Scientists who study aging are currently riveted by a group of 20 dogs in Seattle. The dogs, all house pets older than six years old, are early test subjects in a trial of a drug called rapamycin. The way the drug works is not completely understood, but it’s been used for years to prevent rejection …
Three new weapons that could improve the ability of Navy surface ships to defend themselves against enemy missiles—solid state lasers (SSLs), the electromagnetic railgun (EMRG), and the hypervelocity projectile (HVP). Any one of these new weapon technologies, if successfully developed and deployed, might be regarded as a “game changer” for defending Navy surface ships against …
Tesla Motors software upgrade, version 7, will be released this Thursday. It will include autopilot features. The autopilot will help steer the car on the highway and parallel park the car. Tesla demonstrated many autopilot features, but the upgrade won’t include all of those, said Musk. One feature that will not be available allowed the …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 279 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome Neutron Bytes – The Chicken and Egg Conundrum of Forging a Future for Advanced Nuclear Reactors The bad news is that anyone who is paying attention to the barriers to market entry for advanced nuclear reactors knows what they are. The good news is …
Since its discovery in 2005, Pluto’s moon Hydra has been known only as a fuzzy dot of uncertain shape, size, and reflectivity. Imaging obtained during New Horizons’ historic transit of the Pluto-Charon system and transmitted to Earth early this morning has definitively resolved these fundamental properties of Pluto’s outermost moon. Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) …
DVDs and Blu-ray disks contain so-called phase-change materials that morph from one atomic state to another after being struck with pulses of laser light, with data “recorded” in those two atomic states. Using ultrafast laser pulses that speed up the data recording process, Caltech researchers adopted a novel technique, ultrafast electron crystallography (UEC), to visualize …
Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) has a new take on old memory, one that promises to boost the performance, capacity and battery life of consumer electronics from digital cameras to laptops. Best of all, it is cheap, made from common materials and compatible with just about anything currently on the market. This …