Researchers at the Technological Institute of the Lagoon (ITL), Mexico, have created a nanoparticle-rich, conducting ink that they have used to coat pipes of solar water heaters to increase their efficiency by up to 70 percent. The new coating was recently proven on the solar heating of a Mexican city sports complex swimming pool, where …
Combining gesture interface, augmented reality and virtual reality interfaces, drones, power beaming, beam forming, robotics, magnetic levitation and sonic levitation would enable people to mimick the Star Wars Force or Fictional Telekenesis. Drones with speakers would be able to get into position to provide sonic leviation. Power beaming would enable higher power usage on the …
Stemcentrx, has raised $500 million and is valued at $3 billion, people familiar with its finances say, a nearly unprecedented value for a company with no revenue, facing the usual R and D obstacles, and that almost no one has heard of. Silicon Valley is used to “unicorns,” those private, usually profitless, and fast-growing tech …
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a $20 billion machine being built in France. Constructing ITER has already cost three times as much as budgeted, and completion has slipped from 2016 to 2019, with the first plasma experiments the following year. Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, told the …
Stephen Hsu at Information Processing reports on a paper where the authors use machine learning techniques to build sparse predictors based on grey/white matter volumes of specific regions. Correlations obtained are ~ 0.7 A separate UCLA paper show that brain size alone correlates 0.4 with IQ. Also, a notable genetic sequence, located within the HMGA2 …
The Laser Weapon System or LaWS is a directed-energy weapon developed by the United States Navy. The weapon was installed on the USS Ponce for field testing in 2014. In December 2014 the United States Navy reported the LaWS system works perfectly, and that the commander of the USS Ponce is authorized to use the …
What do you get when you wrap a thin sheet of the “wonder material” graphene around a novel multifunctional sulfur electrode that combines an energy storage unit and electron/ion transfer networks? An extremely promising electrode structure design for rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries. Lithium-sulfur batteries are of great commercial interest because they boast theoretical specific energy densities …
New research has demonstrated how glass can be manipulated to create a material that will allow computers to transfer information using light. This development could significantly increase computer processing speeds and power in the future. The challenge was to find a single material that can effectively use and control light to carry information around a …
Tesla Motors has chosen Nevada as the site for its proposed $5 billion “gigafactory” battery plant. Tesla has already excavated on the presumed site at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, roughly a four-hour drive from Tesla’s Fremont factory. Casinos — which need a lot of electricity — could be prime customers of Tesla’s energy storage …
Mix together air, fuel, and heat and you get combustion, the chemical reaction that powers most engines in planes, trains and automobiles. And if you throw in some ionized gas (plasma), it turns out, you can sustain combustion even in conditions that would otherwise snuff out the reaction: at low air pressure, in high winds …
Nextbigfuture was looking at how and where to operate robotic cars to accelerate their introduction back in 2008. Robotic car only zones in city centers would have enabled robotic cars to have more simplified and controlled environments to navigate. We had also looked at having robotic cars waiting or going to users. Robotic electric cars …