A couple of months ago, the Russian physicist Maxim Chernodub showed how a powerful magnetic field can generate electrically charged ρ mesons that behave like a superconductor along the axis of the magnetic filed. And today, Igor Smolyaninov, at the University of Maryland, takes this idea a step further. Smolyaninov has turned his attention to …
Watching TV for an average of six hours a day could shorten the viewer’s life expectancy by almost five years, indicates research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The impact rivals that of other well known behavioural risk factors, such as smoking and lack of exercise. Other research has shown that lifelong …
Jamais Cascio at Open the Future laments about conventional futurists Consistently accurate predictions about interconnected complex systems are functionally impossible, at least at any real level of specificity. It’s long been known that even people paid far too much money to make predictions about a constrained system (such as the stock market) usually do no …
Modern cities like Rome of old were not built in a day. Until we get molecular nanotechnology fully developed a goal like Rome in a day will probably be beyond the possible. However, we can get far closer to far more rapid development and redevelopment. One big shift would be power and communication that could …
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London had several days of rioting which were initial triggered by the shooting a gang member and then spread into rioting related to looting/shopping. The first day after London started burning, I spoke to Claire Fox, radical leftwinger and resident of Wood Green. On Sunday morning, apparently, people had been not just looting H&M, but …
1. The recent decline in stock prices had Apple decline less than Exxon Mobile. During the day Apple was more valuable than Exxon Mobile. Apple ended the day worth $346.7 billion and 348.3 billion. Apple reported having short-term marketable securities worth $16.3 billion and long-term marketable securities worth $47.8 billion. If you add the cash, …
Alexey Snezhko and Igor Aronson , physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, have coaxed “micro-robots” to do their bidding. The robots, just half a millimeter wide, are composed of microparticles. Confined between two liquids, they assemble themselves into star shapes when an alternating magnetic field is applied. Photo courtesy of …
The discovery of a fundamental, previously unknown property of microbial nanowires in the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens that allows electron transport across long distances could revolutionize nanotechnology and bioelectronics This may one day lead to cheaper, nontoxic nanomaterials for biosensors and solid state electronics that interface with biological systems. Networks of bacterial filaments, known as microbial …
A short-term energy outlook report released by Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics estimates that if the country’s nuclear plants do not begin to restart this fall after shutting down for periodic inspections, there will be a 7.8 percent shortage in the primary energy supply by next summer and a 5.6 percent, $98 billion drop in …
Figure: Octave spanning frequency comb generation in a microresonator. Panel (a) shows the experiment with a glass nano-fiber and a silicon chip with optical resonators. A scanning electron microscope picture of a resonator is shown in panel (b). Panel (c) shows the optical spectrum of the frequency comb generated in such a microresonator seeded by …