Aug 08
Back in May I wrote about the rebirth of the NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) program. Today NASA held a press conference to announce the winners. NASA announced all sorts of cool stuff including fantastic science-fiction projects like: deflecting space debris using pressure waves in the atmosphere fabricating spacecraft using 3D printers using metallic hydrogen as …
Jul 17
A month or so ago Lisa Grossman’s article “Plasmons Create Beautiful Holograms” at Wired caught my attention. The article highlights the work of a team of researchers in Japan who have developed a new way to illuminate color holograms (M. Ozaki, et al, Science 332, 218–220). The line in the article that grabbed me was: “In a …
May 30
This past Tuesday I got to see a demo of Kodak’s new laser-based digital cinematic projector prototype. The venue itself was pretty impressive: Kodak’s “Theater on the Ridge.” When we entered the lobby my friend (and fellow cinema-geek) Paul said, “Did we just walk through a time machine to the 1950s?”, and he meant that …
Apr 23
Once upon a time, in the land of Georgia, there existed a tiny little program called the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, or “NIAC.” NIAC was not directly concerned with shuttles or satellites or space-stations. NIAC was about the future, and by “future” I mean the far future. I mean “Antimatter Driven Sails for Deep-Space Missions.” …