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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

ScienceDaily: Top Technology News


How to improve high-speed rail ties against freezing, thawing conditions

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 08:12 AM PDT

Engineers are helping high-speed rail systems handle the stress of freezing and thawing winter weather conditions.

Titan supercomputer debuts: Computer churns through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 07:35 AM PDT

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just launched a new era of scientific supercomputing with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second -- or 20 petaflops -- by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Hopping robots could conserve energy

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 06:28 AM PDT

A new study shows that jumping can be more complicated than it might seem. In research that could extend the range of future rescue and exploration robots, scientists have found that hopping robots could dramatically reduce the amount of energy they use by adopting a unique two-part "stutter jump."

Cocktail achieves superconducting boost: High-performance material uses iron and selenium

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 05:18 AM PDT

Physicists describe how they have synthesized a new material that belongs to the iron-selenide class of superconductors, called LixFe2Se2(NH3)y. This material displays promising superconducting transition temperatures of 44 Kelvins (K) at ambient pressure, thus improving upon traditional copper-based high-temperature superconductors.

Super-massive black hole inflates giant bubble

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 05:18 AM PDT

Like symbiotic species, a galaxy and its central black hole lead intimately connected lives. The details of this relationship still pose many puzzles for astronomers.

'Beam me to my meeting:' Video conferencing much improved

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 05:18 AM PDT

Forget about crackly lines or blurry webcams. Video conferencing has just got a whole lot better. By combining robotics, video and a host of other sensor and display technologies, scientists can now virtually 'beam' you to locations on the other side of the globe. It may sound like science fiction, but this new approach can make it feel like you are really 'there'.

'Curiosity' on Mars sits on rocks similar to those found in marshes in Mexico

Posted: 29 Oct 2012 05:18 AM PDT

Millions of years ago fire and water forged the gypsum rocks locked in at Cuatro CiƩnegas, a Mexican valley similar to the Martian crater where NASA's Rover Curiosity roams. A team of researchers have now analysed the bacterial communities that have survived in these inhospitable springs since the beginning of life on Earth "Cuatro CiƩnegas is extraordinarily similar to Mars. As well as the Gale crater where Curiosity is currently located on its exploration of the red planet, this landscape is the home to gypsum formed by fire beneath the seabed," as explained by an evolutionary ecologist.

SpaceX Dragon returns from space station with NASA cargo

Posted: 28 Oct 2012 08:11 AM PDT

A Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 2:22 p.m. CDT Sunday a few hundred miles west of Baja California, Mexico. The splashdown successfully ended the first contracted cargo delivery flight contracted by NASA to resupply the International Space Station.

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