Acceleron, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech firm, and other companies are still pursuing myostatin blocking, which can be four times more effective at building muscle versus high doses of steroids Se-Jin Lee, the molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University who discovered myostatin in mice in 1992, says it’s “disappointing” that MYO-029 is dead, but he still …
China wants to have 100 of Westinghouse Electric Co.’s nuclear reactors in operation or under construction by 2020 — more than double what was anticipated. The Westinghouse AP1000 are being scaled up to 1700 MW and some of the ones already being built for China are 1250MW designs, which will be followed by 1400MW designs …
Back in 2006, then Los Alamos researcher Yuntian Zhu was making 4 centimeter long strands of carbon nanotubes and was talking about forming Superthreads out of it with 100 times the strength of steel. The actual GPa strength was not mentioned in the online article. Yuntian Zhu is now at NC State and is now …
More teraflop chips are being introduced by AMD and Nvidia. AMD FireStream 9250 will be available at the end of Sept 2008 for $1999. The FireStream chips can perform “double precision” floating-point calculations at 1 teraflop of performance. A 4x Crossfire X configuration is good for almost 5 TFlops, which means 1.2 TFlops per RV770 …
IEA (International Energy Agency) weekly oil report was issued June 10. Global oil product demand is expected to average 86.8 mb/d in 2008, 80 kb/d below last month’s estimate, following the reduction of price subsidies in several non-OECD countries. Global growth is cut even more steeply by 230 kb/d to +0.9% or +800 kb/d when …
Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the …
Titanium could become a lot cheaper and more commongly used. A non-melt consolidation process being developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and industry partners could reduce the amount of energy required and the cost to make titanium parts from powders by up to 50 percent, making it feasible to use titanium alloys for brake rotors, …
Carbon nanotubes appear to have a similar cancer causing effect as asbestos in mice Within days of being injected into mice, the nanotubes — which are increasingly used in electronic components, sporting goods and dozens of other products — triggered a kind of cellular reaction that over a period of years typically leads to mesothelioma, …
There is news related to my articles on industry progress towards meat produced by stem cells in factories with a goal of ground meat products for supermarkets within 5 years. UPDATE: H/T to Onsingularity.com The PETA prize is meaningless because the winner has to be selling their invitro grown meat in 10 states and it …
Another family of superconducting materials has been found by researchers in Japan and China. The iron-and-arsenic compounds are being hailed as a great advance. Some researchers hope the new materials will help solve the mystery of cuprate high temperature superconductors (discovered in 1986) “It’s possible that these materials will provide a cleaner system to work …
Hyperion power generation has a new frequently asked question page. I had detailed coverage of the Hyperion Power generation uranium hydride reactor from their patent submission. I also had considered applying the device for space power. Power output of the device: Approximately 70 megawatts (MW) of heat (thermal energy) and 25 megawatts (MW) of electrical …