The Wall Street Journal talked about how Russia’s Debt and Currency Markets Could Spiral into Crisis in October. This was before Opec decided to keep oil production and drove down the price of oil. Some now speculate that oil prices could drop to $30 to $40 per barrel before later stabilizing around $70 per barrel. …
The Carnival of Space 376 is up at the Urban Astonomer Universe Today – ‘Death Star’ Ocean? Seven Moons That Could Host Huge Hidden Liquid Reservoirs Newly released data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests there are big liquid reservoirs underneath the surface of Mimas, a moon of Saturn. A global layer of liquid water thick …
Solar panel costs are not as important now, it is balance of system costs. Although having higher efficiency panels reduces the size of the solar installation which reduces balance of system costs. Home solar is dominated by Solar City and Vivint which together are half of the US residential market SolarCity climbed from 28% to …
Lockheed Martin made a lot of news when they revealed their compact nuclear fusion project last week with promises of commercial nuclear fusion within ten years. Recent criticism has forced project leader McGuire to provide more technical and project details. MIT Technology Review reports on the skepticism and critics of the Lockheed Martin approach. Ian …
US Oil crude oil production is just short of 9 million barrels per day at 8.95 million barrels per day and combined with natural gas liquids is at 12 million barrels per day. US crude oil production is now higher than every week in the 1980s other than weeks in May and June in 1985. …
When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O’Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle. Once FindTheBest pursued …
[A paper from 1977] Practical systems for beam direct conversion are required to recover the energy from ion beams at high efficiency and at very high beam power densities in the environment of a high power, neutral injection system. Such an experiment is now in progress using a 120 kV beam with a maximum total …
Physicists have discovered how to create matter from light — a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorized 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and …
DARPA’s Warrior Web would protect injury-prone areas by stabilizing and reducing stresses on joints and promoting efficient and safe movement over a wide range of activities, he said. While protecting against injury, Warrior Web also seeks to make Soldiers into better performers by giving them the feeling of a lighter load and enhancing their existing …
We covered Princeton Satellite Systems nuclear fusion space propulsion work last year. Here is some new work and designs. A paper explores the use of a rocket engine based on nuclear fusion to rendezvous with and move an asteroid. The engine is based on a 5 MW Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) and is presented in …
Rolls-Royce is designing unmanned cargo ships. Control centers will command hundreds of crewless ships. Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says. They might be deployed in regions such as the Baltic Sea within a decade, while regulatory hurdles …