Analysts at Deutsche Bank have predicted that the global solar PV sector will transition from a subsidized market to a sustainable market within a year, citing the arrival of “grid parity” in a number of key markets, unexpectedly strong demand and rebounding margins, reports Renew Economy.
The Deutsche Bank team said key markets such as India, China and the U.S. are experiencing strong demand and solar… read more
Modafinil (Provigil in the United States) was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since has become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs, says New York magazine.
Rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless, no scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very… read more
University of Washington researchers and scientists are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs, and health risks.
“Using existing rocket fuels, it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics.
“We are hoping… read more
Japanese researchers have successfully predicted images seen in sleep based on MRI scans of brain activity.
As reported in Science, they recruited three volunteers to sleep in fMRI machines for 3-hour sessions over the course of 10 days while the researchers monitored each volunteer’s brain activity. They also used EEG to track the brain’s overall electrical activity.
The researchers woke subjects every six or seven minutes, asked them… read more
We reported last month how Duke University researchers remotely linked the brains of two rats. Now researchers from the U.S and South Korea have have taken it a step further: a non-invasive functional link … and between the brains of different species (human and rat) — a brain-to-brain interface (BBI).
The researchers — at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. — set up a system intended… read more
A decade ago, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago.
Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background — a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilized fingerprint of the Big Bang — Cramer has produced new … read more
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued voluntary accessory-design guidelines in an effort to reduce distraction, but given consumers’ hunger for gadgets, managing those distractions to reduce workload may prove a better solution, The New York Times reports.
The overload of inputs, perhaps amplified by foul weather or a demanding toddler, presents a real challenge to the driver — and a danger to all road users. … read more
Every 30 seconds or so, an algorithm developed by Narrative Science produces a computer-written news story, Wired reports.
The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private).
Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food… read more
Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have demonstrated that they can store visual images in a thin vapor of rubidium atoms.
The effort may prove helpful in creating memory for quantum computers.
Their work builds on an approach developed at the Australian National University, where scientists showed that a rubidium… read more
Imagine taking a college exam and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. Then immediately redoing the test to try to improve your grade.
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such software. It can grade student essays and short written answers, freeing… read more
The National Institute of Health (NIH) has provided further details on the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative announced April 2 by President Obama, aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain.
By accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies, researchers will be able to produce a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain that, for the first time, shows how… read more
The international team running the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) — located on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) — today announced the first results in its search for dark matter.
The results, presented by AMS spokesperson Professor Samuel Ting in a seminar at CERN, are to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. They report the observation of an excess of positrons in the… read more
As the universe expands, it is continually subjected to energy shifts, or “quantum fluctuations,” that send out little pulses of “sound” into the fabric of spacetime. In fact, the universe is thought to have sprung from just such an energy shift.
A recent paper in the journal Physical Review Letters reports a new mathematical tool that should allow one to use these sounds to help reveal the shape of… read more
Humans’ closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, have metacognition — knowing what one knows, according to new research by scientists at Georgia State University and the University at Buffalo.
“The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution,” the research team noted.
Metacognition is the ability to recognize one’s own cognitive states. For example, a game show… read more
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, and the University of Crete in Greece have found a new way to switch magnetism that is at least 1000 times faster than currently used in magnetic memory technologies.
Magnetic switching is used to encode information in hard drives, magnetic random access memory and other computing devices. The discovery, reported in the April 4 issue… read more