The ASCI Red supercomputer first broke the teraFLOPS barrier in December 1996. On May 25, 2008, an American military supercomputer built by IBM, named ‘Roadrunner’, reached the computing milestone of one PetaFLOP by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second The budget was $100 million. A 20 PetaFLOP supercomputer is being completed in 2012 …
North Dakota’s Oil Transportation Infrastructure report projects North Dakota and Montana Oil production to 2017 (7 pages by the North Dakota Pipeline Authority) The state also has been setting new production records almost every month, the report states. Studies conducted by the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources in 2008 and 2010 indicate 4 billion …
A group of Penn scientists working across disciplines—in this case engineering and medicine—has developed a novel way to allow patients to re-grow cartilage in their own bodies, using their own cells, directly in the site that has been damaged through injury or disease Penn Engineering Associate Professor Jason Burdick says the breakthrough represents a new …
With clocks, we measure the numerical order of a material change, i.e., motion running in space. There is no experimental evidence that clocks measure time. It is convenient to replace the concept of time with the numerical order of material change. This view corresponds more adequately to the physical world and resolves Zeno problems of …
In this diagram, the M13 virus consists of a strand of DNA (the figure-8 coil on the right) attached to a bundle of proteins called peptides — the virus coat proteins (the corkscrew shapes in the center) which attach to the carbon nanotubes (gray cylinders) and hold them in place. A coating of titanium dioxide …
Nuclear Fusion Journal – Creation of a high-temperature plasma through merging and compression of supersonic field reversed configuration plasmoids (H/T Talk Polywell) A new device, the Inductive Plasma Accelerator, was employed to simultaneously form and accelerate two oppositely directed field reversed configurations (FRCs) where the relative velocity (600 km s−1) of the plasmoids was much …
Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said. “We’ll probably put a first man in space in about three years,” Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. “We’re going all the way to Mars, I think… best case 10 years, …
Michael Anissimov ranks among the voices most prominent and effective in discussing the issue of existential risk, along with other issues related to the Singularity and the future of humanity and technology. Currently the Media Director for the Singularity Institute, as well as a Board member of Humanity+, Michael is Co-Organizer of the Singularity Summit …
The structure of the new carbon allotrope, T-carbon, is shown from different directions. T-carbon is obtained by replacing each carbon atom in diamond with a carbon tetrahedron. Image credit: Sheng, et al. ©2011 American Physical Society. Physical Review Letters – T-Carbon: A Novel Carbon Allotrope Previous work had used computational chemistry to propose T-carbon A …
Geothermal add-ons for heat pumps on the market today collect heat from the air or the ground. A new device from Wake Forest University uses a fluid that flows through a roof-mounted module to collect heat from the sun while an integrated solar cell generates electricity from the sun’s visible light. A standard, rooftop solar …
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics is continuing to examine the causes of the shot-to-shot variability that affects FF-1 (as it does all DPFs to date) and the reason that we, in general, are getting lower fusion yields than our theory expects Previously we have traced this to a too-early generation of the electron and ion beams that …