1. Kirk Sorensen will be presenting an upgraded molten-salt reactor (the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR) concept as one of a dozen finalists at the Manchester Festival. Kirk will also be presenting at Google as part of the Google Talk series in July. A dozen of the most promising applicants will be invited to present …
Starts with a Bang hosts the 108th Carnival of Space. This site contributed two articles. One was on the blast wave accelerator launcher which could launch high gravity hardened payloads for $200-2000/kilogram. and another article a nuclear thermal rocket variant (nuclear DC-X) for launching payloads for $85-150/kilogram. Centauri dreams looks at technology for mimicking volcanoes …
Michael Anissimov has an article which mentions the inevitability of global governance in a future with full blown molecular manufacturing nanofactories. This case has been made by some others that the revolutionary manufacturing capabilities of unrestricted nanofactories would require extreme security measures. If someone could do whatever they want with a atomically precise nanofactory, they …
Google is looking good for continued Internet domination. The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets …
The 2009 Energy Information Administration Projections to 2030 have been released. The highest energy growth case has China at 274 billion kilowatt hours for 2020 and 426 billion kilowatt hours for 2030. China is increasing its nuclear build targets to 75 gigawatts for 2020 and 104 nuclear reactors for 2030. The 2030 reactors would mostly …
More details on the mesoscale mammal brain map proposal that this site first mentioned in February 2009 as the last entry in this post. Mesoscale is a few tens of nanometers and a few thousand molecules. There is a millimeter cube resolution brain map. So this would be about one million times higher resolution. The …
The JILA team has controlled the probe’s position in three dimensions to better than 40 picometers (1 nanometer = 1000 picometers) over 100 seconds. In imaging applications, they showed the long-term drift at room temperature was a mere 5 picometers per minute, a 100-fold improvement over the best previous results under ambient conditions. Just like …
The therapy aims to stop HIV re-producing A one-time gene therapy that puts an anti- HIV RNA weapon into blood cells is safe and, in higher doses and stronger form, could make the body resist the AIDS virus, a clinical trial suggests. This “major advance in the field” is the largest clinical trial ever to …
Canada has an interesting attempt at a political coup. Three disparate opposition parties—the centrist Liberals, the socialist New Democrats (NDP) and the separatist Bloc Québécois—have ganged up in order to oust the minority Conservative government and replace them with a centre-left coalition. On Thursday December 4th Prime Minister Harper asked Michaëlle Jean, who as governor-general …
Biofuel projection from now until 2017 from the (Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute) Fapri 2008 Agricultural outlook The USA and Brazil produce about 70% of the worlds biofuel. This projection is based on conventional non-cellulose, biofuel from waste and non-algae biofuel production. Therefore, it seems likely to be a vast underestimate of the actual …
Current world nuclear power is 611 million tons of oil equivalent. (multiply by 7.1-7.4 for barrel of oil equivalent) This is from 64000 tons of Uranium per year being burned at about 5% efficiency. 3200 tons of Uranium if deep burn reactors were used. Deep burn (50-99%) burn of uranium and thorium for nuclear power …