Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. reached an agreement to buy SolarCity Corp. for $2.6 billion, about $300 million less than an initial proposal criticized as a “bailout” for the solar company in which he’s the largest shareholder. SolarCity investors will receive $25.37 a share in stock under the agreement, according to a statement Monday. Musk …
The old rules don’t necessarily apply when building electronic components out of two-dimensional materials, according to scientists at Rice University. The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson analyzed hybrids that put 2-D materials like graphene and boron nitride side by side to see what happens at the border. They found that the electronic characteristics …
11 patients were injected with stem cells during bypass surgery. The stem cells injected into their hearts caused a 40% reduction in the size of scarred tissue. Such scarring occurs during a cardiac event such as a heart attack, and can increase the chances of further heart failure. The scarring was previously thought to be …
China’s supercomputer accomplishment is far more significant than one computer coming in first. Other countries have done it in the past with what’s called “stunt” machines ― fast and powerful, but unable to apply it to anything. The stunning news here is that China created a High Performance Computing (HPC) “ecosystem” in an amazingly short …
The United States Navy would like to develop two key features for its next-generation SSN(X) successor to the Virginia-class attack submarines. One feature would effectively turn the future attack submarine into a underwater mother-ship for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) while another would dispense with noise-generating moving parts such as a propulsor or driveshaft in the …
Only 5% of Ashley Madison (cheating data site) site members were real women. More than 75% of the site’s customers were convinced to join by an army of 70,000 fake fembot accounts. The accounts were created in dozens of languages by data entry workers…told to populate these accounts with fake information and real photos posted …
MIT engineers have developed a new type of easily customizable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks. So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 percent effective …
At the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, officials at Fujitsu and RIKEN confirmed that they will use ARM cores for its next generation of supercomputers. The exact plans that Fujitsu has for its future ARM processor were not divulged at ISC16, but Yutaka Ishikawa, project leader for the Advanced Institute of Computational …
supercapacitors can store several times more charge in a given volume or mass than traditional capacitors, have faster charge and discharge rates, and are very stable. Over the past few years, researchers have begun working on making supercapacitors that are transparent and flexible due to their potential use in a wide variety of applications. “Potential …
A new University of British Columbia-developed method to isolate cancer cells that have escaped from a tumour could soon pave the way for improved diagnosis and treatment. The simple process involves a special device that squeezes cells in a blood sample through tiny funnels, which drive the cancer cells and blood cells into separate streams …
High-speed photonic and electronic devices at present rely on radiofrequency electric fields to control the physical properties of a semiconductor, which limits their operating speed to terahertz frequencies (10^12 Hz). Using the electric field from intense light pulses, however, could extend the operating frequency into the petahertz regime (10^15 Hz). Here we demonstrate optical driving at a …