Virgin Galactic unveils Spaceshiptwo SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and its mothership, VMS Eve (WhiteKnightTwo) herald a new era in commercial space flight with daily space tourism flights set to commence from Spaceport America in New Mexico after test program and all required US government licensing. SpaceShipTwo uses all the same basic technology, carbon composite construction and design …
1. Telegraph UK, researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. (H/T Instapundit) But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it. “We started our research seeking …
MIT Technology review reports that a group from the German Sport University Cologne in Germany detected the real SARM (selective androgen receptor modulators)in a product called Andarine, available online for $100 and labeled as green tea extracts and face moisturizer. Selective androgen receptor modulators have steroid effects but are believed to be safer, without many …
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. raised its forecast for China’s economic growth this year to 9.4 percent, citing “strong momentum” and the likelihood that the government will delay tightening policy. Hong Kong-based economist Michael Buchanan said China may expand 11.9 percent in 2010. Economies in Asia excluding Japan will grow 5.6 percent this year, and 8.6 …
We don’t know the composition of the asteroids or the objects in the Oort comet cloud or the Kuiper belt in great detail. One theory of solar system formation is that there are more metals in the inner solar system. That would mean most of the uranium is Mars, Mercury, Earth Venus and asteroid belt. …
The Black Swan theory (in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s version) refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as “black swans” — undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as …
President-elect Barack Obama has put forth a goal to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 80% by 2050, using $150 billion over 10 years to create a “clean-energy” future. Cambridge Energy Research Associates has estimated that the potential for world-wide investment in clean energy, of which nuclear generation is the focal point, will reach …
Michele Mosca of the Institute for Quantum Computing and Dept. of Combinatorics & Optimization, University of Waterloo and St. Jerome’s University, and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics reviews Quantum Algorithms. Aug, 2008 [71 pages] Some of the categories of algorithms: Factoring, Discrete Logarithms and the Abelian Hidden Subgroup Problem : like Shor’s algorithm. Quantum Walk …
The US state department reports Iraq oil production for second week of May, 2008 at 2.52 million bpd. (slide 22 of the 35 slide report) Iraq exporting 1.88-2.04 million bpd, since Sept 2007. The May, 2008 projection is for 2.04 million bpd. Vitol, Anadarko, and Dome oil companies have formed a consortium currently negotiating with …
engineers and physicists from Stanford and the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrate a potential progenitor of an essential component of quantum computers, “a logic gate” that enables interaction between just two particles of light. “We have demonstrated a system composed of a single quantum dot in a cavity that can be used to …
Berkeley Lab has signed a collaboration agreement with Tensilica®, Inc. to explore the use of Tensilica’s Xtensa processor cores as the basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design. Tensilica’s Xtensa processor is about 400 times more efficient in floating point operations per watt than the conventional server processor chip shown here and is …