Thu - May 4, 2006

Even More Firebird Accessories!


Professor Sir John Pendry, of Imperial College London, who helped pioneer superlenses, said: "If the speck of dust is close enough it induces a very aggressive response in the cloaking material which essentially acts back on the speck of dust and forces it to stop shining.

Posted at 12:29 AM     Read More  

Tue - April 18, 2006

I want one for my Firebird!


"Our advanced designs, like the gas core and the ablative engine concepts, could take astronauts to Mars in half that time, and perhaps even in as little as 45 days," said Kirby Meyer, an engineer with Positronics Research on the study.

Posted at 12:59 AM     Read More  

Wed - January 18, 2006

Engage Impulse Engines, Mr Sulu


Tests on a prototype called the Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G) thruster, at ESA’s Electric Propulsion Laboratory in the Netherlands showed that DS4G’s two-step process produces an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210 kilometres per second – more than 10 times faster than possible with the engine in SMART-1, and four times faster than the latest prototype ion engine designs.

Posted at 10:35 PM     Read More  

Thu - December 1, 2005

Yin & Yang (in an odd sense)


"The construction of Taipei 101 is totally different to many other high-rise buildings because it used hybrid structures made of both concrete and steel, to give it added protection from earthquakes and fire.

Posted at 11:01 PM     Read More  

Thu - November 24, 2005

Cool, but what's the Frames Per Second?


Because each qubit carries two values, a quantum computer with two qubits could carry out four parallel calculations, one with three qubits eight calculations, and so on. "I see no major technical obstacles to the system I envisage working with 100 qubits," says Yao.

Posted at 12:30 AM     Read More  

Fri - September 16, 2005

I was strolling through the office one day....


SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Posted at 06:43 PM     Read More  

Fri - July 22, 2005

What Does Microwave Popcorn Feel Like?


The millimeter wave technology could go mobile on modified Humvees or other vehicles for use in crowd control.

Posted at 10:13 PM     Read More  

Fri - July 15, 2005

I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.


60 years ago tomorrow morning at 6:29:45 AM (my time) an odd thing happened.

Posted at 07:25 PM     Read More  

Thu - July 7, 2005

Grandfather paradox?


In other words, even if you take a trip back in time with the specific intention of killing your father, so long as you know he is happily sitting in his chair when you leave him in the present, you can be sure that something will prevent you from murdering him in the past.

Posted at 03:11 PM     Read More  

Wed - July 6, 2005

Super Cool discovery from Super Hot temperatures (aka: Something that really matters!)


Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient transport of electricity, said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group and who is the John D.

Posted at 05:11 PM     Read More  

Fri - October 3, 2003

East, West, North, & ...North??


Instead of searching for magnetic monopoles in real space, Yoshinori Tokura of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba and co-workers turned to momentum space - the mathematical space in which condensed matter physicists construct Fermi surfaces, Brillouin zones and so on. The team was motivated by recent theoretical work which suggested that the behaviour of magnetic monopoles in momentum space is closely related to the anomalous Hall effect .

Posted at 10:23 PM     Read More  

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