Bill Gates’ advanced power reactor gets closer to reality.
Terrapower, a startup funded in part by Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, is moving closer to building a new type of nuclear reactor called a traveling wave reactor that runs on an abundant form of uranium. The company sees it as a possible alternative to fusion reactors, which are also valued for their potential to produce power from a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel.
Work on Terrapower’s reactor design began in 2006. Since then, the company has changed its original design to make the reactor look more like a conventional one. The changes would make the reactor easier to engineer and build. The company has also calculated precise dimensions and performance parameters for the reactor. Terrapower expects to begin construction of a 500-megawatt demonstration plant in 2016 and start it up in 2020. It’s working with a consortium of national labs, universities, and corporations to overcome the primary technical challenge of the new reactor: developing new materials that can withstand use in the reactor core for decades at a time. It has yet to secure a site for an experimental plant and surprisingly, the funding to build it.
Full Story at Technology News
Apple holding more cash than USA
Apple now has more cash to spend than the United States government.
Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that the country has an operating cash balance of $73.7bn (£45.3bn).
Apple’s most recent financial results put its reserves at $76.4bn.
The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill to raise the country’s debt ceiling, allowing it to borrow more money to cover spending commitments.
If it fails to extend the current limit of $14.3 trillion dollars, the federal government could find itself struggling to make payments, and risks the loss of its AAA credit rating.
The United States is currently spending around $200bn more than it collects in revenue every month.
Apple, on the other hand, is making money hand over fist, according to its financial results.
In the three months ending 25 June, net income was 125% higher than a year earlier at $7.31bn.
Full Story at BBC
Calling all geeks – Geeks.co.uk relaunch. The website born from a sofa.
Geeks.co.uk couldn’t afford to pay writers – so offered “free room and board” in London when their writers had job interviews, and opportunities in London.
The website – started in Scotland by award-winning journalist Ally Millar – is celebrating its first year in the capital with a fitting party: a sleepover in a location familiar to many of the site’s writers – the editor’s flat.
Although this has been a breakthrough year for the site – finally hitting profit in November – the coffers were so tight that payment came by the 26 year old editor inviting contributors – from as far afield as Ireland and even Denmark – to stay on his sofa when paid work opportunities in London came up.
The site whose motto is “by Geeks for Geeks” exists to display the talents of aspiring artists, photographers, journalists, filmmakers, creative writers, and unsigned musicians and is often compared to a UK-wide student newspaper. It enjoys good relations with institutions from Brighton to Aberdeen; Cardiff to Belfast.
In the past we’ve pinched a few links from these guys, so we feel its only fair to say you should head over and check out the new site and geek out.
World’s biggest hotel left for 15 years unfinished finally opens doors – pics
The pyramid-shaped hotel, the largest structure in North Korea and one of the tallest hotels in the world, will open in 2012, 33 years after it was originally set to accept guests.
Construction on the project was stalled for 15 years until 2008, when Egyptian conglomerate Orascom committed $400 million to finishing it, Architizer reported.
The tower’s sleek and shiny facade was finally completed this year.
The hotel, which has more than 3,000 rooms, will reportedly have five revolving restaurants. It is the only hotel in the world with more than 100 stories, though the Emirates Park Towers, which opened in Dubai this year, is technically taller.
Read more pictures and full article at Business Insider
Dead cryonics founder is frozen as planned
Robert Ettinger, founder of the cryonics movement, has finally become a human popsicle himself after dying on 23 July from unspecified causes following weeks of declining health. The 92-year-old joins his mother, Rhea, his first wife, Elaine, and his second wife, Mae, who were all cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute as well. The minimum price tag: $28,000.
Other organisations charge upwards of $200,000 and offer the option of “neuropreservation”: instead of freezing their whole bodies, clients freeze only their heads. The idea is that one’s personality and memories will be preserved in the brain and could be uploaded to a computer or artificial body in the future.
No one really knows whether we can ever return consciousness to frozen corpses, but cryopreservation is a genuine phenomenon in the animal kingdom and a useful technique in medicine.
Full Article at New Scientist
Transforming robotic clothing – incredible video
A bit NSFW as it contains nudity at 2:00 onwards.
In Time: A movie where time is literally money
Staring none other than Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde and Cillian Murphy, In Time looks at an idea visited in the Sci Fi classic Logan’s Run, where everyone lives until the age of 25. In this society everything you pay for is done so in “life hours”. By working you earn more time, but as things get more expensive society becomes more unfair and the super rich have all the time in the world.
Lulz and Anonymous issue joint official warning to the FBI
In light of the recent hacking scandals, corporate corruption and government arrests, the focus on less-than-legal activities has thrown up an official statement by the now well-known underground groups Anonymous and Lulz.
People are well divided on this issue with some saying they fully support both groups, others saying they admire their balls but worry about unregulated renegade activity, others against it but feel it’s a natural unstoppable phenomenon and of course those calling for their arrests.
The main part of the statement posted is as follows:
Let us tell you what WE find unacceptable:
* Governments lying to their citizens and inducing fear and terror to keep them in control by dismantling their freedom piece by piece.
* Corporations aiding and conspiring with said governments while taking advantage at the same time by collecting billions of funds for federal contracts we all know they can’t fulfil.
* Lobby conglomerates who only follow their agenda to push the profits higher, while at the same time being deeply involved in governments around the world with the only goal to infiltrate and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change.
These governments and corporations are our enemy. And we will continue to fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies.
We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing – absolutely nothing – you can possibly to do make us stop.
China’s experimental fast neutron reactor begins generating power
The experimental fast neutron reactor, with a nuclear heat power of 65 megawatts and a power-generating capacity of 20 megawatts, is among a few experimental, power-generating fast reactors in the world, according to the company.
The reactor is similar, in terms of layout and reference, to a large fast reactor power plant, while its safety requirements have reached those of a fourth-generation nuclear power plant.
“Fast neutron reactor is a major type of fourth-generation nuclear power plant, and it sets the direction for the development of the fourth-generation nuclear power plants,” said Xu Mi, chief expert for the experimental fast neutron reactor.
According to the chief expert, a fast reactor can make better use of the nuclear energy by increasing the utilization rate of uranium to 60 percent, from the 1 percent of utilization rate of a traditional pressurized water reactor.
Full Story at News CN
Report accidentally finds pirate movie website to be full of law abiding citizens
In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.
The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.
Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.
“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.
But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true. This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.
“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.
In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.
Full report at Torrent Freak
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