A real-world bionic man has been built. It has a frame of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs and a functional heart-lung system, complete with artificial blood pumping through a network of pulsating modified-polymer arteries. It has a bionic spleen to clean the blood, and an artificial pancreas to keep his blood sugar on the level. Behind the …
Sinopec and PetroChina quietly have been beefing up efforts to start producing syngas from coal in the last two years. Coal-to-gas production could potentially outstrip both shale gas and coalbed methane by the end of the current five-year economic plan in 2015, as well as by 2020, according to some estimates. Bernstein is predicting synthetic …
China’s High Speed Rail Morgan Stanley has a 64 page analysis of high speed rail in China. China’s complete national coverage for its HSR network makes the economic case different than one off HSR lines in California. HSR is about half the cost of a comparable air ticket. There are environmental benefits. China does have …
A microscale technique known as optical trapping uses beams of light as tweezers to hold and manipulate tiny particles. Stanford researchers have found a new way to trap particles smaller than 10 nanometers – and potentially down to just a few atoms in size – which until now have escaped light’s grasp. To grasp and …
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or dust-obscured galaxies. Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever …
Halophytes are salt-tolerant plants that are found throughout the world. Halophytes can be used to grow both fuel and food, and a NASA facility is attempting to use halophytes for large-scale fuel production. The aim is to create aviation-grade biofuels without using any arable land, freshwater, or standard food crops. Dr. Bilial Bomani, the head …
Technology Review – David Icke, CEO of MC10, wants you to feel like an Olympian. The company wants to provide users with sophisticated knowledge to fuel individual fitness and improve health, all through wearable electronics. The biggest opportunity offered by wearable electronics, he claims, is to unlock the mysteries of human biology so that we …
DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages) (Formerly part of Synthetic Biology project) The goal of Living Foundries is to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation. The program seeks to develop the new …
DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages) One of the best funded projects is program to enable military vehicle to be developed and built 10 times faster. The goal of the META program is to develop novel design flows, tools, and processes to enable a significant improvement …
Imec, in collaboration with Panasonic, has developed a prototype of a 60GHz radio transceiver allowing to reach data rates of 7Gbps over short distances at very low power consumption. The chip achieves this performance over the 4 channels specified by the IEEE802.11ad standard. Imec’s low-power 60GHz solution is an important step towards adoption of 60GHz …
A printable spacecraft project is running as part of the NASA NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) Printable Spacecraft: Flexible Electronic Platforms for NASA Missions (21 pages, by Kendra Short and Dr. David Van Buren. Flexible printed electronics have revolutionized consumer products such as cellular phones and PDAs, allowing greater functionality with decreasing size and weight. …