University of Cincinnati researchers have taken 25-micron carbon nanotube thread and created a dipole antenna using double-sided transparent tape and silver paste. They were immediately successful in transmitting radio signals. “It transmitted almost as well as the copper did, but at about one ten-thousandth of the weight,” says. They transmitted both AM and FM in …
Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. Wolfram Alpha competes more with Wikipedia, Metaweb’s Freebase, True Knowledge, and any natural language search engines (such as Microsoft’s upcoming search engine, based perhaps in part on Powerset’s technology among others), and other services that are trying to build …
New Scientist reports on a 3D bone printer. Exact replicas of a man’s thumb bones have been made for the first time using a 3D printer. The breakthrough paves the way for surgeons to replace damaged or diseased bones with identical copies built from the patients’ own cells. “In theory, you could do any bone,” …
Carnival of Space 94 is up at the Planetary Society blog This site contributed one of the articles in the series on using an underground nuclear blast to launch large unmanned and cheap payloads into space. A Mars sample return mission is examined at robot explorers Discovery helps peole understand the size and scale of …
The Texas Petawatt laser was completed March 31, 2008, allowing an immediate demonstration of its 1.1 petawatt power by producing, 200 J, 167 fs pulses. The US National Ignition Facility is to start firing in 2010 Zettawatt-Exawatt Lasers and Their Applications in Ultrastrong-Field Physics From 1992-2001, however, we have seen a surge in our ability …
Airbus has worked nanostitching into their plans already. MIT engineers are using carbon nanotubes only billionths of a meter thick to stitch together aerospace materials in work that could make airplane skins and other products some 10 times stronger at a nominal increase in cost. The advanced materials currently used for many aerospace applications are …
Matt Hastings writes in an understandable way about adiabatic quantum computer algorithms. The last half of this article describes the question and answer analysis that Matt Hastings uses to try and create a useful algorithm for quantum computing. Adiabatic Quantum Computers are the kind of computer that Dwave systems of vancouver is trying to make. …
Four atomic quantum dots are coupled to form a “cell” for containing electrons. The cell is filled with just two electrons. Control charges are placed along a diagonal to direct the two electrons to reside at just two of the four quantum dots comprising the cell. This new level of control of electrons points to …
Discovery Channel: Future Weapons. Force Multiplier especially with the frag-12 mini-grenades and high explosive. Accurate out to 175 meters. 120 grenade rounds per minute with 9 foot blast radius. The gist of the story is that the AA-12s have so little recoil that it makes the perfect gun for small robots. AA12 shotgun robots at …
Josh Hall has an interesting part 3 for his Singularity series of articles. Here he talks about the ballparking the number of researchers, developers and resources who are doing the work to advance computer hardware and Moore’s law at 300,000 people and some tens of billions of dollars. The proportion of scientists and engineers in …
There is a patent for a electronically enabled bullet dodging capability. If a sniper is firing from 2500 meters then there is 4 seconds to move out of the way if the bullet can be detected as it emerges from the muzzle. (H/T to Firearm blog The knee reflex takes about 20 milliseconds to fire. …