In an interview with Sander Olson, Kevin Parkin, the Deputy Director of the Mission Design Center at NASA Ames, discusses the potential benefits of using microwave power to send payloads to orbit. Microwave power should in theory provide a more efficient, more reliable, and less expensive method than conventional chemical propulsion approaches. Microwave propulsion could …
There has been an active debate on this site about 3D printing/Additive manufacturing and if there is a significant shift that will cause localization of production. Localization of production meaning something like people making a lot of things at home. The Economist magazine has more facts and analysis. Engineers and designers have been using 3D …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 39 is up at Cool Hand Nuke Idaho Samizdat reports on Nuclear power in Turkey Toshiba is “confident” it will seal a deal to build a 5.4 GWe nuclear energy power station on a Black Sea coastal site near Sinop. Norio Sasaki, Toshiba’s president, told the Financial Times 2/8 terms …
By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields in North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day — more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now. New horizontal multifrac drilling is expected to raise U.S. production by at least 20 percent over …
The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory announced on Tuesday that it has inked a deal with IBM to build ten petaflop Mira BlueGene /Q supercomputer in 2012 The Mira machine will essentially be half of the Sequoia BlueGene / Q super that is going into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – another DOE lab …
Tiny, implantable computers that would restore brain function lost to disease or injury is the goal of University of Washington research recently funded by a $1 million, three-year grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. The Keck project is the next step in advancing the technology of miniature devices developed at the UW to record from …
A new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster …
Angewandte Chemie International Edition – Graphene Nanoribbons by Chemists: Nanometer-Sized, Soluble, and Defect-Free Closing the zipper: A method for the bottom-up organic synthesis of defect-free graphene nanoribbons in solution has been developed. Polyphenylene precursors with a unique kinked backbone enabled full cyclodehydrogenation in a single reaction step by an intramolecular Scholl reaction with FeCl Klaus …
The degenerative aging of the immune system is responsible for an enormous burden of disease and disability, from the pain of recurrent Herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia, to elevated rates of chronic urinary tract infections, to complications in wounds, pressure sores, ulcers, and surgical incisions. Most prominently, it underlies the meteoric rise in mortality from …
The world’s largest steel maker, ArcelorMital, has a new nanostructured steel which is not inherently lighter, but it’s so strong that automakers can use thinner gauges and that’s where part of the weight savings comes from. Another part of the weight savings comes from not having to use additional brackets, gussets or panels to strengthen …
Arxiv – Applications of Bayesian model averaging to the curvature and size of the Universe Bayesian model averaging is a procedure to obtain parameter constraints that account for the uncertainty about the correct cosmological model. We use recent cosmological observations and Bayesian model averaging to derive tight limits on the curvature parameter, as well as …