Scientists who study aging are currently riveted by a group of 20 dogs in Seattle. The dogs, all house pets older than six years old, are early test subjects in a trial of a drug called rapamycin. The way the drug works is not completely understood, but it’s been used for years to prevent rejection …
Three new weapons that could improve the ability of Navy surface ships to defend themselves against enemy missiles—solid state lasers (SSLs), the electromagnetic railgun (EMRG), and the hypervelocity projectile (HVP). Any one of these new weapon technologies, if successfully developed and deployed, might be regarded as a “game changer” for defending Navy surface ships against …
Tesla Motors software upgrade, version 7, will be released this Thursday. It will include autopilot features. The autopilot will help steer the car on the highway and parallel park the car. Tesla demonstrated many autopilot features, but the upgrade won’t include all of those, said Musk. One feature that will not be available allowed the …
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 …
Over the next two decades the structure of world population and income will undergo profound changes. Global income inequality is projected to decline further in 2035, largely owing to rapid economic growth in the emerging-market economies. The potential pool of consumers worldwide will expand significantly, with the largest net gains in the developing and emerging-market …
The conversion of sunlight into electricity at low cost becomes increasingly important to meet the world’s fast growing energy consumption. This task requires the development of new device concepts, in which particularly the transport of light-generated energy with minimal losses is a key aspect. An interdisciplinary group of researchers from the Universities of Bayreuth and …
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 …
Russian president Vladimir Putin is planning to recommission Cold War-era fleet of midget submarines, which are virtually undetectable. The Piranha-class vessels can operate very close to the shore and can be used to drop mines or fire torpedoes. With a crew of nine, the Piranha can approach silently and can even deploy combat divers or …
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 …
A non-mechanical approach could open the door to a new class of miniaturized, extremely low-cost, robust laser-scanning technologies for military and commercial use Many essential military capabilities—including autonomous navigation, chemical-biological sensing, precision targeting and communications—increasingly rely upon laser-scanning technologies such as LIDAR (think radar that uses light instead of radio waves). These technologies provide amazing …
The world’s first Malaria vaccine provides modest protection. Four injections of the RTS,S vaccine reduced cases of malaria in children aged 5 to 17 months and babies aged 6 to 12 weeks at first vaccination by 36 and 26 per cent respectively after four years, compared with non-recipients. “Given that there were an estimated 198 …