Starfire Scientific is an ambitious new space launch company. They are currently developing an 8″ gun propulsion launcher for high altitude sounding flights and to orbit small satellites. Operational tests of the Starfire multi-chamber gun propulsion launcher began in 2011 and will continue throughout 2012 with commercial flights beginning soon after. They currently have a …
Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Here he gives the talk “The Rise of the Different: Why the Global Order Doesn’t Work and What We Can Do About It.” His analysis focuses on global macro political trends and emerging markets, which he defines as …
Saturn’s largest moon Titan is an eerie world about the size of Mercury. It is the only moon in the solar system with a thick, hazy atmosphere and the only place aside from Earth that has large bodies of liquid on its surface. But there’s also one very big difference: on frigid Titan, the lakes …
Fightaging looks at the use of the NAD chemical to reverse age related inflammation and insulin resistance in muscle tissue. There has been a fair amount of research into the effects of manipulating hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) in lower animals, mostly nematode worms I believe. Interestingly this is one of the few manipulations in which …
The Chinese government will ease its one-child family size restrictions and abolish re-education through labor camps, significantly curtailing two policies that for decades have defined the state’s power to control citizens’ lives. The changes were announced in a party decision that also laid out broad and potentially far-reaching proposals to restructure the economy by encouraging …
Introducing metal 3D printing to the world as a viable solution for fully functional firearm prototypes. At http://www.solidconcepts.com you can learn more about the reliability, usability, durability and accuracy of DMLS as a functioning prototype or product, and this gun is a successful demonstration of each of those attributes. Its chamber sees pressure above 20,000 …
NBC and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson on Friday announced an agreement to track the development of the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane on television — climaxing in a flight that will put Branson and his children into outer space. If all the flight tests proceed according to plan, that inaugural passenger spaceflight could take off from …
The Carnival of Space 327 is up at Pam Hoffman Everyday Spacer Universe Today – How did supermassive black holes get so… well, supermassive… in the early Universe, when seemingly not enough time had yet passed for them to accumulate their mass through steady accretion processes alone? The Chandra space telescope blog thinks about the …
1. Atomic Insight – I want a nuclear plant in my backyard. So do some of my neighbors A substantial number of the town’s residents gathered at their historic Colonial Theater on October 30 to watch Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise, they cheered with pride when the film turned its attention to their home territory. They …
GE and Hitachi are building the first commercial-scale U-235 laser enrichment facility licensed for production. It will use an Australian-developed laser enrichment technology known as Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation (SILEX). Currently Silex has completed its phase I test loop program at GE-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment’s (GLE) facility in North Carolina. When the commercial …
MIT chemical engineers have designed tiny particles that can “steer” themselves along preprogrammed trajectories and align themselves to flow through the center of a microchannel, making it possible to control the particles’ flow through microfluidic devices without applying any external forces. Such particles could make it more feasible to design lab-on-a-chip devices, which hold potential …