“Nissan Motor Co. pledges that we will be ready to bring multiple affordable, energy efficient, fully autonomous-driving vehicles to the market by 2020,” Executive Vice President Andy Palmer said during a presentation in Southern California. Nissan demonstrated on Tuesday how a prototype self-driving Leaf electric car could use a combination of laser guidance systems, radar …
Desert based solar power has energy utilization of 25% versus 15% for average solar power in Europe. Space based solar power can be considered To have 130% of earth based solar power utilization. There is more solar insolation in space and it is available at all times. However, microwave or laser transmission reduces the power …
Metamaterial applications such as cheaper satellite communications, thinner smartphones and ultrafast optical data processing are where metamaterials are poised to make a huge impact within a year or so. Kymeta of Redmond, Washington, a spin-off from Intellectual Ventures, hopes to market a compact antenna that would be one of the first consumer-oriented products based on …
A team of researchers has reported possible evidence for a new category of solids, things that are neither pure glasses, crystals, nor even exotic quasicrystals. Q-glass, a new solid alloy that has been discovered in a rapidly cooled mixture of aluminum, iron and silicon, is neither a pure glass, a crystal, nor even a quasicrystal, …
A guest post by Joseph Friedlander The “In Praise of Large Payloads for Space” series continues with Part 3: Uploading– –Featuring the ALDEBARAN 2 Thanks to reader Kai Hiwatari for jogging my elbow to finish this series! If a simple water tank this ET could hold 2100 tons plus of water. The ALDEBARAN 2 could …
Here is progress report on DARPAs work to achieve all seeing multicameras at the physical limit of space and time resolution. They are achieving vision 30 to 50 times beyond the limit of human vision. They have a plan and research paper on achieving petapixel imaging which would be one million times beyond human vision. …
Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, officials and activists said. Syria’s state media on Sunday reported that Israeli missiles struck a military and scientific …
Several areas of investigation for deceleration of an interstellar probe have been identified and these include: Reverse engine thrust, solar sail, Magsail, Medusa sail, microwave sail, orbital slingshot, aerobraking. This is an analysis by the Icarus project. Reverse engine thrust simply means using the same engine as used during the boost phase, but to decelerate …
Harvard business review looked at the the Spacex process for lowering the cost of space. Spacex has a big goal, learned from the past, looking at the whole picture to find and prioritize opportunities, then refining key aspects of the space flight model to achieve their objective — is an approach that can make any …
US daily crude oil production increased by 118,000 bpd to 7.326 millions bpd. This is an increase of over 20% (1.2 million bpd) from the same time last year. Getting to over 7.5 million bpd will be a crude oil production level last seen in the late 1980s. (This is likely to happen this summer) …
Two explosions shattered the euphoria of the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday, sending authorities out on the course to carry off the injured while the stragglers in the 26.2-mile trek from Hopkinton were rerouted away from the smoking site of the blasts. A federal law-enforcement source confirmed to The Post there are at least …