I hope I never need one of these, but because I might I hope that they are perfected real darn quick! Black and white is fine if the other choice is being blind.
Physicists and Eye Doctors Design a ‘Bionic Eye’
Category: Science
Ultra-Rapid Charging Li-Ion Battery
Yow! A battery that will recharg to 80% in 60 seconds? Very cool.
My friend Greg mentioned a super capacitor that uses nanoparticles to pack in the joules. These rapid charge lithium ion batteries use the same idea. Look for them in 2006. I hope that they can up the discharge rate and get these in R/C planes.
Toshiba ultra-rapid charging battery
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Mini Big Bang Created
I wonder if this can be used in a practical fashion. Might prove to be a good source of atomic particle.
“We expected to bring the nuclear liquid to a boil and produce a steam of quark-gluon plasma,” said John Cramer from the University of Washington. “Instead, the boiler seems to be blowing up in our faces.”
Mini Big Bang Created, Puzzling Results Too Explosive
(Thank you Kevin for this info)
Fire Bug
Pretty neat, the insect can ‘see’ infrared radiation (fire) via pits in its abdomen (like the kind that are on the heads of some snakes) so it can have a safe place to reproduce and lay eggs. Nature provides amazing adaptations in the strangest of ways.
Jewel beetle flies into the inferno
3D printer to churn out copies of itself
Still a few years away from hitting the mass market but I’ll bet that any day now there will be laws passed against such devices. Imagine the loss of revenue that such items could cause for companies? Oh no! You could pirate everything! Anarchy in the streets!!!
I’m just kidding, I don’t believe that devices like this could ever produce exact replicas of existing products. The only way that could happen is if you could build things atom by atom. However, I’m sure that some lobbyist will bend the ear of a politician and fill his head up with all sorts of crazy ideas, ideas that will eventually force said lobbyist to not provide trips and gifts because his company just can’t afford it any more… Oops! I’m being cynical again aren’t I?
The “self replicating rapid prototyper” or RepRap could vastly reduce the cost of 3D printers, paving the way for a future where broken objects and spare parts are simply “re-printed” at home. New and unique objects could also be created.
3D printer to churn out copies of itself
(Thanks Steve for sending me this link! )
Temperature Inside Collapsing Bubble Four Times That Of Sun
Someone must have done this experiment with deuterium oxide by now. I don’t know that any results would be of much use for energy production, because any serious heat would vaporize the medium. Ironically, it seems like a fusion powered space heater would be easier to make than a useful energy device even if some significant level of fusion could be produced. That is far from certain, of course. They always talk about the surface of the sun, but the surface is frigid compared to the core where fusion takes place.
-GregUsing a technique employed by astronomers to determine stellar surface temperatures, chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have measured the temperature inside a single, acoustically driven collapsing bubble.
Temperature Inside Collapsing Bubble Four Times That Of Sun
Thank you agent Greg for this information.