Dr. Michael Naughton is the Chairperson of the Department of Physics at Boston College. He and his colleagues have recently discovered a way to extract energy from “hot” electrons generated by solar cells. Dr. Naughton is confident that efficiencies as high as 50% could be achieved with solar power. He is currently the cofounder and …
The Carnival of Space 139 is up at mamajoules This site provided an article on the Valkyrie antimatter propulsion spaceship design which was used in Avatar. The article also had a video tutorial on antimatter and a NASA paper on scaling up antimatter production. This site also supplied the article on What would it take …
The Cheytac M200 was rated the top sniper gun Wikipedia on the Cheytac Intervention The CheyTac Intervention is an American bolt action sniper rifle manufactured by CheyTac for long range soft target interdiction. It is fed by a detachable single stack magazine, which holds 7 rounds. It fires .408 CheyTac or .375 CheyTac ammunition. CheyTac …
Power-generating rubber films developed by Princeton University engineers could harness natural body movements such as breathing and walking to power pacemakers, mobile phones and other electronic devices. The material, composed of ceramic nanoribbons embedded onto silicone rubber sheets, generates electricity when flexed and is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy to electrical energy. Shoes made …
Analytical Mechanical Associates (AMA) has been in the business of aerospace engineering for more than forty years. Jan 20, 2010 (today) at American Helicopter Society meeting Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center and his colleagues will officially unveil the Puffin design Scientific American has details In principle, the Puffin can cruise …
Entertainment Week reports – The photorealistic CGI technology James Cameron perfected for Avatar could easily be used for other, even more mind-blowing purposes—like, say, bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life, or making Clint Eastwood look 35 again. You could have a young Sean Connery back as James Bond. Sigourney Weaver appears to drop 20 years …
Steve Jobs is extremely happy with the rumored tablet Jan 26, 2010 is the expected announcement date and sales should start before the end of March, 2010. Appleinsider speculates on the features of the iSlate tablet – tactile feedback bumps that appear and disappear– The hand-based system was said to allow “unprecedented integration of typing, …
The physics blogs are abuzz with rumors that a particle of dark matter has finally been found. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment is one of several designed to look for the tell-tale signature of dark matter particles passing through CDMS is located deep underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, to protect it from …
Printed Electronics World: The first cars looked like horse drawn carriages – suboptimal and using the design rules of the past. So it is with most printed electronics today. The irony of the integrated circuit – the silicon chip – is that it integrates so little. It cannot incorporate a loudspeaker, microphone, push button or …
Air Force Office of Scientific Research and National Science Foundation-funded professor, Dr. Xiang Zhang has demonstrated at the University of California, Berkeley the world’s smallest semiconductor laser, which may have applications to the Air Force in communications, computing and bio-hazard detection. The semiconductor, called a plasmon, can focus light the size of a single protein …
Tiny towers, a hundred times thinner than a human hair, with special properties: such nanostructures are produced by the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Würzburg. (Image: Monika Emmerling / Adriana Wolf) [from Nanowerk] What is special about the Würzburg quantum dot towers is that “with them it is possible to ‘fire off’ …