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DailyTech - Miniature Nuclear Reactors to be on Sale Within 5 Years

Hyperion, Toshiba, others, race to produce “personal” nuclear power.

Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, the Hyperion design uses no water for cooling, meaning it can be sited anywhere. It is designed to be covered in concrete and then buried while in operation, to reduce the risk of tampering. The reactor must be excavated every 7-10 years for refueling, but can otherwise be left entirely undisturbed.

Since power is produced 100% of the time, the total energy output is more than 15 times what the world’s most powerful 400-foot tall 5 MW wind turbine will produce. The total cost is estimated at $25 million USD. It generates no greenhouse gases while in operation and, when one takes into account the total amount of resources used during manufacture, is said to have much less of a carbon footprint than even wind or solar power.

The Phoenix > Lifestyle Features > Space cowboy

For more than 50 years, UConn physics professor Ronald Mallett had a secret. Now that it’s out, we may be one step closer to traveling back in time.

Traveling into the future is easy. Anyone familiar with Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity knows a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. So it’s simple, really: all you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a long — long, long — round-trip voyage, and head for the stars. By the time you return to Earth in, say, five years (as marked by you onboard your light-year-traveling spaceship, of course), you’ll have aged half a decade while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

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For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past.

Mallett is convinced that time travel will become a reality sooner rather than later. “What I’m doing, I like to think of as analogous to the Wright brothers,” he says. “They sent this rickety craft across a few hundred yards of beach. But with the technological acceleration that happened after that, by the middle of the century we had intercontinental air travel. This is only the beginning. Once it can be shown to be done, even in the simplest case, then what we learn from that will be incredible.”

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If that experiment succeeds, then it would be on to the next: trying to confirm that that twisting of space leads to the twisting of time. The idea is to drop tiny neutrons into that tortioned space. If Mallett’s theories held water, the subatomic particles would travel fractions of a second backward in time.

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The actual science behind all this is dauntingly complex. And —though he once took out a provisional patent for what he called a LOTART (Laser Optical Time Machine and Receiver Transmitter), an early-warning device that might allow the reception of signals from the future that could warn us of disasters — Mallett concedes that any practical implementation of his ideas is a ways off.

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Riken researchers make brain tissues from stem cells › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease. Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.

The research was led by Yoshiki Sasai at Riken Center for Development Biology in Kobe.

DailyTech - NASA Launches Probe to Explore Solar System’s Boundary

The IBEX probe launched into orbit over the weekend to help scientists learn more about solar wind

NASA successfully launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) probe over the weekend into orbit so it will be able to research solar wind that helps protect planets from cosmic rays.  The probe launched aboard a Pegasus rocket over the Pacific Ocean.

IBEX was launched into high-orbit and is scheduled for a two-year mission to help researchers learn about solar wind that is now at its lowest pressure in the past 50 years.  The solar system’s interstellar boundary is when particles from the galaxy meet with particles that are emitted from the Sun, which helps create a large buffer zone able to help protect the solar system from the majority of cosmic rays.

DailyTech - British Breakthrough Makes Manned Mars Mission Safer

New method for protecting astronauts would make trip to Mars much safer

A team of British researchers believes that they have defeated one of the major obstacles to the journey: solar storms. The Earth is protected from deadly solar storms by its magnetosphere, which deflects the radioactive particles produced in the storm.

When a spacecraft travels beyond the protective magnetosphere, it is subject to the destructive power of these storms that scientists claim can pop-up quickly and pose severe risk to instruments on the spacecraft and the lives of the astronauts in the spacecraft.

The system Bingham and other researchers developed creates a mini magnetosphere around the spacecraft. The team says that the theory has been tested in the lab on a scale model and provides almost total protection to the ship and occupants inside the vessel.

Designing a mini magnetosphere had previously been dismissed as impossible due to the large amount of equipment and power deemed necessary to create the protective bubble. The researchers were able to develop a prototype system that in its final form would be about the size of a merry-go-round on a playground and require as much energy to operate as a kettle.

Scientists see the system being comprised of two mini magnetosphere-generating satellites housed in outriders in front of the spacecraft. The artificial magnetosphere would not run at all times and would only be fired up when a solar storm was detected.

DailyTech - World’s First Fully Functional Artificial Heart Costs $192,000

French invention could help to extend the natural human lifespan

French scientists have invented a working prototype of a fully artificial heart.  The heart is based on bleeding edge technology found in satellites and aircraft.  The heart beats nearly like its organic counterpart and operates using similar feedback as well.  It uses electric sensors to monitor and control heart rate and blood flow.

Carmat, the company who developed the device, with funding from the European space and defense group EADS, unveiled the heart at a Paris press conference this week.  The device could save millions — and its all thanks to modern aerospace technology, according to Carmat’s top executives.  Carmat’s chief operating officer Patrick Coulombier states, “It’s the same principle in the airplane as in the body.”

In the past there have been artificial hearts, like the much hyped Jarvik heart, however they were only a temporary fix while awaiting transplant.  The key problem was that they could not adjust their pumping like a biological heart, and could only be adjusted externally.  This limited their usefulness.

The new heart tries its best to model the real thing, and come awfully close.  Tiny pressure and altitude sensors, developed for use in airplanes, feed information about blood flow to the heart.  The device responds almost immediately, with lightening fast decisions to increase or decrease blood flow.

Past hearts have also only had one pump, but the new heart features two, just like the real heart. It pumps blood to the lungs and then pumps the returning blood to the rest of the body, just like in the real heart.  The new heart is made largely of a combination of polymer and pig tissue, a similar design to modern heart valves, implanted in many people.

The device has been successfully tested on large mammals, and is awaiting permission to begin clinical human trials.  Its makers are very confident that the device will be safe, long-lived, and will open undreamt of possibilities for people with heart disease.  Initially it will be offered to those suffering from a massive heart attack or who had heart failure.  However eventually it could be implanted in people with milder heart problems.

NASA - Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth

Oct. 30, 2008: During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,’” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”

Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.

DailyTech - New Paper Is 500 Times Stronger Than Steel, 10 Times Lighter

New nanotube paper is expected to set the mark as the world’s strongest material by the year’s end, to be used in aircraft

The new paper is composed of intertwined carbon nanotubes.  Thanks to nanotubes’ excellent flexibility, it can bend like normal paper.  Multiple sheets can be stacked for rigidity.  However, unlike normal paper, it can be up to 500 times stronger than steel, its creators predict, while being a mere tenth of the weight.

Enceladus up close - The Big Picture - Boston.com

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | New minerals point to wetter Mars

A Nasa space probe has discovered a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars.

The find suggests liquid water remained on Mars’ surface a billion years later than scientists had previously thought.

DailyTech - Robot Capable of Doing Chores Developed in Japan

Toyota Motor Corp. and the University of Tokyo have jointly developed a prototype robot named “AR” capable of handling household chores according to The Mainichi Daily News. In a demonstration for reporters the robot was able to clean up rooms, put away dishes from a dining table and pickup shirts and put them in a washing machine. The robot was also capable of moving furniture in order to sweep under a table.

The robot is 155 cm tall, weighs 130 kg, and moves around on wheels. This particular robot’s strengths include the ability to distinguish different objects such as furniture and cleaning equipment. Past robots have traditionally had difficulty handling anything other than solid objects, but AR is able to recognize clothes by their creases and actually pick them up, repeating the action should it drop them.

The robot is also able to learn by analyzing past failures and alter its behavior patterns. The robot is equipped with two arms, five recognition cameras and laser sensors. AR’s movements are slow and often clumsy, but future improvements are planned according to University of Tokyo Professor Masayuki Inaba who said, “The task now is to improve its efficiency and endurance.”

According to Toyota and Tokyo University’s Information and Robot Technology Research Initiative, the robot was developed to help ease the future labor shortage looming due to Japan’s aging society and low birthrate. The developers said they will keep improving the robot and hope to start marketing it in around seven years.

DailyTech - U.S. Beats Britain to Fusion Super Steel

New steel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory is cheaper and stronger than past steel, likely to be used in ITER fusion reactor

The new steel was developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the U.S. ITER Project Office, which is housed at ORNL.  The ORNL was recently in the news for inventing a new titanium manufacturing technique.

With its new cast stainless steel, it continued its successes. The new steel is approximately 70 percent stronger than comparable steels and could be a boon to the fusion industry.  Its material parameters are being evaluated carefully, as it is being considered for use in shielding ITER’s fusion device.

ITER is a multibillion-dollar international research and development project which is accessing the viability of creating a commercial fusion reactor.

DailyTech - One Lightbulb Project Hopes to Launch in 2010

Project hopes to send enough solar power from space to a ground station to illuminate one lightbulb

Solar power is great in that it can generate virtually free power from the energy of the sun. The catch is that existing solar power equipment isn’t particularly effective at capturing and turning the suns energy into electricity.

The concept of an orbiting satellite gathering power from space and beaming it down to the ground to power devices on Earth may sound like science fiction, but that is exactly what the One Lightbulb project hopes to accomplish.

DailyTech - Scientists Wipe Mice Memories, Forgetting the Past Could Be a Pill Away

With new medicine you may soon be able to choose to wipe your memories

The approach targets a specific chemical in the brain.  This chemical, a protein, plays a crucial role in the formation of memories.  When recalling a specific painful event, a drug developed by the researchers overloads this mechanism, causing an excess of the protein to be produced.  This causes the brain to overload and chemically wipe all trace of the negative memory, without any apparent physiologically harmful side effects.

DailyTech - New Images Show no Water Ice in Moon Crater