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High testosterone levels in CEOs negotiating mergers and acquisitions are linked to a higher rate of dropped deals and an increase in hostile takeover attempts, according to a new study in the current issue of Management Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

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Elimination of a molecular gatekeeper leads to the development of arthritis in mice, scientists report in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The newly discovered gatekeeper is a protein that determines the fate – survival or death – of damaging cells that mistakenly attack the body's own tissues and lead to autoimmune disorders such as arthritis.

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Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News    Computer Software Nuclear and defense supplier General Atomics announced in February, 2010 that they would launch a 12-year ($1.7 billion) program to develop a new kind of small, commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S. that could run on spent fuel from big reactors.

The General Atomics reactor, which is dubbed EM2 for Energy Multiplier Module, would be about one-quarter the size of a conventional reactor and have unusual features, including the ability to burn used fuel, which still contains more than 90% of its original energy. Such reuse would reduce the volume and toxicity of the waste that remained. General Atomics calculates there is so much U.S. nuclear waste that it could fuel 3,000 of the proposed reactors, far more than it anticipates building. The EM2 would operate at temperatures as high as 850 degrees Centigrade, which is about twice as hot as a conventional water-cooled reactor. The very high temperatures would make the reactor especially well suited to industrial uses that go beyond electricity production, such as extracting oil from tar sands, desalinating water and refining petroleum to make fuel and chemicals.

General Atomics intends to complete a preliminary design for the reactor and demonstrate that it can manufacture fuel elements in the next few years. It wants to be in a position to seek NRC design certification within five years, and, if no big problems emerge, to gain required approvals to sell reactors and make fuel assemblies by 2022

There was a presentation at the commission on America's Nuclear future (10 page pdf) If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on Reddit, or StumbleUpon. Thanks Supporting Advertising Business Success    How to Make Money     Executive Jobs   Paid Surveys Thank You

Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News    Computer Software Dr. Paul Lorenzini, CEO of Nuscale presented on the planned NSSS reactor on Aug 30, 2010 Initial pre-application review meeting was held with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on July 2008. NuScale anticipates filing Design Certification application in 2012. NuScale forecasts the first plant can be online producing electricity from 2018.

NSSS will be factory built: * Entire NSSS prefabricated and shipped by rail, truck or barge (it will weigh about 300 tons for each module for 60 foot long and 14 foot in diameter cylinder)
• Natural Circulation Cooling: * Inherently safe – Eliminates major accident scenarios * Improves economics - Eliminates pumps, pipes, valves
• Large natural heat sink * Simplifies and enhances safety case • Proven Technology • Below Ground * Enhances security and safety

The use of thorium in the NuScale plant was briefly explored during studies in 2002-3. A thorium fuel core could be installed and, as expected, plutonium inventories in spent fuel would be reduced. Core design issues would arise due to the reduced delayed neutron fraction, with implications for control rod designs. In addition, new fuel areas would need to be designed for higher radiation levels. Even though these matters have not been explored in depth, we see no technical issues that would preclude the design and installation of a thorium fueled core in a NuScale plant

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I'll be speaking at the Singularity Summit AU this coming Sunday afternoon, on the topic "Survival Beyond the Flesh" - which relates to the prospect of "uploading" rather than to anything of a more otherworldly or spiritual kind. I'm rather sceptical about uploading - though I can't rule it out totally, no matter how advanced our technology becomes. I spent yesterday working out what I could say meaningfully in a quite short slot, given that I'd devote at least three lectures to such a topic if teaching it from scratch as part of a philosophy course on issues such as mind and personal identity. I think I managed to work out something useful in the end. This is a sufficiently slippery topic that I'll be relying quite heavily on the shortish paper that I ended up writing. Hopefully I can end up making it interesting.

Please don't ask me to publish the paper on the internet. I am, among other things, a professional writer. Although I don't see an obvious market for this paper I can't simply throw away the intellectual property in something that just might give me a sale somewhere with a bit of tweaking (the paper is nowhere near original enough or rigorous enough or adequately grounded in the existing literature to be sent to an academic journal - it's meant for popular consumption). If you'd like to buy such a paper for a magazine or a book, please contact me.

The big issue, it seems to me, is why I would want to upload myself. Presumably it's to live longer and to gain certain advantages such as being able to think more quickly and powerfully. But that means I must be confident that I can look forward to enjoying those advantages. It's no use if the advantages will simply be enjoyed by a being somewhat like me. Thus, issues about personal identity, survival, and so on are inescapable, even if our conceptions of these things are hopelessly vague. There do seem to be situations where a psychological duplicate of me could be made and it would be pretty clear that I would not enjoy whatever experiences it has, so it's not as if there's no risk of things turning out like that. But what criteria do we use and where do we draw the line?
I don't have clear and convincing answers to these questions, and I don't believe anyone else has either - Derek Parfit's answers are fairly clear but I don't find them all that convincing. Still, I might at least be able to offer my audience some tools for thinking about it. 

Google Inc. stepped on its Internet search accelerator Wednesday by adding a feature that displays results as soon as people begin typing their requests.

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University of Sydney researchers have discovered a new super-strength light alloy and had their key findings published in the prestigious journal, Nature Communications.

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What if there were a way to predict when a species was about to become extinct—in time to do something about it?

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A portable, laser backpack for 3D mapping has been developed at the University of California, Berkeley, where it is being hailed as a breakthrough technology capable of producing fast, automatic and realistic 3D mapping of difficult interior environments.

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Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have engineered a fundamentally new approach to killing cancer cells.

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I was in Denmark last week, speaking at NEXT 2010. The subject... geoengineering (dun dun DUN).

Here's the talk.

When I watched a part of it, the sound was off-sync with the video, so fair warning.

And fun game for any of my talks: count the "Jazz Hands"!

Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News    Computer Software Two asteroids, several meters in diameter and in unrelated orbits, will pass within the moon's distance of Earth on Wednesday, Sept. 8.
NASA has an asteroid watch webpage to keep up to date on all asteroid related news

Both asteroids should be observable near closest approach to Earth with moderate-sized amateur telescopes. Neither of these objects has a chance of hitting Earth. A 10-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 50 million would be expected to pass almost daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike Earth's atmosphere about every 10 years on average.

The Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., discovered both objects on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 5, during a routine monitoring of the skies. The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., first received the observations Sunday morning, determined preliminary orbits and concluded that both objects would pass within the distance of the moon about three days after their discovery. Near-Earth asteroid 2010 RX30 is estimated to be 32 to 65 feet (10 to 20 meters) in size and will pass within 0.6 lunar distances of Earth (about 154,000 miles, or 248,000 kilometers) at 2:51 a.m. PDT (5:51 a.m. EDT) Wednesday. The second object, 2010 RF12, estimated to be 20 to 46 feet (6 to 14 meters) in size, will pass within 0.2 lunar distances (about 49,088 miles or 79,000 kilometers) a few hours later at 2:12 p.m. PDT (5:12 pm EDT).

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Ad Support : Nano Technology   Netbook    Technology News    Computer Software Curved, twisted and overhanging microscopic structures have been made by US researchers from carbon nanotubes by exploiting capillary action. The technique can be used to make patterns of multiple different shapes at the same time and opens up new possibilities for tunable surfaces.

John Hart and his team from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, have used the forces generated by capillary action of a solvent as it condenses and evaporates between carbon nanotube fibres to pull, bend and twist forests of fibres into cones, domes, helices and other unique shapes. 'These sorts of shapes are difficult to make from any material, let alone in carbon nanotubes,' says Hart, adding that with other microfabrication techniques it's traditionally hard to make things that are curved, twisted or generally overhanging without making them one at a time.

The process involves laying down an iron catalyst in a defined pattern on the growing surface, then using chemical vapour deposition to grow forests of vertically aligned nanotube fibres. These are quite normal techniques, but what Hart's team then does is condense acetone into the forests and allow it to evaporate under controlled conditions. Capillary action of the solvent pulls the fibres together into a shape that is dictated by the shape of the original catalyst outline - ring shaped forests pull into volcano-like cones, whereas semicircles bend over into petal-like structures.

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A North Carolina State University researcher and colleagues have figured out a way to make an aluminum alloy, or a mixture of aluminum and other elements, just as strong as steel.

That’s important, says Dr. Yuntian Zhu, professor of materials science and the NC State researcher involved in the project, because the search for ever lighter – yet stronger – materials is crucial to devising everything from more fuel-efficient cars to safer airplanes.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Zhu and his colleagues describe the new nanoscale architecture within aluminum alloys that have unprecedented strength but also reasonable plasticity to stretch and not break under stress. Perhaps even more importantly, the technique of creating these nanostructures can be used on many different types of metals.

Zhu says the aluminum alloys have unique structural elements that, when combined to form a hierarchical structure at several nanoscale levels, make them super-strong and ductile.
The aluminum alloys have small building blocks, called “grains,” that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Each grain is a tiny crystal less than 100 nanometers in size. Bigger is not better in materials, Zhu says, as smaller grains result in stronger materials.
Zhu also says the aluminum alloys have a number of different types of crystal “defects.” Nanocrystals with defects are stronger than perfect crystals.
Now, Zhu plans on working on strengthening magnesium, a metal that is even lighter than aluminum. He’s collaborating with the Department of Defense on a project to make magnesium alloys strong enough to be used as body armor for soldiers.

Nature Communications - Nanostructural hierarchy increases the strength of aluminium alloys

Increasing the strength of metallic alloys while maintaining formability is an interesting challenge for enabling new generations of lightweight structures and technologies. In this paper, we engineer aluminium alloys to contain a hierarchy of nanostructures and possess mechanical properties that expand known performance boundaries – an aerospace-grade 7075 alloy exhibits a yield strength and uniform elongation approaching 1 GPa and 5%, respectively. The nanostructural architecture was observed using novel high-resolution microscopy techniques and comprises a solid solution, free of precipitation, featuring (i) a high density of dislocations, (ii) subnanometre intragranular solute clusters, (iii) two geometries of nanometre-scale intergranular solute structures and (iv) grain sizes tens of nanometres in diameter. Our results demonstrate that this novel architecture offers a design pathway towards a new generation of super-strong materials with new regimes of property-performance space.

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JPod by Douglas Coupland

Edition reviewed: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2006; ~550pp; £7.99 RRP – ISBN13: 978-0747585879

My initial response on finishing Coupland’s 2006 novel JPod was less than valedictory, but it deserves qualification: I was relieved to have finished it and glad it hadn’t eaten a large amount of my time, but I’d felt no urge to stop reading it. The fairest and truest thing to say would be that it’s not my sort of novel. Whether this is due to a sort of cultural immune-system reaction to the modern “novel of character” by a mind more accustomed to the biome of science fiction (and its defiantly non-literary concern with plot and story) is an open question. (more…)

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DKNG has created a cool bunch of gig posters.

via DKNG

Jean-François Thériault takes a look at the less glitzy side of Vegas.

via design work life

Nice poster for what I thought was a good movie.

via flickrdesign

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed new software that greatly improves the speed at which scientists can analyze RNA sequencing data.

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