General Fusion on track for Demonstration of Net Gain Equivalent Plasma Compression this year

Tweet There is a 19 page presentation from 2012 that updates the progress of General Fusion

General Fusion is trying to make affordable fusion power a reality.
• Founded in 2002, based in Vancouver, Canada
• Plan to demonstrate proof of physics DD equivalent “net gain” in 2013
• Plan to demonstrate the first fusion system capable of “net gain” 3 years after proof
• Validated by leading experts in fusion and industrial engineering
• Industrial and institutional partners
• $42.5M in venture capital, $6.3M in government support

General Fusion intends to build a three-meter-diameter steel sphere filled with spinning molten lead and lithium. Super-heated plasma would be injected into the vortex and then the outside of the sphere would be hit with 200 computer-synchronized pistons travelling thousands of miles per hour. The resulting shock waves would compress the plasma and spark a fusion reaction for a few microseconds.

Carnival of Space 302

Tweet The Carnival of Space 302 is up at Cheap Astronomy

Dr. Paul Spudis has written Earth-Moon: A Watery “Double-Planet” on his Once and Future Moon weblog.

Tesla Repays $451 million Government loan ten years early and will get about $188 million this year selling Zero Emission credits

Tweet Tesla Motors announced that it has paid off the entire loan awarded to the company by the Department of Energy in 2010. In addition to payments made in 2012 and Q1 2013, today’s wire of almost half a billion dollars ($451.8M) repays the full loan facility with interest. Following this payment, Tesla will be the only American car company to have fully repaid the government for a Dept of Energy loan.

The loan payment was made today using a portion of the approximately $1 billion in funds raised in last week’s concurrent offerings of common stock and convertible senior notes. Elon Musk, Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer and cofounder, purchased $100 million of common equity, the least secure portion of the offering.

In the first quarter of 2013, Tesla sold nearly $68 million of the zero-emission credits to other automakers. That represented 12% of its overall revenue. Other automakers are buying the zero emissions credits are concerned they won't able to meet tough new environmental regulations requiring that more than 15% of sales in 11 states be zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. Adam Jonas, auto analyst with Morgan Stanley, who estimates that the credits will come to $188 million this year.

Seager equation based on detected exoplanets alternative to Drake Equation for alien life

Tweet The Kepler space telescope has found more than 130 worlds and detected 3000 or so more possibles.

Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckons the Drake equation is ripe for a revamp. Her version narrows a few of the original terms to account for our new best bets of finding life, based in part on what Kepler has revealed. If the original Drake equation was a hatchet, the new Seager equation is a scalpel.

Red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy: projections based on Kepler data suggest that the nearest habitable Earth-sized world could orbit a red dwarf as close as 6.5 light years away.

Even better, it will be easier to probe these planets for gases associated with life, because tighter orbits mean that more of the star's light will filter through a planet's atmosphere on the way to us, picking up telltale clues to its composition. Seager's goal is to find the fraction of habitable Earth-sized worlds in our galactic neighbourhood with detectable atmospheric biosignatures – in other words, inhabited worlds. She has already put the number of inhabited planets that the James Webb space telescope might see at less than 10.

"Just like with the Drake equation, some of the terms are always speculative," Seager says.

Sara Seager has a 48 page ebook about "Is There Life Out There ? The Search for Habitable Exoplanets

New Technique May Open Up an Era of Atomic-scale Semiconductor Devices with wafer scale one atom thick layers

Tweet Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating high-quality semiconductor thin films at the atomic scale – meaning the films are only one atom thick. The technique can be used to create these thin films on a large scale, sufficient to coat wafers that are two inches wide, or larger.

“This could be used to scale current semiconductor technologies down to the atomic scale – lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), computer chips, anything,” says Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work. “People have been talking about this concept for a long time, but it wasn’t possible. With this discovery, I think it’s possible.”

The researchers worked with molybdenum sulfide (MoS2), an inexpensive semiconductor material with electronic and optical properties similar to materials already used in the semiconductor industry. However, MoS2 is different from other semiconductor materials because it can be “grown” in layers only one atom thick without compromising its properties.

In the new technique, researchers place sulfur and molybdenum chloride powders in a furnace and gradually raise the temperature to 850 degrees Celsius, which vaporizes the powder. The two substances react at high temperatures to form MoS2. While still under high temperatures, the vapor is then deposited in a thin layer onto the substrate.

Nature Scientific Reports- Controlled Scalable Synthesis of Uniform, High-Quality Monolayer and Few-layer MoS2 Films

Molecular Trigger for Alzheimer's Disease Identified

Tweet Researchers have pinpointed a catalytic trigger for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease – when the fundamental structure of a protein molecule changes to cause a chain reaction that leads to the death of neurons in the brain.

For the first time, scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry have been able to map in detail the pathway that generates “aberrant” forms of proteins which are at the root of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

They believe the breakthrough is a vital step closer to increased capabilities for earlier diagnosis of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and opens up possibilities for a new generation of targeted drugs, as scientists say they have uncovered the earliest stages of the development of Alzheimer’s that drugs could possibly target.

Single cell genomics breakthrough - RNA in single cells sequenced and up to 1000-fold variability in expression levels found

Tweet A team of scientists at the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute recently completed an effort to read, or sequence, all the RNA — the “transcriptome” — in individual immune cells. Whereas DNA in a cell’s genome represents its blueprint for making the building blocks of cells, RNA is more like the cell’s contractor, turning that blueprint into proteins. By sequencing RNA in single cells, scientists can obtain a picture of what proteins each cell is actively making and in what amounts.

The Broad researchers sought to adapt a recently developed technique for single-cell RNA sequencing, known as SMART-Seq, and apply it to a model of immune cell response well-studied by Regev, Broad senior associate member Nir Hacohen, and their fellow researchers. In this model, immune cells known as bone-marrow derived dendritic cells (BMDCs) are exposed to a bacterial cell component that causes the cells to mount an immune response.

Working with scientists in the Broad’s Genomics Platform, notably research scientists Joshua Levin and Xian Adiconis, the team established the SMART-Seq method for use in their model system, using it to gather RNA sequence data from 18 BMDCs in this pilot phase.

The team first analyzed the data for differences in expression, or activity, of various genes among the cells, seen as alterations in RNA abundance. Although they were working with a single cell type — BDMCs — they did expect to see some variation in gene expression as cells activated various pathways during their immune response. But the team discovered that some genes varied greatly, with 1000-fold differences in the expression levels between cells. “We went after a narrowly defined cell type that has a specific function that we think of as being very uniform,” said Shalek. “What we saw was striking — a tremendous variability that wasn’t expected.”


Nature - Single-cell transcriptomics reveals bimodality in expression and splicing in immune cells