Despite some success with air pollution, current levels — mainly nitrogen oxide, fine particles and ground-level ozone — are estimated to shorten average life expectancy in Western and Central European countries by almost a year and to threaten the healthy development of children. This from the report, ‘Europe’s environment — The fourth assessment’, which was …
Ontario Liberals initially promised to close Ontario’s coal plants by 2007. They since pushed the closures back several times when it became obvious alternatives were not going to be in place, eventually writing the 2014 closures into regulation in the summer of 2007 The Liberals won a strong majority with 71 of 107 districts. There …
A recent paper “Use of Mini-Mag Orion and superconducting coils for near-term interstellar transportation” discusses using a massive laser beam to accelerate fuel pellets to catch up to and supply a minimag Orion with fuel. The 1000 ton minimag Orion could then accelerate to 10% of light speed. The laser array would need 2500 times …
Three physicists in Italy and the US have proposed a method for retrieving quantum information from memory that should make total quantum recall more reliable. A quantum computer uses not bits but qubits, which can be a blend of 0 and 1 – a quantum superposition of the two states. Therefore, in quantum RAM, the …
We are getting closer to cyborgs that are as strong and as fast as people. The prototype rocket powered mechanical arm can lift (curl) about 20 to 25 pounds – three to four times more than current commercial arms – and can do so three to four times faster. “That means it has about 10 …
Nasa crowns a Personal Air Vehicle prize winner Pipistral Virus is a 50mpg two seater plane that costs $70,000. Dayjet, air taxi service, is nearing a soft launch Eclipse 500 By Aug 21, 2007, Dayjet will have 11 jets. They are close to launching the first per-seat, on-demand air-taxi operation. before DayJet can fly passengers, …
Wikipedia on (EROEI) energy returned based on energy invested. In physics, energy economics and ecological energetics, EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested), ERoEI, or EROI (Energy Return On Investment), is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. …
From nanowerk, the successful rapid prototyping of an atomic force microscope hear (AFM), something which normally costs hundreds of thousands of dollars Go to this site for a tutorial on how to build a plastic-AFM head The heads perform as well as traditional heads but are not as durable. The computational chemistry simulation software and …
Many people think that nuclear power is not being added in the USA or that it cannot be added in time to help with climate and pollution problems. That belief is not correct. The world has 320 nuclear reactors in the construction pipeline This is an increase of 80 reactors from January 2007 when 240 …
Nuclear rockets can have 2 to 200 times the performance of chemical rockets. They are a technology that we only need the will to develop. The science is solid and straight forward. We just have to have the courage to become a truly interplanetary civilization. This article will review the various pulsed plasma (using nuclear …
IBM and Sun have announced petaflop supercomputers. They indicate that there are no barriers to more computer power but the most important issues going forward are to manage and reduce power usage and to improve software. “The hardware speed [of supercomputers] will not reach a plateau,” said Simon See, Sun Microsystems’ director for Advance Computing …