Monthly Electricity Statistics from the IEA through April, 2011 Electricity production was 771.5 TWh in April 2011. – This was higher by 8.5 TWh, or 1.1%, compared to April 2010. – This was a decrease of 91.3 TWh, or 10.6%, compared to the previous month. – Nuclear production showed the most significant percentage change compared …
A Cubic-Millimeter Energy-Autonomous Wireless Intraocular Pressure Monitor (31 pages) 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 readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers …
The status of goals of the DARPA synapse brain emulation project. It appears on track for human scale brain emulation by 2019. It is funded at $30 million per year. Europe could kick off a $1.6 billion human brain emulation project with a target for 2024. It seems like there will be a human brain …
A tethered platform hovering at an altitude of 20 kilometers would operate in the stratosphere, above most clouds and weather. At that altitude, a platform covered with photovoltaic cells would be able to collect considerably more sunlight than a ground-based solar collector. A company called stratosolar has developed a proposal to use either concentrated solar …
Current Status, Technical Feasibility and Economics of Small Nuclear Reactors (OECD, June 2011, 177 pages) Small and modular reactors should be competitive with non-nuclear technologies for generating electricity in cases where large nuclear power plants cannot compete for whatever reason. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. …
Google Plus is currently only usable by selected users on a field trial basis. During this invite-only stage, Google+ has four components: +Circles, +Hangouts, +Mobile and +Sparks. This is different from the +1 button that was introduced in March, 2011. Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of Engineering, introduced Google Plus +Circles: share what matters, …
iRobot hopes someday soon a robot waiter will deliver your food–and it might well use an Android tablet to see, hear, speak, and think. Today there are two general robot types that are sustainable businesses: high-end, expensive ones for defusing bombs in Afghanistan or monitoring radiation in Japan, and low-end ones for vacuuming. Angle wants …
In 1996, the US Congress kicked off the broadband revolution when it passed the Telecom Act. The 1996 Act created a level playing field for competitive carriers, and brought about widespread deployment of DSL and other broadband technologies. Then in 2003 and 2004, the then Republican led FCC reversed course, removing shared access to essential …
DARPA had an open call to design a vehicle for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) XC2V Challenge. 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 readers per month. His …
IAEA – Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that engineers were able to lay an external grid power line cable to unit 2. The operation was completed at 08:30 UTC. It is now 6:30 PM UTC (14:30 UTC) They plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 …
Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by boosting the speed at which the “cores” on a computer chip communicate with each other by six times. The technology, called HAQu, is “not hardware designed to communicate data on its own, but is hardware that expedites …