iMedia

"Netscape moment" for commercial space exploration?

According to VentureBeat, commercial space may be having its "Netscape moment".

The commercial space industry has seen some interesting developments over the past weeks. Statements last week by members of President Obama’s human spaceflight review committee (The Augustine Commission) suggest that commercial providers may be taking a significant role in how NASA accesses low Earth orbit and how missions beyond low Earth orbit use orbiting 'gas stations'. At the same time, two commercial space companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, have received significant investments from well known funds (more on that below), suggesting that capital markets see a fundable new industry developing.

Some of these developments are reminiscent of the Internet industry in the early 90s....

If so, Kentucky Space may well be in the right place at the right time.

Venture capital flowing to Clean tech

With venture investments in clean energy having $2.7 billion in the past couple of years, clean technologies are poised to experience rapid growth. From the inside of one of the premier events in the field, the CleanTech Investor Summit, KSTC's own Sean O'Leary is twittering the action. How big is this? T. Boone Pickens just spoke.

Extending the digital highway

Most people would be suprised to know that broadband penetration has lagged in the United States compared to the rest of the developed world, and one often cited metric has the country between 15th and 20th in broadband penetration. What would it take to extend broadband connections to every corner of Kentucky? The New America Foundation takes a look at the issue of getting high speed information access to underserved urban and rural areas.

Metamaterial breakthroughs could have energy, medical applications

Next Big Future highlights a couple of breakthroughs in metamaterials, materials that gain their properties from the their structure rather than their composition.

Next Big Future: Physorg.com points out that software breakthroughs have enabled faster construction of metamaterials.

And secondly, while the idea of developing a "cloaking device" has garnered most of the popular press, light might also be concentrated, rather than routed around an object, which makes new energy and medical uses are possible, according to Duke University Professor David R. Smith:

Other applications of metamaterials... include optical devices that take light energy and concentrate it, instead of turning it away--conceptually, the opposite of a cloak.... New work suggests that this could be done over the whole spectrum of wavelengths found in sunlight. Similarly, broadband 'hyperlenses' that gather up light missed by normal lenses could revolutionize biological imaging. [Researchers] have developed narrowband hyperlenses with resolutions of only a few nanometers, which make the molecular workings of cells visible. A broadband hyperlens could work with all colors of visible and infrared light.

Subscribing to iMedia Kentucky

Just a note: if you'd like to stay abreast of the goings on here, you might consider taking the blog feed, which is sometimes called "RSS." By clicking the button on the right side of the page, you'll have the option of selecting from among a number of feed readers that you can use use to subscribe to the feed offered by iMedia Kentucky. Once you have associated the two, your reader will retrieve new material automatically without the need to check the web site.

Several of you have done this already. Thank you!

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If you have questions about how to use RSS, shoot me an email.

Wayne