The European Union and other countries are discussing the funding of a 1 billion laser fusion project as a backup to the ITER fusion project. The bid to the European Union is to build an international laboratory, called “HiPER”, to run in parallel with the ITER machine. Bureaucrats in Brussels are interested. Canada and Russia …
There is a lot of reprocessing of nuclear waste (unburned uranium fuel). More in the UK according to wikipedia. Japan will be reprocessing at about half of the French rate this year. The Russians have an operating 560MW fast breeder and will complete an 800MW fast breeder in 2012. The Russians want to capture a …
Semiconductor for splitting CO2 powered by sunlightKubiak and Sathrum initially used a silicon semiconductor to test the merits of their device because silicon is well-studied. However, silicon absorbs in the infrared range and the researchers say it is “too wimpy” to supply enough energy. The conversion of sunlight by silicon supplied about half of the …
Centauri Dreams discusses how applying Devon Crowe space bubble ideas with nanotechnology could fully enable the ideas of Robert Forward for interstellar solar sails. The prior article about Devon Crowe’s space bubble concepts. Prior article on the state of solar sails Prior article on putting the brakes on laser mirror solar sails Article on laser …
As of April 2007, Dr. Robert Bussard, stated that due to the publicity from his 11/9/2006 talk at Google and the 2006 Outstanding Technology of the Year Award, the U.S. Navy sent him a contract extension to continue his fusion research. UPDATE FROM TOM LIGON: Evidently somebody got carried away with some fairly routine bookkeeping. …
Interesting article about Artificial General Intelligence and the Singularity. The article is by Ben Goertzel who is the CEO and Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente LLC and bioinformatics firm Biomind LLC. He mentions an AI Manhattan project could achieve success withing 5 years. However, I believe his Venture funded company could get more funding …
Robert Freitas had a very interesting essay a few years back called “Death is an Outrage”, which discusses how long life spans could be extended if our bodies could be rejuvenated and maintained without aging as a factor. If we cure diseases but do not have effective rejuvenation then we get less overall life extension …
Intel’s Larrabee chip will be a multi-core, programmable part that will use a tweaked version of the x86 instruction set and will have at least one teraflop of processing power. Intel expects software developers to craft specialized applications for the processor, giving them a boost on some of the most demanding workloads. Intel expects to …
The most interesting study released from the March 2007 meeting is Devon Crowe of PSI corporation for making large space structures from bubbles that are made rigid using metals or UV curing A single bubble can be 1 meter in earth gravity, 100 kilometer in low earth orbit or 1000 kilometers in deep space. Foams …
Zyvex is working on prototypes of aluminum reinforced with carbon nanotubes, making the metal two or three times stronger than traditional aluminum. 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 technology …
Vinod Khosla debates Herman Scheer about energy solutions at CNET Vinod says many things that are correct but is only half right on nuclear. He indicates that it was a mistake not to advanced nuclear power over the past 30 years, but then he says it is too late for nuclear to make an impact …
