The Stratolaunch press kit has 11 pages Stratolaunch Systems, a Paul G. Allen project, is developing an air-launch system that will revolutionize space transportation by providing orbital access to space at lower costs, with greater safety and more flexibility. Delivering payloads in the 10,000lbm class [13,500 pounds into low earth orbit, the system allows for …
Alex Knapp at Forbes talks about the example of the limits of airplane speed as an example of real world limits to exponential progress. The speed of rockets continue the speed curve slightly. What made us really fall of the speed of vehicle improvement curve was abandoning the development of nuclear pulse propulsion. Nuclear bombs …
Some discussion at the vortex forum about the October 28 Rossi Energy Catalyzer test If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 …
NY Times – A Georgia company says it has overcome a major roadblock in turning agricultural waste into vehicle fuel and other useful chemicals by experimenting with a technology that treats the waste with compressed water heated to very high temperatures. The goal is to accomplish something that has eluded a dozen companies in recent …
Technology Review – George Church is most excited about using regeneration as the key to treatments and keeping people health. Regeneration using induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells. He also wants to get personalized genomics. He wants to establish an IPS line for every single person who gets sequenced. First bone marrow patients. Then skin, then …
Star Wars: The Old Republic, abbreviated as SWTOR or TOR, is an upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game based in the Star Wars universe. The story takes place in the Star Wars fictional universe shortly after the establishment of a tenuous peace between the re-emergent Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, 300 years after the …
1. ANS Nuclear Cafe by Meredith Angwin – What do Miss Marple, hard-boiled LAPD detective Harry Bosch, and Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps have in common? At ANS Nuclear Cafe, Meredith Angwin wrote about their communication lessons for nuclear. Thrillers in the Dog Days, Lessons for Nuclear Communication. 2. Yes Vermont Yankee – Money …
Los Alamos has found a potential key for unlocking the energy potential from non-edible biomass materials such as corn leaves and stalks, or switch grass. A potential pretreatment method that can make plant cellulose five times more digestible by enzymes that convert it into ethanol, a useful biofuel. Journal of the American Chemical Society – …
Scientists from the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing and the National University of Singapore have now developed a technique that collapses spherical carbon nanostructures down into perfectly formed quantum dots—structures useful for electronics because of their ability to trap single electrons. The carbon atoms in graphite are arranged into stacked sheets that are weakly …
Journal Science – Superelastic Effect in Polycrystalline Ferrous Alloys In superelastic alloys, large deformation can revert to a memorized shape after removing the stress. However, the stress increases with increasing temperature, which limits the practical use over a wide temperature range. Polycrystalline Fe-Mn-Al-Ni shape memory alloys show a small temperature dependence of the superelastic stress …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 55 is up at Yes Vermont Yankee. Atomic Power Review discusses how this is a critical time for nuclear advocacy As pro-nuclear advocates go, we may find ourselves at a watershed moment when nuclear literacy is in demand, when the NRC is being exposed for what it really is, when …