PodSpec » Business

Messing with our planet

cs — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:21:40 +0000

IN 1975 scientists expert in a new and potentially world-changing technology, genetic engineering, gathered at Asilomar, on the Monterey peninsula in California, to ponder the ethics and safety of the course they were embarking on. The year before, they had imposed on themselves a voluntary moratorium on experiments which involved the transfer of genes from [...]

Rewriting Macroeconomics Curriculum

cs — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:12:28 +0000

IN MORE than 30 years of teaching introductory macroeconomics, says Alan Blinder of Princeton University, he has never seen interest as high as it was last year. At Harvard, says David Laibson, students in his undergraduate macroeconomics course are “chomping at the bit”.

At elite American universities, where endowments have shrivelled and hiring is down, increased [...]

Small island for sale

cs — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:42:46 +0000

The takeover of Cadbury by Kraft seems to symbolise a hollowing-out of corporate Britain. The truth is rather more complicated. THE Thames Valley provides two contrasting examples of what happens when foreign companies buy British ones. Any day now the Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) brewery beside the M4 motorway at Reading will brew its last [...]

Coming up empty

cs — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:37:06 +0000

THE renewable-fuel standard released in February by America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paints an ambitious picture of biofuels’ future. It wants the amount of the stuff used as transport fuel to climb from 13 billion gallons (49 billion litres) in 2010 to 36 billion gallons in 2022, requiring by far the largest part of that [...]

Single Molecule Transistor

cs — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:59:05 +0000

MANHASSET, NY — Researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have successfully created a transistor made from a single molecule. The researchers showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

They were able to manipulate the molecule’s different energy [...]

Wireless Electricity

cs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:27:24 +0000

Marin Soljacic couldn’t sleep. The problem was his wife’s Nokia cell phone. The tyrannical device beeped on the bedside table when it needed to be plugged in. It could not be disabled.

Instead of taking a hammer to the phone, Soljacic marveled at the fact that this device, and billions of others like it, was sitting [...]

News vs Newspaper

cs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:09:53 +0000

How a new communications technology disrupted America’s newspaper industry — in 1845. CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some [...]

Foundations of Economic Analysis

cs — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:41:29 +0000

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in [...]

Birds and Aviation Fuel Efficiency

cs — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:10:28 +0000

Copying Birds may save aircraft fuel.

Source: The Economist. Photo: Corbis

BOTH Boeing and Airbus have trumpeted the efficiency of their newest aircraft, the 787 and A350 respectively. Their clever designs and lightweight composites certainly make a difference. But a group of researchers at Stanford University, led by Ilan Kroo, has suggested that airlines could take a [...]

Nanodots

cs — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:54:16 +0000

Nanodots could yield denser memories, ceramic engine

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at North Carolina State University said they were able to read and write bits at room temperature using magnetic nanodots that delivered 1 terabit of memory per centimeter2.The ferromagnetic film on which the nanodots were based could lead to ultra-dense memory chips that store bits [...]

iPhone Teardown

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:11:23 +0000

Whenever a new gadget hits the streets, it’s a race to see who will be the first to reduce to its constituent pieces. With the launch of the iPhone 3G S we’ve got a pair of different companies doing their darndest to disassemble the latest iteration of Apple’s iconic device. Frankly, I’d be happy to [...]