Ultrafast laser pulses are used to create features and surface textures in metals, ceramics and other materials for applications including the manufacture of solar cells and biosensors. The lasers pulse at durations of 100 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, and cause electrons to reach temperatures greater than 60,000 degrees Celsius during the pulse duration. …
US-Japan Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion 2011 Workshop presentations Joel Rogers presented simulations of a p-11B Polywell power reactor that would reach breakeven at diameter 13 meter. (15 pages) Last year Joel Rogers had an inferior design simulated that had a breakeven diameter of 300 meters. Some of the improvements are described in Joel Rogers 2010 …
cheaper method of manufacturing fuel cells. A noble metal nanoparticle catalyst for fuel cells is prepared using atomic layer deposition (ALD).This ALD method for manufacturing fuel cells requires 60 per cent less of the costly catalyst than current methods. This is a significant discovery, because researchers have not been able to achieve savings of this …
Now a new technology, pioneered by Houston-based n3D Biosciences, promises to float cells in a 3D matrix made of nothing but magnetism. The secret ingredient is a proprietary mix of nanoparticles the company calls Nanoshuttle. The addition of these particles to a dish of living cells allows them to move in response to magnetic fields …
A guest post by Joseph Friedlander Once in a while you read a statistic that gets you thinking. What I read was that the volume of salt in the oceans was the volume of the land of the African continent above the waterline. That sounded amazing to me. I had to run the figures to …
Researchers from Aneeve Nanotechnologies, a startup company at UCLA’s on-campus technology incubator at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), have used low-cost ink-jet printing to fabricate the first circuits composed of fully printed back-gated and top-gated carbon nanotube–based electronics for use with OLED displays. The team made carbon nanotube thin-film transistors with high mobility and a …
Kinect for Xbox 360 brings voice control to living room entertainment with update that launches Dec. 6. 57 million people worldwide already have an xbox 360 that’s about to be upgraded for free. Kinect for Xbox 360 revolutionized controller-free entertainment by letting you use your body and voice to play your favorite games and entertainment, …
A team of university researchers, aided by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have succeeded in integrating a new, highly efficient piezoelectric material into a silicon microelectromechanical system (MEMS).* This development could lead to significant advances in sensing, imaging and energy harvesting. A piezoelectric material, such as quartz, expands slightly when …
Researchers take a step toward bringing three-dimensional printers to the masses by developing new materials compatible with the object-building technology Hod Lipson (Cornell) thinks that three-dimensional printers—those robotic machines that build solid objects layer by layer from powders, liquids, and pastes—are sitting on the verge of a parallel personal manufacturing revolution. “In 20 years, many …
Michael Pettis (professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) agrees with Arvind Subramanian (Peterson Institute) that China should use current events to play a bigger and more decisive role in global finance, and I certainly agree that as a surplus nation it is …
HPCWire – just three and half years after IBM broke the petaflop barrier with its Roadrunner supercomputer, Fujitsu’s “K computer” has passed the 10 petaflops mark. Fujitsu and RIKEN announced on Tuesday that they have completed the final build-out of the system and achieved 10.51 petaflops on Linpack, reaching a major milestone of Japan’s Next-Generation …