Pat Gelsinger, head of the Digital Enterprise Division at Intel, says that Moore’s Law will continue until 2029 with zettaflop supercomputers at that time. [link is to his Intel Developers Forum keynote address, 80 pages, From Petaflops to Milliwatts] Pat expects by 2017 it will be possible to create a complete genetic simulation of a …
Idaho National Lab Strategic plan for improving light water nuclear reactors This plan has not been adopted and funded yet, but recently released with INL’s Utility Advisory Board and EPRI’s Nuclear Power Council as the authors. I think the plan can and should be adopted, while parallel work is ongoing with uranium hydride reactors, molten …
The US government has funded Sun Microcomputer research for optical on chip and between chip communication. Recent coverage has NEC working on that as the key technology for 10 petaflop computers in 2010 and IBM as well for faster computers. Sun believes it is high risk research with a 50% chance of success but that …
ABC News’ online coverage of the Taiwan presidential election, with most polls showing presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT with big or small leads. Prediction markets also are forecasting a Ma Ying-jeou win in the Taiwan Presidential election at the end of this week (March 22, 2008). I have had several articles on this …
From nanowerk, a new approach for solar power, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each interlocking spiral “nanoantenna” is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair. Update: Al fin has an excellent article that …
I had previously proposed more widespread use of biomarkers for improved healthcare and medical research. I have now discovered the work that is already underway to realize that vision. The vision is to greatly shorten the time it takes to find and prove that a new drug or medical procedure is effective and to approve …
Dr. Eric Hoffman envisions that some parts of the approval process may be developed for DNA-like molecular medicine as a ‘class’ of drugs, rather than individual testing of hundreds of different sequences. Dr. Hoffman is a world-renowned human geneticist, who is the Director of the Research Center for Genetic Medicine, a James Clark Professor of …
1. Dwave systems’ adiabatic quantum computers could reach 512 to 1000 qubits and performance superior to classical computers in 2008 Successful development of quantum computers would accelerate the development of molecular nanotechnology with superior molecular simulation and modeling. CTO Geordie Rose revealing his 16 qubit machine in Feb, 2007. A 28 qubit machine was revealed …
SiCortex and Scalable Servers Corporation have each packaged something like a server cluster into a single box, to produce what each hopes will be a commercially viable desktop supercomputer. On the outside, the machines in question look like big desktop PCs. On the inside, they are rather different. Instead of one or two microprocessors (the …
A robot, smaller than one millimeter, has been built by Korean scientists to travel through blood vessels Once inside a blocked artery, it is able to release drugs to dissolve blood clots, which are often the cause of heart attacks. The robot has three short front legs and three longer back legs which are attached …
The U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa, materials-technology company GTM Advanced Structures and scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have patented a fiber metal laminate (FML) called CentrAl reinforced aluminum, or CentrAl, for use in aircraft manufacture. CentrAl provides some 25 percent more tensile strength than high-strength aluminum alloys, is extremely resistant to metal …