¤Futuretek¤ In this area you will find articles of information related to real-world advancements in science and technology. Cold Fusion gets another look Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion�the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now. The cold fusion story began at a now infamous press conference in March 1989. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, both electrochemists working at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, announced that they had created fusion using a battery connected to palladium electrodes immersed in a bath of water in which the hydrogen was replaced with its isotope deuterium�so-called heavy water. With this claim came the idea that tabletop fusion could produce more or less unlimited, low-cost, clean energy. Read moredate posted: 09.4.04 Posts below this mark are pretty old. At least a year or older. Powerful Laser Beam To Be Visible Sunday Night The laser beam is about 40,000 times more powerful than a common laser pointer pen. The company has taken special precautions to protect aircraft and birds that might fly into the beam. "Every precaution has been taken to ensure the safety of the environment in the surrounding area," according to a release issued by Ball. "The laser system is equipped with radar that will shut down the system in the event that an object is about to enter the laser beam." Read More... Terabit Ethernet Ethernet Timeline 10� Megabit Ethernet 1990* 100� Megabit Ethernet 1995 1� Gigabit Ethernet 1998 10� Gigabit Ethernet 2002 100� Gigabit Ethernet 2006** 1� Terabit Ethernet 2008** 10� Terabit Ethernet 2010** * Invented 1976, 10BaseT 1990 ** projected Every kind of networking is coming together: LANs (Local Area Networks), SANs (Storage / System Area Networks), telephony, cable TV, inter-city optical fiber links, etc., but if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it.� Your networking must also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) to be marketable... Read more @ Directions Mag Plasma Force Field The plasma valve, which has no moving parts, can activate in a nanosecond, a million times faster than mechanical valves. To keep air from rushing in, the Brookhaven-Argonne team create a dense, high-temperature plasma (collection of charged particles) held together by electric and magnetic fields. Story @ Physics News Update Developed by Brookhaven 15 GigaFlop Linux Processor PCI Card This HPC (High Performance Computing) on-a-card enables use of the Open Source Linux OS on standard PCI computer platforms, as well as rack-mount systems. The high performance offered by the dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 card make it ideal for very high performance applications such as Defense, Medical, Imaging, scientific clusters, embedded systems and commercial OEM applications. <--//Snipped from osforge.com The Z-Machine The fusion facility at Sandia, the so-called Z-Machine, recently announced the creation of the hot, dense plasma that produces neutrons associated with nuclear fusion, by passing 20 million amperes of electricity through a cylindrical array of up to 600 fine metal wires. The wires are crushed together by the extremely high magnetic field produced by the current, and become so hot and dense that they produce an X-ray pulse of 100 trillion watts for a few billionths of a second. The X-rays are used to compress and heat hydrogen fusion fuel to near solid density at about 10 million degrees Celsius (18 million degrees Fahrenheit). Visit www.sandia.gov for more.