Monday, June 08, 2015

Evil Mouse Screws Americans

Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. - NYTimes.com:

...Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost...

Revolutionary Software?

Gee, guys. I recall doing this on an Apple II.

Licensees sought for revolutionary 3D modelling software | Business Weekly | Technology News | Business news | Cambridge and the East of England:

Researchers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) filled the gap in existing CAD/CAM systems by creating a software tool that flattens 3D developable freeform surfaces into 2D patterns....

Monday, September 17, 2012

Warp Drive Coming

'Warp drive' may be more feasible than thought, scientists say | Fox News

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy...

Monday, February 20, 2012

The Smallest Transistor

Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom - NYTimes.com

Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

The Oldest Life

200,000-Year-Old Patch of Seagrass Is the World's Oldest Living Organism | Popular Science

A patch of Posidonia oceanica, a species of seagrass native to the Mediterranean, has just gotten its DNA sequenced and its age determined--and as it turns out, some parts of this particular patch are up to 200,000 years old. That easily destroys the previous world record of the oldest living organism, a Tasmanian plant believed to be around 43,000 years old. Ha! A youngun!

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Atomic Storage Nears

Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of Nanotechnology - NYTimes.com

Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible...

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Lotsa Planets

Crowded cosmos: In Milky Way, planets more plentiful than stars, even in unexpected places - The Washington Post

...Confirmed planets outside our solar system — called exoplanets — now number well over 700, still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands...