#Spectrom: A device that allows desktop 3d printers to print in color for less than $100 Full color printing is generally a privilege limited to professional and high-end consumer 3d printers,
so the more casual user is stuck likely printing in one or two colors. But Cédric Kovacs-Johnson and Charles Haider, both chemical engineering undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say they have come up with a solution:
and will help lower the overall price of lithium ion batteries globally. ust the threat of (Tesla CEO) Elon musk building this huge factory will lower prices,
Tesla is selling debt (convertible senior notes) to the tune of between $1. 6 billion to $1. 8 billion to fund part of the battery factory,
Tesla and solar financier and installer Solarcity (Musk other energy company) have been quietly selling small volumes of Tesla batteries as energy storage paired with Solarcity solar projects.
Batteries for the grid at current prices are largely too expensive for most projects. There a handful of companies that are trying to innovate around using batteries for grid storage
It might not be able to get to that price with battery cost reductions alone, but it gets Tesla a whole lot closer t
#Bitcoin is not only digital currency, it s Napster for finance Bitcoin will start its transformation from a mere currency into an entire open-source.
Bitcoin s valuation didn t just skyrocket in 2013, but its infrastructure, services, and adoption exploded as well,
culminating in recent#announcements that major online retailer Overstock. com and NBA team the Sacramento kings would accept the digital currency as payment.##
##Some still doubt#bitcoin s usefulness and durability, but 2014 may leave skeptics even further behind developers and entrepreneurs are already hard at work building features on top of the Bitcoin protocol that will allow for the decentralized execution of financial services, from currency hedging to loans to stock
issuance to rental and purchase contracts. These new services rely on the same innovative proof-of-work model of distributed security
and record-keeping that has kept the bitcoin currency secure as its value ballooned well past $10 billion.
In the long term, peer-to-peer finance threatens to weaken banks and other financial agents just as peer-to-peer file sharing did the music industry
#and some of the architects of this financial Napster seem gleeful about the possibility. The Bitcoin protocol (crucially distinct from bitcoin, the currency it underlies) was built from the ground up to support far more complex transactions and relationships than simple value transfers.
Example: Send five bitcoins to Steve.)Some of the kinds of transactions that Bitcoin can support include so-called M of N transactions,
which require agreement between a certain subset of a group, and can be used for escrow, mediation,
time-locked transactions, in which bitcoins are distributed on a strict schedule, useful for trusts or wills;
and even data-conditional transactions, in which a script uses a data input such as a regular Google search to monitor real-world events that would automatically trigger disbursements or other actions.
with contracts enforced by digital locks interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain to manage real-world leases, mortgages, and purchase contracts.
with their transactional integrity guaranteed by the Bitcoin blockchain, constantly vetted by the vast network ofminers rewarded for their maintenance work with a stream of bitcoin.
In fact the comparison to Napster is somewhat inaccurate, since Napster used centralized servers to track music sharing,
while Bitcoin is distributed entirely. That means loans without banks, contracts without lawyers, and stocks without brokers, executed
and recorded across hundreds of servers at all corners of the earth. Consultant Andreas M. Antonopoulos, echoing a 2012 white paper by software developer J. R. Willett,
says that the Bitcoin protocol is distributed to finance what Internet Protocol has been distributed to information. The blockchain is IP.
And through manipulation of that we can build a whole other system. In the same way that IP and the infrastructure of network nodes that make up the Internet now support functions from e-mail to video streaming
the Bitcoin protocol and its miners can support a variety of financial functions. Alternately, Antonopoulos suggests thinking of thebitcoin blockchain as#having an API#(application programming interface) that makes its data usable by third parties,
Efforts to make complex financial functions a part of Bitcoin have been bubbling through 2013, but 2014 will see them come to fruition.
Mastercoin, based on Willett s white paper and programming, is projected to add many functions to the Bitcoin blockchain.
and businesslike, doesn t fit the stereotype of woolly young bitcoin developers. But he slyly describes himself asnot quite an anarchist
and executed with assets already represented in the Bitcoin blockchain, Middleton says they eliminate counterparty risk
while also subtracting conventional banking and brokerage fees. The most immediate function Middleton envisions for his system is for hedging bitcoin against existing national currencies.
With bitcoin s valuation still showing huge volatility Middleton claims the availability of distributed hedging will both ensure the value of bitcoin for individuals holding the asset
and provide systemic stability. Given persistent skepticism, there should be plenty of takers to short bitcoin against the dollar.
And the entire system relies on decentralization for its security and integrity: My contracts are peer-to-peer,
says Middleton. If you hack my servers, there s nothing to get. Somebody call#Target#(TGT.
Such hedging functions have particularly unique promise because of the extremely low transaction costs of peer-to-peer currency.
Bitcoin makes microtransactions ranging down to fractions of a cent viable, but Middleton says thatright now,
the volatility of bitcoin can really take you out. Because of the low cost of Middleton s swaps,
The most speculative and long-range potential functions of peer-to-peer finance and smart contracts are forms of what s known assmart Property.
and former George washington University law professor Nick Szabo (who has come under occasional suspicion of being pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto).
But combining telecommunications with the Bitcoin blockchain presents more intriguing possibilities for example, cars able to read the blockchain could disable themselves
if a loan payment wasn made t on time. Mike Hearn, one of the main developers of the Bitcoin architecture alongside the mysterious Nakamoto, has said that any implementation of the concept is at least a decade away because of the need for hardware upgrades on physical goods. The functions that advocates say could be automated through the Bitcoin network
seem nearly endless including peer-to-peer investment funds, Kickstarter-like crowdfunding, binding arbitrations, and even nonfinancial transactions such as naming rights management and encrypted communication.
And all could be executed without a cut for intermediaries.##Bitcoin partisans, from developers down to rank-and-file users, often seem to revel in the idea that they are threatening the control and profits of Wall street institutions,
who they see as rent-seeking fat cats. If it were limited to the loss of fees on payments and transfers,
bitcoin s threat to existing financial institutions would still be substantial. But with a full array of commission-free financial services on the horizon, there is even more reason to take heed.
Middleton sounds a bit like an 18th-century pirate striking back against the Empire when he declares thatwhat
I m doing right now is a direct threat to fiat merchant banking. For him
excitement over value fluctuations in the bitcoin currency is missing the point: It s not a threat as people sit there
and ponder whether bitcoin is a bubble or not. But if people go through the protocol and use their imagination,
the existing system is threatened. However, there is a substantial obstacle to this coming revolution. Despite the emergence in 2013 of entities like Coinbase that have streamlined drastically the process,
it is still difficult to exchange bitcoin for national currencies in a quick, reliable manner.
It s unclear how Middleton s automated dollar-bitcoin hedging will work without a lightning-quick and reliable dollar-bitcoin exchange platform.
the trueautomation of bitcoin functions that integrate with the economy as a whole may require a reconciliation with existing trading platforms.
Citing studies on disruptive innovation by the likes of 20th-century economist Joseph Shumpeter, he makes an analogy with the energy industry.
Some financial institutions Zynis predicts, will be nimble enough to adapt. If I m an investment firm, do
I see peer-to-peer finance as an opportunity, and adopt it, because it s##more efficient?
Or do I not make the investment, and in 10 or 20 years I become irrelevant?
So, all bankers and stockbrokers might not go the way of the coal miner, telephone operator, or record store clerk.
But the hard lessons of other upturned industries may now be relevant to the financial sector in ways they never were before.
as well as expenses. The special eyewear has yet to be named but it has already been used during surgery at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of medicine.
Investments in autonomous vehicles accelerating SOUTHFIELD, Mich. Google and various automakers have increased their activity and investment toward the goal of self-driving vehicles,
with Google now focusing on fully driverless vehicles for the future, according to a report by IHS Automotive.
Pointwise director of applied research. hat we are releasing today for production use is the result of a multi-year research effort Pointwise conducted with funding from the U s. Air force Arnold Engineering Development Complex,
The price paid for that flexibility is need the to ensure a sufficient degree of overlap so the CFD solver can accurately share data between the component grids.
In segments such as Oil and Gas Computer Aided Engineering and Computational Science many organizations have made substantial investments in Openmp to create scalable workloads.
Connectx-4 adapters provide the means to increase data center return on investment while reducing IT costs. Connectx-4 has already been selected to power CORAL (Collaboration of Oak ridge,
The goal of reference architectures is to achieve high performance at a cost-effective price for rapid deployment.
After all seeds cost money and so does the equipment to get them in the ground. Why grow'em
and rising commodities prices frequently illustrate. To help reverse this sobering trend and to generate enough food to meet the ever-growing demands of a growing global population today's
but provides enough return on investment to fund additional high-tech solutions. While the days of farmers using the divining rod to find water are passed long since many farmers especially in developing countries still rely too much on guesswork in making planting irrigation and harvesting decisions.
By combining supercomputing and Big data analytics with other technological innovations even farmers with modest means can bolster production and profits.
-and-trade scheme this amount of CO2 equates to 8-14 million British pounds ($13-23 million) per year in carbon credits the researchers estimated.
One of the things that we really wanted to be able to do was show that these slightly obscure animals actually perform a service that has an economic value
#German bank and EU offers funding to Chile mining power plant State owned German bank Kfw has said it is to advance a#100 million loan ($123 million),
to help provide funding for Chile first solar-thermal power plant which will supply electricity to the mining industry.
The German bank announced an advancement of its loan in a statement today, the funding represents around 10%of the total investment that is estimated to be required for the power plant project.
In addition, Germany environment ministry is set to support the project with interest subsidies and consultancy for the build as part of its global development policies.
to be given to Kfw through its Latin american Investment programme. The project is hoped to ease strain on Chile energy sector
Chile lacks extensive fossil-fuels to support such ongoing energy consumption by industry that is necessary for its economy
with no expenditure on full-time security staff to operate a tool store required
#ABB#s MIDAS Library technology released Swiss power and automation technology group ABB has released a new technology that is designed to help engineers easily resolve electrical problems in mines right from their control room.
Jim Motavalli) The big drawback of the Twike is the price around $27000 for the base model
Plastic-bodied ELFS weigh only 150 pounds achieve 1800 mpg (the company says) and can reach 20 mph with 15 miles of electric range
"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U s. Department of defense responsible for developing new technologies for the military, provided funding for the $53. 5 million project.
"Today, it costs a lot in time and money to make a new robot, "Rus told reporters in a press briefing."
What more a single EZ-Charge card will give Leaf-ers access to stations run by Chargepoint Blink Carcharging Group NRG evgo and Aerovironment.
It 31 inches tall weighs less than 200 pounds and can be wall-mounted. Businesses and municipalities that partner with BMW will be able to buy the charger
BMW's fast charger weighs less than 200 pounds and can be mounted on the wall. Photo:
But trust me on this it worth the money for the flexibility it adds. It would be interesting to know how many i3s have been sold and
compared with multimillion-dollar missiles, Navy officials said.""At less than a dollar per shot, there's no question about the value Laws provides,
"Klunder said.""With affordability a serious concern for our defense budgets, this will more effectively manage resources to ensure our sailors
The military research agency launched the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program in 2006 with the goal of developing a prosthetic device"to repay some of the debt we owe to our service members"
and both crowdsourcing video for it and raising money through a Kickstarter campaign. She wants a modest $40, 000,
and these bikes can save money and increase efficiency. It a credible solution for young businesses.
which form bonds called base pairs. The syniii chromosome contains 272871 base pairs slightly fewer than the 316617 base pairs in chromosomes of native yeast or natural yeast on
which could enable humanity to transition off of a petroleum economy Boeke said. In addition to practical applications synthetic yeast could be used to study how different genes function
Returns aren the only convenience ereceipts offer though For tax purposes if every purchase I made at a brick
The Launcherone rocket while still in the design and testing phase hopes to eventually deliver payloads from 250 pounds to 500 pounds into space for less than $10 million per flight.
everybody has a home theater that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.
In the Economist Autodesk head of sustainability Emma Stewart writes about how the smart thing to do is to figure it out before you build.
and the huge infrastructure investments in them are made on a whim for political reasons for pork a highway here and a bridge to nowhere there.
If there are data to back up these decisions it's based on an engineer traffic counts or an estimator dollar estimates.
Wikipedia) But there are other costs involved with anything we do the social and environmental costs the effect on people and the planet as well as the profit.
You can put a dollar value on happiness and people have been doing it for years.
and money to do these studies and you can do hat ifanalyses of alternatives. Which is all a very long-winded background to an interesting product that was announced today.
As Stewart noted in her Economist articlethey are following up with modules for transit roads highways and buildings.
it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace. It the ultimate example of that old expression:
President bush had placed tight restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research; President Obama has promised to reverse those.
The Geron cells come from one of a score of lines approved for federal funding under the Bush policy.
"Think of it like a compounded interest rate; the difference between a 1%return and 2%return compounded annually over 50 years will be huge."
Nature News The global drive to eliminate the last pockets of polio infection is to receive a boost of more than half-a billion dollars from international donors.
which Rotary matched dollar for dollar. The new money will go to vaccination programmes, better disease surveillance and research on new vaccines.
Eradication hope"We are on the brink of eradicating one of the most feared diseases in the world"
He adds that the big injection of new money should galvanize governments and non-governmental organizations to step up funding
and efforts"to end polio once and for all"."If polio is eradicated, it would follow smallpox, which in 1980 became the first disease to be officially wiped out from the planet.
the global polio programme has faced funding shortfalls, as government donations have tailed off. The large new commitments by non-governmental organizations therefore offers a much-needed cash injection to finish the job.
Even with the new money, however, the global initiative will still be some $340 million short of the budget it needs for 2009-10."
"We urge other countries to join us in closing the funding gap, "says Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development."
"You can't persuade shareholders that they should invest money indefinitely in the absence of any light at the end of the tunnel,
"We are planning to get an investment to build up mass-production facility of the large-scale graphene films,
Last month, Thorium power in Mclean, Virginia, with a market capitalization of about $40 million established a joint venture with Punj Lloyd, an engineering company in Gurgaon.
The two companies plan to set up an investment fund and to act as consultants to other companies looking to get in on the rush
Nature News A funding programme for health research will for the first time hand complete control to its African recipients along with the cash,
Funding will come from British and Canadian charities and government. The money will, among other things,
train researchers, refurbish labs and set up mechanisms to make sure research results are used in policymaking. In Kenya
the funding will be channelled through a new non-governmental organisation, the Consortium for National Health Research (CNHR. In Malawi, the National Research Council will be in charge of funding decisions.
The body received just US$286, 000 from the Malawian government in 2008, so the new money is a considerable addition to its coffers.
At first, both bodies will receive assistance to ensure sound financial management, but this support is expected not to last longer than three years.
Loans but not grants have been provided on this basis before, for example, through the World bank's Millennium Science Initiative."
The donors hope the funding will help the countries develop and implement high-quality research programmes that meet their own needs.
African scientists see the funding as a vote of confidence.""The agenda will not be set in London or Washington.
the grant-making capacity that will be built could inspire more health research funders to channel grants through the new funding agencies.
which will distribute the Kenyan funding. The unpredictability of donor funding also means that many Kenyan scientists are underfunded,
he adds. Leveraging more In the long term Ochieng and his colleagues hope to encourage the Kenyan government to put more money into health research it funds very little at the moment.
They also want to raise an endowment from international donors that could provide a more stable source of funding for medical research in Kenya.
The HRCS initiative is unlikely to stay unique for long. In a separate programme the Wellcome Trust has joined forces with the Indian government's Department of Biotechnology to fund postdoctoral researchers in the country through a new,
The funding rumoured to be in the region of#30 million (US$38 million) would be distributed by a body hosted in Africa,
says Alistair Steel, executive director of the Brussels-based industry group Euro Chlor. Traditionally, chlorine production has used a mercury electrode in the electrolysis of sodium chloride,
Yin contributed 3 billion Taiwanese dollars, the equivalent of roughly US$100 million, to set up the Tang Prize Foundation.
Each prize will consist of 40 million Taiwanese dollars (US$1. 34 million) as well as a 10-million-Taiwanese-dollar research grant.
finance and retail investment. He talks to Nature about his vision for the Asian Nobel prizes.
but winners of the Tang Prize#either individuals or institutions#will not only get the 40-million-Taiwanese-dollar prize money,
but also receive 10 million Taiwanese dollars for their areas of research. The Tang Dynasty was renowned for its sophisticated cultural and scientific achievements.
and as the country s economy has boomed, the fungus"has enjoyed unprecedented popularity, says one of the study s co-authors, Kamaljit Bawa, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
Based on estimates of the volume of trade2 and average retail prices, Uttam Babu Shrestha, the study's lead author, puts the global market at betwen $5 billion and $11
The high price and rising demand are driving a fungus gold rush in poverty-stricken rural communities in Himalayan countries,
"It will have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and local economy e
#Coffee rust regains foothold Where there is coffee, there is coffee rust. But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken#with the fungus taking the advantage.
On 22 january, Costa rica enacted emergency legislation to speed up the flow of government money towards fighting the fungus.
And in Africa, Noah Phiri, a plant pathologist working in Nairobi for the not-for-profit development organization CABI,
In Nairobi, Phiri is using money from the intergovernmental agency the Common Fund for Commodities,
#Japan s stimulus package showers science with cash Three years ago, the picture for research funding in Japan looked bleak.
The stimulus flags up the new leadership s determination that research should pull its weight in dragging Japan s economy out of recession.
#South korea makes billion-dollar bet on fusion power South korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of energy's Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New jersey.
There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done,
and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks. Moreover, Lee adds,
The rotating blades lose energy as they smash into these droplets, accounting for up to 30%of the inefficiency of the turbine,
#Court lifts cloud over embryonic stem cells The US Supreme court s decision last week to throw out a lawsuit that would have blocked federal funding of all research on human embryonic stem cells
US funding for each approach is matched now roughly at about US$120 million a year. C. T. Scott et al.
August 2001 US President George w bush restricts federal funding for work on human ES cells to a few extant lines.
March 2009 US President Barack Obama expands the number of human ES-cell lines eligible for funding.
but eligibility for funding is uncertain as case works through the courts. October 2010 Biotechnology company Geron doses first patient in world s first clinical trial to test an ES-cell product.
saying it is a poor investment. January 2013 Supreme court lets stand ruling that the NIH can fund human ES-cell research.
bring down the price of these nanomaterials and boost other applications that have stalled.""Displays are a potential market that could help quantum dot companies find traction,
As recently as 2010, the biomedical sector was responsible for US$48#million of $67#million in total quantum dot revenues, according to BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
will make up $310#million of a total $666 million in quantum dot revenues. Melnick says that these numbers might be overly optimistic,
"Even on the low end, they still cost in the hundreds of dollars per gram,
But demand from 3m and Sony could help to bring prices down. Although neither QD Vision nor Nanosys would comment on the volume of material they expect to make this year,
or their selling price, both say that they are scaling up their manufacturing volume. Bawendi is not surprised that it took quantum dots so long to find their footing."
says Howard Bond, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State university in University Park, who announced the finding on 10 january at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long beach, California1.
First, Bond and his team made a new and more accurate determination of the star s distance from the Solar system,
says Bond. His team calculates that the star is 13.9 billion years old, give or take 700 million years.
says Bond. The discovery places constraints on early star formation, says Volker Bromm, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.
Lauran Qualkenbush, director of the research-integrity office at Northwestern University in Chicago, says that there is a gap between harsh penalties for misconduct#such as bans from receiving government funding
if the money might be spent better on measures that prevent misconduct. Although the ORI is not endorsing Repair specifically
#High court ensures continued US funding of human embryonic-stem-cell research The US Supreme court today ended an effort to shut down government support of human embryonic-stem-cell research,
by refusing to hear a case that challenged the legality of funding for the work by the National institutes of health (NIH).
"The ruling erases the nagging worry that existing funding could be cut off at any time.
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