1. The U.S. Department of Energy is quietly collaborating with China on an alternative nuclear power design known as a molten salt reactor that could run on thorium fuel.

China plans to have a 5 megawatt molten salt reactor in 2015.

DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy Peter Lyons is co-chairing the partnership’s executive committee, along with Jiang Mianheng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), according to a March presentation by CAS on thorium molten salt reactors. Beijing-based CAS is a state group overseeing about 100 research institutes. It and the DOE have established what CAS calls the “CAS and DOE Nuclear Energy Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding.”

Outside of the DOE, at least three companies in the West are privately developing thorium reactors: Flibe Energy, Huntsville, Ala, which has dusted off 1960s ORNL technology; Thorenco, San Francisco; and Ottawa Valley Research, Ottawa. Baroness Bryony Worthington of the UK House of Lords has emerged as the West’s political champion for thorium. India, home to huge reserves of thorium, also has ambitious plans. Japanese utility Chubu Electric is considering it.

2. India Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman R K Sinha said - India is planning to establish a nuclear power plant that uses thorium as main fuel instead of uranium, which is used in conventional reactors.

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Here is a 6 page progress report on the Dense Plasma Focus fusion work at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP)

Every doubling of current means 30 times power. So some relatively simple modifications which are being developed should boost power levels by 300 times.

Total elimination of arcing, which they are working on now, may drop the resistance to as low as 2 mOhms.

Full power, shorter electrodes, and our existing switches, FF-1 will produce over 2.3 MA, over twice our current output.

New, faster switches now under design for LPP by Raytheon will get us the rest of the way to our goal of 2.8 MA.


In May, 2012, the LPP plan for the next 12 months was laid out.

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Forbes - Based on 2011 salaries, some Chinese workers are earning as much as their American counterparts.

Position                             Annual Salary (US$)

Engineering supervisor                25,000 – 42,000
General manager                      130,000 – 330,000
R and D director                     100,000 – 167,000
Procurement director                  67,000 – 150,000
Quality director                      67,000 – 150,000
Chief technology officer             167,000 – 330,000
Marketing director                   100,000 – 130,000
PR/communications manager             34,000 – 67,000
Regional sales manager                67,000 – 100,000

Source: Hays 2012 Salary Guide – Asia

Of course, most Chinese do not have professional jobs, and minimum wage and social safety net comparisons to the U.S. are dismal. The federal minimum wage level in the U.S. is $7.25 per hour. A 40 hour work week means $290 a week gross for the lowest full-time workers in America. In Shenzhen and Shanghai, two of the highest earning cities in China, minimum wage is $238 and $230, respectively…per month.

There is 25 page salary survey from Gemini. It quotes monthly salary ranges by position in RMB.

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IEEE Spectrum - A robot (from the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Toyko) is unbeatable at rock, paper scissors. It's one of those high speed hands that works with a high speed vision system. And when we say 'high speed,' we mean fast enough that you can't really tell that the robot is cheating.

It only takes a single millisecond for the robot to recognize what shape your hand is in, and just a few more for it to make the shape that beats you.



Ishikawa Oku Lab website

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Technology Review - Leap Motion will launch a $70 superaccurate gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works. If you've seen the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you know what it does. More importantly, if you're familiar with the touch modality -- and at this point, most of us are -- the interface is entirely intuitive.



Verge has the technical details on the Leap Motion Controller

The Leap uses a number of camera sensors to map out a workspace of sorts — it's a 3D space in which you operate as you normally would, with almost none of the Kinect's angle and distance restrictions. Currently the Leap uses VGA camera sensors, and the workspace is about three cubic feet; Holz told us that bigger, better sensors are the only thing required to make that number more like thirty feet, or three hundred. Leap's device tracks all movement inside its force field, and is remarkably accurate, down to 0.01mm. It tracks your fingers individually, and knows the difference between your fingers and the pencil you're holding between two of them.

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CNN Money - Google's science-fiction-like virtual reality glasses will start shipping next year with a price tag of $1,500 -- but most buyers won't be able to get their hands on a pair just yet.

The under-development glasses, a stealth project hatched in the company's mysterious Google X lab, are still buggy, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Wednesday at Google's I/O developer conference. Google also faces regulatory hurdles that prevent the glasses from being shipped anywhere but the United States.

So for now, only U.S.-based attendees of this week's I/O developers conference will be eligible to buy the "Google Glass Explorer Edition." Those who want the glasses can pre-order today and will get the gadget early next year.

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Researchers used a novel computational method to demonstrate that the properties of what had previously been thought to be only a hypothetical structure of a superhard form of carbon called “M-carbon” – constructed by Oganov in 2006 – matched perfectly the experimental data on “superhard graphite.” M-carbon is almost as hard as diamond.

Another result of this study is a set of detailed mechanisms of formation of several potential carbon allotropes. These could be used to engineer ways of their synthesis for potential technological applications.

“We don't know yet which applications M-carbon will find, but most forms of carbon did manage to find revolutionary applications, and this amazing material might do so as well,” said Oganov.

The story of yet another form of carbon started in 1963, when Aust and Drickamer compressed graphite at room temperature. High-temperature compression of graphite is known to produce diamond, but at room temperature an unknown form of carbon was produced. This new form, like diamond, was transparent and superhard - but its other properties were inconsistent with diamond or other known forms of carbon.

"The experiment itself is simple and striking: you compress black ultrasoft graphite, and then it suddenly turns into a colorless, transparent, superhard and mysterious new form of carbon – ‘superhard graphite,’” said Oganov. “The experiment was repeated several times since, and the result was the same, but no convincing structural model was produced, due to the low resolution of experimental data.”

The new work confirms that experiments produced M-carbon, which has a known structure.

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Jerry Pournelle linked to an article by Joseph Friedlander from Chaos Manor

Jerry Pournelle said -

There is a long bit on McNamara and the Strategy of Technology http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/where-did-future-go-strategy-of.html which will be worth the attention of those interested in those subjects.

The article is - Where did the future go-- The Strategy of Technology and The Space Race, McNamara and LBJ and the Lost Future of 2001.

Abstract of the article- Robert McNamara killed X-plane experimentation. Technological development needs a lot of trial and error with rapid build and test and modify iterations. By removing rapid development cycles the cost of technology has increased and the pace of technology has slowed. This has become a fundamental flaw in many US technology development programs. There is a lot of links and extracts from Freeman Dyson and Jerry Pournelle about the flaws in Technology Development policy which are traced back to what McNamara did.

wikipedia - Jerry Eugene Pournelle (born August 7, 1933) is an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte.

Since 1998, Pournelle has maintained a website with a daily online journal, "View from Chaos Manor", a blog dating from before the use of that term. This is a continuation of his 1980s blog-like online journal on GEnie. He says he resists using the term blog because he considers the word ugly and because he maintains that his "View" is primarily a vehicle for writing rather than a collection of links.

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The Google IO conference has had the announcement of the $199 Google Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q for $299. They are also showing off the google glasses. Google's Nexus Q is a streaming media player. Nexus 7 is a 7 inch tablet.

Android 4.1, Jelly Bean was announced as well.

Android has crossed 400 million activations.

20 billion apps have been downloaded from Google Play.

Nexus 7

The 7-inch tablet will come pre-loaded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google's latest operating system. Available in black or white, an 8GB version will be priced at $199, with 16GB for $249. A quad-core Tegra 3 processor, 1280 x 800 IPS display, 1.2-megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, and a 4,325mAh battery. It is made by ASUS.

Nexus Q Social Streaming Media Appliance

The Verge -The Nexus Q, an audio and video streaming appliance for users at home. It's a cloud-oriented device, designed to pull media from the Google Play Store as well as YouTube. The Q delivers the media to your television or a set of external speakers — it features a 25-watt amplifier as well — and is powered by the same chipset as the Galaxy Nexus. It features ethernet, Bluetooth, and NFC connectivity, and owners will be able to use their Android devices to control the streamer. Optical audio and micro-HDMI output are included, and the device also features banana-style connectors for connecting speakers.

Nexus Q (social Streaming Media Appliance) is shaped like a black sphere

Multiple Qs can be controlled from a given Android device, turning it into a multi-room solution, but the big selling point here is the social aspect. Different users can add music from their own Google Play music collection to the Q's queue, turning it into a clever option for parties or group events

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U-Star is a spinoff from the Singapore government A*Star research institute. U-Star has a translation application. The Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium is an international research consortium conducting research and development on a network-based speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system, with the aim of breaking the language barriers of the world. U-STAR are implemented with ITU-T standardization protocols, F.745 and H.625.

This application is the multi-device application "VoiceTra4U-M." It helps multiple users (up to 5) communicate in different languages, in real time either face to face or remotely.

The application contributes to breaking the barriers of modalities other than language as well. For instance, it helps users to communicate with the visually-impaired via spoken word, or with the hearing-impaired via text input.

This application mainly targets the field of travel-related conversations in airports, hotels, shops, or restaurants. The application covers 31 languages. (See below for the list of the Languages)

U-STAR has also initially focused on translating words and phrase related to tourism, making it 80 to 90 per cent accurate versus Google's 40 to 60 per cent accuracy - though of course, this accuracy falls if you want to discuss a topic not covered by the app.

The app will soon be available for free from the App Store and U-STAR hopes that tourists visiting the UK will use it during the Olympics, allowing the researchers to gather experimental data and improve the service.

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1. Business Standard - Work on additional two 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor units at BHAVINI at Kalpakkam, India would commence by 2015

Kumar said around Rs 2500 crore has been spent so far on the project, which began in 2009.

He replied in the affirmative when asked whether they have to raise funds for the additional 2x500 MW projects.

"Approximately, I will say, we will be raising funds of Rs 1000 crore", he said and added that they planned to begin construction for the two plants by 2015.

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World Nuclear News - The government of the Sverdlovsk region of Russia has approved the construction of the country's first BN-1200 fast reactor at the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant. The unit will be built to replace the existing smaller BN-600 reactor at the plant, which is scheduled to be shut down by 2020.

The government said that the planned 1200 MWe unit will produce around 9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually and help avoid the emission of "millions of tonnes" of carbon dioxide. In addition, it would completely remove the region's need to import fossil fuels. With a 60-year operating life, the reactor is expected to have an annual capacity factor of at least 90%.

The technical design of the BN-1200 is scheduled for completion by 2013, while the manufacture of equipment will start in 2014. Construction of the Beloyarsk unit is set to begin in 2015.

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Oil: The Next Revolution, The Unprecedented Upsurge of Oil Production Capacity and What it means for the World. (86 pages) The figure is an all oil liquids prediction (which includes crude oil, natural gas liquids, biofuels etc...).

The natural endowment of the initial American shale play, Bakken/Three Forks (a tight oil formation) in North Dakota and Montana, could become a big Persian Gulf producing country within the United States. But the country has more than twenty big shale oil formations, especially the Eagle Ford Shale, where the recent boom is revealing a hydrocarbon endowment comparable to that of the Bakken Shale. Most of U.S. shale and tight oil are profitable at a price of oil (WTI) ranging from $50 to $65 per barrel, thus making them sufficiently resilient to a significant downturn of oil prices.

The combined additional, unrestricted liquid production from the aggregate shale/tight oil formations examined in this paper could reach 6.6 mbd by 2020, in addition to another 1 mbd of new conventional production. However, there remain obstacles that could significantly reduce the U.S. shale output: among them, the inadequate U.S. oil transportation system, the country’s refining structure, the amount of associated natural gas produced with shale oil, and environmental doubts about hydraulic fracturing, one of the key technologies for extracting oil from shale. After considering risk factors and the depletion of currently producing oilfields, the U.S. could see its production capacity increase by 3.5 mbd. Thus, the U.S. could produce 11.6 mbd of crude oil and NGLs by 2020, making the country the second largest oil producer in the world after Saudi Arabia. Adding biofuels to this figure, the overall U.S. liquid capacity could exceed 13 mbd, representing about 65 percent of its current consumption.

The analysis in this paper is subject to a significant margin of error, depending on several circumstances that extend beyond the risks in each project or country. In particular, a new worldwide recession, a drastic retraction of the Chinese economy, or a sudden resolution of the major political tensions affecting a big oil producer could trigger a major downturn or even a collapse of the price of oil, i.e. a fall of oil prices below $70 per barrel (Brent crude).

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