Future Pundit discusses interstellar travel and asks why would humanity send a manned mission. Randall Parker and most other people make several mistaken assumptions when they analyze interstellar travel. They implicitly assume that humanity is sending a manned mission with very little changes to our society except that there is the added capability of interstellar …
(a) Kaplan-Meier survival curves of mice fed a standard diet (SD) or a high-fat diet (HFD) supplemented with SRT1720 at either a low (HFD-L) or high (HFD-H) dose. Mean and maximum lifespan in weeks and the hazard ratio for mortality are represented below. In the parentheses the increases in maximum lifespan from birth and then …
A mix of spiders silk, goat’s milk and human skin can stop a reduced speed 22 caliber bullet from a rifle. Dutch scientists recently brought this combination to life, pushing the limits of science. The project is called “2.6 g 329m/s” which is the standard weight and velocity that a Type 1 bulletproof vest can …
Journal of the American chemical society – Ultrathin Zirconium Disulfide Nanodiscs We present a colloidal route for the synthesis of ultrathin ZrS2 (UT-ZrS2) nanodiscs that are 1.6 nm thick and consist of approximately two unit cells of S–Zr–S. The lateral size of the discs can be tuned to 20, 35, or 60 nm while their …
Reporting in the online July 20 issue of Science Translational Medicine, cardiology researchers have demonstrated feasibility, the long-term therapeutic effectiveness and the safety of S100A1 gene therapy in a large animal model of heart failure under conditions approximating a clinical setting. Cardiac dysfunction (from a heart attack) was reversed in this pre-clinical heart failure model …
Biologically-Inspired Massively-Parallel Architectures – computing beyond a million processors (10 pages) Steve Furber, who was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, is a leader of the Spinnaker project. The SpiNNaker project aims to develop parallel computer systems with more than a million embedded processors. The goal of the …
Pork plays a vital role in China’s commerce. There are almost half a billion pigs in China, one for every three people. In gross terms, like in humans, China dwarfs other countries in pigs. And there’s no India of pigs to rival China. The next biggest producer is the U.S., which has 65 million pigs, …
Defkalion Green Technologies, who has world rights (minus Americas and military) to sell, distribute, and license Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer), recently sent out invitations to certain individuals to attend a press conference about the technology on June 23 in Greece. Several places are covering the announcement of the press conference. By combining Hydrogen and …
The ASCI Red supercomputer first broke the teraFLOPS barrier in December 1996. On May 25, 2008, an American military supercomputer built by IBM, named ‘Roadrunner’, reached the computing milestone of one PetaFLOP by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second The budget was $100 million. A 20 PetaFLOP supercomputer is being completed in 2012 …
Bigelow Aerospace has designed a larger, heavier, and more capable expandable space station module, or interplanetary human transport module The BA 2100 would have a 2100 cubic meter volume and the BA 330 has a 330 cubic meter volume. The International space station has an internal volume of 1,000 cubic meters. The weight of the …
Nouriel Roubini sent out a note regarding China’s growth. I’m writing on the heels of two trips to China during which I met with senior policy makers, bank executives and academics, just as the government launched its 12th Five-Year Plan, intended to rebalance the long-term growth model. My meetings deepened my own impression and RGE’s …