Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope
First time accepted submitter szotz writes "The National Ignition Facility has one foot in national defense and another in the future of commercial energy generation. That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky. This article in IEEE Spectrum looks at NIF's recent missed deadline, what scientists think it will take for the facility to live up to its middle name, and all of the controversy and uncertainty that comes from a project that aspires to jumpstart commercial fusion energy but that also does a lot of classified work. NIF's national defense work is often glossed over in the press. This article pulls in some more detail and, in some cases, some very serious criticism. Physicist Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, doesn't mince words. When it comes to nuclear weapons, he says in the article, '[NIF] has no relevance at all to primaries. It doesn't do a good job of ...
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Meet Facebook’s Stealth Marketing Platform, “Publishing Garage”
One of Facebook’s bigger hurdles in advertising has been to figure out ways of either applying traditional metrics, or coming up with new ones, to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns on the social network. Today, we got wind of one of its latest efforts to connect the dots a bit better. Publishing Garage is a new program — and platform — that the social network has created to work with mega-agencies and brands to improve how brands use Facebook to market themselves, and measure when it’s working well. The existence of Publishing Garage was first spotted by the blog Fusible, which noticed that Facebook had registered a number of domain names — variations on publishinggarage.com, facebookpublishinggarage.com, and so on. Fusible also notes that there have been some other hints for it elsewhere: an online search for “Facebook Publishing Garage” takes you to the site of Addie Marino, a brand specialist and creative strategist for Facebook in New York. One of the projects ...
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Laser Fusion Put On a Slow Burn By US Government
gbrumfiel writes "Those hoping to laser their way out of the energy crisis will have to wait a little longer. The U.S. government has unveiled its new plan for laser fusion, and it's not going to happen anytime soon. It all comes down to problems at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's most powerful laser at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. For the past six years researchers at NIF have been trying to use the laser to spark a fusion reaction in a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. Like all fusion, it's tougher than it looks, and their campaign came up short. That left Congress a little bit miffed, so they asked for a new plan. The new plan calls for a more methodical study of fusion, along with a broader approach to achieving it with the NIF. In three years or so, they should know whether the NIF will ever work."
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Found more than 1 month ago on channel
Slashdot
Big Data Leader Cloudera Raises $65M To Fuel Further Hadoop Adoption
loudera has raised $65M to further fuel Hadoop adoption and expand its European operations. The new round led by Accel Partners, brings the total raised to $140 million. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners all participated in the round.
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David Lee From SV Angel: “Foursquare Is One Of The Most Misunderstood Companies”
Today at Business Insider's Ignition conference in New York, David Lee, founder and managing partner at SV Angel commented on Foursquare. As SV Angel is an investor, he had good things to say. "Foursquare is one of the most misunderstood companies," he said. At 43, Lee isn't using Foursquare to check in. He uses it in a passive way to find new restaurants, and finds the app very powerful. It goes further than the simple check-in mechanism.
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