Singer Brightman is next space tourist?

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MOSCOW British singer Sarah Brightman may be the next paying passenger to ride a Russian rocket to the International Space Station, sources familiar with the negotiations said Wednesday.

If the trip happens, Brightman, 52, would make the journey in 2015, the Interfax news agency reported, citing an unidentified official in the Russian space industry. A source familiar with Brightman's side of the negotiations confirmed to NBC News that talks were under way, but stressed that they were at an early stage.

Assuming the negotiations are successful, Brightman would be the first paying orbital space passenger since Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who donned a red clown's nose for his 2009 trip to the space station.

Russia has sent seven private passengers to the space station, with the reported price tags escalating from $20 million to more than $40 million. California investment manager Dennis Tito was the first to make the journey in 2001.

Seats on the three-person Soyuz capsules have become scarce since NASA retired its space shuttles last year, leaving Russian rockets as the only craft capable of carrying crews to the station for now.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: NASA's Curiosity rover has wiggled its wheels to warm up for its first honest-to-goodnes...

Brightman who rose to fame starring in the original London and New York casts of "The Phantom of the Opera" visited Russia about a month ago and received the approval of a medical commission to begin training at the Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow, the source added.

She was married to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1980s and pursued a chart-topping solo career after their divorce, bringing classical music to a broader audience and selling millions of records along the way. Estimates of her net worth have ranged from $45 million to $52 million and beyond.

Virginia-based Space Adventures has organized trips to the space station for deep-pocketed passengers in the past, but representatives of the company have not commented publicly on the prospects for future trips.

Sources have said the space station's partners are considering a plan to send two spacefliers into orbit in 2015 for almost a year, instead of the usual six months. The logistics involved in that experiment would open up an opportunity for two short-term visitors to the station visitors who could include paying passengers such as Brightman.

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Singer Brightman is next space tourist?

NASA | Yellowstone Burn Recovery – Video

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21-08-2012 11:06 A combination of lightning, drought and human activity caused fires to scorch more than one-third of Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1988. Within a year, burn scars cast a sharp outline on the 793880 acres affected by fire, distinguishing wide sections of recovering forest, meadows, grasslands and wetlands from unburned areas of the park. After more than two decades, satellite instruments can still detect these scars from space. Landsat Project Scientist Jeff Masek has been studying the recovery of the forest after the 1988 Yellowstone fires. In the video below, he talks about how Landsat satellites detect the burn scars from space and distinguish them from healthy, un-burned forest and from new growth. NASA and the US Department of the Interior through the US Geological Survey (USGS) jointly manage Landsat, and the USGS preserves a 40-year archive of Landsat images with free distribution of data over the Internet. The next Landsat satellite, now known as the Landsat Data Continuty Mission (LDCM) and later to be called Landsat 8, is scheduled for a launch in 2013. This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on facebook: Or find us on Twitter:

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NASA | Yellowstone Burn Recovery - Video

Real Dinosaur Prints Found at NASA Flight Center

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(via LiveScience) At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, some of the most brilliant minds in the world work to build the spacecraft that humans use to explore their universe. But where space scientists now roam, dinosaurs used to call home, according to dino-hunter Ray Stanford.

Stanford has discovered the footprint of a lumbering, spiny dinosaur called a nodosaur in NASA's own backyard on the Goddard Space Flight Center campus. NASA officials aren't disclosing the precise location of the print, fearing that someone might damage or try to remove the fossilized track.

The dinner-plate-sized footprint bears the mark of four dino toes. It belongs to a nodosaur, a tank-like, armored beast studded with bony protuberances that roamed the area about 110 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, which lasted from about 125 million to 65 million years ago. Nodosaurs were plant-eaters, and this one appeared to be moving quickly across the Cretaceous mud, as its heel did not sink deeply into the ground. [See Images of the Ancient Dino-Print]

Stanford, an amateur paleontologist who has had several papers published, confirmed his find with Johns Hopkins University dinosaur expert David Weishampel. On Aug. 17, Stanford shared the location of the find with Goddard officials and with Washington Post reporter Brian Vastag, who made the discovery public the same day.

Continue Reading at CBSNews

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Real Dinosaur Prints Found at NASA Flight Center

The best medicine

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Did you know Canberra is serviced by two country music stations? No, not one for country and the other for western, but FM and AM. So you could find a band called Old Crow Medicine Show to be rampant on a least one of these stations. They may get on Hot Country, but that's really ''Billboard Country'' territory (Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, etc). And they're not quite ''alt-country'' enough for Star Country Canberra AM, which is a shame as OCMS have always been an interesting, evolving group.

It's been four years since the last Old Crow Medicine Show album, Tennessee Pusher, and what a difference. Producer Don Was's stripped-back bluegrass country-drawl has been fully fleshed out to sound like the tight-sounding house band of the biggest, jumpiest joint in Nashville. The Neil Young shanty-style sounds have been replaced with early '70s country Bob Dylan, none more apparent than on Levi, sounding remarkably like Dylan's 1971 classic George Jackson. In fact, you may be hard pressed to recognise that these two albums are from the same band. Overall there is more of an ''old-timey'' feel to the album.

There is still the same thoughtfulness to their lyrics, but wrapped tightly up in a homage to the roots of their music. Songs rise in full-swing fiddle, foot-stomping zest - but listening more closely to the lyrics you find it was about the grim reality of warfare in the 19th century (or even the 21st). Full of more political statements than modern protest albums, Carry Me Back rides in Southern rhythms to find an examination of the human condition just below the surface.

Carry Me Back also has some rockin' jumpers: Mississippi Saturday Night, Steppin' Out and Country Gal are all great swinging numbers. With pronounced harmonies and gusto, these songs will have you at least tapping your feet in no time. Anyone who picked up the O Brother, Where Out Thou? soundtrack and found a real keenness, not just a passing fancy, will love what's on offer here.

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Perhaps OCMS would find more chart success with their roots revival music today if they threw in some strong swear words.

Kam Noack

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The best medicine

Does Interview Process Favors Extroverts?

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(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Although conscientiousness is the personality factor that predicts better performance in medical school and physician practice, a new UC Davis study has found that extroversion is the only personality type associated with better performance in the Multiple Mini-Interview (MMI) process, an increasingly popular method for interviewing and selecting medical students.

Based on the results, published online in the September issue of the journal Academic Medicine, the authors warn that reliance on MMI -- adopted by medical schools nationwide, including the UC Davis School of Medicine -- could potentially lead to medical school classes dominated by a single personality attribute.

"A range of thoughts and styles is important in any institutional setting," said lead author Anthony Jerant, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Family and Community Medicine. "Having a dominant personality type in medicine is a particular concern, since the field has many specialties and, within each, unique and important roles to fill."

In place of the traditional 45-minute applicant interview, MMI is a fast-paced, timed circuit of approximately 10 stations, each featuring a unique 10-minute exercise designed to assess teamwork, problem-solving and communication abilities. Different evaluators, usually physicians or other health-care professionals, at each station rate the applicants using predetermined criteria. The ratings are forwarded to the Admissions Committee, which considers them along with the rest of each applicant's portfolio.

Jerant said that the "speed dating" format of the MMI process favors extroverts, who can be perceived on brief contact to be better communicators.

"That doesn't necessarily mean they actually are better at communicating with patients or colleagues over the long haul," he said. "Extroversion hasn't been shown to confer advantages in other aspects of medical student performance, and we don't know how it affects clinical performance after medical school."

Pioneered by McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, MMI is considered to have several advantages over the traditional medical school interview. It's believed to favor candidates who have the social and communication skills to navigate the complexities of health care and who can think on their feet and work in teams.

"We adopted the MMI approach to explore a potentially more reliable, multisource assessment of our applicants than the traditional, one-on-one interview format," said Mark Henderson, associate dean for admissions at UC Davis School of Medicine and a co-author of the study. "The results raise important questions that can only be answered with longitudinal follow up of students chosen using this method and further studies. We will continue to refine the MMI as part of our selection process with the goal of selecting a diverse group of qualified students capable of handling the challenges of a medical career while remaining dedicated advocates for their patients."

In this UC Davis-funded evaluation, Jerant and his team examined the relationship between the personalities of UC Davis School of Medicine applicants and their MMI scores.

They studied 444 applicants for the 2010-11 school year who participated in the MMI process and voluntarily completed a Big Five Inventory questionnaire, a validated measure assessing agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness.

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Does Interview Process Favors Extroverts?

Investor sues Sirius board for not fighting Liberty's control

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(Reuters) - A police pension fund is suing Sirius XM Radio Inc's board of directors for letting Liberty Media Corp take over the company without a fight and without paying a premium. The lawsuit, filed in the Court of Chancery in Delaware by the City of Miami (Florida) Police Relief and Pension Fund, comes just days after Liberty said it planned to take full control of Sirius and its board by ...

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Investor sues Sirius board for not fighting Liberty's control

Gary Johnson: Ryan’s no libertarian

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The Libertarian movement has been working for years to infiltrate the GOP and basically what they have accomplished is getting a bunch of Republicans to pay lip service to certain tenets of Austrian Economics. Unfortunately this makes it easy to think that your average Professional Libertarian is dedicated less to liberty than to keeping top marginal tax rates low for billionaires. Related: Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz, one of the movements most influential figures, loves Paul Ryan.

Meanwhile, Gary Johnson is still running for president (on the Libertarian Party line), and he is still saying things that make me admire him even though I am a big-government socialist. Here he is on Paul Ryan:

He voted for the Patriot Act, he voted for the National Defense Appropriation Act, he voted to ban online poker, hes proposing a budget that gets balanced in thirty years. He is anything but a libertarian, anything but, said Johnson after a packed campaign dinner at Hills Caf.

Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee for president, noted that Ryan was a strict social conservative who voted to restrict abortion rights and against marriage equality.

Paul Ryan submitted personhood legislation that is anything but libertarian, he said. Johnsons eyes widened and his volume increased as he went into detail about Ryans support for a national version of Virginias controversial transvaginal ultrasound law.

Gary Johnson was the Republican candidate who might have broken out during the primaries if the movement that surrounds Ron Paul a born-again anti-abortion isolationist with a history of making racist political appeals were actually about libertarian principles instead of being a weird cult of personality. (Johnson also might have benefited if the liberal media hadnt decided Jon Huntsman was the official Republican Liberals Should Like solely because of his bold decision to repeatedly call his partys base a bunch of morons.) (And if those Principled Libertarian Koch Brothers had wanted to throw a bunch of money at him it probably wouldnt have hurt, right?) Alas, it was not to be.

Oh, Johnson also released a statement on Rep. Todd Akins recent unpleasantness:

Rep. Akins comments were not just offensive, but also absurd on their face, and serve to remind us why politicians and the government ought not be asserting themselves onto decisions and judgments about a womans right to choose.

Its almost as if this crazy guy actually means it when he says he doesnt want the government interfering in private affairs, and he isnt just talking about the God-given right to profit as much as possible from pumping as much carbon as possible into the atmosphere.

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Deadly outbreak of West Nile virus highlights urgent need for more research, funding

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Public release date: 22-Aug-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Vicki Cohn vcohn@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

New Rochelle, NY, August 22, 2012Mosquito-borne West Nile virus (WNV) caused 26 deaths already this year, and nearly 700 cases had been reported by mid-August according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). WNV had become "old news" among the public and the media. Furthermore, funding to support research, training and education, and surveillance and vector control had waned. Now there is an urgent imperative to redouble our efforts to understand and control this dangerous virus. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, a major peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, has published numerous timely and informative studies on WNV, and articles on the topic published since 2007 are available free on the Journal website at http://www.liebertpub.com/vbz through September 10 to help disseminate vital information about this deadly virus that continues to infect and kill people across the U.S. and abroad.

Texas is currently a hotspot for WNV, reporting more than 336 cases and 14 deaths to date, resulting in a state of emergency and aerial spraying for mosquito control in Dallas County, but several other states are also reporting fatal West Nile cases.

"No conclusive explanation has been offered for the increased number of WNV cases, but over the years, many experts have learned that predictions related to West Nile virus should be made with caution," says Stephen Higgs, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases and Associate Vice President for Research, Research Director, Biosecurity Research Institute, Peine Professor of Biosecurity, and Professor of Diagnostic Medicine and Pathobiology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.

"Our journal, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, will continue to inform researchers and public health experts and policymakers on all aspects of WNV around the world," adds Dr. Higgs.

###

About the Journal

Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases is an authoritative, monthly peer-reviewed journal published in print and online dedicated to diseases transmitted to humans by insects or animals. The Journal covers a widespread group of vector and zoonotic-borne diseases including bacterial, chlamydial, rickettsial, viral, and parasitic zoonoses and provides a unique platform for basic and applied disease research. The Journal also examines geographic, seasonal, and other risk factors that influence the transmission, diagnosis, management, and prevention of zoonotic diseases that pose a threat to public health worldwide. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases is the Official Journal of SocZEE, the Society for Zoonotic Ecology and Epidemiology. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases website at http://www.liebertpub.com/vbz.

About the Publisher

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Deadly outbreak of West Nile virus highlights urgent need for more research, funding

I Want My Hover Bike! Inventor Makes Real-Life Star Wars Tech

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Footage of a hover bike test flight surfaced on the Internet this week and quickly sent sci-fi nerds and techies on a heavy Star Wars nostalgia trip. The video is enthralling not only because it's a futurists wet dream. The vehicle's user-friendly design could usher in an era of low-altitude flight as a form of daily, personal transportation.

Built by Aerofex, a California company, the hover bikefinally perfects a design that was scrapped in the 1960s due stability issues. Like earlier versions, it achieves flight through the rotation of very large fan blades, like a helicopter. The difference is in control bars near the knees that react when the driver leans on them,allowing the vehicle responds like a horse or surfboard. (Aviators call this systemkinesthetic control, a tem coined by Charles H. Zimmerman, who in the 1950s created flying shoes and a flying pancake for the US military.) Aerofex's hover bike has been testedat 30 miles an hour and a height of 15 feet, and it has flown under bridges, in trees, and around buildings.

"Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV's (all-terrain vehicles)," said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and the founder of Aerofex in an interview with InnovationNewsDaily.

Aerofex's goal to break the barriers that limit access to the benefits of flight, according to the company's website. "Imagine personal flight as intuitive as riding a bike," reads another passage on the site.

So when can we expect these flying contraptions to hit the market, and how much will they cost? According to De Roche, the answer is... No. Aerofex has no intention of offering these bikes to the public. De Roche sees them being used by search-and-rescue teams in difficult terrain, by farmers, and by the military in the form of an autonomous supply carrier.

Aerofexs hover bike isnt the only small flying machine trying to get off the ground, although it has racked up the most successful test flights. An Australian competitor has yet to complete a successful untethered test flight despite a similar design and ambitions to reach the mass market.

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I Want My Hover Bike! Inventor Makes Real-Life Star Wars Tech

BAFact Math: Jupiter is big enough to swallow all the rest of the planets whole | Bad Astronomy

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[BAFacts are short, tweetable astronomy/space facts that I post every day. On some occasions, they wind up needing a bit of a mathematical explanation. The math is pretty easy, and it adds a lot of coolness, which I'm passing on to you! You're welcome.]

Todays BAFact: Jupiter is so big you could fit every other planet in the solar system inside it with room to spare.

Volume is a tricky thing. Our brains are pretty good at judging relative linear sizes of things: this thing is twice as long as that thing, for example. But volume increases far more rapidly than linear size. Take a cube where each side is one centimeter. It has a volume of one cubic centimeter (cc). Now double the length of each side to 2 cm. It looks twice as big, but its volume goes up to 8 cc! The volume of a cube is a the length x width x height, so there you go.

Spheres are the same way: the volume increases with the cube of the radius. Specifically, volume = 4/3 x x (radius)3. So one sphere might look slightly larger than another, but in fact have a lot more volume.

Such is the way of Jupiter. I see pictures of it compared to the other planets, and honestly Saturn looks only slightly smaller Saturns radius is about 60,000 km compared to Jupiters 71,000. But that turns out to make a huge difference in volume!

Heres a table I created to compare the planets. The first number column is the planets equatorial radius in kilometers (the biggest planets arent perfect spheres, but as youll see this doesnt matter). The second number column is the volume in cubic km based on that radius. The third is the volume of the planet divided by the volume of Jupiter (so that ratio = 1 for Jupiter itself). The last column is the same, but rounded to two decimal places to make it easier to read.

The big conclusion here is pretty obvious when you look at that last column. Even though Saturn is only a little smaller than Jupiter, it only has 60% of the big guys volume! Uranus and Neptune together are only another 9%. If you combine all the planets in our solar system, they add up to only about 70% of Jupiters volume. That leaves a lot of room left over for all the moons and asteroids in the solar system, too!

So Jupiter really is a monster. Theres a half-joke astronomers say: The solar system consists of the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted rubble. As you can see, thats really not that far off from the truth!

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BAFact Math: Jupiter is big enough to swallow all the rest of the planets whole | Bad Astronomy

Belarusian students won the 6th International Olympiad on astronomy and Astrophysics

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The 6th International Olympiad on astronomy and Astrophysics in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Belarusian schoolchildren took one gold and two bronze medals, as well as two praiseworthy sheet. Correspondent BakuToday the Observatory told Belarusian State University Victor Gorenkov.

The Olympics ended on 14 August, Belarus was represented by five Parties: Rosa Novitskaya (the Lyceum of BELARUSIAN STATE UNIVERSITY, Minsk) won the gold medal, Julia Korenovskaya (also the Lyceum of BELARUSIAN STATE UNIVERSITY, Minsk) won the bronze medal, Eugene Obukhiv (the gymnasium No. 1 city of Grodno) won the bronze medal. Honourable sheets got two more Minsk students- Mikhail Kushev (the gymnasium No. 29) and the Maria Goshka (the gymnasium No. 50).

Belarusian schoolchildren have traditionally win prizes at international competitions in astronomy. In 2011, with those Olympics they took three medals.

As Ukrainian News earlier reported, BakuToday, guide of Belarus has set itself the task of winning national team at the Olympics in London 25 medals, including five gold. After doping scandal in Belarusian with hope piggy Ostapchuk medals on the London Olympics 2012 year 12 Awards (2 Gold, 5 Silver and 5 bronze medals) and 26-th place in the overall ranking of the national teams.

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Belarusian students won the 6th International Olympiad on astronomy and Astrophysics

AUI and NRAO Comment On NSF's Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee

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Associated Universities (AUI) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have made a preliminary examination of the report from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee (PRC).

Among the recommendations of that report are that the NSF's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) be fully divested from the NSF Astronomy Division's portfolio of research facilities in the next five years, with no further funding from the Astronomy Division.

AUI and NRAO recognize and acknowledge the need to retire obsolete facilities to make way for the state-of-the-art. However, both the GBT and the VLBA are the state-of-the-art, and have crucial capabilities that cannot be provided by other facilities.

Separately the two telescopes provide unparalleled scientific access to the universe. When their information is combined, the instruments provide the highest sensitivity and resolution available for any astronomical instrument in the world.

The Green Bank Telescope The GBT, located in Green Bank, West Virginia, is the largest and most capable fully steerable single-dish radio telescope in the world. It is a cutting-edge research instrument at the height of its powers, and it is continually growing more capable through the introduction of low-cost upgrades to its light detecting and processing electronics. It is the only world-class astronomical telescope in the eastern United States and has been in full scientific operation for less than 10 years.

Weighing sixteen million pounds, and able to precisely point its 2.3 acres of light-collecting surface area anywhere within all but the southernmost 15 percent of the celestial sphere, the $95 million GBT is an engineering and scientific marvel unlikely to be recreated, much less surpassed, by American astronomy for decades to come.

Indeed, astronomers in other parts of the world are at work trying to build their own telescopes of similar concept and design to the GBT, but none of those telescopes will exceed its performance.

The GBT is used by astronomers and students around the world for important research. It is a powerful tool for searching out the molecular building blocks of life in space, for probing the nature of matter at extreme densities, for mapping diffuse clouds of intergalactic gas that are invisible to other telescopes, for finding beacons in space that can serve as mileposts for calibrating our understanding of cosmic distance scales and the characteristics of dark energy, for detecting gravity waves first predicted by Einstein, and for pioneering and experimenting with new observational tools and techniques.

The GBT's annual cost of operation is about 0.7 percent of the annual federal budget for astronomy and astrophysics, but the cost of replacing it, once it's gone, would be enormous. In an era of constrained budgets, leveraging and improving the existing state-of-the-art through low-cost technology upgrades (the development of which often involves students) is a cost-effective way to keep science moving forward.

Today's GBT, because of such improvements, is 10 to 100 times more powerful than the original telescope, which entered full science operations in 2003. With small upgrades, the GBT has substantial potential to continue on this upward arc of increasing scientific power.

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AUI and NRAO Comment On NSF's Astronomy Portfolio Review Committee

Diagnos Started a Large Claiming Program With Its Ontario Partner for the Plan Nord in the Province of Quebec

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BROSSARD, QUEBEC, CANADA--(Marketwire - Aug. 22, 2012) - DIAGNOS inc. ("DIAGNOS" or "the Corporation") (ADK.V), a leader in the use of artificial intelligence and advanced knowledge-extraction techniques, is pleased to announce the acquisition of 2,969 claims in the Plan Nord in the province of Quebec. Based on the press release dated October 25, 2011 with its Ontario partner for the analysis of the government of Quebec data, DIAGNOS started claiming in the month of July 2012.

DIAGNOS has used its proprietary Computer Aided Resource Detection System (CARDS) to target the mineral potential of the remote, sparsely staked northern portion of the province of Quebec. The work consisted of compiling, processing, and merging available geological, geochemical, geophysical, and topographical data as well as satellite imagery of the area. As stated on the official Plan Nord website; "Mining operations are a major component of the economy of Northern Quebec. Northern Quebec produces all of Quebec's nickel, cobalt, platinum group metals, zinc, iron ore and ilmenite, and accounts for a significant portion of gold production. Lithium, vanadium and rare-earth metals, used increasingly in numerous fields related to energy, transportation and high technology, are also found there".

"We have been working on this project for the last 8 months and are very pleased to have partnered with an organisation that values the opportunity of the Plan Nord. This is the largest data analysis contract we have ever done. It is our partner's ambition to become one of the largest land owner in the Plan Nord. Based on our agreement DIAGNOS has a 2% NSR on all targets generated for this project." noted Andre Larente, President and CEO of Diagnos.

About DIAGNOS

Founded in 1998, DIAGNOS is a publicly traded Canadian corporation (ADK.V), with a mission to commercialize technologies combining contextual imaging and traditional data mining thereby improving decision making processes. DIAGNOS offers products, services, and solutions to clients in a variety of fields including healthcare, natural resources, and entertainment.

Forward-looking information

This document contains forward-looking information. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements.

For further information, please visit our website at http://www.diagnos.com or the SEDAR website at http://www.sedar.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

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Diagnos Started a Large Claiming Program With Its Ontario Partner for the Plan Nord in the Province of Quebec

New Technologies Offer Hope for American Manufacturing

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Advanced robotics systems and other technologies promise to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing.

Michele Nash-Hoff, president, ElectroFab Sales

While the state of American manufacturing has been grim for the past decade, the reshoring trend and new technologies are making the outlook for the future of American manufacturing look brighter than it now appears.

In the past few years, the key factors for returning manufacturing to America have been quality problems, rising labor costs, intellectual property theft, rising shipping costs, long lead times for product delivery from Asia, and the cost of inventory for the larger lots you have to buy from Asia to get the cheaper prices.

Now, Harry Mosers Total Cost of Ownership worksheet calculator is helping companies quantify the hidden costs of doing business offshore, enabling more companies to make the decision to reshore manufacturing. According to Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative,about 10% of companies nationwide are bringing manufacturing back to America from Asia. It is a pleasure to read frequent stories about even large companies such as Dow Chemical, Caterpillar, GE, and Ford starting to move some manufacturing back to the U.S. from China.

But rising costs and political pressure arent whats going to rapidly change the equation. according to Vivek Wadhwa, Vice President of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential rates and converging. These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These have been moving slowly so far, but are now beginning to advance exponentially just as computing does.

ROBOTICS: In the past, large American food product companies like General Mills and Kraft Foods, as well as the automotive industry, have been the biggest user of complex robotic systems. But, todays robots are smaller and cheaper they are really specialized electromechanical devices run by software and remote control designed to perform specific tasks in the manufacturing of products for a variety of industries. These robots, cost-effective for lower production volume than those used in the food and automotive industry, are enabling more companies to utilize this technology.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:AI is really the software that makes computers, robots, and even unmanned aircraft and space vehicles run in an intelligent manner. Unmanned vehicles have dominated the sky in the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now being used to provide surveillance along our international border with Mexico. The unmanned rover, Curiosity, traversing the surface of Mars is an example of the latest AI technology.

ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING: Additivemanufacturingis the process of producing parts by successive melting of layers of material rather than removing material, as is the case with conventional machining. Each layer is melted to the exact geometry defined by a 3D CAD model. Additive Manufacturing allows for building parts with very complex geometries without any sort of tools or fixtures, and without producing any waste material, explains Arcam ABs website.

This process, also known as 3D printing, is turning product designs into reality for a fraction of the cost of past manufacturing technologies. The application of this technology started as a way to make prototypes faster and cheaper. What is great about parts made by this process is that they are not just the fragile prototype parts previously made by stereo lithography technology; parts made by 3D printing can function as production parts.

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New Technologies Offer Hope for American Manufacturing

Record profit as Sonic Healthcare booms

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Sonic Healthcare expects expansion in the United States and Germany to boost its growth, despite the gloomy US economy.

The international pathology, radiology and medical centres group on Tuesday reported a record net profit for the 2011/12 financial year, up 7.3 per cent to $316 million compared with the previous 12 months.

Chief executive Dr Colin Goldschmidt said the company expected to increase its earnings by five to 10 per cent this financial year, pointing to the US and Germany as key markets for future growth.

"Our big growth for the future is probably going to come out of the USA and Germany where the markets are still quite fragmented and our positions are still relatively young," he told investors.

By comparison, the Australian laboratory market was more mature and consolidated, he said.

Revenue growth in the US for 2011/12 year ending June 30 was 11 per cent, including acquisitions.

But once acquisitions were stripped out, that left organic growth at just two per cent.

"That sounds low but we have an unprecedented low-growth environment in the US lab market," he said.

"That two per cent is higher than our major competitors have reported recently."

The low growth was probably associated with the high unemployment rates in the US, where private health insurance is provided by employers, Dr Goldschmidt said.

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Record profit as Sonic Healthcare booms