Virgin space flights cleared for US take-off
Los Angeles (AFP) May 29, 2014 -
Richard Branson's dream of commercial space flights took a step nearer reality after Virgin Galactic signed a deal with US aviation authorities to let it blast paying customers into space, the company said Thursday.
The agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sets out how routine space missions from the Spaceport America base in the US state of New Mexico will be coordinated ...
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Velociraptor robot almost as fast as robotic rival Cheetah
Daejeon, South Korea (UPI) May 30, 2013 -
Luckily for Usain Bolt, robots aren't allowed to compete for gold medals. If they were, the new Velociraptor robot designed by researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, might force Bolt to settle for silver - or bronze if Raptor's robotic rival Cheetah raced, too.
The new sprinting robot, Raptor, currently tops out at 28.5 mph. Bolt's highest clocked speed ...
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Sending entangled beams through fast-light materials
College Park MD (SPX) May 27, 2014 -
Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streamin ...
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A Path Toward More Powerful Tabletop Accelerators
Berkeley CA (SPX) May 29, 2014 -
Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed.
Researchers hope the finding could bring about a new era of accelerators that would need just a few meters to bring particles to great speeds, rather than the many kilometers required of ...
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Leaving the islands
Munich, Germany (SPX) May 29, 2014 -
In a recent study involving LMU researchers, the desorption of oxygen molecules from a silver surface was successfully visualized for the first time. The effects account for the shortcomings of conventional models of desorption.
In heterogeneous catalytic reactions, which take place at the boundary layer between a solid and the gas phase, the products finally have to desorb from the surfac ...
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Scientists develop new hybrid energy transfer system
Southampton, UK (SPX) May 28, 2014 -
Scientists from the University of Southampton, in collaboration with the Universities of Sheffield and Crete, have developed a new hybrid energy transfer system, which mimics the processes responsible for photosynthesis. From photosynthesis to respiration, the processes of light absorption and its transfer into energy represent elementary and essential reactions that occur in any biological livi ...
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DNA nanotechnology places enzyme catalysis within an arm's length
Tucson AZ (SPX) May 29, 2014 -
Using molecules of DNA like an architectural scaffold, Arizona State University scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Michigan, have developed a 3-D artificial enzyme cascade that mimics an important biochemical pathway that could prove important for future biomedical and energy applications.
The findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Led ...
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