A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.
A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life… Szostak’s protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that [...]
The Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options for intervening directly in the planet’s climate. Some of these are pretty scary.
Richard Branson, a British businessman, is already offering a prize of $25m for a workable way of removing a [...]
Semi sales up 7.6% year on year (via Briefing.com). Lots of market talk about LCD sales softening as well.
Semiconductor chip sales during July increased 7.6% from last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In turn, total July sales were $22.2 billion. Sales were also up from the prior month when they totaled [...]
Progress on the invisibility cloak… Two teams lead by Xiang Zhang at Berkeley manufactured material that will bend waves close to the visible spectrum.
One approach used nanometre-scale stacks of silver and magnesium fluoride in a “fishnet” structure, while another made use of nanowires made of silver… Light is neither absorbed nor reflected by [...]
From Technology Review:
A fledgling Web site called Mygazines.com encourages people to copy and upload popular magazines that are currently on newsstands. Visitors can read high-quality digital copies of dozens of current titles, including People, Men’s Health and The Economist, in their entirety… Magazines routinely make some or all of their articles available online for free, [...]
Brad Setser thinks that China is back to holding the RMB down to maintain export volume in the face of softening global demand. From the comments:
China prefers subsidizing US consumption of Chinese goods to subsidizing Chinese consumption of Chinese goods… if China’s foreign asset accumulation continues at $800b a year, it will add [...]
Toyota Motor on Friday showed off a new stand-up scooter that could one day be seen zipping alongside the Segway on the personal-transporter superhighway…
The “Winglet” has a body the size of an A3 sheet of paper that houses an electric motor, two wheels, and internal sensors that constantly monitor the rider’s position and make adjustments [...]
Technology Review knows:
Jennifer Colegrove, analyst at iSuppli… projects that 341 million touch screens will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 218 million in 2007 and 81 million in 2006… Most touch sensors are made in Japan, Taiwan and China by companies that are relatively unknown in the U.S., like Nissha Printing Co., Wintek Corp. [...]
The top 100 advertisers in the U.S., who represent 41 percent of total advertising spending, increased measured internet spending by $1 billion; slashed newspaper spending by $674 million; and cut TV budgets by $406 million.
Comscore May 2008 results: Search volume is still increasing rapidly – about 18% per year… Google and [...]
TR reports that Ottawa will build the first gasification facility in North America to make energy from waste.
Ottawa will build the first gasification facility in North America… [It] will turn 400 metric tons of garbage per day into 21 megawatts of net electricity–enough to power about 19,000 homes… PlascoEnergy will cover the estimated [...]