technology

Senior Fusion researchers give major endorsement to Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Dense Plasma Focus Fusion Work and say they expect feasibility will be shown within two years with adequate funding

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In a major endorsement of the fusion energy research and development program of start-up Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a committee of senior fusion researchers, led by a former head of the US fusion program, has concluded that the innovative effort deserves “a much higher level of investment … based on their considerable progress to date.” …

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China nearing the world average in corruption where Italy and Kuwait are at the average

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China has made modest improvements in perceived corruption and has moved up to a corruptipon level of 40 on the Transparency.org index. 0 is the most corrupt and 100 is the least corrupt. 43 was the global average in corruption in 2013. So China is just short of the global average in corruption. China is …

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MIT Biosuit is a non-bulky spacesuit that is more like a diving wetsuit for space and the basis for a soft exoskeleton for people with cerebral palsy

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The Biosuit is pressurized close to the skin–an advance made possible by tension lines on the suit (those are the Spiderman lines) that don’t break when an astronaut bends their arms or knees. Active materials, like nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys, allow the nylon and spandex suit to be shrink-wrapped around the skin even tighter, getting Newman …

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Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life

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A NASA team reported 10 months ago that the first rock [nicknamed “John Klein”] Curiosity drilled at “Yellowknife Bay” on Mars yielded evidence that met the mission’s goal of identifying a Martian environment favorable for microbial life long ago. Yellowknife Bay’s clay-rich lakebed habitat offers the key chemical elements for life, plus water not too …

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New theory may revolutionize superconductors and lead to the design for room temperature superconductors

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Oddities, known as intertwined ordered phases, seem to interfere with superconductivity. “We now have a simple way to understand how they are created and hopefully this understanding will help us to know how to get rid of them,” said Lee. Most subatomic particles have a tiny magnetic field – a property physicists call “spin” – …

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Automation of Restaurants would allow for higher wages but fewer jobs #Fastfoodstrikes

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Today a few thousand people are striking in 100 cities for fast food workers to be paid $15/hour instead of $7.25 per hour. A robotic hamburger kitchen already exists that can produce 360 gourmet hamburgers in one hour. McDonalds corporation has enough profit to fund the development of automated machines that could provide a one …

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Thieves in Mexico who stole Cobalt 60 likely to die within days from radiation poisoning

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The day after a load of stolen radioactive material was found in a field, Mexican authorities had formed a perimeter around the area and were measuring for contamination as they planned the recovery process Thursday. Federal police and soldiers formed a cordon of several hundred yards around the highly radioactive container of cobalt-60, stolen earlier …

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Brain emulation machine with one million chip cores able simulate one billion neurons is nearing completion

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SpiNNaker (a contraction of Spiking Neural Network Architecture) is a million-core computing engine whose flagship goal is to be able to simulate the behaviour of aggregates of up to a billion neurons in real time (1% of the human brain). It consists of an array of ARM9 cores, communicating via packets carried by a custom …

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$500 ‘nano-camera’ can operate at the speed of light for collision avoidance for cars and other applications

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A $500 “nano-camera” that can operate at the speed of light has been developed by researchers in the MIT Media Lab. The three-dimensional camera, which was presented last week at Siggraph Asia in Hong Kong, could be used in medical imaging and collision-avoidance detectors for cars, and to improve the accuracy of motion tracking and …

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