Smart Planet – Danish architects Frederik Agdrup and Nicholas Bjorndal of Eentileen used just a computer, a printer (computerized milling) and 820 sheets of plywood to build a 125 square meter (1,345 square foot) home in four weeks. Named Villa Asserbo, the home is the pilot project of Eentileen’s Print a House project. The designers …
Time – Patients with hemophilia need to receive infusions of FIX two to three times per week in order to prevent them from bleeding spontaneously or bleeding too much from even slight cuts and wounds — a potentially fatal condition. But in the new study, four of the six patients who received gene therapy were …
There was just an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area The earthquake was 2 km (2 miles) ESE (112°) from Berkeley, CA 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 …
NIST’s “optics table on a chip” is a superconducting circuit on a square sapphire chip about 6 millimeters wide. Scientists use the chip to place a single microwave photon in two frequencies, or colors, at the same time. The photon is prepared by an “artificial atom” (small yellow square) in the middle of the chip. …
Defending Planet Earth [from space asteroids] 15 page presentation from Future of Space Operations talk 4 approaches depending on circumstances * Civil defense (evacuation, sheltering, first aid, etc. – Up to 50 meter in diameter? * Slow Push-Pull (tug, solar heating, albedo change, gravity tractor, et al.) – Needs decades to operate (plus time to …
MCKinsey Quarterly – Africa’s collective GDP, at $1.6 trillion in 2008, is now roughly equal to Brazil’s or Russia’s, and the continent is among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions. Speech by Millennium Challenge Corporation CEO Daniel W. Yohannes — By 2020, Africa’s collective GDP could be 2.6 trillion dollars. Foreign direct investment surged …
For the first time, scientists have made star-shaped, biodegradable polymers that can self-assemble into hollow, nanofiber spheres, and when the spheres are injected with cells into wounds, these spheres biodegrade, but the cells live on to form new tissue. Nature Materials – To repair complexly shaped tissue defects, an injectable cell carrier is desirable to …
Ames Laboratory researchers found that adding just one percent of the rare-earth elements cerium or ytterbium to a TAGS (group of thermoelectric materials is composed of tellurium, antimony, germanium and silver) material was sufficient to boost its performance by 25%. Previous work at Harvard showed that Melt spinning TAGS 85 achieved ZT of 1.48. The …
Previously we had summarized the countries that come believed would be the hot growth emerging countries to follow China, India, Brazil and Russia The CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) is an acronym for favored emerging markets coined in late 2009 by Robert Ward, Global Forecasting Director for the Economist Intelligence Unit …
The Carnival of nuclear energy 30 is up at Yes Vermont Yankee Dan Yurman had looked at China’s increasing nuclear build. Other savings advantages (beyond low labor costs) are possible by simplifying reactor design, and lowering materials input. Building a reactor with less materials and fewer parts lowers nuclear costs directly and indirectly. Decreasing core …
Global Wind Energy Council has published their global wind energy outlook for 2010. Greenpeace is one of the sponsors of the report. This report can be viewed as the maximum optimistic scenarios for wind energy. There is minimal discussion in the report about increased transmission and energy storage issues with higher percentages of wind power. …