Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: energy – Page 364

A Russian Megawatt-class nuclear propulsion system for long-range manned spacecraft must be ready by 2017, Skolkovo Foundation’s Nuclear Cluster head Denis Kovalevich said on Wednesday.

“At present we are testing several types of fuel and later we will start drafting the design,” Kovalevich said. “The first parts [of the nuclear engine] should be built in 2013, and the engine is expected to be ready by 2017.”

The engine is being developed for interplanetary manned spacecraft to ensure that Russia maintains a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

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Dear readers,

My son Ethan Kurzweil — who is a partner at Bessemer Ventures Partners — tracks the future of web innovation, social and legal concerns about privacy, and start-ups who have an edge with their business or consumer applications, like team sourcing or software-as-a-service.

He appeared on C • NBC business affairs show Power Lunch. Episode debated the recent news about the US government and law enforcement asking Apple to release private data on an iPhone used by terrorists.

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In what appears at first to be a storyline ripped from a sci-fi thriller, a multi-national research team spread across two continents, four countries, and ten years in the making have created a model of a supercomputer that runs on the same substance that living things use as an energy source.

Humans and virtually all living things rely on Adenosine triphosphate ( ATP ) to provide the energy our cells need to perform daily functions. The biological computer created by the team led by Professor Dan Nicolau, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, also relies on ATP for power.

The biological computer is able to process information very quickly and operates accurately using parallel networks like contemporary massive electronic super computers. In addition, the model is lot smaller in size, uses relatively less energy, and functions using proteins that are present in all living cells.

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Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are a source of endless fascination. But despite a decade of observations, not all astronomers are sure that they’re real. A study out in Nature today, which reports the very first recurring FRB, is now causing lingering skepticism to evaporate.

“I think this is pretty huge,” Peter Williams, an astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo. “For awhile, I wasn’t sure these things were genuinely astrophysical. This paper settles the question.”

And Williams is not one to take splashy new claims about FRBs—high energy radio pulses of unknown origin, which flit across the sky for a fraction of a second—lightly. In fact, he’s spent the last week raising major doubts about another recent study, which, as Gizmodo and other outlets reported, claimed to have pinpointed the location of an FRB in space for the first time.

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