India and Russia have agreed to develop and induct a new hypersonic version of their joint venture 174 miles-range BrahMos cruise missile by 2015. The new missile will be known as ‘BrahMos-2’ and will have a speed of over 6 Mach (around 3,600 miles per hour) with a striking-range of 174 miles. NASA Hypersonic ProjectNASA …
The Wall Street Journal has an article about five technologies that would change the energy and climate picture. Over the next few decades, the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels and drastically reduce greenhouse gases. Current technology will take us only so far; major breakthroughs are required. * Space based …
Amory Lovins wrote an article on Grist primarily making the case that nuclear power is not economic and has a 30+ page pdf on the “Four Myths of Nuclear” This will be the first of a few articles where I show where Lovins is wrong. Firstly he talks about gross dollar or energy amounts. Those …
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer zips through JavaScript nearly 10 times faster than usual when Google’s new Chrome Frame plug-in is partnered with the browser, benchmark tests show. According to tests run by Computerworld, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) with the plug-in was 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite …
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility marked a step forward in the field of advanced particle accelerator technology with the successful test of the first U.S.-built superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) niobium cavity to meet the exacting specifications of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC). Superconducting radiofrequency accelerator cavities are crucial components …
Norman Borlaug has died. Norman (and his research team) saved more human lives than any other in history. At the end of this article is a comparison of rice yields 1968, 1997, 2008 and what is expected for 2020. More than 30 years ago, Borlaug wrote, “One of the greatest threats to mankind today is …
Talks that are scheduled for Sunday, Sept 6, 2009 at the SENS4 conference. Session 21 Tissue engineering (Chair: Leonid Gavrilov) Augustinus Bader Leipzig, Germany Currently Available Therapies with Autologous Stem Cells – From Basic Principles to Clinical Application Gabor Forgacs Columbia, USA Organ Engineering by Bioprinting Biomaterials-based exogenous scaffolds, though promising, still face general as …
Nuclear fuel burnup is measured in gigawatt-days per tonne and its potential is proportional to the level of enrichment. Hitherto a limiting factor has been the physical robustness of fuel assemblies, and hence burn-up levels of about 40 GWd/t have required only around 4% enrichment. But with better equipment and fuel assemblies, 55 GWd/t is …
Numonyx CTO Ed Doller thinks Phase Change Memory (PCM) will need three to five more years to attain widespread adoption. Random lantency in a PCM device is 17 times faster than Flash memory and over 3000 times faster than a hard drive. The biggest drawback in PCM is the price, which is about 10 times …
From a research paper: “Probing Cold Dense Nuclear Matter”: The protons and neutrons in a nucleus can form strongly correlated nucleon pairs. Scattering experiments, where a proton is knocked-out of the nucleus with high momentum transfer and high missing momentum, show that in 12C the neutron-proton pairs are nearly twenty times as prevalent as proton-proton …
Fujitsu torus network (right) Fujitsu Sparc VIIIfx chip (left) Fujitsu and Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, known as RIKEN, announced that RIKEN has decided to employ a new system configuration with a scalar processing architecture for its next-generation supercomputer. Despite the NEC/Hitachi withdraw, the plan is to get a “partially operational system” by …