The UK Guardian has a profile of Wendi Deng (wife of Rupert Murdoch who defended him from someone attempting to Rupert with a pie Deng is a former school volleyball champion in China’s southern city of Guangzhou. In keeping with her keen interest in physical fitness, Deng, worked at a Los Angeles gymnastics academy (in …
1. Nuclear energy has been formally recognised as a critical technology in a decree that makes nuclear development a priority for Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev signed off a list of 27 technologies as critical to Russia, including nuclear energy, the nuclear fuel cycle, safety of radioactive waste and used nuclear fuel. Nuclear power, along with …
Nature Materials – High-performance flat-panel solar thermoelectric generators with high thermal concentration The conversion of sunlight into electricity has been dominated by photovoltaic and solar thermal power generation. Photovoltaic cells are deployed widely, mostly as flat panels, whereas solar thermal electricity generation relying on optical concentrators and mechanical heat engines is only seen in large-scale …
China’s first aircraft carrier, the reconditioned Soviet-era Varyag, will begin sea trials on Friday, according to military sources, and will be officially launched around October next year. Another report indicates there will be a delay of the launch to August because of mechanical problems The Hong Kong Commercial Daily quoted unnamed military sources as saying …
HTC Inside reports on the HTC Eternity Eternity HTC will be a high-end Windows Mobile 7 smartphone. The HTC Eternity launch in the early autumn, 2011 with Windows Mobile 7.1 “Mango”. – 4.7-inch LCD screen – Qualcomm Single-Core 1.5 GHz processor – 8 megapixel camera is used. – HDMI output and supports additional DLNA. – …
Charles Robertson, chief economist of Renaissance Capital, predicts that China will be a democracy by 2017 China could be a democracy by 2017 assuming the economy grows and annual incomes rise to $15,550 a head. A groundbreaking report analyses 150 countries and 60 years of history, and concludes that rising levels of wealth are entrenching …
IEEE Spectrum January 2010 report on winners and loser, aimed one loser arrow that might have missed its mark. Building a practical quantum computer has proved hard. Really hard. Despite efforts by some of the world’s top physicists and engineers and the likes of IBM, HP, and NEC, progress has been slow. Ask the experts …
Steven B Krivit of New Energy Times blog is visiting Italy to investigate the Rossi and Focardi Energy Catalyzer. The primary validity of the E-Cat trio’s dramatic energy claim is highly contingent on and derived from the heat output which they calculate indirectly from a claimed full or near-full vaporization of 100-degree water to steam. …
Nanoletters – Nanoelectronic Programmable Synapses Based on Phase Change Materials for Brain-Inspired Computing Brain-inspired computing is an emerging field, which aims to extend the capabilities of information technology beyond digital logic. A compact nanoscale device, emulating biological synapses, is needed as the building block for brain-like computational systems. Here, we report a new nanoscale electronic …
The Worldwide professional PC market is about $160 billion per year (about 125 million professional desktop PCs). Google’s Chromebook is trying to capture a large piece of that market. Google unveiled a subscription program for businesses and schools to get Chromebooks. For businesses the cost is $28 per machine per month. And for schools, the …
Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says a new generation of industrial robots could be enabled by better machine vision. A coming wave of industrial robots will be smart enough to work safely alongside humans in many different settings, says Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus of robotics at MIT and a founder of iRobot. “I think there’s …