Enable cheap silicon to perform better than current best for solar power

The University of NSW (New South Wales) researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade. The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality …

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Carnival of Nuclear Energy 155

1. At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus discusses the report by James Hansen finding that nearly 2 million lives have been saved because of nuclear power that replaced the need for coal burning. She observes that, while this study did receive some publicity because of its author, one might have expected a number that large …

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When will non-experimental Driverless cars or trucks arrive and when will they be common ? They arrived in 2012

The Economist magazine has hosted a debate about driverless cars between Futurist Paul Saffo and Andrew Bergbaum (director at AlixPartners, a global advisory firm and co-author of the AlixPartners Annual Automotive Study). Saffo’s case The inevitable arrival of autonomous vehicles is tracing a classic innovation S-curve. First is an extended period—typically a decade or two—when …

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Consumer Grade Smartphone satellites go into orbit and send back pictures to amateur radio operators and NASA

For about one week, engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to reconstruct an image of Earth sent to them from three smartphones in orbit. The joint effort was part of NASA’s nanosatellite mission, called PhoneSat, which launched on Sunday, April 21, 2013 aboard the …

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Drug could expose HIV reservoirs and enable elimination

Currently, there is no treatment to remove HIV from the cells; a group of researchers from Aarhus University Hospital and Aarhus University in Denmark has found exceptional ability to reactivate HIV in a substance otherwise being developed for cancer treatmentWhen HIV activated the cells habouring the virus become visible and vulnerable to the body’s immune …

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Spacex Grasshopper flew 250 meters into the air on a windy day

SpaceX’s Grasshopper flew 250 meters (820 feet) straight up, tripling the height flown on its previous leap. The video provides a great overhead view from SpaceX’s hexacopter. Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. Spacex …

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Robotic Cars Could Enable Super-suburb cities

Cityminded notes two ways that cities will change with driverless cars. * Cities will greatly expand, again: Faster and more efficient transportation will convert locations that are currently too remote for most users into feasible alternatives, abundant with space. Like suburban rail in the early twentieth century and the mass consumer automobile that followed, driverless …

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NASA wants to spend $105 million to capture a small asteroid

Planetary Resources talks about NASA’s plan to bag an asteroid. $105 Million has now been proposed for starting work on an asteroid retrieval and utilization mission in NASA’s official FY2014 budget. NASA identified three areas for accelerated development: * Asteroid observing efforts to identify target asteroids (twice current funding, 10x from a few years ago) …

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