Tech Suki

DailyTech - IBM Creates Tunable Nanolaser

IBM continues its march towards creating an optical computer with another breakthrough.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Stem cells ‘created from teeth’

Japanese scientists say they have created human stem cells from tissue taken from the discarded wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.

DailyTech - Physicists Theorize New Method for Faster than Light Travel

he physicists — Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy — have theorized a new idea for faster than light travel that involves manipulating dark energy to propel a spacecraft. According to Space.com the universe — in theory — moved faster than light for a short time after the Big Bang, propelled by dark energy which represents about 74% of the mass energy budget in the universe. Space.com goes on to say that, 22% of the mass energy budget consists of dark matter and what remains of the mass-energy budget in the universe being made up of stars, planets and other things we see.

Some current evidence supports the theory that the fabric of space-time can expand faster than the speed of light. This is said to be because the reality which light travels is expanding itself.

PhysX by NVIDIA - A review of what to expect

I took a few captures of the Nurien demo:

DailyTech - Cassini Spacecraft Investigates Saturn’s Enceladus

“Icy Jets” Suggest Liquid Water May Be Beneath Surface
New pictures taken by the Cassini Spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have revealed stunning new features of the moon’s surface. The images display the so-called “tiger stripes” that span the south pole, and reveal the features to be V-shaped cracks a thousand feet deep. Seen for the first time are the sources of active jets inside the features, which are hurling plumes of ice particles high into space.

DailyTech - Intel Roadmap Shows SSDs Launching in Q3 2008

Extra info: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3376

Intel SSDs will have a read speed of 240MB/sec and a write speed of 170MB/s

DailyTech - New Ribosomal Research Offers Fresh Evidence, Understanding of Evolution

Skepticism aside, evolution is steadily being verified and analyzed thanks to cutting edge computing

Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 | News | Custom PC

Nvidia claims that it’s just demonstrated ‘the world’s first fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer’ at the show, which was achieved using a Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS) containing four Quadro GPUs, each with 1GB of memory.

Nvidia says that ‘the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application.’ Impressively, Nvidia claims that the polished car demo runs at 30fps at 1,920 x 1,080, and includes ‘an image-based lighting paint shader, ray traced shadows, and reflections and refractions’ at three bounces.

Nvidia also demonstrated the demo running at 2,560 x 1,600, although frame rates have not been revealed at this resolution. Even so, the demo makes for a visual treat at this resolution, which demonstrates the gorgeous reflective potential of ray traced games

DailyTech - Reports: IPhone’s 3G Well Below Specified Standards

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cern lab set for beam milestone

A vast physics experiment - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - reaches a key milestone this weekend ahead of an official start-up on 10 September.

DailyTech - OCZ Announces Core Series V2 SSDs with 170MB/sec Reads, 98MB/sec Writes

OCZ announces larger, faster SSDs with a built-in mini-USB port for firmware upgrades.

The SSDs will be available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB storage capacities. In addition, read speeds have increased to 170MB/sec while write speeds are now listed at 98MB/sec across the whole product family.

Another interesting feature of the drives is the addition of a mini-USB port which allows end-users to increase the performance of their drives with future firmware updates from OCZ.

DailyTech - New DIY SSD Accepts Six Secure Digital Cards

Using six Transcend 8GB SDHC cards, Impress Watch was able to extract sequential reads of 111.4 MB/sec and sequential writes of 55.17 MB/sec while operating in a RAID-0 configuration. For comparison, the OCZ Core Series is rated at 120 to 143 MB/sec for reads and 80 to 93 MB/sec for writes; Super Talent’s upgraded MX Series SSDs clock in at 120MB/sec read and 80MB/sec write.

DailyTech - Commercially Developed Plasma Engine Soon to be Tested in Space

New Vasimir engine could cut Mars travel to 60-70 days, allow greater rocket fuel economy

The new rocket is named Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR).  A traditional rocket can produce a specific impulse of around 450 seconds, or in other words 1 pound of thrust from 1 pound of fuel for 450 seconds.  VASIMR can produce several times this amount, cutting a trip to Mars from 6 to 9 months with conventional rockets down to a mere 2 to 3 months.  It could do this by being able to burn fuel continuously the whole trip accelerating on the first half of the journey to Mars and decelerating on the second leg of the journey, preparing to enter orbit.

The rocket consists of three critical units or cells.  The first is the plasma generator.  It sits deepest into the rocket and consists of a generator which ionizes heated light gases such as hydrogen, creating plasma — atoms stripped of their electrons.  The plasma, at a modest temperature of 10,000 °C, is then pumped into the second unit, the amplifier.  In the amplifier cell the plasma is blasted with electromagnetic waves via radio waves.  These waves heat the plasma burning hot similar to how food is heated in a microwave.  Finally the ultra-hot plasma is channeled in magnetic containment fields to the final cell, the magnetic nozzle.  This nozzle is the critical control which controls how much fuel exits, and how fast the exiting plasma is going.

The nozzle also protects the spacecraft from the burning hot plasma.  How hot is the plasma exactly??  Well, early estimates are that it will be around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius), only about 25,000 times hotter than the burning gases exiting the space shuttle.  However, thanks to the magnetic nozzle the plasma can be tamed and channeled into useful impulse.

Dr. Chang-Diaz explains, “Rockets tend to work much better the hotter the exhaust is and the plasma allows you to go to temperatures millions of degrees rather than thousands of degrees in a conventional rocket engine.”

DailyTech - Scientists Find Ways to Cloak 3D Materials

Researchers at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley have for the first time found a way to cloak 3D materials.

DailyTech - Revolutionary Nanoantenna Skin to Provide Next Gen PC Cooling, Solar Cells

New technology could one day cool PC components and recharge consumer electronics, collecting energy even at night