Posted by admin in Science on 31. Aug, 2010 | 0 Comments
Thorium One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and 3.5 million tons of coal, according to the former director of CERN. An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a [...]
A new breakthrough in cell regeneration could lead to the repair of damaged hearts Heart disease remains one the biggest killers in the Western world. When a heart attack or heart failure occurs, permanent damage often affects the heart, destroying live cells and leaving the patient with irreversible scarring. This scarring can often lead to [...]
The Tevatron Accelerator An interesting blog post from University of Padua physicist Tommaso Dorigo is churning up the rumor mill this morning, and it’s so tantalizing we can’t help but engage in a little rumormongering ourselves. So without any evidence or proof, we’re just going to dive right into the meat of the matter: there’s [...]
The Fusion Core of Suppes’ Homemade Reactor Need a weekend project around the house? Mark Suppes, web developer by day, has built his own nuclear fusion reactor in a Brooklyn workspace. It kind of makes that project car you’ve got rusting in the garage seem lame by comparison. Suppes’ reactor – it’s about the size [...]
You know the Bat Computer, Batman’s machine that can answer any question? Well, IBM has been working on developing something like it for well on three years now, and now the company feels that the machine is nearly ready for prime time. Literally — called "Watson," the Q&A supercomputer is scheduled to appear on Jeopardy! [...]
Posted by admin in Space on 26. Aug, 2010 | No Comments
How’s this for spooky action at a distance? The sun, at 93 million miles away, appears to be influencing the decay of radioactive elements inside the Earth, researchers say. Given what we know about radioactivity and solar neutrinos, this should not happen. It’s so bizarre that a couple scientists at Stanford and Purdue universities believe [...]
Posted by admin in Science on 26. Aug, 2010 | No Comments
‘Hygroelectric’ collectors could someday harness atmospheric electricity Nikola Tesla once dreamed of being able to harness electricity from the air. Now, research being conducted at Brazil’s University of Campinas (UC) is indicating that such a scenario may indeed become a reality. Professor Fernando Galembeck, a UC chemist, is leading the study into the ways in [...]
Posted by admin in Space on 25. Aug, 2010 | No Comments
The Hubble Space Telescope image of the inner region of Abell 1689, an immense cluster of galaxies located 2.2 billion light-years away Dark energy has been described as the greatest puzzle of our universe. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds and astronomers have now devised a new [...]
Posted by admin in Space on 25. Aug, 2010 | No Comments
Spotting Sunspots Big Bear Solar Observatory/NJIT Researchers at Big Bear Solar Observatory have tuned their adaptive optics array and achieved first light, capturing this image of a sunspot that is now the most detailed ever captured in visible light. The image was captured with Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), a brand new instrument (as [...]
Posted by admin in Space on 24. Aug, 2010 | No Comments
Arecibo If we ever find aliens, there’s a good chance they’ll be intelligent machines, not biological systems as we know them. So says a senior SETI astronomer. Writing in the journal Acta Astronautica, Seth Shostak says we ought to turn our attention to galactic centers and hot, young stars — likely areas of interest to [...]
