Shell Estimates Iraq could Produce 6 to 10 million barrels of oil per day in the early 2020s

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, …

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Depleted Uranium can be used to provide chemical industry feedstocks from carbon monoxide

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, …

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Brillouin funded for $2 million and Acoustic Cavitation Fusion

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 …

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“Supercomputing on demand” becoming a reality

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 …

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Geoengineering: Whiter Skies?

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 …

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Geoengineering: Whiter Skies?

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 …

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Boulder Ionics liquid electrolytes could double storage of ultracapacitors and improve batteries by up to ten times

Boulder Ionics’ ionic-liquid-based electrolytes enable a new generation of energy storage devices with superior performance, improved safety and lower costs. The company’s novel high-throughput synthesis process produces electrochemical-grade materials in minutes rather than days. This dramatic reduction in processing time enables a very low capital cost for the production equipment, minimizes labor costs, and improves …

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Superconducting 50 Tesla magnet revolution for future accelerators

Fermilab Today – The Department of Energy recently presented an Early Career Research Award to Fermilab scientist Tengming Shen, a 2010 Peoples Fellow working to spur the next magnet revolution. DOE awarded Shen $500,000 per year for five years for his research into engineering high-field superconducting materials for advanced accelerator technology. If his team succeeds, …

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Kickstarter and Crowdfunding

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Technology Review – Kickstarter, a New York City–based website originally founded to support creative projects, has …

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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels

Technology Review – this past winter, a startup called Semprius set an important record for solar energy: it showed that its solar panels can convert nearly 34 percent of the light that hits them into electricity. Semprius says its technology, once scaled up, is so efficient that in some places, it could soon make electricity …

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