Foresight Update 23.21: Solar progress- May 21, 2009
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
Top News of the Week
Two new items that are follow-ons to the Moore's Law for Energy thread. A story at Technology Review about new electronics that improve the usable power from existing solar panels by 5-25%. The advance is new smarter electronics that allows for an inverter for each panel instead of one big one for the whole system…
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If you connect a 12-volt battery to a 4-ohm lamp, 3 amps of current will flow through the circuit by Ohm's Law, V=IR. Power = VI = 36 watts will be dissipated by the lamp. If you add a 2-ohm resistor in series with the lamp, the resistances add to 6 ohms, the current is 2 amps and the circuit thus dissipates 24 watts. The voltage across the resistor is 4 volts so it dissipates 8 watts and the lamp gets 8 volts and dissipates 16…
There is at Technology Review's arXiv blog an article "How to find bugs in giant software programs." It's an overview of a paper on arXiv which is a statistical study of program sizes and bug distributions in the Eclipse dataset of Java programs…
"Codex Futurius" is a project of Discover Magazine's Science Not Fiction blog in which they ask science questions
raised by science fiction…
From PhysOrg:
Implants and scaffolding for tissue growth require porous, soft materials — which are usually very fragile. Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation…
The highly anticipated Wolfram|Alpha site came online over the weekend, and here are some first impressions: alpha on firefox. They need a little work on the html — this was Firefox, but it looked the same on Konqueror…
Engineers at the University of Ulster are the first researchers to create diamond nanorods with a diameter as thin as 2.1 nm, which is not only smaller than all the currently reported diamond 1D nanostructures (4-300 nm) but also smaller than the theoretical calculated value (2.7-9 nm) for energetically stable diamond nanorods…
A nice display of serendipitous artistic images found while doing science, at Princeton…
From Azonano: Physicists to Brief Media and Public on Real Science of Antimatter
On May 15, 2009, Sony Pictures will release "Angels and Demons," and bring the world's largest particle physics laboratory to the silver screen…
—Nanodot posts by J. Storrs Hall
Foresight Events – Lectures
Foresight Lectures
May 28-29, 2009
1st Annual Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence Symposium
Palo Alto, California
Christine Peterson will speak on beneficial medical nanotechnologies.
Click here for conference details
June 17-18, 2009
Size Matters 2009: the future fields of application, opportunities and ethical challenges of nanoscience
Saarbrücken, Germany
Christine Peterson will speak on Nanotechnology & Open Source Sensing.
Click here for conference details
August 20-22, 2009
Gnomedex: a technology conference of inspiration and influence
Seattle, Washington
Christine Peterson will speak on life extension.
Click here for conference details
Advancements in technologies such as nanotech, robotics, and biotech are promising to make major differences in our lives in the not-too-distant future, as the Industrial Revolution did to the agrarian world — to do for the physical world what the computer and Internet have done to the world of information.
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