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Building a Homemade Nuclear Reactor In NYC 219

Posted by samzenpus from the extreme-diy dept.
yukk writes "Mark Suppes, a web developer for Gucci, is working on his own personal fusion reactor. His work in a NYC warehouse using $35,000 of his own money and $4,000 raised on a website has made him the 38th independent researcher recognized as creating a working fusion reactor. How's that for a hobby?"
Science

Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269

Posted by Soulskill from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Biotech

Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts 71

Posted by kdawson from the we-can-assemble-it-for-you-wholesale dept.
TechReviewAl writes "A new startup called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts, such as strings of specific genes, for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight, also a research scientist at MIT, says: 'I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"

Comment Re:projection (Score 1) 596

by Knx (#25466129) Attached to: How Much Storage Will You Use 10 Years From Now?
While this is an interesting example, I don't have any doubt that there are plenty of other things that you would like to store than just video. And many of them may require *much* more storage capacity.

Let's take just one example: chess. As far as I know, most endgame databases currently in use are up to 5 or maybe 6 pieces remaining on the board. A 6-men endgame database is about 1TB. And as you increase the number of pieces, the size of the database grows very fast.

I don't event talk about storing all possible chess positions ... But here's a quote from this article, including some new numbers for you to play with:

"Allis also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10^123, "based on an average branching factor of 35 and an average game length of 80". As a comparison, the number of atoms in the Universe, to which it is often compared, is estimated to be between 4x10^79 and 10^81."

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Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.

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