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POPS Invisibility cloaks could take sting out of tsunamis "I think that this is a great idea with much potential," says Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK. "One could really imagine protecting coastlines by arrays of cleverly designed concrete poles." Such structures act like metamaterials, materials whose properties result from their structure not composition, and can be used to make invisibility cloaks for light, he says. But Guenneau cautions that large structures like islands and coastlines are unlikely to become invisible anytime soon, because building the many small islands needed to protect one is such a big job. "It's crazy – maybe only people in Dubai could do this," he adds, referring to the spectacular artificial islands built there. Smaller structures such as offshore oil platforms would be easier to protect, he says.
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POPSMIT Team Use Viruses to Build Nex-Gen Batteries Bio-battery technology could open up a whole new field of science with exotic new applications. The study was partly funded by the Army Research Office Institute of Collaborative Biotechnologies, and the Army Research Office Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies, which suggests that the Army has some interest in this type of research. One can only imagine the strange and/or nefarious possibilities of fusing batteries into living organisms. However, Belcher diffuses any excitement over possible cyborg applications.
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POPSEnergy at your feet Finally, unlike roof-top solar arrays, which some find unattractive, the solar collectors in roads and parking lots would be invisible.” In the lab, small slabs were exposed to halogen lamps, simulating sunlight. Larger slabs were set up outdoors and exposed to more realistic environmental conditions, including direct sunlight and wind. The tests showed that asphalt absorbs a considerable amount of heat and that the highest temperatures are found a few centimeters below the surface. This is where a heat exchanger would be located to extract the maximum amount of energy. Experimenting with various asphalt compositions, they found that the addition of highly conductive aggregates, like quartzite, can significantly increase heat absorption, as can the application of a special paint that reduces reflection.
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POPSText Message To Capture Team, "I am with KSM" His cooperation came in fits and starts, and interrogators said they believed at times that he gave them disinformation. But he talked most freely to Martinez. The intelligence riches ultimately gleaned mount to a detailed history of Mohammed's initiation into terrorism along with his nephew, Yousef; his plotting of mayhem from Bosnia to the Philippines and his alliance with Osama bin Laden. Mohammed also claimed a role in a long list of completed and thwarted attacks, including the beheading of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter Martinez told colleagues that Mohammed volunteered out of the blue that he was the man who killed Pearl. Intelligence analysts eventually were convinced because Mohammed pointed out to Martinez details of the hand and arm of the masked killer in a videotape of the murder that appeared to show it was him. For now, Deuce Martinez teaches other CIA analysts the arcane art of tracking terrorists.
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POPSSolar plant a 'small but important step' The Australian centre gets an incredible amount of sunlight. There's very little that can be done without the first step. Remember computers became a prospect (distant) when they invented the transistor. Every program is a series of small steps. Step left 0 step right 1-(or vice versa) at least until we work out how to go organic (it's not far off). Who knows, with the amount of sunlight Australia gets, in time energy is likely to become an export. We'll just have to look out for real estate agents. "Want to buy a block of land in the desert?- Get it while it's hot."
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POPSH.P. Unveils New Memory Technology This makes them function like biological synapses, which would be ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech.
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POPS Billionaire Texas oil man makes big bets on wind Though Pickens admits that wind power won't be as lucrative as oil deals, he still expects the Texas project to turn at least a 25 percent return. Pickens' wind farm is part of his wider vision for replacing natural gas with wind and solar for power generation, and using the natural gas instead to power vehicles. To picture Pickens' energy strategy, imagine a compass. Stretching from north to south from Saskatchewan to Texas would be thousands of wind turbines, which could take advantage of some of the best U.S. wind production conditions. On the east-west axis from Texas to California would be large arrays of solar generation, which could send electricity into growing Southern California cities like Los Angeles.
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POPSFaster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
He envisions modern chips that will increasingly resemble musical orchestras. Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem. In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant. “My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”
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POPSMolecular Memory The HP patent describes a memory device built from crossbar arrays of nano-wires sandwiching molecules that act as on/off switches. In writing a bit, one voltage decreases the electrical resistance through the molecules, turning the switch "on"; at another voltage, the molecules are turned "off." One advantage of the technology, says Kuekes, is that hardware engineers will be familiar with the design; except for the remarkable fact that it utilizes organic molecules, not silicon or magnetic particles, the technology resembles electronic memories used in PCs. The HP patent is one of the first to issue that covers a molecular electronic device. While it's too early to predict the winner of this race to build and commercialize molecular electronics, those following the field say these initial patents could be critical.
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POPSScientists Identify Prion's Infectious Secret But prions have another characteristic that enables them to wreak havoc. They recruit other, properly folded proteins into misforming along with them, a process Lindquist calls a "conformational cascade." In many organisms, this conformational cascade creates long fibers called amyloids. (The brains of animals that have died from prion infections are literally packed with amyloid clumps.)
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