The cost estimates for phase one of California High Speed rail increased to between $98.1 billion and $117.6 billion—of which approximately $12.5 billion has been secured. Although the Authority identifies the federal government as its largest potential funding source, the plan provides few details about how it expects to secure this money. The cost estimates …
Businessweek – European banks may borrow as much next month from the European Central Bank as they did in a record offering in December as they seek refuge from frozen funding markets. Basically Germany agreed to open up the printing presses to fund the ECB and thus the banks of Europe. This should prevent/limit any …
—Developing countries should prepare for further downside risks, as Euro Area debt problems and weakening growth in several big emerging economies are dimming global growth prospects, says the World Bank in the newly-released Global Economic Prospects (GEP) 2012. The Bank has lowered its growth forecast for 2012 to 5.4 percent for developing countries and 1.4 …
Arxiv – Metamaterial ‘Gecko Toe’: Optically-Controlled Adhesion to Any Surface (5 pages) On the mesoscopic scale, electromagnetic forces are of fundamental importance to an enormously diverse range of systems, from optical tweezers to the adhesion of gecko toes. Here we show that a strong light-driven force may be generated when a plasmonic metamaterial is illuminated …
Journal of Applied Physics – Precise manipulation of a microrobot in the pulsatile flow of human blood vessels using magnetic navigation system (3 pages) This paper proposes a method to precisely manipulate a microrobot in the pulsatile flow that simulates the flow characteristics of human blood vessels by utilizing the electromagnetic transfer function of a …
Eurekalert – In an effort to make data storage more cost-effective, a group of researchers from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created a DNA-based memory device that is “write-once-read-many-times” (WORM), and that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to make it possible to encode information. The device, …
Telegraph UK – Iran claims to have successfully produced and tested nuclear fuel rods in an advance that Western experts have long stated is beyond Iran’s technological capabilities. Senior naval officers announced that a new medium-range missile capable of evading radar detection had been test-fired in the Persian Gulf, escalating tensions in one of the …
1. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Yukiya Amano presented a forecast that the number of nuclear power plants would increase by 90 to 350 units in the world between now and 2030. The figure was estimated by IAEA following the accident at the Fukushima I nuclear power station operated by Tokyo Electric …
China will allow commercial use of IPV6 internet in 2015 IPV6 can have speeds up to 10 gigabytes per second and have a trillion times more internet addresses for new types of applications. Clarification (H/T to commenters) – The next-generation IPV6 network is faster because of the underlying physical infrastructure, wires/fibers and hardware. The speed …
Researchers have created a new type of optical device small enough to fit millions on a computer chip that could lead to faster, more powerful information processing and supercomputers. The “passive optical diode” is made from two tiny silicon rings measuring 10 microns in diameter, or about one-tenth the width of a human hair. Unlike …
A Photo-Thermal-Electrical Converter Based On Carbon Nanotubes for Bioelectronic Applications A device based on carbon nanotubes wrapped with poly(3-hexylthiophene) (and dispersed in poly(dimethylsiloxane)) sheets can effectively convert laser light into thermal energy and subsequently to electricity. The converter is flexible and extremely compact (see picture), and can be manipulated by using a laser that functions …