EETimes – IBM has become the first company to ship a commercial microprocessor using transactional memory, a new feature for multicore chips researchers have studied for years. The BlueGene/Q processor used in the Sequoia supercomputer IBM is building for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will employ the new feature, IBM disclosed in a paper at the …
The SENS Foundation Academic Initiative’s new structure is actively in the process of being implemented, and involves a number of significant changes. Among these are the separation of the Initiative into branches, an updated membership system that allows students to become involved more easily and in more ways, the creation of volunteer committees, and the …
Jamais Cascio at Open the Future laments about conventional futurists Consistently accurate predictions about interconnected complex systems are functionally impossible, at least at any real level of specificity. It’s long been known that even people paid far too much money to make predictions about a constrained system (such as the stock market) usually do no …
Carnival of Space 209 was up earlier in the week at Starry Critters If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks 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 …
Looking to nature for their muse, researchers have used a common protein to guide the design of a material that can make energy-storing hydrogen gas. The synthetic material works 10 times faster than the original protein found in water-dwelling microbes, the researchers report in the August 12 issue of the journal Science, clocking in at …
Hotelier Middle East – US$1.5 billion of funding has been secured for a major tourism and theme park development in Jordan, featuring a Star-Trek inspired attraction. Construction work on the 74-hectare Red Sea Astrarium project in Aqaba, which will include four hotels and 17 entertainment developments, is expected to start early 2012. The Amman company …
Andrea Rossi and Defkalion have terminated their contractual licensing agreement. PRESS RELEASE : Bologna-Rome (Italy) August 4th 2011 EFA- Energia da Fonti Alternative srl, the Italian Company through which the rights for the production of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat were granted to Praxen Defkalion Green Technologies LTD, publicly announces that the License and Technology Transfer Agreement …
Space Review – Today, no true air-breathing spaceplanes or reusable boosters yet exist, but there is now renewed interest in air-breathing technology. At the same time, remarkable launch cost reductions in more conventional boosters are imminent due to the efforts of SpaceX and other firms. There is now steady progress in actual testing of hypersonic …
Researchers describe a new technique to isolate light signals on a silicon chip, solving a longstanding problem in engineering photonic chips. An isolated light signal can only travel in one direction. If light weren’t isolated, signals sent and received between different components on a photonic circuit could interfere with one another, causing the chip to …
Gale Crater: Future Home of Mars Rover Curiosity This view of Gale is a mosaic of observations made in the visible-light portion of the spectrum by the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August …
Protean Drive™ is a fully-integrated, direct-drive solution. Each motor has a built-in inverter, control electronics and software – no separate large, heavy and costly inverter required. Direct drive reduces part count, complexity and cost, so there is no need to integrate traditional drive train components such as external gearing, transmissions, drive-shafts, axles and differentials. Protean …