Claudio Filippone, a nuclear scientist and director of the Centre for Advanced Energy Concepts at the University of Maryland, has designed an improved nuclear reactor, called CAESAR (?clean and environmentally safe advanced reactor?), that is not only environmentally friendly?it can produce electricity without causing any extra pollution?but could also help prevent nuclear proliferation.
The author argues that it is "better to control and regulate human cloning than to try to ban it."
Building a practical quantum computer will be hard. But another step towards one has just been announced in Nature. Stephan Gulde, of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and his colleagues have built a prototype machine whose chief working part is a single atom of calcium, and they have run a program on it.
The economist evaluates the probability of pilotless commercial passenger flights in the near future.
The authors survey the optimistic and pessimistic projections for nanotechnology and conclude that nanotechnology is "still a long way from living up" to either expectation.
Researchers are developing the capability to detect a biological weapons attack (or natural outbreak) from a distance using hyperspectral imaging satellites and other techniques.
A computer science researcher has come up with a new way of control computer viruses by limiting limit the rate at which a computer can connect to (and infect) new computers.
Astronomers are building telescopes at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea to detect nuetrinos and possibly confirm the existence of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs).
New research on the topology of the internet indicates that it is "scale-free". The practical implication of this finding is that efforts to control computer viruses (or possibly file-sharing networks) are shifting away from a focus on exponentially increasing the number of disinfected machines to focusing on a few key hub machines that control the network.
Although they are not particularly efficient, plastic solar cells that are flexible enough to be sprayed on roofs or printed on clothes could boost their use in mobile computing or wearable augment the use of solar cell technology in mobile computing.