Business Week reports on the BP (British Petroleum) project to modernize the Rumaila oil field to nearly double its production and restore Iraq’s power in OPEC. A lot of the underproduction of “easy oil reserves” is in Iraq and Nigeria. Brazil, Russia, China, United States, Kazakhstan and Canada have key oil megaprojects that are non-OPEC …
Green bars are the engine efficiency. Conventional diesel on the left is 44% and the the best gas-diesel mix would be 53% efficient. Less heat trasfer and exhaust thermal losses. 1. What if an engine could be programmed to harvest the best properties of both diesel and gasoline fuel sources at once, on the fly, …
Chris Phoenix, of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, has an idea for speeding up DNA Nanotechnology Build a DNA Framework to Position DNA Components When building 100-nm structures out of DNA, the final self-assembly step may [sometimes] require a week. I assume the synthesis of large structures goes something like this: First, use Rothemund staples …
Power pistons: General Fusion’s reactor is a metal sphere with 220 pneumatic pistons designed to ram its surface simultaneously. The ramming creates an acoustic wave that travels through a lead-lithium liquid and eventually accelerates toward the center into a shock wave. The shock wave compresses a plasma target, called a spheromak, to trigger a fusion …
Researchers in Isreal have integrated suspended carbon nanotubes into micro-fabricated (MEMS) devices. They grow the carbon nanotubes onto the MEMS. Chirality is not controlled in their method. Other researchers have used DNA to sort carbon nanotubes by chirality but these methods have not been integrated. The full paper is available for 30 days with a …
Neutraceuticals for longevity are not released yet, but will be released soon according to Gregory Benford at his presentation at the Covergence conference of last year. Video here Genescient is testing a longevity product in Bangalore later in 2009. Genescient’s first longevity product — to be ready for human trials later this year — will …
P values were calculated by the log-rank test. Four per cent of the control mice and three per cent of rapamycin-assigned mice were removed from the experiment for technical reasons. Only five animals (three controls, two rapamycin) were removed after the start of rapamycin treatment at 600 days. Thus, there were no significant differences between …
Surface electron band structure of bismuth telluride. (Image courtesy of Yulin Chen and Z. X. Shen.) Physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material (bismuth Telluride) that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips. Bismuth Telluride allows …
1. Unity Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley start‐up that will serve the semiconductor data storage memory market as a designer, developer and manufacturer of non‐volatile memory (NVM) ICs, has announced a breakthrough technology called CMOx, which is based on the use of conductive metal oxides in the semiconductor process that allows for ionic motion. Unity said …
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. have created an “astro-comb” to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant stars. Presentation CMII1, “Femtosecond Laser Frequency Comb for Precision Astrophysical Spectroscopy,” Chih-Hao Li et al, 3:45 p.m., Monday, June 1. Right now standard spectroscopy techniques can determine star movements to within a few …
1. Heartland Robotics Update Rod Brooks, of Heartland Robotics, pointed out that between iRobot and Foster-Miller, New England has a virtual lock on the military robot business. Brooks wouldn’t give details about what his own company, Heartland Robotics, is up to—but he did say that it’s working on systems that will help American workers be …