Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats for commercial use, laid off some 40 of its 90 employees Sept. 29. The BA 330 is a six-person inflatable space station Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nev., is developing to serve commercial and government human spaceflight markets. The BA 330 is one of the proposed …
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Thursday that financial institutions in the U.S. risk holding back the economy because they are unwilling to lend. Well D’Uh. The lack of lending to people and companies that are perfectly able to pay back the loan has been slowing the world economy for three years. People cannot refinance mortgages …
The US Senate Appropriations Committee ended the rail boosters’ hopes of getting a meaningful appropriation for high-speed rail in the new (FY 2012) fiscal year. There is a token $100 million for high-speed rail as a “placeholder” in their FY 2012 budget recommendations (a sum that is likely to be further cut in the House-Senate …
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have a new method for carving diamond crystals. The method offers a precise way to engineer microscopic cuts in a diamond surface, yielding potential benefits in both measurement and technological fields. NIST semiconductor researchers have found a way to create unique features in diamond—potentially leading to improvements …
The Zero Emission High Speed Transport or ZEHST is a supersonic passenger airliner project by EADS. EADS revealed the proposal at the Le Bourget air show (June 18, 2011). It is expected to fly at mach 4, 32km above the ground, and it will carry 50 to 100 people. It will combine three propulsion systems: …
1. BioTime has entered into an exclusive license agreement with Cornell University for the worldwide development and commercialization of technology developed at Weill Cornell Medical College for the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells into vascular endothelial cells. Published last year in Nature Biotechnology, the methods provide an improved means of generating these cells on …
Tom Murphy at the University of California of San Diego ran some numbers for a Kardashev level 2 civilization, but made several crazy assumptions. He indicated that if energy usage continued to increase by 2.3% per year and all used on earth then the temperature would in 930 years be equal to the surface of …
Advanced Fusion Reactors for Space Propulsion and Power Systems (8 pages) Previously we looked at a proposal for a laser enabled megawatt class nuclear fusion space propulsion system for about 2020-2025 Now the full eight page paper by John J. Chapman, NASA, Langley Research Center is online. We had also looked at laser particle acceleration …
or the first time, a malaria vaccine that uses the entire malaria parasite has proven safe and shown promise to produce a strong immune response in a clinical trial. Though malaria has been largely eliminated in much of the developed world, it is still a widespread threat in warm, tropical areas where infected mosquitoes thrive, …
Jeff Bezos is CEO of Amazon and investor in Blue Origin Rocket and General Fusion. Blue Origin had a crash of a test rocket Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and …
Venture Beat covered the closing ceremonies of the third summer session of the Singularity University. Matternet is the most technologically ambitious. What is The Matternet? Autonomous, electric, aerial vehicles. In the first phase, it utilizes small-scale electric vehicles deployed with vertical take-off and landing capability, limited payload-bearing capacity and range. In the longer term, we …