Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma to get the particles up to speed. The setup is known as a laser-plasma accelerator, an emerging class of particle accelerators that physicists believe can shrink traditional, miles-long accelerators to machines that can fit on a table. The …
Under the most aggressive assumptions China will still be using coal for over 50% of its power needs in 2030 At the same time as China renewables grow, the absolute amount of China coal fired generation will continue to skyrocket. According to Bloomberg, 343-450 Gigawatts of new coal generation will be built in China over …
Transatomic Power, developers of a molten salt nuclear reactor design, announced today that FF Science, an investment vehicle of Founders Fund, has invested $2 million to assist the company with its seed stage development. The funds will be used for bench-top laboratory testing and refinement of the company’s designs and computer models. Transatomic Power is …
Stanford bioengineers have developed faster, more energy-efficient microchips based on the human brain – 9,000 times faster and using significantly less power than a typical PC. This offers greater possibilities for advances in robotics and a new way of understanding the brain. For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could …
Zetta is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10^21 or 1000000000000000000000. The collective Bitcoin mining hardware is over 64 Exaflops in computing in October, 2013. It is likely closing in on 100 exaflops now. One of the leading makers of bitcoin mining rigs is pre-selling $12,995 20 nanometer ASICs. They …
Safety-related concrete has been poured for the basemat of the second AP1000 unit at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. The milestone means that four AP1000s are now officially under construction in the USA. the Vogtle plant will be the only four-unit nuclear power plant in the USA. Two AP1000 units are also under construction at …
GDP growth across the 34-member OECD is projected to accelerate from this year’s 1.2% rate to a 2.3% rate in 2014 and a 2.7% rate in 2015, according to the Outlook. The world economy, by contrast, will grow at a 2.7% rate this year, before accelerating to a 3.6% rate in 2014 and 3.9% in …
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a US$70 million project to develop an implant to monitor neuronal activity in a bid to improve the mental health of soldiers and veterans. DARPA seeks to develop new technology to enable near real-time measurement and analysis across brain systems to drive precise neural stimulation therapies …
On Aug.13, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) focused all 192 of its ultra-powerful laser beams on a tiny deuterium-tritium filled capsule. In the nanoseconds that followed, the capsule imploded and released a neutron yield of nearly 3×10^15, or approximately 8,000 joules of neutron energy — approximately three times NIF’s previous neutron yield record for …
DARPA-funded researchers recently demonstrated the world’s smallest vacuum pumps. This breakthrough technology may create new national security applications for electronics and sensors that require a vacuum: highly sensitive gas analyzers that can detect chemical or biological attack, extremely accurate laser-cooled chip-scale atomic clocks and microscale vacuum tubes. The vacuum created was nearly one billion times …
One major and readily available source of nutritious and protein-rich food that comes from forests are insects, according to a new study FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) launched at the forests for food security and nutrition conference. It is estimated that insects form part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people. …