James Cameron is preparing to dive to the deepest point of the oceans as part of his research for a sequel to Avatar, his 3D epic. He has commissioned Australian engineers to build a deep sea submersible which can reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench – 10.9km (36,000ft) down in the western Pacific – …
NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has become unstuck and has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet. riday, Jan. 21 at 10 a.m. EST, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite deployed its 100-square-foot polymer sail …
Using detailed land analysis, Illinois researchers have found that biofuel crops cultivated on available land could produce up to half of the world’s current fuel consumption – without affecting food crops or pastureland. The critical concept of the Illinois study was that only marginal land would be considered for biofuel crops. Marginal land refers to …
1. China’s top energy official Zhang Guobao says China will increase its nuclear power capacity by 38 gigawatts and hydropower capacity by 140 gigawatts by 2015 This would increase China’s nuclear power to about 50 GWe and hydropower to about 330 GWe in 2015. China has 13 nuclear reactors operating now and generating about 10.5 …
In a breakthrough in the effort to achieve controlled fusion energy, a research team at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. (LPP) in Middlesex, NJ, announced that they have demonstrated the confinement of ions with energies in excess of 100 keV (the equivalent of a temperature of over 1 billion degrees C) in a dense plasma. They …
Iraq’s oil production has exceeded 2.7 million barrels a day. Just last week it passed 2.6 million barrels of oil per day. Iraq’s oil exports also continue to rise and are expected to exceed two million barrels per day by the end of January from 1.95 million barrels shipped abroad last month. The increases were …
Angstron Materials has invented a graphene-based supercapacitor with ultra high energy density, a feature that permits storage of a significant amount of energy This development has pushed the specific energy density of an electrical double-layer (EDL) graphene-enabled supercapacitor to an unprecedented level of nearly 90 watt hours per kilogram at room temperature and a level …
Michael Dittmar wrote a series of posts about nuclear energy that was published on The Oil Drum in 2009. In the first post of the series, he said that uranium “civilian uranium stocks are expected to be exhausted during the next few years” and “the current uranium supply situation is unsustainable”. Basically lack of uranium …
Labnol has a list of devices for watching internet videos on TV Here is an updated list of pricing and updated descriptions. There are definitely good options for ditching your cable and satellite TV subscription to watch internet TV instead. Then the choices are if the freely available internet content is enough or if you …
Researchers at EPFL and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics announced the discovery of a method for coupling photons and mechanical vibrations that could have numerous applications in telecommunications and quantum information technologies. Controlling and modulating the flow of light is essential in today’s telecommunications-based society. Professor Tobias Kippenberg and his team in EPFL’s …
Robin Hanson is an economist who has written about the economics of technological singularities. I will summarize some of his writings and my own about achieving higher levels of economic growth. There are several projects from DARPA and Airbus which could revolutionize manufacturing. A construction revolution is possible with Contour crafting (printing buildings with concrete …