Brain Scan Mind Reading of Spatial Information Progress

New Scientist reports : Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person’s location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms. The work is continuing to use scans …

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Sasol making 1.1 million barrel per day Coal to Liquid Operation in Indonesia by 2015, Competitive prices with Oilsands and Deep Water Oil

South Africa’s Sasol Synfuels has a US$10 billion project to build 1.1 million barrels per day of oil equivalent with a massive coal to liquid operation in Indonesia. Until recently coal to liquid cost $1 billion for 10,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent. So the Sasol operation is eleven times more cost effective at …

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Non-electric Uses for Nuclear Fusion

Non electric uses for nuclear fusion were presented in a 2003 report to the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). There are at least 5 unique products that we can “sell” from fusion reactions before the fusion community enters the main market for fusion energy (the generation of electricity): A.) high energy neutrons (2-14 MeV) …

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Telescoping Carbon Nanotubes Can Make Flash Memory Replacment

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have used carbon nanotubes to make fast non-volatiles memory. (H/T Sander Olsen) If one nanotube sits inside another — slightly larger — one, the inner tube will ‘float’ within the outer, responding to electrostatic, van der Waals and capillary forces. Passing power through the nanotubes allows the inner tube …

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Zyvex Atomically Precise Manufacturing funded by DARPA and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund

Zyvex is getting funded by DARPA for $9.7 million to develop atomically precise manufacturing. This follows earlier funding of $15 million for Zyvex’s Atomically Precise Manufacturing project. Zyvex Labs today announced the award of a $9.7M program funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Texas’ ETF (Emerging Technology Fund). The goal of this …

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Improved process for getting oil from Oil Shale

Oil Recovery from Oil Shales by Electrical Heating has been improved by adding iron powder. (Canada -University of Alberta and Turkey researchers The economics of the process are presented above. The recovery characteristics of four different oil shale samples were tested experimentally using the retort technique. To accomplish efficient temperature distribution, the thermal conductivity of …

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Micro and small nuclear reactors

More than 50 new small and medium size reactor designs were developed and are being considered by research groups around the world in 2006. There are a number of small and medium nuclear reactors that are in funded development. Toshiba has designs for a micro nuclear reactor that generates 200 kw for 40 years The …

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