The New Cold War Threatens the International Space Station and will kill the Atlas Rocket

Russia cast doubt on the long-term future of the International Space Station, a showcase of post-Cold War cooperation, as it retaliated on Tuesday against U.S. sanctions over Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Moscow would reject a U.S. request to prolong the orbiting station’s use beyond 2020. It will also bar Washington from using …

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Multiferroic material can increase power efficiency for future computer processors by up to 1000 times

UCLA researchers were able to demonstrate that using multiferroic material to generate spin waves could reduce wasted heat and therefore increase power efficiency for computer processing by up to 1,000 times. Multiferroic magnetic materials reduce the amount of power consumed by “logic devices,” a type of circuit on a computer chip dedicated to performing functions …

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Venter and Diamandis Launched an Anti-Aging Company to develop Genomics and Stem Cell Therapies

Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), is a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span, was announced Mar 4, 2014 by co-founders J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Robert Hariri, M.D., Ph.D., and Peter H. Diamandis, M.D. The company, headquartered in San Diego, California, is being capitalized with …

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Videos of Electric and Hybrid electric plane designs from Boeing, EADS and NASA

Technology Review – Boeing has a concept for hybrid airplanes the size of 737s, which can seat more than 150 passengers, although it’s unlikely these will come into service before 2030. EADS, the parent company of Airbus, has also developed a conceptual design for passenger airplanes that fly exclusively on electricity, although the range of …

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Cyborg Era Has Started

Medical implants, complex interfaces between brain and machine or remotely controlled insects: Recent developments combining machines and organisms have great potentials, but also give rise to major ethical concerns. In their review entitled “Chemie der Cyborgs – zur Verknüpfung technischer Systeme mit Lebewesen” (The Chemistry of Cyborgs – Interfacing Technical Devices with Organisms), KIT scientists …

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Hubble Traces Subtle Signals of Water on Hazy Worlds

Using the powerful­ eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but this is the first study to conclusively measure and compare …

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Google, Elon Musk, China are raising the bar on competition and forcing more aggressive technological target setting

Google is using Solve for X and major projects like self driving cars and Google Glass to attempt to leapfrog the competition to achieve radical improvement. Google’s latest effort is to legitimize efforts to achieve radical life extension with their new company Calico. This will force more aggressive target setting from biotech companies. Elon Musk …

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Self-assembling hybrid diamond-biological quantum devices at room temperature

Researchers have begun to self-assemble quantum components on the nanometer scale. This is beginning of a multi-decade process to revolutionize the computing. An international team of physicists say they’ve used biological self-assembly techniques to make diamond-based prototypes of the quantum information storage devices of this type. That’s a development that has the potential to profoundly …

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Carnival of Nuclear Energy 172

The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 172 is up at Yes Vermont Yankee James Conca at Forbes explains how Vermont could be paying 8 cents per kwh for clean electricity but instead will pay 20 cents per kwh “The current [upward] trajectory of electricity prices is likely to continue as Vermont mandates production from much more …

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Spacex shifting to launching about once per month in 2014, 2015 and 2016

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) on July 14 test fired the core stage of the Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket that will be used to launch Canada’s Cassiope space weather satellite this September, a company spokeswoman confirmed. “The recently tested booster is the first stage for SpaceX’s upcoming next-generation Falcon 9 demonstration flight for MDA and …

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Upgraded Spacex Falcon 9.1.1 will launch 25% more than old Falcon 9 and bring price down to $4109 per kilogram to LEO

SpaceX’s new engine, the Merlin 1D, has been qualified for spaceflight in advance of its first launch. The engine, a heavily modified version of the Merlin 1C that powers SpaceX’s standard Falcon 9, will be utilised on what SpaceX dubs the “Falcon 9 version 1.1”, scheduled for its first launch in June. The Merlin series …

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