Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics has “Enhanced Adhesion by Gecko-Inspired Hierarchical Fibrillar Adhesives” for makgin wall crawling robots The CMU work will be presented at 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 12 – 17, 2009, Kobe, Japan. Tankbot is a simple, energy efficient, lightweight (60 g), and robust climbing robot. It uses …
Scientists and engineers at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) are hoping to save around Rs.5 billion (Rs.500 crore or $104 million) by modifying the design of four fast reactors nuclear power plants. With the experience gained from prototype that is being completed, the new projects can be completed in five years as …
An excellent idea featured at Melanie Swan’s blog: there are 1,000 trillion bacteria that are part of each human (10x the number of human cells) could be an ideal augmentation substrate. There are at least three ways for achieving human-electronic interfaces; physical implants, wearables and a third as yet unconsidered possibility, exploiting the human bacterial …
Many environmentalists love to point to public transportation as the blessed technology and policy which would reduce oil consumption and dependence. I agree that increasing public transportation can be helpful, but how helpful and how long would it take to have what level of impact ? In the big energy picture, the USA uses 40% …
From the Economist magazine, the genetic makeup of individuals effects results of performance enhancing doping tests. It shows that some dopers would not be caught with current tests and that some innocent people would be accused. I think we just need to make better safe forms of enhancement and then not worry about it. The …
In theory, it is possible for a magnetic sail to launch directly from the surface of a planet near one of its magnetic poles, repelling itself from the planet’s magnetic field. However, this requires the magnetic sail to be maintained in its “unstable” orientation. A launch from Earth requires superconductors with 80 times the current …
AlFin’s excellent blog points out that “nuclear batteries” could be used for a near term civilization lifeboat. The initial goal would not be creating fully resistant civilization lifeboats that could handle destruction of the biosphere but hardened points of key civilization services like databases, medical facilities, food services, water services and electricity. The goal would …
The NY Times discusses an interesting study that connects the removal of lead from gasoline with the drop in violent crime Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior. In the early 1990s, a …