Years ago I read an engineering white paper (recent version, see Appendix 2) on the feasibility of collecting solar energy in space and beaming it via microwaves to collectors where it was needed. The numbers worked out to a clean, perpetual power source for 9bn people at American per capita consumption levels for for $2 trillion. Seemed like a lot of money at the time. It is one of those things that is bound to happen as there is no other source that makes as much scientific, engineering and economic sense and has the scale. Space Energy Inc is a startup hoping to commercialise that vision.
Space Energy, Inc. has assembled an impressive team of scientists, engineers and business people, putting together what Sage calls “a rock-solid commercial platform” for their company… “This is an inevitable technology; it’s going to happen. If we can put solar panels in space where the sun shines 24 hours a day, if we have a safe way of transmitting the energy to Earth and broadcasting it anywhere, that is a serious game changer.” If everything falls into place for this company, they could be producing commercially available SBSP within a decade.
Terrafugia, the car/plane hybrid, made its first flights for the FAA, (gallery)
The aircraft is designed to be driven on public roads: its wings fold up in 30 seconds, and it operates in front-wheel drive and uses 27 miles per gallon. Transition also fits in a standard garage. In the air, it can reach speeds of 115 miles per hour on flights of 450 miles or less at 30 miles per gallon… it will not hit the market for at least two years, and even then it’ll cost around $194,000.
I’ve been agnostic on cold fusion, with not enough data either way. Now U.S. Navy researches claim to have experimentally verified that fusion at room temperature exists, though still an incredibly weak effect.
U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting… Cold fusion was first reported in 1989 by researchers Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, then with the University of Utah, prompting a global effort to develop the technology… Other scientists were unable to duplicate the 1989 results, thereby discrediting the work… Now, the Naval researchers claim that the problem was instrumentation, which was not up to the task of detecting such small numbers of neutrons… Antonella De Ninno, a scientist with New Technologies Energy and Environment (Rome)… reported both excess heat and helium gas… Tadahiko Mizuno of Japan’s Hokkaido University also reported excess heat generation and gamma-ray emissions…
All three research groups are currently exploring both experimental and theoretical studies in hopes of better understanding the cold fusion process well enough to commercialize it.
This is a great idea for funding fun to fly robots. WiFly?
Researchers at Germany’s Ilmenau University of Technology are developing flying quadcopter robots that can be used to form a self-assembling ad-hoc wireless network in the event of disaster. Built with off-the-shelf parts (including VIA’s Pico-ITX hardware and a GPS unit) the robots are designed to provide both mobile phone and WiFi access — and they can do it far more quickly than a technician on the ground might be able to. The device comes in a kit for €300 (about $380), which includes all but the battery…
“Alpha” from Wolfram Research computes answers to natural language questions.
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web… Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?” … The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media)… The system is beautiful, and the user interface is already quite simple and clean. In addition, answers include computationally generated diagrams and graphs — not just text.
Japan researchers have put a female face on a dynamically stabilised robot, and are saying it will appear as a fashion model later in the month.
The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres (five foot two inches) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms (95 pounds) — including batteries… The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment… Like her real-life counterparts, robot model HRP-5C commands a hefty price — the institute said developing her cost more than 200 million yen (two million dollars).
Researchers at the universities of Miami, Tokyo, and Tohoku have discovered a completely new way of storing energy using a magnetic field.
Charged by the application of a very strong magnetic field, the Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) contains a set of nano-magnets–zones some 5 nanometers across in a zinc-gallium-arsenic-magnesium matrix–which absorb energy and then release it over time… “the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected,” said one of the researchers… the current device is a few hundred micrometers across… the current delivered by the MTJ is spin-polarized; the electrons are predominately spinning in one direction… That’s hot news for spintronics, which, together with graphene, has the most exciting potential for fundamentally new computational devices. Spin logic could work much faster at much lower power…
TED video from Juan Enriquez – How mindboggling science will outlast the crisis. The non-financial crisis part starts about half-way.
Venture backed companies are 0.02% of GDP investment creating about 17.8% of output… three big trends – the ability to engineer microbes (beer with resveratrol, bacteria to aid kidneys), the ability to engineer tissues (human molars, a trachea, an ear, a bladder, a heart) and the ability to engineer robots… prosthetics are the wedge into bionics… rate of improvement is orders of magnitude beyond biologic. Homo Evolutis: a self-evolving species
A key development in naval firepower gave England the sea in Elizabeth’s time
The new research follows the discovery of the first wreck of an Elizabethan fighting ship… Elizabeth’s navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage…. Elizabeth’s “supergun”, although relatively small, could hit a target a mile away. At a ship-to-ship fighting distance of about 100 yards, the ball would have sufficient punch to penetrate the oak planks of a galleon, travelling across the deck and out the other side… the English navy and its gun founders were almost 50 years ahead of their time technologically… This made Elizabeth I the mother of British naval dominance lasting three centuries.
Scientists at UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst have a new data storage technique that lets microscopic nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces.
Russell and Xu conceived of the elegantly simple solution of layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal… the molecules in the thin film of block copolymers – two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together – self-assemble into an extremely precise, equidistant pattern when spread out on a surface… the density is over 15 times higher than anything achieved before… 10 terabits per square inch… Today’s commercial hard disks carry 200 gigabits (0.2 terabits) per square inch.
The trouble is intelligent life is scattered not just across space, but across time. Explains why there is precious little here on earth in the 21st century.
The discovery of more than 330 planets outside our solar system in recent years has helped refine the number of life forms that are likely to exist. The current research estimates that there are at least 361 intelligent civilisations in our Galaxy and possibly as many as 38,000.