …
Scott Aaronson, a D-Wave Skeptic, visited the offices of Adiabatic Quantum computer company Dwave Systems He had three factual points : Point #1: D-Wave now has a 128-(qu)bit machine that can output approximate solutions to a particular NP-hard minimization problem—namely, the problem of minimizing the energy of 90-100 Ising spins with pairwise interactions along a …
1. Mitch Randall writes at New Energy Times. They claim that Rossi manipulated the power controls during the Energy Catalyzer demonstration to Mats Lewan of Ny Teknik. 2. Rossi is claiming that he is being libeled and is preparing to sue to back up the claim. 3. A rumor is that Defkalion will begin selling …
Wired – By 2017, HP hopes to build a computer chip that includes 256 microprocessors tied together with beams of light. Codenamed Corona, this laser-powered contraption would handle ten trillion floating points operations a second. In other words, if you put just five of them together, you’d approach the speed of today’s supercomputers. The chip’s …
Energy Horizons provides the Air Force vision and blueprint for energy S&T spanning the domains of air, space, cyber, and infrastructure. Energy Horizons focuses on science and technology in the near (1-5 years), mid (6-10 years), and far (11-15 years) term that hold the most promise to revolutionize AF operations, efficiency, and effectiveness. (72 pages) …
The Carnival of Nuclear energy 89 is up at Idaho Samizdat ANS Nuclear Cafe – The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is working with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a long-term strategy to embrace and implement these directives for military installations that includes small modular reactors (SMRs) in the mix of clean energy …
MIT engineers have developed a nanoscale biological coating that can halt bleeding nearly instantaneously, an advance that could dramatically improve survival rates for soldiers injured in battle. The researchers, led by Paula Hammond and funded by MIT’s Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies and a Denmark-based company, Ferrosan Medical Devices A/S, created a spray coating that includes …
1. The Atlantic – Walmart and China have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. With some 30,000 Chinese factories making things for Walmart, the company’s future was tied to China in the most …
Technology Review – Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel They’ve laid down 300 DDQ molecules on a gold substrate, setting them up as a cellular automaton. More impressive still, they’ve then initialised the system so that it “calculates” the way heat diffuses …
At Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is a site where the remains of nine 45-foot (14-meter) ichthyosaurs, of the species Shonisaurus popularis can be found. These were the Triassic’s counterpart to today’s predatory giant squid-eating sperm whales. The new thinking is that there was a Kraken (giant octopus) that preyed on the ichthyosaurs. They hypothesize …
An artist’s rendering of an array of pressurized graphene membranes. A CU-Boulder team recently discovered that graphene has surprisingly high adhesion properties, findings that may help lead to the development of new graphene-based mechanical devices like gas separation membranes. (Illustration courtesy Victor Tzen and Rex Tzen.) graphene has surprisingly powerful adhesion qualities — are expected …