Business Week – Libyan production rose to 1.3 million barrels a day last month, up 150,000 barrels from the previous month, according to IEA estimates. The country’s output is about 300,000 barrels less than its average before the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi last year. Saudi will probably produce 9.8 million barrels a day this month, …
The Carnival of Space 240 is up at Linksthroughspace. Discovery news by Ian O’neill writes about the Cassini mission that has sniffed oxygen in Dione’s exosphere, how does this affect the search for life beyond Earth. Why is the discovery of oxygen in Dione’s exosphere important? If Dione’s got it, then perhaps its sibling moons …
Star Wars Phantom Menace 3D will make about $45-50 million domestically. It will make about two times that amount in foreign box office. It is already at $46 million in foreign box office. There will be Blu-ray and other revenue and it re-invigorates toy sales. Toys sales are about 4 times the movie box office …
Working at a scale applicable to infrared light, the Harvard team has used extremely short and powerful laser pulses to create three-dimensional patterns of tiny silver dots within a material. Those suspended metal dots are essential for building futuristic devices like invisibility cloaks. “If you want a bulk metamaterial for visible and infrared light, you …
Applied Physics Letters – Charge redistribution in piezoelectric energy harvesters Piezoelectric energy harvesting cantilevers provide a simple, compact low cost construction method for energy harvesting from vibrational sources. Beam theory predicts a linear distribution of strain along the length of the beam, but the conversion of this strain to electrical energy is dependent on the …
Theory of High-TC Superconductivity: Accurate Predictions of TC The superconducting transition temperatures of high-TC compounds based on copper, iron, ruthenium and certain organic molecules are discovered to be dependent on bond lengths, ionic valences, and Coulomb coupling between electronic bands in adjacent, spatially separated layers.1 Optimal transition temperature, denoted as TC0, is given by the …
Here is the english translation of a recent post from Kitegen. Success with Kitegen could lead to radical improvement in the cost and amount of energy from wind. The original page in italian is here Nextbigfuture’s coverage from May 2011. This is the preproduction sample of Kitegen (3 Megawatt prototype) that was being developed in …
Harvard – A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices. In prototypes, 18 layers …
CERN1 today announced that the LHC will run with a beam energy of 4 TeV this year, 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011. This decision was taken by CERN management following the annual performance workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the external CERN Machine Advisory Committee (CMAC). …
At next week’s SPIE Advanced Lithography conference (San Jose, CA), imec announces the successful implementation of the world first 300mm fab-compatible Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) process line all-under-one-roof in imec’s 300mm cleanroom fab. The upgrade of an academic lab-scale DSA process flow to a fab-compatible flow was realized in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, AZ …
For the Wang Bullet (Nuclear Space Launch Cannon) – How do thermonuclear charges compare in $ per megajoule (megawatt-second) to chemical propellants and fuels? A guest post by Joseph Friedlander Reader Ack_and_Eft wanted to know (in an article about Wang Bullet thermonuclear launch technology) How do thermonuclear charges compare in $ per megajoule to chemical …