The Carnival of Space 34 is up at Rainer Gerhards space launch blog. I provided my updated look at the status of scramjets Colony Worlds considers gravity suits for offworld children A Babe in the Universe reports on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission to study the moon There is a lot of speculation …
MIT Technology review reports that Senators representing several Western states, including Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, are working on legislation to promote thorium. I am a big supporter of developing Thorium fission reactors and in particular molten salt reactors. I support the upcoming legislation from Orrin Hatch and Harry …
AlFin’s excellent blog points out that “nuclear batteries” could be used for a near term civilization lifeboat. The initial goal would not be creating fully resistant civilization lifeboats that could handle destruction of the biosphere but hardened points of key civilization services like databases, medical facilities, food services, water services and electricity. The goal would …
Neutron cameras “can detect, unambiguously, at a greater distance, and through more shielding,” said Jim Lund, manager of the Rad/Nuc Detection Systems group at Sandia National Laboratories in Alameda, Calif. The neutron scatter camera has an advantage over traditional neutron detection because it can differentiate low energy neutrons from high energy neutrons. While some gamma …
D-Wave Senior Scientist and condensed matter physicist Mohammad Amin gave a highly technical presentation at MIT. (54 slides in this power point presentation) Dwave recently demonstrated a 28 qubit computer. They are predicting that they will have 512 qubit and 1024 qubit quantum computer systems in 2008. If Dwave is successful then in 2009 it …
SiCortex and Scalable Servers Corporation have each packaged something like a server cluster into a single box, to produce what each hopes will be a commercially viable desktop supercomputer. On the outside, the machines in question look like big desktop PCs. On the inside, they are rather different. Instead of one or two microprocessors (the …
DC-based research and consulting firm Social Technologies released a series of 12 briefs on their top 12 areas for high impact technology innovation through 2025. 1. Personalized medicine [I agree and have covered personal genomics ]2. Distributed energy (DE) [Here I think nuclear energy has more potential]3. Pervasive computing [Fully realizing smart phone and wireless …
A new type of memory technology could lead to thumb drives or digital-camera memory cards that store a terabyte of information–more than most hard drives hold today. The first examples of the new technology, which could also slash energy consumption by more than 99 percent, could be on the market within 18 months UPDATE:I have …
The NY Times discusses an interesting study that connects the removal of lead from gasoline with the drop in violent crime Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior. In the early 1990s, a …
Under Monday’s settlement, Microsoft said it would allow open-source software developers access to inter-operability information for work-group servers used by businesses and other large organisations. Other technology companies using this information will only have to pay a €10,000 ($14,300) one-off fee rather than a percentage of revenues from any software developed as a result. Also, …
There is a post at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) about how if nanofactory level nanotechnology is created that there will not be nano Santa Claus creating a post-capitalist society with abundance for everyone. The CRN post goes onto discuss the Dale Carrico prescription of a guaranteed income in order to redistribute the bounty …