This is a phase 2 NASA NIAC study which could reduce the cost of space telescopes by 250 times. Beyond Hubble class space telescopes could cost a few million instead of a few billion dollars. The mirror costs would be reduced by over 500 times. Photons weigh nothing. Why must even small space telescopes have …
Nearly 3,000 cars, trucks and buses equipped with “connected” Wi-Fi technology to enable vehicles and infrastructure to “talk” to each other in real time to help avoid crashes and improve traffic flow began traversing Ann Arbor’s streets on August 20, 2012 as part of a year-long safety pilot project by the U.S. Department of Transportation. …
Eurekalert – For the first time, engineers at the University of New South Wales have demonstrated that hydrogen can be released and reabsorbed from a promising storage material, overcoming a major hurdle to its use for energy storage and part of a system that displaces oil for cars. Researchers from the Materials Energy Research Laboratory …
IEEE Spectrum – A miniature, massively parallel computer, powered by a million ARM processors, could produce the best brain simulations yet. The average human brain packs a hundred billion or so neurons—connected by a quadrillion (10^15) constantly changing synapses—into a space the size of a cantaloupe. It consumes a paltry 20 watts, much less than …
Parabolicarc – Armadillo Aerospace Gets Launch License for Reusable STIG-B At Newspace 2012 hosted by the Space Frontier Foundation in Santa Clara CA, Dr. George Nield, Associate Administrator for the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation, presented Neil Milburn, Armadillo Aerospace’s VP of Program Management,with an Operator Launch License for their STIG (Suborbital Transport with …
Glybera is the first gene-therapy medicine to be recommended for authorisation in the European Union. Gene therapy medicines have the potential to cure genetic disorders by replacing a defective gene with a working copy, thus helping the body to recover functionality. Glybera uses an adeno-associated virus vector as the delivery vehicle to add working copies …
1. Idaho Samizdat – TEPCO’s managers didn’t want to use salt water to cool the reactors at Fukushima because they had the ludicrous objective of thinking the units could be saved. Jaczko spiked the NRC’s plan to review the Yucca Mountain license application because of loyalty to his political sponsor, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, who …
Google Analytics counted over 20 million page views from May 2008 to Today for Nextbigfuture. Thanks to my readers for the success of Nextbigfuture. The site was started in early 2005. However, articles before October, 2005 were lost when blogger.com had a problem. The site has been running for 7.5 years. There was about 200,000 …
Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Technology Review – Kickstarter, a New York City–based website originally founded to support creative projects, has …
Strange new materials experimentally identified just a few years ago are now driving research in condensed-matter physics around the world. First theorized and then discovered by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their colleagues in other institutions, these “strong 3-D topological insulators” – TIs for short – …
Arxiv – Graphene can collect energy from the ambient heat and convert it to electricity, which makes it an ideal candidate for the fabrication of self-powered devices. However, this technology is suffering the high cost, which limits the practical use of it. In this work, we demonstrated that the cost can be reduced by using …