Global production of biofuels increased 17 percent in 2010 to reach an all-time high of 105 billion liters (28 billion gallons US, 667 million barrels of oil), up from 90 billion liters (24 billion gallons US) in 2009. Biofuels provided 2.7% of all global fuel for road transportation—an increase from 2% in 2009. The two …
Applied Physics Letters – Tuning laser-induced band gaps in graphene Could a laser field lead to the much sought-after tunable band gaps in graphene? By using Floquet theory combined with Green’s functions techniques, we predict that a laser field in the mid-infrared range can produce observable band gaps in the electronic structure of graphene. Furthermore, …
Engineers at Brown University have created a nanopatch for the heart that tests show restores areas that have been damaged, such as from a heart attack. Credit: Frank Mullin/Brown University Engineers at Brown University and in India have a promising new approach to treating heart-attack victims. The researchers created a nanopatch with carbon nanofibers and …
The Indian Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), under construction at Kalpakkam, near Chennai, is “a unique reactor” which does not require water for emergency cooling of its nuclear fuel core in the case of an accident, said Baldev Raj, Director, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) at Kalpakkam. The 500 MWe PFBR will be …
Arxiv – Gliese 581d is the fi rst discovered terrestrial-mass exoplanet in the habitable zone It has been suggested that the recently discovered exoplanet GJ581d might be able to support liquid water due to its relatively low mass and orbital distance. However, GJ581d receives 35% less stellar energy than Mars and is probably locked in …
Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has assembled a team of nine top European scientists for the research effort to build a computer model of a human brain. The Human Brain Project is in discussion with the EU for a £1billion (US$1.61 billion) grant. ‘This is one of the …
Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences have outlined a method for storing programs inside DNA that simplifies nanocomputing—computation at the molecular level. Co-authored by Jessie Chang and Dennis Shasha, Stored Clocked Programs Inside DNA: A Simplifying Framework for Nanocomputing (Morgan and Claypool) describes how to build millions of DNA programs from …
China plans to build second-generation nuclear power plants in neighbouring countries, including Vietnam, Pakistan, Malaysia and others. At the same time, it wants to increase domestic civilian nuclear production six-fold by 2020. It has tightened security after Fukushima. After 13 years of development, the CNNC last year successfully developed a new reactor, which has a …
Gartner projects that the number of tablets will increase from about 17 million at the end of 2010 to 294 million (over 16 times more) by 2015. There will be a new class of robot that uses a tablet or smartphone as its head launching in 2011 and 2012. iRobot which makes millions of vacuuming …
graphene-based waveguide-integrated optical modulator. This is a follow up to coverage of graphen optical modulators from a few days ago. UC Berkeley researchers have a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size — small enough to include in silicon circuitry — and modulated it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say …
Cyclone Power Technologies, developer of the external combustion Cyclone Engine, announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has allowed the company a patent on its scalable waste energy recycling engine known as the WHE (Waste Heat Engine). It is designed to run on waste heat from the exhaust of small industrial furnaces, diesel engines …