Nature Neuroscience – Scale: a chemical approach for fluorescence imaging and reconstruction of transparent mouse brain Scale, a new solution that turns tissue transparent without distorting its shape. Researchers can look into tissues without destructive cutting. After incubating the tissue in a concentrated urea solution for two weeks, the researchers could study the fine structure …
It was considered the great hope of the solar industry and a poster child for the government’s efforts to remake the U.S. economy with clean-tech as a linchpin. Now, after about $1 billion invested by venture capitalists, Solyndra Inc. has gone bust. The Fremont, Calif., company, which received a $535 million federal loan guarantee in …
1. Only 11 nuclear reactors will be operating in Japan with a combined power generation capacity of 9.864 GW in early September, which represents 20% of the country’s total installed capacity of 48.96 GW spread over 54 reactors according to Platts calculations Tuesday. Platts calculations were made as Japan’s Kyushu Electric and Shikoku Electric are …
Emergence of immediate funds transfer as a general-purpose means of payment (16 pages) It is a Chicago Fed paper from Bruce Summers and Kirstin Wells. The main point is that immediate funds transfer needs national programs with support from a central body to succeed in a timely fashion. The most advanced means of transferring money …
1. Centauri Dreams – Interstellar propulsion expert and solar sail proponent Greg Matloff talks about interstellar flights in worldships, and the possibility of long, slow missions to the stars. 2. Centauri Dreams – The HARPS spectrograph is looking hard at 10 nearby stars for signs of rocky planets. Six have already been identified. This article …
A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte “drive”—that’s 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the …
Memristor Memory Trends,Recent Results and research gaps area discussed by HP Why Memristor-based Memories? – RRAM with good scaling • 5 nanometer junctions demonstrated – Some memristor material systems are nonlinear • Enables use in crossbars – Crossbars • Amortizes current steering transistors over more cells • Achieve higher bit densities and lower cost than …
Carbon nanotube bundles are at the center of supercapacitors developed at Rice University. Arrays of nanotube bundles are coated via atomic layer deposition to create thousands of microscopic devices in a single array. The electron microscope images at right show the three-layer construction of one of the supercapacitors, which are about 100 nanometers wide. A …
Ridley Scott is set to helm a follow up to his own ground-breaking 1982 science fiction classic “Blade Runner” for Warner Bros-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment (“The Blind Side,” “The Book of Eli”). Alcon has not revealed whether the new Blade Runner will be a sequel or prequel to the original, and all …
General fusion aims to develop an acoustically driven magnetized target fusion (MTF) reactor. Two spheromaks are made to merge in the center of a 3 meter diameter sphere full of liquid lead-lithium. 200 pneumatic pistons hit the outside of the sphere and launch an inward going spherical pressure wave that focuses and compresses the merged …
1. Two of three patients dying of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) appear cured and a third is in partial remission after infusions of genetically engineered T cells. The treatment success came in a pilot study that was only meant to find out whether the treatment was safe, and to determine the right dose to use …