ESO (European southern Observatory) is to build the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world. At its meeting in Garching today, the ESO Council approved the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) Programme, pending confirmation of four so-called ad referendum votes. The E-ELT will start operations early in the next decade. The E-ELT will collect 100 million …
Traditional cookstoves are to blame for much of the pollution that leads to millions of deaths in the developing world. Safer stoves are available, but few people buy them. Stanford researchers say that’s because the newer models aren’t designed to give people what they really want. Preparing a meal in some of the world’s poorest …
Prof. Moshe Kol of Tel Aviv University’s School of Chemistry is developing a super-strength polypropylene — one of the world’s most commonly used plastics — that has the potential to replace steel and other materials used in everyday products. This could have a long-term impact on many industries, including car manufacturing, in which plastic parts …
Last month, a team of science and engineering students at Strathclyde University developed an innovative ‘space web’ experiment which was carried on a rocket from the Arctic Circle to the edge of space. The experiment, known as Suaineadh – or ‘twisting’ in Scots Gaelic, was an important step forward in space construction design and demonstrated …
NY Times – Iraq produces around three million barrels a day, and few analysts believe it can reach its goal of 10 million barrels a day by 2017, a target Baghdad recently reduced from a previous estimate of 12 million barrels a day by that year. But Hans Nijkamp, Royal Dutch Shell’s Iraq country chairman, …
A simple three-step chemical reaction which could herald the introduction of new sustainable feedstocks for the chemical industry has been developed by scientists at The University of Nottingham. Scientists in the School of Chemistry have developed a recyclable system for converting carbon monoxide (CO) directly into more complicated organic molecules using depleted uranium. The research, …
1. PESN reports that low energy nuclear reaction company Brillouin was funded for $2 million. Brillouin is starting an SRI contract middle of June. 2. Impulse Devices’ Extreme Acoustic Cavitation™ from Impulse shows the potential to produce plasma at the super-concentrated cores of the collapsed bubbles, making this technology well-suited for producing acoustic inertial confinement …
In 2006, Amazon unveiled the Elastic compute cloud, which allowed individual users to rent large numbers of CPUs from Amazon’s server farms. Since then Amazon has repeatedly slashed the cost of the CPUs. For organizations requiring supercomputing levels of power, a company called Cycle computing is able to gather tens of thousands of CPUs from …
The purpose of a Nimbus Labs project is to develop a wireless power transfer system that enables unmanned areal vehicles (UAVs) to provide power to, and recharge batteries of wireless sensors and other electronics far removed from the electric grid. We do this using wireless power transfer through the use of strongly coupled resonances. We …
One proposed side effect of geoengineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosols is sky whitening during the day and afterglows near sunset, as is seen after large volcanic eruptions. Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere would increase diffuse light received at the surface, but with a non-uniform spectral distribution. We use a radiative transfer model to calculate spectral …
One proposed side effect of geoengineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosols is sky whitening during the day and afterglows near sunset, as is seen after large volcanic eruptions. Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere would increase diffuse light received at the surface, but with a non-uniform spectral distribution. We use a radiative transfer model to calculate spectral …