China’s Small/Medium Businesses, Biotech Companies and Physics

China’s Small and Medium Size Enterprises Are to Employment and Economy Chinese enterprises, especially small and medium ones, are facing a harder time because of the combined effects of the global slowdown, tight domestic credit, rising costs and an appreciating yuan. About 67,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) went bankrupt throughout China in the first …

Read more

Myostatin manipulation doubling lean muscle

Wired talks about new strength and muscle enhancement technology Johns Hopkins’ Se-Jin Lee recently found that overproduction of one myostatin inhibitor pumps the mice up even more than previous results instead of 60% up to 81 percent in females and a whopping 116 percent in males. Results of human clinical trials are pending. Researchers at …

Read more

Highly directional semiconductor lasers demonstrated

semiconductor lasers are widely used in everyday products such as communication devices, optical recording technologies, and laser printers, they suffer from poor directionality. Divergent beams from semiconductor lasers are focused or collimated with lenses that typically require meticulous optical alignment—and in some cases bulky optics. Researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a plasmonic collimator, consisting …

Read more

Artificial intelligence milestone -Polaris computer begins beating human poker champions

The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition has computers from the University of Alberta playing some of the biggest names in the online poker world: Nick “stoxtrader” Grudzien, Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko, and IJay “doughnutz” Palansky. On July 6, 2008 Polaris completed a come-from-behind victory by posting a decisive win against Matt Hawrilenko and IJay Palansky. Polaris won …

Read more

Better Robots and AI are not the only ways your job could disappear in the future

by Christina Wong When people talk about the Technological Singularity and advanced robots and artificial (general) intelligence, it seems a large part of the denial of that future is the idea that “a machine cannot do what I do” or “a machine cannot replace my job”. It does not necessarily take more “intelligence”. People have …

Read more

New work on nanorobotics design, simulation and control for nanomedicine

A follow up to a group working on nanorobots for nanomedicine The researchers have new papers: Nanorobot hardware architecture for Medical Defense This work presents a new approach with details on the integrated platform and hardware architecture for nanorobots application in epidemic control, which should enable real time in vivo prognosis of biohazard infection. The …

Read more

Exaflop computer studies

$7.4 million in funding has been provided for researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to look at issues for exaflop computers They are preparing for the challenges of developing an exascale computer at the new Institute for Advanced Architectures. One such challenge is power consumption. “An exaflop supercomputer might need 100 megawatts of …

Read more