The new book from CRC Press features a chapter written by Zyvex founder Jim Von Ehr: “Zyvex Corporation: Providing Nanotechnology Solutions today.” The chapter discusses Zyvex’s Instruments and Materials product lines, our partners, processes, and corporate focus. It also contains a section on Zyvex’s vision for atomically precise manufacturing and the 2001 NIST-ATP grant for “Assemblers for Nanotechnology Applications and Manufacturing: Enabling the Nanotechnology Era.”
The book begins by detailing the steps required to turn an idea into a marketable product. The editors give examples of previously successful products and relate to their own experiences in development. Next, the text focuses on the importance of entrepreneurship and the required steps to finance and develop a marketing strategy. It contains various definitions of nanotechnology and how each relates to roadmap and production issues. Three detailed case studies from the leading MNT development and manufacturing companies describe how each venture started and progressed to become a market leader. These studies offer valuable insight into overcoming the challenges related to achieving financial backing and specifying the right product for development.
Chapter 1: The Path to Commercialization
Chapter 2: Entrepreneurships role in Commercializing Micro-nanotechnology products
Chapter 3: Roadmapping Nanotechnology
Chapter 4: Technology transfer of nanotechnology products from US Universities
Chapter 5: Commercialization strategies for Public research organizations
Chapter 6: Market Analysis and growth for Micro-nanotechnology products
Chapter 7:
Oxonica PLC - A leading UK nanotechnology firm : Kevin Matthews
Chapter 8: Zyvex Corporation - providing nanotechnology solutions today: Jim Von Ehr
Chapter 9: microParts GmbH - History of a successful German Microsystems based business. Reiner Wechsung
Chapter 10: Shaping the Future
Oxonica is one of the leading international nanomaterials groups with products already launched into international markets. Oxonica’s business model is to focus on its strength in identifying market opportunities, securing intellectual property and introducing new technology to market. The company has four operating divisions: Oxonica Energy, Oxonica Healthcare, Oxonica Materials and Oxonica Security.
Oxonica has 60 staff. O2Q:London Stock Exchange. 1.4 Billion market capitalization. $20 million in revenue in 2006.
Commercialised products are:
Envirox™ Fuel Borne Catalyst – a fuel borne nanocatalyst for diesel engines which reduces fuel consumption with savings of 5-10% and reduces particulate emissions by up to 15%. The product has already been adopted by Stagecoach Group in the UK and is distributed by DMX Technology Corporation to petroleum companies in the Philippines for use in a premium diesel.
Optisol™ UV Absorber – a photostable UV absorber that provides enhanced and longer lasting protection against UVA in sun-care and anti-ageing products. Optisol™ also reduces the formation of free radicals produced from exposure to the sun and which are implicated in premature skin ageing. Boots Group plc is the first to incorporate Optisol™ in their new Soltan Facial Sun Defense Cream for 2005.
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Wimax will have about 20% of the next generation wireless communication market, Long Term Evolution (LTE), a follow-on to cellular's GSM standard, will command the lion's share of fourth-generation cellular systems.
MacLeod said carriers Sprint Nextel, startup Clearwire and Russia's Sistema have committed to WiMax, while Cingular and Vodafone are backing LTE. AT&T, BT and Verizon may use WiMax as an adjunct to their fiber-to-the-home deployments, and satellite broadcasters are considering WiMax as a back channel.
Qualcomm may play the role of spoiler in what some see as a two-way race between LTE and WiMax. As early as the 3GSM or CTIA conference this spring, the company will demonstrate its plans for a technology beyond wideband CDMA that could be a contender for fourth-generation cellular.
Uma Jha, a director of product management at Qualcomm, said the company will demo products that deliver 10 Mbits/second of data and have better spectral efficiency than WiMax. Qualcomm has been working with partners such as Lucent and Samsung to get its version of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing accepted by the IEEE 802.20 group as well as the 3GPP2 group's Ultra Mobile Broadband cellular standards effort.
Carriers like Sprint are said to be attracted to WiMax primarily as a replacement for the leased lines they use to backhaul cellular traffic. But Atish Gude, senior vice president of Sprint's mobile broadband group, said one of the features that makes WiMax stand out is its ability to break old cellular business models by supporting new users and new devices, bought at retail.
Intel expects to follow up next year with devices offering a tenfold reduction in power draw. The 2008 devices will also include very low-power X86 CPUs now in design under Gadi Singer, who worked on both the Itanium server and the Xscale cellular processors at Intel.
Spectrum remains a factor limiting some WiMax uses. One carrier at last week's meeting lamented that his company could deploy WiMax in the United States today to serve rural users if the government would approve WiMax at 3.5 GHz. Many countries outside the United States allow WiMax at 3.5 GHz.
Other conference goers said the United States should open up use of WiMax at 700 MHz, where new spectrum will be available after the government reclaims analog broadcast TV airwaves in February 2009.
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Better uses for the conservative estimate of the Iraq War 1.2 trillion
Currently the war is not buying much. A shift should be made to a lower cost approach. Just engage enough to prevent safe havens for terrorists. Redeploy to borders. Occasional sweeps through different cities. Reduce the objectives. Shore up allies Kuwait, Israel, Turkey, Kurds, Afghanistan, etc... Let Sunnis and Shia fight it out. Come back at a time of the US's choosing. A later unpredictable surge. Run experimental tech through Iraq. New UAVs, robot fighting systems, make things more unpredictable.
Put some of the money into research in game changing military sensors and technology. Re-engage when technology projects change the way things can be done.
Fareed Zakaria indicates the problem of the Arab states being mostly poorly run. The successful non-Arab muslim states of Turkey and Malaysia are examples what should be encouraged
Another Fareed Zakaria piece. Looking at our circumstances in Iraq should give us some appreciation for the difficulty of his [Kissinger's] task. With a losing hand and deteriorating conditions on the ground, Kissinger maneuvered to extricate the United States from a situation in which it could not achieve its objectives, while at the same time limiting the damage, shoring up regional allies and maintaining some measure of American credibility. A version of such a strategy is the only one that has any chance of success in Iraq today.
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I made several comments at this futurepundit post that again lay out more of the case against coal energy
There is some aspects of global warming and fossil fuel energy that are controversial. The uncontroversial and certain damage should be enough for us to motivate us to stop using coal. Stop using coal means trying anything else cleaner, which includes nuclear energy.
What I think should not be controversial
1. Coal and fossil fuel pollution kills hundreds of thousands if not a million people per year
from premature lung disease etc... 27000 in the USA according to the American lung assoc.
Sick and dieing people have a cost burden on medical systems.
2. When you mountain top removal mine, you often remove old growth forest and then replace decades later
with younger trees.
3. Coal mining moves material and is more dangerous. Moving the billions of tons. More miners die.
Statistically more accidents moving millions of freight cars and trucks of coal.
4. Mercury from coal is building up in fish.
5. Arsenic from coal also causes health problems
6. 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium are put into the air every year from coal energy use
Somewhat controversial for political but not factual reasons
7. Wars are fought over oil
Letting the "free market" replace coal is not good enough.
The coal companies are not paying for a lot of the costs that they create.
Why are we deciding to let this continue?
Is it just because we have been using coal for over a hundred years?
Suppose we equate what coal industry is doing to a foreign power. Say WW2 Germany had started in 1860. If they slowed down or moved their killing would that have been good enough?
OK, WW2 Germany if you only kill 27,000 americans in 2006 instead of 100,000-200,000 in 1950 and instead kill 400,000-1,000,000 in China you can keep doing it. (Not doing the calculation for other countries but thousands also die in Canada, UK, Germany and elsewhere) People no longer really think we can stop or mitigate what you are doing and we no longer really think about the deaths because you are using a slower acting gassing and poisoning. Plus gee you are supplying more inexpensive power. Our economies really needs that cheap power. Your costs are low cause you only pay for extraction and building the plants plus your margin. We will get everyone to pay for the gassing and poisoning. So we really are paying you to kill us, but let us continue that because if we made you pay then we would be destroying the free market you are operating under. Plus we let you destroy 7% of our forests in Appalachia and other places in the US and the world. But we do make you pay to replant them in a few decades. You do so many things it is sometimes difficult for people to believe it. Poisoning and killing animals, fish, trees etc... But maybe we should try to stop you because we have not convinced everyone that you are also making or contributing to making the earth warmer. Until we know whether life as we know it on the earth is doomed, we better not mess with the free market
Someone else in that discussion asked
My questions are as follows:
1. What part does the sun and sunspots play in global warming?
2. What part does the ocean play in global warming?
3. What part does Volcanoes play in global warming?
4. How do you stop China from producing more emissions into the air?
Question 4 first - China
Note: China will probably catch up to the USA in 2009 in terms of carbon and pollution created. This does not mean that the USA should not clean up is own pollution. US companies like Walmart have significant influence on Chinese supplier companies, so that is one means of influencing China. I make the case that China does not need to have us stop them from emissions into the air. They know the cost they are paying.
30,000 very ill from arsenic poisoning in China described in this pdf
China is arresting major industrial polluters. Environmental pollution cost China 511.8 billion yuan (64 billion dollars) in economic losses in 2004, amounting to 3.1 percent of total economic output that year, according to a previous report by Xinhua.
World Bank, Asia Development Bank study - connecting Asia
178000 premature deaths in major cities every year from coal (Rural areas would increase this to 400,000) Other estimates as high as 1,000,000 deaths.
China will spend $30B each year on environmental protection and cleanup each year.
include estimates of 6.4 million work years lost annually in China to air pollution
In over 20 major cities, the population in China coughs up black. They know they have a problem.
A PBS show upcoming: China From the Inside: Documentary. Directed by Jonathan Lewis, co-produced by KQED and Granada Television. Parts 1 and 2 at 9 p.m. Wednesday; Parts 3 and 4 at 9 p.m. Jan. 17, KQED.
While there are fleeting glances at the larger cities here and there, most of the filming took place in the provinces, in parts of the country few have ever heard of: the virtual dust bowl in the middle of China, where the Gobi Desert is encroaching rapidly now because the trees along the Yellow River have all been cut down; the little village of Hisai, where townspeople dared to expel a gang of corrupt local officials; various locales along the Huai River, a waterway so thick with pollution it is called "the river of death" and communities along its shores are labeled "cancer villages."
It will make economic and political sense for China to clean up its energy. The Chinese leaders know that this can lead to an uprising, which is what they fear.
Coal is part of the mix because Chinese leaders also must deliver growth to prevent too many people from being unemployed (again a bunch of unhappy unemployed uprising). Problem for Chinese leaders that in past uprising old leaders got killed.
China is at least completing two nuclear reactors every year (as noted by Ned).
China is spending a lot on nuclear and alternative power.
Mass transit and better cars will be introduced for economic efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Big subway expansions in Chinese cities because of gridlock.
Questions 1, 2, 3
Why put 6 billion tons of carbon per year into the air? Again you are saying until this part of the equation can be proved to be a cause of warming then you do not want to stop?
How about the particulates? Is it not contributing to worse health and deaths from lung cancer, asthma, lung disease ?
Why is the equivalent in deaths of over 15 Hiroshima's over the last 60 years to the US's own population not enough to motivate more energy infrastructure change? Oh look China is killing its own people at a rate of 5-10 Hiroshima's per year. Well if they are not going to stop then we should not either.
What about the mercury, arsenic, thorium and uranium ?
The 27,000 people who die each year usually are spending time in the hospital before they go, plus they are taking more medicine during their lifetime.
The annual direct health care cost of asthma is approximately $11.5 billion; indirect costs (e.g. lost productivity) add another $4.6 billion, for a total of $16.1 billion dollars. Prescription drugs represented the largest single indirect cost, at $5 billion. The value of lost productivity due to death represented the largest single indirect cost at $1.7 billion. Air pollution is a significant part of that one aspect of lung disease.
Freight transportation pdf describes that it will cost California $200 billion over the next 15 years from pollution from transportation. Note: Coal is a big part of that. The US is moving about 2 billion tons of coal each year.
40% of the pollution that hits the US comes from other countries but the US still produces the most pollution so the US is returning the favor to those other countries.
An estimate of costs from air pollution
Three quarters of the way down the above linked page
It estimates US air pollution costs at $145 to 530 billion. Extract the $18 to $140 billion estimate for greenhouse gases. Still $127 billion to $390 billion.
Sulfur Dioxide ** 52 to 122 billion
visability/airline delays 12 billion
health/work productivity 30 to 100 billion
lakes/recreation 10 billion
Nitrogen Oxide ** 25 to 55 billion
health/work loss 10 to 40
lake/bay/
eutrophication 5
lakes/rivers/rec 5
ozone layer damage/
nitrous oxide(N2O) 5
Materials Damage 10 to 35 billion
Probably reduced life of vehicles etc... from acid rain
Do you buy used cars from New York? Detroit? Toronto?
Did the coal or oil companies reimburse you for the shortened life of
your car if you are in one of places with more acid rain?
Toxic Metals ** 10 to 60 billion
Particulates/Health 5.6 to 48 billion
US coal industry 2005-2006
The coal industry in the USA is only $50+ billion/year industry in sales.
So if they all about as profitable as Peabody (largest US coal energy company) looking at 4-6 billion in earnings/year.
Which is far less than the health care costs per year.
Far less than the damage to property.
Plus they are subsidized even to get that measely amount.
40% of freight rail cargo is coal.
There are about 900 rail fatalities per year Coal statistical share of that is 360. The 2 billion tons of coal also sometime travel in large trucks. There were about 5000 large truck fatalities per year in the united states.http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=17555522&postID=508496613352056777
Blogger: advanced nanotechnology - Edit Post "More against coal"
There are about 24 mining workers driving fatalities per year and 621 workers per year died from material moving (1.24 billion tons of coal in 2002
Coal share of that is probably about 100-150 workers.
Breakdown of freight tonnage
1.8 billion tons by rail. (40% of rail tonnage is 720 million tons. So 500 million tons would move by truck.
Moving that much material also uses up a lot of gasoline. So the secondary effects continue to increase the costs in money (40% of railway maintenance related to coal and more oil used) and lives (truck and rail pollution generated by moving all that coal.
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India will start building a 300MW thorium based advanced heavy water nuclear reactor this year IT will take about five to six years to complete.
Another article talks about the advantages for India in using a Thorium fuel cycle
India's president Kalam talks about developing 50% efficient solar cells, Thorium reactors and biofuels to make India energy independent by 2030 Recent research has shown that the alignment of the CNT with the polymer composites substrate is the key issue and this aligned CNT-based PV cells would give very high efficiency in photovoltaic conversion. In this process, researchers could achieve an efficiency of about 50% at the laboratory scale. Our scientists have to take up this challenge and come up with the development of CNT-based PV cell with an efficiency of at least 50% within the next three years so that it can go into commercial production within five years. Solar power generation using high efficiency CNT based solar power photovoltaic cells will be highly competitive, compared to other forms of energy generation systems.
India rise as an economic and technological power with a technological visionary President could boost better energy and nanotechnological solutions for the whole world. If India is successful in starting down this path over the next 5-10 years then other nations will have to respond and adopt better practices and choices. I think India is making superior technological choices.
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The Super 3G (third generation) service will only require upgrades to the existing network, keeping down necessary investment to between 100 billion and 200 billion yen (840 million to 1.68 billion dollars), the Nikkei newspaper reported.
With a speed of roughly 100 megabits per second, Super 3G will be some 260 times faster as the existing 3G service of DoCoMo, which tops out at 384 kilobits per second, the business daily said without citing sources.
If the costs are similar for the USA and other locations then high speed mobile could become the dominant form of broadband communication unless the cable and fixed line services upgrade to faster than 100 mbps or a lot cheaper. Why would I keep using fixed line if mobile is as fast or faster and as cheap or cheaper?
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Walmart targets selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs each year by 2008
If it succeeds in selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008, total sales of the bulbs in the United States would increase by 50 percent, saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and 3 million tons of greenhouse gas per year. A compact fluorescent has clear advantages over the widely used incandescent light — it uses 75 percent less electricity, lasts 10 times longer, produces 450 pounds fewer greenhouse gases from power plants and saves consumers $30 over the life of each bulb.
The compact florescent bulbs are eight times as expensive as a traditional bulb, gives off a harsher light and has a peculiar appearance. As a result, the bulbs have languished on store shelves for a quarter century; only 6 percent of households use the bulbs today. During an extraordinary meeting in Las Vegas in early October, competing bulb makers, academics, environmentalists and government officials met to ponder, at times uncomfortably, how Wal-Mart could sell more of the fluorescent lights.
The proposals discussed at what Wal-Mart dubbed the “light bulb summit” ranged from the practical (advertise the bulbs on the back of a Coke 12-pack) to the quixotic (create a tax on incandescent bulbs to make them more expensive). At the same time that it pressured suppliers, Wal-Mart began testing ways to better market the bulbs. In the past, Wal-Mart had sold them on the bottom shelf of the lighting aisle, so that shoppers had to bend down. In tests that started in February, it gave the lights prime real estate at eye level. Sales soared.
To show customers how versatile the bulbs could be, Wal-Mart began displaying them inside the lamps and hanging fans for sale in its stores. Sales nudged up further.
To explain the benefits of the energy-efficient bulbs, the retailer placed an education display case at the end of the aisle, where it occupied four feet of valuable selling space — an extravagance at Wal-Mart. Sales climbed even higher.
In August 2006, the chain sold 3.94 million, nearly twice the 1.65 million it sold in August 2005, according to a person briefed on the numbers.
This is a step in the right direction but even with 100 such projects there is still the need to clean up energy sources. Coal got 50% cleaner in 1960s and 1970s and we got twice as efficient with the use of energy but coal is still a big problem that kills over 1000 people per day.
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From IEEE spectrum, IBM is making a major research effort into services science. The goal is to measureably improve service productivity.
Paul Maglio, a senior manager at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, says his services group has grown from nine people in December 2002 to more than 70 now. He estimates that 550 of IBM’s 3000-plus researchers are working on services, either directly with clients or as part of teams running company projects. Maglio says the skill mix of IBM research will continue to shift as the labs hire ever more anthropologists, sociologists, and economists.
IBM isn’t alone. Last year Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., announced that it, too, was hiring anthropologists and social scientists to help in its product development.
IBM has been aggressively promoting a new academic discipline it calls services science, management, and engineering (SSME).
IBM’s research in business consulting “tends to be much more mathematical,” tailored to specific industries and involving supply-chain optimization, logistics optimization, data management, and data analytics. All of those, he says, are “aimed at helping our clients improve their business processes and their approaches to markets.”
Further Reading:
IBM's services science, management, and engineering group
Business Weeks article on services science
The university of Berkeley's service science department
The effort to develop and productize new scientifically based services
IBM service science recommended reading list
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Researchers at Samsung, one of the leading producers of flash-memory chips, recently announced a new chip that can hold twice as much data as before, and without an increase in its footprint on a circuit board. They were able to double the data capacity by building chips with multiple layers of silicon, creating 3-D structures. At the International Electron Device meeting in San Francisco last week, lead researcher Soon-Moon Jung said that by combining today's chip-making processes with the new 3-D design, they could build a one-terabit flash chip composed of eight layers of silicon.
Because flash-memory chips are made with silicon, their storage capacity has consistently increased, while chip size has shrunk. But, like microprocessors, flash memory will face fabrication hurdles in the next few years. Right now, the features on many flash-memory chips are about 60 nanometers wide. Some engineers estimate that today's lithography systems, used to pattern and carve out these features, will only be able to keep shrinking them until about 2009. And even then, the chips face physical limitations. Samsung's Jung says that with features smaller than 30 nanometers, electrical charges stored in a flash-memory cell will start to leak, meaning data will be lost.
So the Samsung researchers set out to find a way to use existing fabrication technology to increase flash capacity. Jung says that two elements were key: minimizing the amount of extra area used for their stacking architecture, and keeping the number of extra fabrication steps to a minimum, so as not to drive up costs.
Although Samsung didn't offer a specific timeline for its 3-D flash memory, Jung says that it could "be rapidly deployed because it can fully utilize existing 2-D planar technology. The prototype memory chip announced in San Francisco is still in its early stages and only has a capacity of 32 bits. Still, the results are encouraging. "I think it's an interesting demonstration of concept," says Subramanian. "The fact that they got it to work and they're getting very good electrical data, and the fact that the multiple layers built on top of each other work pretty nicely, is attractive."
Yet Subramanian cautions that the technology for 3-D flash still needs to prove its manufacturability. Even with Samsung's results, adding layers of silicon increases the number of steps in the process and ultimately makes the chip more expensive. "Flash memory is very driven by price, and it's a very cutthroat business," he says.
terabit memory
samsung
future memory
flash memory
Further reading:
possible flash memory replacement phase change memory
Ovonic cognitive computer possible transistory replacement from the inventor of phase change memory
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An article from the New York Times about the UN report on global wealth distribution
A lot of focus has been on how much is owned by the top tier. (40% by the top 1% and 50% by the top 2%, 85% from the top 10%)
I think it is more important to note how India and China are developing and helping many of their people move up. Poorer nations face many obstacles to amassing wealth, including sketchy property rights and land tenure systems, and underdeveloped financial markets. So it is possible for countries to fix their systems and get onto the development track.
People can also study and see how individuals become more successful within countries. Such as the millionaires and billionaires in the United States. If someone is in a developed country they can change what they are doing to improve their situation.
Hints:
Someone in Africa either has to become a successful warlord or has to leave and escape the area and get to someplace where they can do better. Note: even within developed nations and regions, some places might be a better match to ease your own path to wealth. Location, location, location is not just advice for real estate but for ideally locating yourself to optimize your chances and situation. The report is telling you that some countries are loser countries. Some regions are loser regions. In a lot of places that will not change. Winners will keep on winning. A few places can change, but it will be apparent years in advance who is turning it around.
Someone who is in the United States (or anywhere else) has to look at moving beyond low skill salary work and master advantages for a successful business or some form of investment. This advice is advantages, advantages, advantages. If you really want to do well then you must figure out ways to do what you do better than your competitors. Better means having lower costs, being able to sell at higher prices, being able to add value, being able to complete transactions faster etc... The report is also saying that some people and personal strategies are winners. If you are not winning then you are and will stay a loser if you do not change.
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A former secretary of the UK cabinet discusses the need and shift to more comprehensive energy policies that take into account all costs
A good modified market energy portfolio should take into account the volatility of the availability and price of different fuels.
Natural gas, as the world has witnessed, can fluctuate enormously. In the U.K., the spot price of natural gas doubled between 2004 and 2006. Even more damaging were two price spikes, in which U.K. gas prices briefly rose about 400 percent. Importing nations, in particular, have little recourse if suppliers raise prices suddenly (as Russia’s Gazprom has done) or supplies approach a natural peak (as has been predicted for oil). Other fuels are relatively stable; once reactors are built, the price of nuclear power remains relatively constant. Nuclear power can therefore take the role that bonds play in a pension fund: not necessarily the highest-yielding asset, but one that reduces volatility.
Recent analysis conducted by the U.K. government shows that nuclear power would be viable over a wide range of scenarios. It would struggle to compete only if gas prices and the shadow price of carbon were both low. That combination is inherently implausible, however; it would almost certainly lead to a higher shadow price for carbon, bringing nuclear power back into contention.
A consensus is building in Europe and North America with respect to global climate change and energy security, and it is coupled with a growing sense of urgency. We now have a moment of opportunity to create a framework that enables the essential energy choices to be made — not by dictating them, but by providing open competition and building all the relevant factors into the marketplace where choices are made.
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Dwave systems plans to demo a 16 qubit (4×4 grid) superconducting AQC (adiabatic quantum computing) in the first quarter of 2007. Each qubit is connected to nearest- and next-nearest neighbors using tunable couplers. The chip is programmed by setting the values of the biases on each qubit (16 total), and the values of each of the (42) couplers.
The demo will focus on running two applications on the hardware. One is a planning/scheduling application and the other is a pattern match application for small molecules.
Since Dwave was considering starting out with a 64 qubit machine, I believe that if they hit the Q1 2007 16 qubit target that by Q4 of 2007 they will have the 64 qubit machine.
My paid public prediction at long bets is 100+ qubits by Dec 31,2010. I remain confident that Dwave systems will the company that makes that prediction come true. I think 100+ qubits will happen in 2008.
Logistics dependent companies like airlines, buses, trucking and package delivery companies will benefit with more efficient routing. The stocks of and related to the Dow Jones Transportation index
Biotechnology and nanotechnology companies will benefit from the improved quantum simulation capabilities. The Nasdaq biotechnology index lists prominent biotech companies
The routing and infrastructure of information delivery for computer networks could also be optimized. There is also optimization potential in the layout of computer chips.
I think there will be significant efficiency gains that will be captured in the 2008-2010 timeframe with 64-1024 qubit quantum supercomputers.
Computer security companies and computer security consultants will benefit from new work changing the computer security to be quantum computer resistant. Banks, governments and financial institutions will have the expense of converting their systems to the new algorithms.
quantum computer
quantum computer business impact
adiabatic quantum computer
quantum
qubits
qubit
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Firstly, coal power never left. New coal power went from almost 95% to 50% but it never went away.
The December, 2006 issue of Discover magazine has an article about the dangers of a return to coal power and the Independent talks about what we can use to replace oil the way oil replaced coal.
People talk about future power but the technologies of the past like coal still have a firm grip on our world and our economy.
The Discover magazine article has a couple of things that I will note:
1. 7% of the Appalachian forest has been obliterated by mountain top-removal mining.
Images of coal mountain top removal are all over the internet, here is one example.
9-15 men using explosives and massive bulldozers remove a mountain top in about 14 months then scoop out the coal. The alternative is mine shafts but that has deaths rate that are 10-100 times higher.
2. 2.5 billion tons of carbon are put into the atmosphere every year from coal. Included with that are 20,000 tons of radioactive uranium and thorium and thousands of tons of mercury and arsenic. The best of newest coal plants (Futuregen) on the drawing board only capture 90% of the carbon and would not clean up the other pollutants. It costs $100/ton to sequester the carbon. So if we keep the existing coal plants it will take $250 billion/year to store the carbon. The carbon scrubbers do not get react to get the other material. So we would still get the radioactive material and other poisons. It will take decades to convert over to carbon sequestering and cleaner coal plants. We are looking at 9 new IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle plants) which wold help reduce emissions over the next decade starting in about 2013. That much carbon is not good for the environment. Even without talking about global warming the most anti-environmental must recognize the actual deaths from coal mining, significant pollution deaths, and environmental damage. The greatest global warming doubters must accept that global warming as a risk is increased by the 2.5 billion tons of carbon and global warming would be a bad thing.
As has been noted Coal causes 178000 premature deaths in major Chinese cities every year. Adding in rural Chinese areas would increase this to 400,000. 27,000 premature deaths in the United States as noted by the American lunch association.
Coal provides about 2 terawatts of global electricity every year and we are adding about 100 gigawatts every year in new coal plants. Coal power is a mid to late stage cancer that is killing the world, animals, plants and hundreds of thousands of people every year. Even the doubters cannot say that the mountain forests (plants) have not been removed. The doubters cannot say that ten thousand do not die each year digging up the coal around the world.
We need an aggressive nuclear energy program to help accelerate the removal of coal power. Just using solar (1.7GW added in 2005), wind (12 GW added in 2005) and hydro is like saying let us take some drugs to slow the growth of cancer tumors by 5% each year. But let us not take the nuclear capsules which can also slow the growth because we are scared the capsules could break. A three mile island nuclear "capsule" breaking caused no deaths and the Chernobyl "capsule" was the worst but it only caused 1/10,000th of the deaths in that year compared to coal. 100 capsules each year would stop the coal tumor growth and an additional 2000 capsules replaces the existing coal power cancer. We need the whole treatment cocktail. (conservation, biofuels, solar, wind, and nuclear.) Using everything gets to a cure within 20-40 years. Leaving big parts of the solution out means it takes decades longer to stop the coal tumor growth and decades more to get rid of our current tumors. Meanwhile the coal tumors kill over 1,000 every day and are already making planet sick and could kill the planet at some point. We just don't know when.
Happy thoughts and partial treatments will leave you dead.
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Here is an article about outsourcing healthcare With an estimated 45 million uninsured Americans, some 500,000 trekked overseas last year for medical treatment, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. Asian hospitals in Thailand, India and Singapore have long been swarmed by medical tourists looking for tummy tucks and face lifts, but many glitzy, marble-floored facilities are now gaining reputations for big-ticket procedures including heart surgery, knee and back operations.
This could also be a means of circumventing the Food and Drug Administrations 19 year drug approval process. A country could work with global drug and insurance companies to create a system of more advanced healthcare without restrictions from using newly discovered effective or promising approaches. Stem cells and regenerative treatments as well as life extension could be developed overseas with lower costs and fewer unnecessary delays. There would still be incentives to not apply treatments in a reckless fashion (too many people with bad results would be bad for future business).
Just as several small countries and states became tax and business havens with highly streamlined corporate laws and rules were created by lawyers and accountants, healthcare companies could create advanced healthcare havens.
Some of these locations might also be used to advanced transhuman and life extension medicine.
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If you have more than 10% of overall power from wind then there are issues keeping power supply stable
Mr. Frost, of the Alberta system operator, said European countries such as Denmark and Germany have been able to maintain a high proportion of wind power in their electricity systems mainly because they have multiple connections to other countries' power grids. That gives them substantial flexibility to import or export power to compensate for wind fluctuation.
Germany, for example, has 39 international interconnections, he said, making variable wind conditions much easier to manage.
Underground electical grid connections cost from $500,000 to $3 million per mile. $120,000 per mile for the erection of overhead lines. Connecting countries and states is very costly.
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A couple of other comments that I made on the greenpeace site. Re-edited.
The comments were in reference to information at links pointed to by the Greenpeace person.
End the nuclear age campaign. Talks about why Greenpeace is against nuclear power. they think plants are unsafe, nuclear waste problems and nuclear proliferation.
However, the current and past real alternative to nuclear power has been coal and oil. Coal and oil plants and mining are inherently less safe than nuclear. Here are statistics on coal mining deaths in the US and China Some calculate 22,000 lives each year in US alone are lost prematurely due to getting and using coal energy. Even without an unusual meltdown type accident coal plants kill people from normal operation. Nuclear energy deaths (other than 50 so far from Chernobyl and 4000 more potential deaths) are mainly hypothetical deaths and fears of radiation. Those 4000 Chernobyl deaths from 56 years of nuclear plant operations and a few hundred nuclear submarine deaths are less than one year of mining and health deaths from coal under business as usual.
Another interesting point is that more radiation and radioactive material is released from coal plants than from nuclear plants For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium. The population gets 100 times more radiation from a coal plant than from a nuclear plant.
The end the nuclear age links that you have discuss renewables generating more power than nuclear already. The vast majority of that renewable power is hydroelectric. I thought that Greenpeace would be against building more dams, since it messes up the water ecosystem and the surrounding vegetation. The rotting vegetation releases CO2.
Here are the figures from the Energy Information administration for the global picture Notice that the forecast is for hundreds of new coal plants to be built. President Bush has coal as a central part of his energy policy.
The british anti-nuke site says that 10 new plants will take at least until 2024. Perhaps those are for UK plants with UK building regulations. The projected global case is for over 43 gigawatts of nuclear capacity to be added from non-OECD countries. It is only going to take China about 4 years to build each new plant. Building the plants can be a lot faster with less bureaucracy.
Improvements to the fuel (hollow cylinders instead of solid rods) and the heat removal liquid will allow current nuclear plants to generate 50% more power. In the USA that is 160GW. This can be done over the next few years.
Nuclear waste is a problem. However, nuclear waste is not killing anyone or very few people now. Coal and oil pollution and CO2 are costing lives now. Thorium reactors can process the current waste. So we will not be storing the waste for 10,000 years but converting it to a more manageable form in decades if we make the right choices.
Nuclear alone is not the only answer, but it is part of a better and realistic solution. Along with carbon sequestering, conservation, efficiency improvements, solar and wind.
Thorium reactors can be brought online faster if we use the liquid-fluoride (molten-salt) reactors. The Norwegians are looking at accelerator based versions. How long things take depend upon choices and how well we plan and execute.
Here are links to my thorium articles
A lot of the information is from Kirk Sorensons excellent Thorium energy blog
Accelerating Futures has an interesting proposal for mass produced Thorium reactors
There are some 440 nuclear plants around the world.
Most of the hundreds of reactors were built from 1960 to late 1980's. So the statement that only ten can be made from now to 2024 is wrong. China has turned on seven reactors from 2002 to 2006.
The most conservative IAEA projection is for nuclear power to increase to 640 GW by 2030. China will be adding 40 or more nuclear plants by itself. India has 8 under construction and is looking for ten times as much by 2022.
The world economy is not standing still. the energy revolution stuff is a plan to make enough power for individuals in there homes. Domestic power usage is not all there is. There is industry and productivity. Expansion and growth are going to happen. Greenpeace would have to initiate a successful war and a totalitarian regime to turn that around. As I noted before, millions die to keep the current system going.
I will also note that there is an excessive fear and fixation on nuclear weapons. What you fear is all out war. The fire bombing of Tokyo in world war 2 killed 100,000. In the same range as each of the atomic bombings. More than Nagasaki and almost as much as Hiroshima. Current weapons for fire bombing are 10-20 times more effective than at that time. An all out max-casualty conventional air campaign could run up any kind of casualty amount that you can imagine. Plus once a medical infrastructure is ruined a humanity disaster can easily be triggered via water supply etc... The point is we should not have all out war. Trying to campaign against one or two classes of weapons or technique is pointless.
Of the over 170 to 220 million deaths from mass killings in the 20th century less than 0.2% were from nuclear weapons.
It is alright to fear the potential deaths from nuclear weapons but try not to lose sight of the millions dieing every year now from coal and oil pollution and car accidents and conventional violence.
If we mass produced nuclear power 6000 plants or more by 2050. We should also develop solar and wind and other renewable power, but to get to over 10 times our current power level we will need more. You could say we can stop or convince China and India and other countries to not come up to our power usage or higher. The millions dead in the oil wars of the last two decades would be nothing compared to the fight to stop other countries from developing or in more resource competition wars. If we get most everyone off of the dependence on oil then I think the Middle East will still likely be a mess. It will be a mess like Africa. A lower priority mess where we look at non-military solutions and aid. On the plus side, we will have fairly happy and materially well off 70% of the world. The environment will be coming out of crisis as we stop adding CO2 and start sequestering and cleaning it up.
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The Open Prototype Initiative is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology House_n Research Consortium, Bensonwood Homes and other construction industry members to develop a series of four prototype homes , deploying advanced designs, materials, systems, and fabrication strategies, with a goal of showing how high-quality, sophisticated, and personalized homes can be built more cost-effectively and in less time. Each home will be built in 20 working days. The first prototype, Open_1 - a three-story 28-by-46-foot house begins in June 2006, with another new home being built every 18 months through 2010.
Some key features:
- The floor, wall and roof systems will be pre-built with wiring pre-installed.
- Floors, ceilings and baseboards will allow for easy access to plumbing, heating and wiring;
- The structure will consist of distinct, disentangled and accessible layers that allow for both efficient assembly and for change over time;
- The building shell, with exterior finish, will be assembled in five working days
- Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems will be installed in three working days
- Interior fit-out will be completed in five working days
- Interior finishes will be completed in five working days
It seems like they have several interesting ideas to improve upon the modern manufactured/prefab home.
A quick summary of categories of manufactured homes. The MIT plans are a fresh take on a mix of panelized and modular systems.
Manufactured Home: Built entirely in the factory under federal code administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which went into effect June 15, 1976, has been upgraded numerous times.
Mobile Home: The term mobile home used for homes built prior to June 15, 1976, when HUD code went into effect. Voluntary standards were previously in effect.
Modular Home: Built to state, local or regional code where home will be located. Multi-section units are transported to sites and installed.
Panelized Home: Built in factory, where panels that include windows, doors, wiring & siding, are transported to site and assembled. Codes are set by state or locality where sited.
Pre-Cut Home: Materials are factory cut to design specifications and then transported to the site and assembled. Examples are: kit, log and dome homes. Standards are set by state and locality.
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The team, led by Martin Richardson, university trustee chair and University of Central Florida (UCF)'s Northrop Grumman professor of X-Ray optics, successfully demonstrated for the first time an EUV light source with 30 times the power of previous recorded attempts – enough to power the stepper machines used to reproduce detailed circuitry images onto computer chips.
"We must use a light source with a wavelength short enough to allow the minimum feature size on a chip to go down to possibly as low as 12 nanometers," Richardson said. The current industry standard for semiconductor production is approximately 65 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
This means that the normal semiconductor business and Moore's law should have a clear technical path to 12 nanometers. Even better and cheaper technology could still come up, but it is difficult to displace the proven processes.
The semiconductor roadmap 2005, 2006 will be out Dec, 2006
The roadmap projects about 10 nanometer structures in 2015
CNET has an article about the projected semiconductor manufacturing process nodes, 32 nanometers, 22 nanometers and the challenges of achieving them
Wikipedia info on semiconductors
A series of CNET articles about extending Moore's law with other technology
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Xiaohua Huang, a professor of bioengineering in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, leads the effort at UCSD to develop a promising technology that shrinks what is currently being done in large genome-sequencing laboratories down to a glass slide the size of a business card. Huang's team will combine micro- and nano-fabrication technologies with innovative chemistry technologies to simultaneously sequence more than 1 billion individual pieces of DNA attached to the surface of single slides.
Huang will be joined at the Jacobs School by Pavel Pevzner, a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department who leads the department's Bioinformatics Laboratory. Sequencing the 23 pairs of human chromosomes extracted from the cells of one individual involves cutting the DNA into tens of millions to hundreds of millions of pieces, and Pevzner is developing the computational techniques needed to computationally reassemble the chromosomes by piecing together the overlapping ends of all the fragments after they have been sequenced.
Bioengineering professor Michael Heller is a third member of the UCSD team. He is an expert on using electric fields to actively manipulate biomolecules and assemblies of nanostructures. His expertise will be utilized to accelerate and enhance the sequencing process.
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