1. At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus talks about a recent Time magazine article on new nuclear plants that was quite favorable on the need for nuclear power, and optimistic about its prospects. She points out that they focus a lot of the article on a discussion of 2 start-ups headed by graduate students focusing …
There are several articles and researchers who believe that asymetric warfare will become dominant in the future. This is usually based on advanced tiny drones, cheap bioweapons, dirty nukes or massive nuclear proliferation and molecular nanotechnology. Eric Drexler has talked about unconstrained access to an unconstrained range of [nanotech]-level technologies would place unpredictable capabilities in …
At $3,299, the Form 1 could expand the market for 3-D printing technology. It can produce much higher-fidelity plastic objects than the consumer desktop printers available today. But it is still cheap enough to be affordable to a wide swath of professional designers, engineers, and dedicated tinkerers. The Form 1 can, for example, create detailed …
MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts. The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic, thus making …
Dwave’s 502 qubit adiabatic quantum computer was found to be 10,000 times faster than a regular quadcore workstation for some optimization problems and just a little faster for some other problems. There was an attempt to approximate the computing power of the Dwave quantum computer by using multiples of performance against the Linpack capabilities of …
The EPA has updated protective action guidelines in regards to radiation. The government’s legal safety standards haven’t changed. The new guidelines aren’t enforceable rules — they are suggestions to help local officials make tough decisions. In fact, the guidance repeatedly refers to meeting existing standards, not flouting them. The question, though, is how to handle …
U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Chinese Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. Every new drone feed and every new soldier with a satellite radio creates more appetite for bandwidth — an appetite the military can’t hope to fill with military spacecraft alone. To try to …
Israel’s air force is on track to developing drones that within four to five decades would carry out nearly every battlefield operation executed today by piloted aircraft, a high-ranking Israeli officer told The Associated Press Sunday. The officer, who works in the field of unmanned aerial vehicle intelligence, said Israel is speeding up research and …
Cosmislog – Bigelow Aerospace and NASA say they’ve agreed to look at ways for private ventures to contribute to human exploration missions, perhaps including construction of a moon base. NASA signed a Space Act Agreement with Bigelow Aerospace to foster ideas about how the private sector can contribute to future human missions. NASA still is …
BBC News – Duke University fitted rats with an infrared detector wired up to microscopic electrodes that were implanted in the part of their brains that processes tactile information. The researchers say that, in theory at least, a human with a damaged visual cortex might be able to regain sight through a device implanted in …
Nature Materials – Quantum dots embedded within nanowires represent one of the most promising technologies for applications in quantum photonics. Whereas the top-down fabrication of such structures remains a technological challenge, their bottom-up fabrication through self-assembly is a potentially more powerful strategy. However, present approaches often yield quantum dots with large optical linewidths, making reproducibility …