TOKYO! Trailer released
Here is the new trailer for the film TOKYO! directed by Michel Gondry Leos Carax and Joon-ho Bong
if you like neo-surrealism this movie might just be for you!
African company to shutdown plans for pebble bed reactor
After 10 years in development, an African company has decided to abandon its plans to build a Pebble Bed Reactor.
The original plans to build the 165 MegaWatt reactor were abandon because of multiple engineering problems associated with the build. Unfortunately while the prospect of safe, pebble bed reactors being built in a timely and safe manner seems like an easy task for engineers, most reactors are canceled or ignored because of the restrictive up front cost and dangers.
Pebble Bed Reactors use helium to cool their cores and graphite to moderate the temperature. With other failsafes in place, they are considered one of the safest designs of nuclear reactors. The use of graphite and helium also allows them to "burn" at a much higher efficiency than traditionally water cooled reactors.
It should be interesting to see where this leaves the PBR design, if it will encourage China to continue building theirs or if it will discourage other places from using PBRs.
Farthest object observed in space
The Swift orbitor has detected an object in space that has a higher red shift than any other object ever observed (This excludes microwave radiation, which is much further away)
The object in question is actually a massive star. We are able to estimate that the event occurred 625 million years after the big bang (Quite young in celestial years!)
This star will allow us to discover even more about the birth of stars at the earliest part of the universe. Including, presumably giving us evidence that a stars UV radiation ionized the universe.
Sources:
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/update/2009/07/earliest-astrophysical-object.html
(N. R. Tanvir et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.1577; R. Salvaterra et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.1578.)
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