Graphene photonics breakthrough promises fast-speed, low-cost communications

Swinburne researchers have developed a high-quality continuous graphene oxide thin film that shows potential for ultrafast telecommunications. Associate Professor Baohua Jia led a team of researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics to create a micrometre thin film with record-breaking optical nonlinearity suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices used in all-optical communications, biomedicine and photonic …

Read more

China Rolling out Global high speed rail plans and projects – From Pan-asian plan to future Africa projects and proposed China-Russia-Canada-US line

China’s academy of engineering is talking about a global high speed rail network. There are reasons to doubt that the politics and negotiations can come together. However, China plans to have 50,000 kilometers high speed rail network built inside of China by 2020. The external line to the US via Russia and Canada would be …

Read more

Young blood reverses age-related cognitive impairments

Last year, Saul Villeda, then at Stanford University in California, and colleagues showed they could boost the growth of new cells in the brains of old mice by giving them a blood infusion from young mice. New work presented at Neuroscience 2012 showed that old mice that had received young blood plasma performed better in …

Read more

Blue Origin Tests Rocket Engine Thrust Chamber

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) partner Blue Origin has successfully fired the thrust chamber assembly for its new 100,000 pound thrust BE-3 liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen rocket engine. As part of Blue’s Reusable Booster System (RBS), the engines are designed eventually to launch the biconic-shaped Space Vehicle the company is developing. Blue Origin is a …

Read more

Carnival of Nuclear Energy 126

The Carnival of Space 126 is up at Entrprenuclear Atomic Insights – Rod Adams covered the discussion about nuclear energy between Theo Simon and George Monbiot. I have no desire to put words into the mouths of either man, but here is my summary of their current arguments. Both of them start with the perspective …

Read more