Nature – Fission power back on NASA’s agenda Michael Houts, nuclear-research manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, wants astronauts to ride a nuclear reactor to Mars. He is convinced that small amounts of uranium-235 — which has an energy density one million times greater than that of liquid fuels — could power rockets efficiently, …
NY Times – on Dec. 14, the China State Council approved changes to shrink the boundaries of a Yangtze River preserve that is home to many of the river’s rare and endangered fish species. The decision is likely to clear the way for construction of the Xiaonanhai Dam, a $3.8 billion project that environmental experts …
1. Idaho Samizdat – Concrete cracks up costs of restart at two reactors. Progress Crystal River and First Energy Davis-Besse have very different problems, but similar concerns about restart. Progress is looking at several years of work while Davis-Besse told its investors in a letter it expects to restart the reactor by the end of …
The UK Engineer describes cheap thermoelectric material. (H/T New Energy and Fuel) We use the same kind of mill they use to make paint, it’s a well-established technique, it can be upscaled and it’s cheap, so that’s important. Calculations suggest it could recover around 15 per cent of all energy losses in a variety of …
NVIDIA today ushered in the era of quad-core mobile computing with the introduction of the NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 processor, bringing PC-class performance levels, better battery life and improved mobile experiences to tablets and phones. The world’s first quad-core tablet with the Tegra 3 processor is the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime. Known previously by the …
X-libyan leader Gaddafi has been reportedly killed If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive …
A University of Minnesota team of researchers has overcome a major hurdle in the quest to design a specialized type of molecular sieve that could make the production of gasoline, plastics and various chemicals more cost effective and energy efficient. The team devised a means for developing free-standing, ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets that as thin films …
Techcrunch – On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. It will be a 7-inch backlit display tablet that looks similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook. It will use a Texas Instrument dual-core OMAP chip. This is the same chip used inside many newer Android devices.The clockspeed will probably be 1.2 …
Hobbyspace – spacex has submitted a draft Environmental Assessment for Issuing an Experimental Permit to SpaceX for Operation of the Grasshopper Vehicle at the McGregor Test Site, Texas – September 2011 to the FAA A 65 page pdf describes the Grasshopper RLV plans. The Grasshopper RLV consists of a Falcon 9 Stage 1 tank, a …
1. OKG’s Oskarshamn 3 has reached its new maximum thermal capacity, two years later than originally anticipated. The unit’s capacity increased from 1200 MWe to 1450 MWe. It received regulatory approval for one year’s trial operation at 1450 MWe in October 2009. The path to full capacity, however, has not been smooth thanks to problems …
The previous zoomerang poll had technical problems. Restarted with pollhost. The EU will provide two projects out of 6 pilot projects with 1 billion euro from 2013-2022. Pick your favorites Human Brain Project Guardian Angel (sensors) Robotic companions IT Future of Medicine Graphene Global computing – FuturICT Free polls from Pollhost.com If you liked …