1. Alcoa today announced it has developed a new all-aluminum space frame and bus design for BYD that has reduced the weight of the new BYD Electric Bus body by 40 percent, or nearly one ton, versus steel options. The first two BYD Electric Bus prototypes were launched this week in Changsha City, Hunan Province, …
Low-Latency Lunar Surface Telerobotics and Telepresence from Earth-Moon Lagrange Points by Dan Lester (27 pages) * Latency smaller than our “cognitive timescale” leads to ”telepresence” * When 2-‐way latency exceeds our “cognitive timescale”, the brain works differently. “Move and wait” to avoid instability – inefficient. Cognitive Timescale is about half of one second • Human …
ITU (International Telecommunications Union) World Telecommunication facts and figures for 2011 (8 pages) With 5.9 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions, global penetration reaches 87%, and 79% in the developing world. Mobile-broadband subscriptions have grown 45% annually over the last four years and today there are twice as many mobile-broadband as fixed broadband subscriptions. * Of 1.8 billion …
Ohio State University – Scientists under the age of 40 used to make the majority of significant breakthroughs in chemistry, physics and medicine – but that is no longer the case, new research suggests. A study of Nobel Laureates from 1901 to 2008 in these three fields examined the age at which scientists did their …
Businessweek – Italian bonds slumped, driving two- five-, 10- and 30-year yields to euro-era records, after LCH Clearnet SA raised the deposit it demands for trading the nation’s securities. Two-year note yields rose above 10-year rates, with five- year debt climbing above 7.5 percent as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s offer to resign left his weakened …
“Peptoids at the 7th Summit: Toward Macromolecular Systems Engineering” [8 page pdf] kicks off the peptoid special issue of Biopolymers: Peptide Science. All the papers are open access. In peptoid self-assembly, the most exciting development of the past year has been the synthesis of peptoid nanosheets, crystalline bilayers with a thickness of 2.7 nm and …
Technology Review – Polymer solar cells are inefficient compared to silicon solar cells, but they are much cheaper to make. Organic materials—whether made of polymers or so-called “small molecules,” which are organic compounds with a low molecular weight—can be made into inks and printed over large areas. They’re also lightweight and flexible, which makes them …
1. Discovery Space News by Ian O’Neill – Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. The lasers planned by the Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility, known as “ELI,” would concentrate 200 petawatts of power — that’s 100,000 times the …
Ars Technica – Internet Explorer still retains a majority of the desktop browser market share, at 52.63 percent, a substantial 1.76 point drop from September. However, desktop browsing makes up only about 94 percent of Web traffic; the rest comes from phones and tablets, both markets in which Internet Explorer is all but unrepresented. As …
Cancer is responsible for killing 40 per cent of all the men and women who die prematurely between the ages of 25 and 74 in the UK – according to a new analysis of the figures released today by Cancer Research UK. This means cancer causes more untimely deaths than any other disease including coronary …
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jim Breyer made $5 billion for his firm Accel Partners and earned himself billionaire status by taking a risky bet on Facebook in 2004. Breyer says that over the next decade “you will see at least half of the top 10 or 20 Internet companies come from China. China remains a …