The Wall Street Journal describes how Europe made better choices than the USA in regards to H1N1 vaccines * Europe choose to use adjuvants An adjuvanted H1N1 vaccine being used in Europe contains 3.75 micrograms of vaccine stock. The same vaccine in the U.S., without the adjuvant, requires 15 micrograms of vaccine for equal potency. …
MIT Technology Review reports that REvolt of Switzerland claims to have solved issues with rechargeable Zinc Air Batteries. Nonrechargeable zinc-air batteries have long been on the market. But making them rechargeable has been a challenge. ReVolt Technology claims breakthrough achievements in developing a metal-air battery that overcomes all of the above barriers to deliver: ㆍ …
An analysis showed that low cost materials are needed to scal solar power and Pyrite (FeS2) is a leading candidate. Solar photovoltaics have great promise for a low-carbon future but remain expensive relative to other technologies. Greatly increased penetration of photovoltaics into global energy markets requires an expansion in attention from designs of high-performance to …
When people think about building things with carbon nanotubes or with carbon nanotube enhanced materials they need to know that there is not much production of carbon nanotubes. There is less than 1000 tons/year of carbon nanotubes being produced and most of that is in a form that is like an unsorted powder. The material …
It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. The Blue Brain team is now developing a model of a complete rat brain—that should be done in 2010—Markram …
GE (General Electric) Hitachi is proposing the Advanced Recycling Center (ARC) which would be the fourth generation PRISM sodium-cooled fast reactors and an electrometallurgical separation process that would make a new form of fuel from spent fuel rods without separating plutonium. The first of kind system they are proposing would cost about $3.2 billion and …
Michael Anissimov answers ten questions from Popular Science about the technological Singularity and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It is a lengthy piece but is well worth reading for anyone interested in the Singularity and AGI. Al Fin believes that the time scales for AGI are too optimistic. There is a 6 page draft of an …
Plane passengers have not been able to carry bottles of liquid through security at airports, leaving some parched at the airport and others having expensive toiletries confiscated, but work by a group of physicists in Germany is paving the way to eliminate this necessary nuisance. Success might also mean that we can leave our shoes …
At the Frontiers in Optics conference on October 14 ,2009 Jeffrey Kash of IBM Research gave a presentation on the road to Exascale supercomputering He gave a projection of the necessary timeline for the shift from electrical communication in supercomputers to optical in order to support exascale supercomputing. Photonics describes the Kash exascale talk VCSEL-based …
Physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have calculated a quantum speed limit on computing. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for an elementary quantum operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit …
Adam Crowl, crowlspace, points out that with the 6.3% of light speed exhaust velocity from Winterbergs deuterium fusion rocket design means a 120,000 ton starship attached to 12,000,000 tons of deuterium can do a delta-vee of ~0.2 c (20% of lightspeed). This would be using the two stage configuration of the Project Daedelus (which was …