Next Big Future - 4 new articles

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Subject: Next Big Future - 4 new articles

 

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Here are the latest updates for jorgeus.george@gmail.com "Next Big Future" - 4 new articles Closing in on affordable 50 percent conversion efficiency in side by side concentrated solar White Space equipment will become widely available in 2013 Muscle Development Protein could be used to fight muscle wasting diseases Tissue Engineering as a Third Age of Medicine More Recent Articles Search Next Big Future Prior Mailing Archive Closing in on affordable 50 percent conversion efficiency in side by side concentrated solar IEEE Spectrum - Todays armies marches on its batteries. Without them, soldiers can't see in the dark, work their radios, or determine their positions. But even the best storage batteries—accounting for one-fifth of the load in a typical infantryman's 45-kilogram pack—can't last the week or so that field soldiers require. Better energy storage is taking too long, so far better solar power is also being pursued. The most promising effort to create such superefficient photovoltaics (solar power) began in 2005, when Doug Kirkpatrick, a veteran of the optics industry, kick-started the Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He wanted a way to build modules from solar cells that would convert a full 50 percent of the solar energy they receive into direct current. That's a jaw-dropping number when you consider that in 2005 the best laboratory devices were still shy of 40 percent efficiency and were improving by less than one percentage point per year. Funneling Color: The DARPA design concentrates sunlight and splits it into "buckets" optimized to absorb at particular frequency ranges. The initial concept, not yet realized, was to split light into three ranges. High-energy photons would go to a single cell, while two or three cells stacked together would harness the power from mid-energy and low-energy cells, respectively. As of today, researchers have not been able to produce a good enough cell for the high-energy photons, so the prototype design has just two buckets—a "green" one for higher frequencies and a "red" one for lower ones Read more » • Email to a friend • Article Search • White Space equipment will become widely available in 2013 Fierce Broadband Wireless - A consortium of higher education associations, public interest groups and high-tech companies today announced a partnership named AIR.U (Advanced Internet Regions) to deploy Super Wi-Fi networks to upgrade the broadband available to underserved campuses and their surrounding communities. By using unlicensed access to unused television channels (TV band "white spaces"), universities and neighboring communities will be able to significantly expand the coverage and capacity of high-speed wireless connectivity both on and off campus. The consortium's initial goal is to plan and deploy several pilot networks in diverse university communities and create a roadmap for the rapid deployment of sustainable, next generation wireless networks as White Space equipment becomes widely available in 2013. The AIR.U consortium expects one or more pilot networks will be operational by the first quarter of 2013. White-space is technical slang for television channels that were left vacant in one city so as not to interfere with TV stations broadcasting on adjacent channels in a neighboring city. In the early days of television, America's broadcasting authorities reserved 50 or so channels for TV stations. But because of worries about interference, no metropolitan area has ever come close to using all 50 channels at its disposal. In rural areas, vacant channels (ie, white-space) have frequently amounted to 70% or more of the total bandwidth available for television broadcasting. Read more » • Email to a friend • Article Search • Muscle Development Protein could be used to fight muscle wasting diseases Science News - Australian scientists have suggested that a protein called Grb10 plays a crucial role in increasing muscle mass during development By identifying a novel mechanism regulating muscle development, our work has revealed potential new strategies to increase muscle mass," said lead author Dr Lowenna Holt of the Diabetes and Obesity Research Program at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. "Ultimately, this might improve treatment of muscle wasting conditions, as well as metabolic disorders such as Type 2 diabetes." To make this discovery, Dr Holt's team compared two groups of mice. Once group had disruption of the Grb10 gene, and were very muscular. The other group, where the Grb10 gene was functional, had normal muscles. The researchers examined the properties of the muscles in both adult and newborn mice and discovered that the alterations caused by loss of Grb10 function had mainly occurred during prenatal development. These results provide insight into how Grb10, nicknamed 'Hulk' protein, works, suggesting that it may be possible to alter muscle growth and facilitate healing, as the processes involved in muscle regeneration and repair are similar to those for the initial formation of muscle. FASEB Journal - Grb10 regulates the development of fiber number in skeletal muscle Read more » • Email to a friend • Article Search • Tissue Engineering as a Third Age of Medicine CNET - Columbia researcher Nina Tandon believes that the era of engineered tissues -- think ultimately of a replacement kidney grown in the lab -- is just beginning. Medical science, boosted by manufacturing and information technology, is on the cusp of being able to grow human tissue. So believes Nina Tandon, a senior fellow at Columbia University's Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, who for her Ph.D. thesis grew cardiac cells that beat like tiny hearts. A third age of medicine is beginning, she said in a speech here at the TEDx Berlin conference held in conjunction with IFA consumer-electronics show. The first age, most of human history, had only a primitive understanding of the body. The second age ran from the first dialysis machines in 1924 to today's organ replacement procedures dependent on human donors and limited by the fact that many tissues are rejected by the body they're being transplanted into. The third age builds replacement materials through tissue engineering. "We've gone to growing pieces of the body that are living -- from scratch," Tandon said. Though she's careful to give credit where it's due: humans provide a framework and the correct environment, but "the real tissue engineers are the cells." Her work so far has focused coaxing cells into activity with electrical impulses inside what she calls a bioreactor. Some of her work is shown in a video of a pulsating cube of lab-grown rat heart tissue. It's about 5mm on a side, a scale that makes her ambition -- growing a patch of heart tissue that could be applied after a heart attack -- seem more achievable. Read more » • Email to a friend • Article Search • More Recent Articles Singularity Summit 2012 Apple attempting to ban newer Samsung phones and tablets in futile attempt to fight the future Decoherence induced deformation of the ground state in adiabatic quantum computation Investigating the Performance of an Adiabatic Quantum Optimization Processor Healthy living into old age can add up to 6 years to your life

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