Archive by category | Technology

World’s first ‘clean coal’ commercial power plant opens in Canada

World's first 'clean coal' commercial power plant opens in Canada

The world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant that can capture its carbon dioxide emissions officially launched today in Canada – marking a milestone for so-called ‘clean coal’ technology.  Read more

Schön loses last appeal against PhD revocation

 Schön loses last appeal against PhD revocation

The German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has confirmed on 1 October that the University of Constance was within its rights to revoke the PhD thesis of physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was dismissed in 2002 from Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for falsifying research results.  Read more

Prime numbers, black carbon and nanomaterials win 2014 MacArthur ‘genius grants’

Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  Read more

Indian Ocean signal was not crash of flight MH370

Indian Ocean signal was not crash of flight MH370

Hopes have faded that hydroacoustic signals picked up on the floor of the Indian Ocean might help to locate the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 airliner which disappeared in March. Data from an additional sensor suggest that the signal likely resulted from geological activity and not the sound of an aeroplane crashing into the ocean’s surface.  Read more

Baby steps towards rescue of Human Brain Project

Baby steps towards rescue of Human Brain Project

Cautious efforts to restore unity to the billion-euro Human Brain Project have begun. Both the European Commission and the project’s leaders have now responded to a scorching open letter in which angry neuroscientists condemn the flagship project, and pledge to boycott it.  Read more

The decline and fall of Microsoft Academic Search

The decline and fall of Microsoft Academic Search

Five years after it launched, Microsoft’s free scholarly search engine has fallen into shabby disrepair, failing to track even a fraction of papers published since 2011. But the team behind the product says they are shifting their focus to a yet-to-be-released, next-generation version of the service.  Read more

UK budget sees boosts for data science, graphene and cell therapy

British scientists already know that their public funding for the next two years is frozen at £4.6 billion annually (as it has been since 2010, which, for the nation’s seven research-grants agencies has meant a 10% cut in real terms over the past three years), so they did not expect anything transformative from today’s budget.  Read more

India’s heavy-lift rocket passes crucial test

With the successful liftoff of a Geo-Synchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) D 5 yesterday, India became the sixth nation to possess cryogenic propulsion rocket technology. The 415-tonne rocket successfully injected a 2-tonne communications satellite into the intended geosynchronous orbit, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has announced.  Read more

Cutting-edge UK science facilities going unused

Scientific instruments that cost millions of pounds are standing idle in the UK because of a lack of money to run them, a new parliamentary report has revealed. There is a “damaging disconnect” between funding to build new facilities and the funding to actually run them, it concluded. This includes spending nearly £40 million on high performance computers, without budgeting for the electricity they use.  Read more