Apple appears to be investing $5 billion in robots for Foxconn Factories

Seeking Alpha – Apple is about to become one of the world’s biggest buyers of industrial robots. The company has announced a 78% increase in its non-retail capital expenditure to $7.1bn. Analysts in Asia and America believe that the size of Apple’s robot purchases could tie up the market for several years. The increase is …

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Shell Estimates Iraq could Produce 6 to 10 million barrels of oil per day in the early 2020s

NY Times – Iraq produces around three million barrels a day, and few analysts believe it can reach its goal of 10 million barrels a day by 2017, a target Baghdad recently reduced from a previous estimate of 12 million barrels a day by that year. But Hans Nijkamp, Royal Dutch Shell’s Iraq country chairman, …

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Photon Sieve will make Space Telescopes one thousand times lighter for the same sized collection area

FalconSAT-7 is a 3U CubeSat satellite measuring just 30cmx10cmx10cm. It is a DARPA funded project that is led by Geoff Andersen and colleagues at the US Air Force Academy. They hope to launch a device into orbit in 2014. While not optimized for ground observation, such a telescope would have a 1.8 meter resolution at …

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Many Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs in the Milky Way

A new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun’s …

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Apple Valuation, cash and revenue breakdown

Apple ended the day just short of $500 billion. Apple finished at 499.20 billion on Feb 28, 2012. Apple is up to $507 billion in valuation today. Seekingalpha had a transcript of the January 24, 2012 Apple first quarter earnings call Apple cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $97.6 billion at the end …

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One in ten million neutrons could disappear into other universe and matter swapping between universes might be induced using lasers

One in ten million neutrons could disappear into another universe and matter swapping between universes could be initiated with a laser induced system. Technology Review – Their conclusion is that the probability of a neutron jumping ship is smaller than about one in a million. According to their theoretical work, a change in the gravitational …

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Graphene nanoribbons can make spinvalves for Spintronics according to calculations

Calculations suggest that a combination of graphene nanoribbon structures could be used to create a spin valve for spintronics applications. Spin valves are one of the basic building blocks of spintronics, allowing a signal to be processed using magnetic spin properties rather than electronic charge. A theoretical study by Zhaoli Ma and Weidong Sheng from …

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Small energy efficient lens could make smartphone projectors mainstream

Alps Electric’s tiny new lens might just be the key to bringing on-board smartphone projectors to the mass market. The FLGS3 Series is a highly efficient 1 × 1mm square aspherical glass lens—the industry’s smallest. Alps harnessed technologies accumulated through more than 20 years serving the optical communication market—in the areas of optical design, mechanical …

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New Tool provides a view into how neurons communicate and work together

Isolated cluster formation on CNT multi electrode array (MEA). (a) A bright field image of a neuronal cluster on a CNT electrode. The electrode diameter is 30 µm and the inter electrode distance is 200 µm (b) A fluorescent microscope image of the cluster in (a), stained for cell nuclei (DAPI-blue), glia (GFAP-green) and neurons …

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IBM making more reliable phase change memory

Long-term memory: Each cell in this 200,000-cell phase-change memory chip can store multiple bits of data reliably over a period of several months. Credit: IBM MIT Technology Review – IBM encoding phase-change memory for greater reliability IBM researchers have developed a programming trick that makes it possible to more reliably store large amounts of data …

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General Fusion raises more money and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is one of the investors

General Fusion (Canadian magnetized target nuclear fusion) has completed its US$19.5 million Series B funding round providing the financing necessary to complete the first phase of its development and demonstration program. The investors include Cenovus Energy, through its Environmental Opportunity Fund, Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos, together with existing investors Chrysalix …

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