What Is The True Tax Rate? And What Is The Best Single Tax or Pair of Taxes to Boost Growth Rates?

A guest article by Joseph Friedlander Article summary:   The true all inclusive tax rate of GDP may be harder to calculate than it appears and higher relative to the ‘real’ economy outside the world of government funded NGOs and contractors.   Readers are invited to give their take on the question: Should government expenditures be …

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DARPA can non-mechanically sweep a laser back and forth 100,000 times a second will make far cheaper and more powerful laser scanning

A non-mechanical approach could open the door to a new class of miniaturized, extremely low-cost, robust laser-scanning technologies for military and commercial use Many essential military capabilities—including autonomous navigation, chemical-biological sensing, precision targeting and communications—increasingly rely upon laser-scanning technologies such as LIDAR (think radar that uses light instead of radio waves). These technologies provide amazing …

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10 Teraflops per FGPA chip and 100 GFlops per watt

Altera Corporation is a pioneer of programmable logic solutions and enabling systems. They are a leader with FPGAs. The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a semiconductor device that can be programmed after manufacturing. Instead of being restricted to any predetermined hardware function, an FPGA allows you to program product features and functions, adapt to new …

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Conventional weapon power

On March 9, 1945, B-29 bombers in the U.S. Air Force began dropping incendiary bombs on the city of Tokyo. This raid, known as “Operation Meetinghouse,” caused incredible destruction, killing perhaps 100,000 people aand burning out fifteen square miles of the city. Incendiary bombings continued in the months to come, targeting other Japanese cities and …

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Ultrahard fullerite is almost twice as hard as diamond but new synthesis works at room temperature and lower pressure

Researchers from the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials in Troitsk, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), National University of Science and Technology (MISiS), and Moscow State Univ. (MSU) have developed a new method for the synthesis of an ultrahard material that exceeds diamond in hardness. An article recently published in …

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Metals that mimic Bamboo Gradient structure will make stronger and more stretchable body armor and other parts

Drawing inspiration from the structure of bones and bamboo, researchers have found that by gradually changing the internal structure of metals they can make stronger, tougher materials that can be customized for a wide variety of applications – from body armor to automobile parts. “If you looked at metal under a microscope you’d see that …

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Vanadium redox batteries could balance the electrical grid for solar and wind power

Vanadium “redox flow” batteries are very stable. They can be discharged and recharged 20,000 times without much loss of performance, and are thought to last decades (they have not been around long enough for this to have been demonstrated in practice). They can also be enormous, and – in large part thanks to their vanadium …

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Large Hadron Collider will be upgraded from 8.4 tesla magnets to 11 to 13 tesla

Oxford Instruments will work with CERN for the next generation upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to high luminosity. The proposed HiLumi upgrade will enable a significant increase in the proton collision rate and extend the physics reach of the LHC. This requires the deployment of high field 11-13 Tesla magnets constructed with Nb3Sn …

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Graphene Based computer logic circuits

A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering have solved a problem that previously presented a serious hurdle for the use of graphene in electronic devices. Graphene is a single-atom thick carbon crystal with unique properties beneficial for electronics including extremely high electron mobility and phonon thermal conductivity. However, …

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Update on China’s High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor HTR-PM

A key nuclear research project for China is the demonstration Shidaowan HTR-PM. It will have 210 MWe (two reactor modules, each of 250 MWt) which is being built at Shidaowan in Shandong province, driving a single steam turbine at about 40% thermal efficiency. It is now expected to be completed in 2015. IAEA (Aug 2012 …

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