Images of (A,B) shaped CNT solids monoliths, (C) shards, and (D) powders derived from said monoliths. Credit: Naval Research Laboratory.
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been produced in high yields in bulk solid compositions using commercially available aromatic containing resins. The concentration of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) and metal nanoparticles can be easily varied within the shaped carbonaceous solid.
The CNTs obtained by this patented method are not formed from gaseous components, as is common with the current CNT production based on chemical vapor deposition (CVD) methods, but rather evolve from metal and carbon nanoparticles that form within the carbonaceous solid during the carbonization process above 500°C. Only a small amount of the organometallic compound or metal salt is needed to achieve the formation of CNTs in high yield, but large quantities of the metal source can be used, depending on the application, if desired.
The solid-state method enables the large-scale production of MWNTs in moldable solid forms, films, and fibers using low-cost precursors and equipment, thereby reducing economic barriers that are inherent with carbon nanotube materials produced by more conventional methods, such as CVD.
The use of commercially available resins is a potentially inexpensive route to CNTs. Using this simple, potentially cost-effective method could result in the production of CNTs in large quantities and various shapes. Scientists are evaluating them for possible use in numerous aerospace, marine, and electronic applications.
FURTHER READING
Carbon nanotube production in 2007More on the carbon nanotube market
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A 9000 meter long magnetic catapult was proposed in 2003 by Warren D Smith, mathematician at Temple University. It was designed to launch 5 meter long, 1 meter diameter projectiles at 2250 gees of constant acceleration with a launch velocity of 20km/s (twice earth escape velocity, Mach 58). It would cost about $2-20 billion to build and operating costs would be $10-100 million/year. This system is not a railgun and is not a coilgun. It is similar to a superconducting coilgun but is better than the quench gun proposal.
2250 gees would allow electronics to be launched
It is an engineering project on the same scale as the largest particle accelerators. So it is difficult but achievable. The system should be cheaper and safer than chemical rocket launches.
The magnetic catapult would be different from an electromagnetic railgun or linear electric motors.
The magnetic catapult has the following advantages:
1. No electrical or mechanical contact between the projectile and anything else
2. No capacitors or other external energy storage devices. The superconducting magnets of the launcher are the energy storage device and the energy stored is at essentially uniform density in the form of magnetic field.
3. the accumulation of electric power may be accomplished gradually, losslessly and purely mechanically
4. Essentially 100% of the stored energy is converted to projectile kinetic energy. Guns, railguns and rotary pellet launchers suffer damage from friction and other wasted energy.
5. Magnetic catapult has inherently stable operation. Instabilities of other designs at these velocities could be catastrophic.
6. No switching at large current and voltages (like Linear electric motors). Switching only occurs when current and voltage are zero. This minimizes stress on the switch and maximizes energy efficiency.
Railguns use two sliding contacts that permit a large electric current to pass through the projectile. This current interacts with the strong magnetic fields generated by the rails and this accelerates the projectile.
The Magnetic catapult is similar to a superconducting coilguns (quench gun), which are contactless and which use a magnetic field generated by external coils arranged along the barrel to accelerate a magnetic projectile. However, the quench gun releases a lot of heat during coil quenching.
The picture to the left is a standard copper coil coilgun. The magnetic catapult would need cryogenics (to cool the superconductors) and a lot of superconducting material. The magnetic catapult design will need to address the issue of magnetic quenching. During projectile flyby of a superconducting ring, the magnetic environment near that ring can change as much as plus or minus 12 Tesla. to protect against quenching a finely intermixed composite material made of both YCBO and an electrically and magnetically inert companion material is needed. TiO2 might be a suitable material. With a ratio of twice as much TiO2 to YCBO then the inner rings would be 3 times bigger. The total energy losses related to the quenching issue are about 8%.
Another disadvantage is the system does not scale down well, so some test sections could be built but only a nearly full scale system would really indicate if the system would work. However, it seems promising and worth detailed testing and modeling.
The superconducting magnets that are needed for the project are on the leading edge of developments in that area There are record superconducting magnets with 50 cm bore sizes, 7 Tesla and 20 cm bore size, 8.1 Tesla. The full scale system needs 17 Telsa magnets with 100 cm bore size. There is an Atlas hybrid magnet being built to hold 1.2 Gj with 22 meters (2200cm) diameter. The highest power superconducting magnet is 26.8 Tesla and they believe they can soon reach 50 Tesla
Magnet Lab researchers tested a small coil (9.5-millimeter clear bore) in the lab’s unique, 19-tesla, 20-centimeter, wide-bore, 20-megawatt Bitter magnet. However, I think the main issue is one of cost that larger bore sizes mean more wire and more expense. More information on superconducting magnets
A Cern superconducting magnet has an inside diameter of 6.3 meters, a length of 12.5 meters and generates a magnetic field of 4 T (about 80,000 times stronger than the Earth’s). Once completed, the Cms superconducting magnet will boast a notable record: with its 2.6 Gigajoule of energy it will hold the world record of energy ever stored in a magnet.
The magnetic catapult is described in a 42 page postscript file.
The Magnetic Catapult Design
The projectile will be a cylindrical shaped permanent magnet. The accelerator will consist of a sequence of coaxial stationary rings, each of which is also a supercurrent loop magnet. The projectile and the rings all generate the same amount of magnetic flux, which will be assured by initially magnetizing all the rings.
[Thread a ring shaped piece of superconductor with another magnet whose North end is on one side and whose South end is on the other of the ring. cool the ring to ists superconducting temperature, then remove the magnet. Its flux no longer traverses the ring but the total magenetic flux through ring must remain unchanged. More discussion on page 11 of the paper.]
During launch, the projectile passes through the superconducting rings. The South end of the first ring attracts the North end of the projectile. Once the projectile has reached a central position inside that ring (the supercurrent is now zero) and we switch off the superconductivity in that ring converting it into an insulator. The projectile continues on without deaccelerating. This repeats along each of the magnetic rings.
The entire accelerator is enclused in a pipe with a superconducive inner coating. The outer pipe has the following purposes:
1. Is a vacuum vessel
2. It is an EM shield
3. It is a thermal insulator
4. It would help to levitate the projectile
5. The sequence of rings are a long solenoid, the field must come back the otehr way on the outside of the solenoid.
The projectile bursts a membrane at the end of the tube or it passes a double door airlock.
The system should be made in a mountain like Annapurna or Dhaulagiri in Nepal. The projectile would exist above half to two thirds of the atmosphere. The projectile would need to have material that would burn off (ablate) to take away the heat. Only a few percent of the total projectile would need to be sacrificed.
Cost estimate
The Superconducting supercollider (SSC) was to cost $8.25 billion but ran into cost overruns and was cancelled. The SSC was to be in an 87 kilometer long tunnel with 10,000 7m long 6.6 Tesla magnets that were Helium cooled. The Magnetic Launcher would be almost ten times shorter, the magnets need not be as precise, the outer vacuum shells are smaller and the vacuum need not be as high. The Magnetic launcher would be built very robustly and be located on a high mountain. The Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was 4 kilometers long with 1740 superconducting magnets. The RHIC cost $600 million for $155,000 per linear meter. Those prices would enable the 9 km launcher to be made for $1.4 billion. Another cost estimate looks at costs of components (tunneling, Dewaring, structural support and superconductors) for a maximum cost of $800,000 per meter or $7.2 billion for a 9km long launcher.
FURTHER READING
The previous article that I had on scaling up railguns still had the issue of wearing out the launch tube and replacing the worn launch tube was the primary cost driver for the advanced railgun proposal.
Overview of electromagnetic guns
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Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have begun to develop the hardware for deploying a 1 gigawatt space based solar power system by 2030. These we will small lab tests.
JAXA, which plans to have a Space Solar Power System (SSPS) up and running by 2030, envisions a system consisting of giant solar collectors in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The satellites convert sunlight into powerful microwave (or laser) beams that are aimed at receiving stations on Earth, where they are converted into electricity.
The researchers will use a 2.4-meter-diameter transmission antenna to send a microwave beam over 50 meters to a rectenna (rectifying antenna) that converts the microwave energy into electricity and powers a household heater
JAXA ultimately aims to build ground receiving stations that measure about 3 kilometers across and that can produce 1 gigawatt (1 million kilowatts) of electricity — enough to power approximately 500,000 homes.
FURTHER READING
Low earth orbit spaced based solar power could be more easily scaled
Space Island Group has almost completed financing for a prototype 10-25 megawatt system that it claims will be in orbit within 18 months, at a total cost of $200 million.
"It will 'site-hop' across base stations in Europe, beaming 90 minutes of power to each one by microwave." If the test proves successful, a 1 gigawatt installation for the UK domestic market would be the next step.
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A set of 15 proteins found in urine can distinguish healthy individuals from those who have coronary artery disease (CAD), a new study has found.
Coronary artery disease is the most common type of cardiovascular disease, occurring in about 5 to 9% (depending on sex and race) of people aged 20 and older.
In 2001, the death rate from coronary artery disease was 228 per 100,000 white men, 262 per 100,000 black men, 137 per 100,000 white women, and 177 per 100,000 black women. Over 1 million deaths per year worldwide.
Due to the ease of obtaining samples, urinary protein analysis is emerging as a powerful tool to detect and monitor disease.
The researchers next examined how predictive their protein panel was and found it could identify the presence of CAD 83% of the time. The panel had a sensitivity of over 98%, which means the test produced almost no false positives and thus inaccuracies are primarily misdiagnosing CAD individuals as healthy. The researchers also observed that the protein signatures of CAD individuals became more normal after exercise, suggesting these biomarkers can be used to both help diagnose CAD and monitor the progress of treatment.
FURTHER READING
A USB stick size device has been created for genetic screening in minutes for tens of dollar A similar cost device seems possible for screening for the proteins that identify coronary artery disease.
This is another major piece in the vision that I and many others have to transform public health with widespread use of frequent biomarker tracking to identify people in the early stages of disease or those just with the increased risk factors and transform medicine to cheaper prevention of disease developmentThis should also be used to change drug approvals by identifying earlier when a drug is having effect with improved biomarkers.More papers by Anna DominiczakCardiovascular disease statistics
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A prism of engineered material — metamaterial comprised of an arrangement of nano-coils of precious metals such as gold or silver — embedded in a solid glass-like material. The prism structure has a negative refractive index, which makes it truly transparent to light, allowing it to pass freely through with no reflection.
This site was mentioned on the Wired Magazine defense blog I helped to decode the meaning of
"exploiting the optical plasmon phenomenology characteristics of nanoscale structures."
from a DARPA project about transparent displays.
Wavelengths of light interact with nanoscale patterns that are made to create new effects that alter the wavelengths to enable super-microscopes or invisibility.
It refers to using transparent metamaterials to alter light to create displays. Most metamaterials that have been used to this point have been made of metal and some have been semiconductors
Concentric rings of plastic on gold allow an optical microscope to resolve objects too small to otherwise be seen (Image: Science/Maryland University)
Metamaterials can shape visible light and other wavelenths (sound, microwaves etc..). Metamaterials have tended to be metals with particular patterns. The wavelengths interact with the patterns and can be guided by them to make things invisible or to give wavelengths negative indexes of diffraction (enabling superlenses for better microscopes).
Metamaterials can also be made out of non-metals but to effect visible light would need to have nanoscale dimensions (nanoscale structures part).
Plasmons are what are interact[s] with the metamaterial to create the effect.
Plasmons :The quanta of waves produced by collective effects of large numbers of electrons in matter when the electrons are disturbed from equilibrium. Metals provide the best evidence of plasmons, because they have a high density of electrons free to move.
It sounds like Darpa wants to make big transparent metamaterial displays for windshields of planes or vehicles. Plus the material could react to light and block out lasers that were trying to blind or damage the occupants or react to a radiation flash from a nuclear device.
OTHER READING
Contact lens and displays in glasses
Contact lens display
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A naturally myostatin blocked boy. Antisense RNA has been used to activate myostatin inhibition in mice
Mice lacking the myostatin gene have 25–30% increased muscle mass. Individual muscles, such as the pectoralis and quadriceps, of myostatin mutant mice are two- to threefold heavier than those of wild type mice.
Antisense RNAs were injected into normal mice through intravenous (i.v.) routes at the dose of 5 mg kg-1, twice weekly for 4 weeks. Two days after the last injection, the leg muscles were weighed and the ratio of the leg's muscle weight to body weight in each group was calculated
Myostatin blockers would let more people look like this body builder who did not have myostatin blocked but worked harder at building his muscles the old fashioned way.
Another study indicates that myostatin blocker enhanced muscles will result in more tendon injuries.So it is a good thing that they have found that
gene therapy can be used to increase tendon strength in rats by 70%.
Tendons transduced with BMP-14 exhibited less visible gapping, a greater number of neotenocytes at the site of healing, and 70% greater tensile strength than did either those transduced with GFP or the sham controls at two weeks after repair. Histological examination revealed no inflammatory response to the adenovirus in tendons transduced with BMP-14 or GFP. No ectopic bone or cartilage formed in the tendons transduced with BMP-14.
They believe this will help tendons heal.
Gene therapy could one day help cure diseases like cancer, aids and diabetes and it's been estimated that by 2011, the market for gene therapy products will be US$6.5 billion.
They are using gene therapy to hinder HIV by sabotaging HIVs ability to replicate.
The new method approaches treatment of the AIDS virus by using modified HIV virus, called VRX496, to attack and destroy the protective shell, or envelope, of the virus within living cells.
Typically, viruses reproduce by taking over the replication machinery of a living cell, turning the cell into a factory that pumps out more copies of the virus.
By attacking the protective envelope of the HIV virus, the new therapy suppresses the viability of the HIV virus, meaning that the virus can no longer replicate itself as successfully.
However, the possible changes to the human body don't end with disease.Researchers have also been able to reduce fat, pump up muscle (myostatin blockers), prevent and help recovery from radiation damage, lengthen lifespans and change the color of mice through gene manipulation. Although gene therapy is not yet considered safe for humans, it is only a matter of time before better techniques arrive that make it possible on a large scale.
Gene therapy is leading to faster and cheaper drug development and production.
It is quicker to make transgenic animals using gene therapy. Current methods of producing such animals involves microinjection and cloning, which is a more expensive and longer process. These methods are inefficient and also carry a risk of producing offspring with developmental abnormalities. Instead of 100 to 300 attempts to make clones that work, 10% of animals were breeding the desired changes with gene therapy.
RNA interference (RNAi) for gene therapy
At least six clinical trials using RNA interference (RNAi) have been approved, “with many more coming down the pipeline,” according to the Editorial by Mark A. Kay, MD, PhD, an Associate Editor of Human Gene Therapy and the Dennis Farrey Family Professor in Pediatrics and Professor of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. “One thing is clear,” adds Kay, “small RNAs as a therapeutic platform are here to stay.”
Gene therapy could fix chronic pain.
The rats were injected with a gene that tricks the body into releasing endorphins, a natural painkiller, in the nerve cells surrounding the spinal cord.
The treatment simulates the effect of painkilling drugs but is much narrower in scope, targeting nerve cells along the spinal cord, but not in the brain or in other parts of the central nervous system.
FURTHER READING
Myostatin inhibitor trials on humans
UK sports study expects myostatin inhibitor use by 2012
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Jamais Cascio, founder of Open the Future and a director at CRN, says nanofactories will have a huge impact: "If it becomes cheaper and more efficient to have something printed out locally instead of made in China, it will have a big effect on things like trade balances, international labor, and ... our national economy."
I think with improved technology that centralized production will not go away.
Technological impact starts occuring before nanofactories arrive with advances on the current generation of 3d printers, fabbers and rapid manufacturing systems. Also, the technology impact is not exclusively in favor of local manufacturing versus China production. Transportation costs to ship 140 million 100 gram UAVs do not put centralized production at much of a disadvantage relative to local fabrication. So do transportation costs outweigh economies of scale ? Big photocopying jobs still go to Kinkos and bigger printing runs of marketing materials still get outsourced to China. I see the relationship with local printable electronics and fabbers to be the same.
Adaptable but relatively large reel to reel printable electronic production could be part of the warehouse area of a Walmart or Costco. Just like they photograph printing at Walmart and Costco and Kinkos now.
Monster high volume production would still make sense to be placed in China.
It is not just that you can have bigger machines with higher economies of scale, the economies of scale also have to do with having the customers to keep the machines busy and running all the time. There are economies of constant operation and amortization and economies of specialization. The manufacturing specialist will be better at it because that is what they do all the time.
I do not think the business factors change that much even with nanofactories (at least not beyond the current products like printing). I think the big nanofactory will still be more efficient and lower cost than the desktop nanofactory.
Economies of scale
The common ones are purchasing (bulk buying of materials through long-term contracts), managerial (increasing the specialization of managers), financial (obtaining lower-interest charges when borrowing from banks and having access to a greater range of financial instruments), and marketing (spreading the cost of advertising over a greater range of output in media markets). Each of these factors reduces the long run average costs (LRAC) of production by shifting the short-run average total cost (SRATC) curve down and to the right.
There are
Diseconomies of scale as well.
Causes
1. Cost of communication
2. Duplication of effort
3. Top-heavy companies
4. "Office politics"
5. Isolation of decision makers from results of their decisions
6. Slow response time
7. Inertia (unwillingness to change)
8. Cannibalization
9. Large market share / portfolio
10. Public and government opposition
11. Other effects related to size
FURTHER READING
Prodution costs and pricingThis discusses the advantages and disadvantages of mass production, jobbing and batch production.
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Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on "watchful vigilance from underneath". The idea is that citizens should be working together to watch society and government to prevent abuse of power and to help detect and defend against terrorists and others who would act against society.
An interesting new development is that there are "do it yourself" DIY instructions on "How to build your own witness camera." The camera will detect people moving around, it silently starts recording to digital media.
The Witness Camera is a combination of a VGA CMOS camera, a passive-infrared movement sensor, a 1 GB SD-card (or bigger), and an AVR Mega32 microcontroller implementing a solid-state time-lapse recorder. It is a compact, complete, self-contained surveillance system designed with home users in mind. It can be installed in minutes wherever there is a mains plug, and it is affordable because of it is built using an handful of inexpensive parts.
The component prices are less than $100 for the camera part and maybe $150 for a display (you could already own a display system with your own computer.) Commercial systems range from $1000-2000+ and have hard drives and video disk or tape recording.
About $50 for the camera
$14 for the remote
$14 for the Passive IR
You need a out-of-sight place, spacious enough to accommodate the recorder and the video display ($150), because images can only be inspected using the original recorder.
Your mileage can vary, but you should be able to get about 50,000 frames at 320x200 (like the one below), or 25,000 at 640x480, using a 1 GB card (I haven’t tried bigger cards). This corresponds to more than 40 hours of overall recording.Actual time span is much more than that. Likely, the best location for the camera is in the foyer, where people stand just a few minutes per day. In my case; just 20 minutes on average, giving an impressive 120 days of storage capacity.
All fo the pieces should be fabricatable with rapid manufacturing and printable electronics. So this will get even cheaper and more capable.
The state of sousveillance and surveillance will be radically transformed over the next 4-8 years even without full blown nanofactories. Right now there are about 200 million vidphones (about 150+ million activated video cellphones) and camcorders (50+ million) and there are tens of thousands of closed circuit television and other monitoring. There are over one billion camera cellphones.
Power efficiency and power generation will make it easier for always on camcording
MIT and Texas Instruments have designed chips that are ten times more energy efficient and could run off of ambient energy (thus could be always on.) 5 years away from commercialization for the low power TI chips. A few years back in the
lab there has been work that makes digital CMOS cameras 50 times more energy efficient. The recent development of systems to generate (5 watts) power from people walking and taking the power from the breaking part of the step actually makes walking easier.
Superior Lidar, t-rays and better satellite and other remote sensing too.
Progress with computers and software automatically deciphering what is in the digital images. Quantum computers will also help with pattern recognition and faster image database searches.
So within 6 years there will be billions of vidphones/camcorders always on. 10-20 times as much as now.
- serious reel to reel fabrication of printable electronics integrated with upgraded fabbers (see what current 1 million dollar rapid manufacturing systems can make) could enable people to dump out smaller than USB stick versions of the witness camera for less than 5 dollars a piece. Within ten years it could go to less than rice grain sized and be producable for pennies a piece. Once we are past the $5 a piece level then people can wire up every aspect of themselves, their home, their office cubicle, their car etc...
FURTHER READING
Make magazine is has other ideas that are suitable projects for rapid manufacturing and future fabber machines.
Example: Do-It-Yourself robotic inflatables that navigate autonomously and intelligently. They are light-seeking helium-filled balloons that graze the landscape in search of light and cellphone signals
So you can fab your own witness cameras and mount them in your inflatable flying robots.
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Next-generation memories--such as FRAM, MRAM, PCM and others--are supposed to replace today's DRAMs and flash memory technologies. Current memory devices are expected to hit the wall, as the floating-gate reaches its physical limits.
Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics Inc. reached a milestone, as they begin shipping prototype samples of their previously-announced phase change memory (PCM) line. The 90-nm, 128-megabit product is slightly late to the market; the companies were supposed to ship the device late last year.
As RAM and flash technologies run into scaling limitations over the next decade, PCM costs will decline at a faster rate, Intel and ST claimed, further predicting that the advent of multi-level-cell PCM will accelerate the cost per bit crossover of PCM relative to today’s technologies. The duo also projected that by combining the bit-alterability of DRAM, the non-volatility of flash, the fast reads of NOR, and the fast writes of NAND, PCM has the ability to address the entire memory market and be a key driver for future growth over the next decade.
Intel has said that it has produced prototypes of PCM devices and is shipping samples to customers now. Codenamed “Alverstone” the devices are 256 Mb multi-level (2 bit) cell devices manufactured in 90 nm. Taking the prototype down to leading edge lithography levels of 45nm would increase the 2 bit cell technology to 1 Gb, which is still behind the latest flash at 16 Gb.
Unofficially, the 90-nm, 128-Mbit part is being billed as a NOR flash compatible replacement. Cliff Smith, technical industry manager at Intel, said that the part provides fast read and write speeds at lower power than conventional flash, and allows for bit alterability normally seen in RAM.
According to Al Fazio, memory technology development director, Intel, only three memory technologies that more or less meet the next generation memory criteria: MRAM, FeRAM and PCM, with the latter being the most promising. PCM is the most promising because it appears to have the capability to scale down to 5 nm and beyond.
PCM is already proven in certain applications; it is the material that is used in rewritable CD-ROMs. There, it is used with a laser — photon energy changes its material from an amorphous to a crystalline state. “We’re trying to use an electrical current — IR heating — instead of light to change the memory,” Fazio said. “While it’s doable, it hasn’t been proven on a large manufacturing base. That’s a major hurdle — moving this feasibility, the basic capability, to the manufacturing floor.” Another PCM concern is that although there are many studies showing that it is scalable down to probably <5 nm dimensions, producing a device around it is a different matter. “How do you build the device structure, what’s the wordline/bit line configuration of that array, how do you get all of this to work in those small dimensions? I have little doubt that it will be solvable, but it will require work,” Fazio said.
Meanwhile, in recent times, Freescale, NEC and others have rolled out rival MRAM devices. And Texas Instruments and others claim to be shipping another competitive technology called FRAM.Japan's NEC recently claimed that it has developed the world's fastest MRAM. NEC's new ''SRAM-compatible, MRAM'' can operate at 250-MHz. The MRAM has a memory capacity of 1-megabit.
The MRAM is still in the development stages, and eventually, it will be targeted for select markets, said Masao Fukuma, senior vice president of NEC Electronics Corp. "Embedded memory is our first target," he told EE Times at ISSCC
SanDisk builds NAND flash chips with 3-bit cells when others had only offered 2 bit cellsSeveral firms are working on NAND flash structures with 4-level cells. SanDisk is using the intermediate step x3 MLC with three bits per cell, developed jointly with its partner Toshiba, for a 16-gigabit chip.
In comparison with single-level cell (SLC) NAND flashes, which are more expensive because of their larger die areas, MLC memory chips do, however, have disadvantages. The number of write cycles that each individual cell survives is typically around 10,000 for MLCs, but the figure for SLCs is usually 100,000. Error correction for MLCs requires a more expensive 4-bit ECC technique, whereas 2-bit ECC is sufficient for SLCs. The higher cost of signal processing, moreover, reduces the data-transfer rate.
A closely related chip with x2 MLC and half the capacity, on the other hand, is to achieve more than 60 Mbytes per second. SanDisk quotes only 8 megabytes per second for writing to the x3 MLC NAND flash. SLC NAND flashes are therefore still commonly built into fast solid-state discs (SSDs). Intel and Micron had also announced ONFI 2.0 NAND flashes with a capacity of eight gigabits and a write-data transfer rate of up to 100 Mbyte/s at ISSCC 2008.
SanDisk intends to begin shipping products. Shipments will start with 16-Gbit devices, followed by 32-Gbit parts in the second half of 2008.
FURTHER READING
Another alternative memory is programmable metallization cell or nanoionic memory
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Carnival of Space #40 is up at orbiting frog
I contributed my article on SpaceX's progress on the Falcon 9 rocket
Hobby space updates the activites of Bigelow Aerospace who are making an inflatable space hotel
Centauri Dreams lives up to its siet name with a talk about the Longshot space mission. It was a plan to develop technologies over 20-30 years for a 100 year mission to reach the alpha centauri solar system.
Longshot was conceived as being built with modular components on the ground and then launched to low-Earth orbit for assembly at the space station presumed to be operational there. The enabling technologies included a “pulsed fusion micro-explosion drive” (I’m quoting from the Project Longshot report) with a specific impulse of 1 million seconds, along with a long-life fission reactor with 300 kilowatts power output.
The Longshot pdf report is here
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Images of (A,B) shaped CNT solids monoliths, (C) shards, and (D) powders derived from said monoliths. Credit: Naval Research Laboratory.
