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John Shilling surveyed the payload capabilities of the SpaceX Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan and the New Glenn rocket at Space Access 2019. The Falcon Heavy has the capabilities for Moon missions but...

Rand Simberg proposed a resilient low-earth orbit infrastructure.

A University 3U Cubesat using a new solid fuel plasma thruster but costing only a few tens of thousands of dollars. #SpaceAccess2019

Dan Rasky of NASA Ames is presenting what has be done and what could be done with the PICA heat shield at Space Access 2019.

The Tiltrotor Bell Valor V280 tiltrotor is now 55% faster than the maximum speed of the Blackhawk helicopter. The V280 is competing to replace helicopters as part of the Future Lift program. The Army...

Call for Code, a worldwide, multi-year initiative that inspires developers to solve pressing global problems with sustainable software solutions. You may even have participated in the 2018 Global...

The Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory is on track to having the completion of the external building in May, 2019. Rapid completion of the Shanghai Gigafactory is critical for Tesla to hit sales goals in...

SpaceX is making good progress on putting together the pieces of an orbital starship prototype. This would be the pieces for the top part of the Super Heavy Starship. Here are renderings by SpaceX of...

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy Center Core booster landed safely on the drone-ship but then fell over. It has now returned to dock in pieces. The bottom half is the drone-ship. #FalconHeavy center core...

Renewable energy sources has come a long way to becoming viable solutions for our clean energy needs. Solar energy has had decades of exponential growth. Global capacity is expected to reach over...

EXOS Aerospace has reusable suborbital research rockets. #SpaceAccess2019

A two-way recommendation system will enable great advances in music and other kinds of business. Top recommenders can be monetized and millions of jobs could be created at scale. #TCRobotics

Trexo Robotics is on a mission to help children with disabilities walk. #TCRobotics

Two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, robotics and deep learning are creating another paradigm shift in manufacturing. As more parts of production become automated, what will human workers...

Autonomous vehicles can't be as good as human drivers. They need to be better. Aurora co-founder and CPO Sterling Anderson and Uber ATG Chief scientist Raquel Urtasun dig into the self-driving stack...

AI-based tools are proving capable of fabricating or modifying imagery and audio in ways that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. #TCRobi

Robots and humans are working and living together more than ever, and that means we have to watch out for one another. #TCRobotics

NVIDIA’s VP of Engineering Claire Delaunay is showcasing the company’s push to democratize robotics development.

Nextbigfuture is live blogging at the Techcrunch Robotics and AI 2019 conference and covering the panel on Building a Better Robotics Company

Circulation and cellular activity were restored in a pig’s brain four hours after its death which challenges long-held assumptions about the timing and irreversible nature of the cessation of some...

SpaceX Starlink satellites, Amazon new Kuiper and OneWeb are competing for the low latency low-earth satellite market. This market will be worth tens of billions of dollars per year.

EU researchers have developed a graphene-enabled detector for terahertz light that is faster and more sensitive than existing room-temperature technologies. This can lead to a fully digital low-cost...

The Wall Street Journal reports that US-China negotiators are targeting a late May or Early June signing date for trade deal.

Elon Musk was interviewed by Lex Fridman about AI and self-driving cars.

DARPA has scheduled the first test of a new advanced hypersonic glide weapon interceptor defense for 2020.

D-Wave has been selling quantum annealing computers since 2010 and customers have built over 150 early applications on D-Wave computers. They currently sell a 2000 qubit quantum annealer but should...

Malaysia Rail Link Sdn Bhd (MRL) and China Communications Construction Co Ltd (CCCC), the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) will now be 40 kilometers shorter for a total of 648 kilometers and pass through...

SpaceX finished raising $273 million and has now starting raising another $500 million according to Prime Unicorn Index and the Wall Street Journal. This will be at $204 per share and a $29 billion...

Future of Optical-infrared Interferometry in Europe

Ground Based Optical Interferometry Directly Images Exoplanet and Sees Its Atmosphere

Google has a new end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer to power speech input in Gboard. It is only 80 megabytes in size and can work offline.

Two organs-on-a-chip experiments will try to understand why astronauts get so many infections.

The University of Pennsylvania confirmed for the first time that two US patients had been treated using CRISPR gene editing. Several other human trials of CRISPR are starting or are set to start in...

The XM556 Microgun is smaller and lighter than some current 5.56mm belt-fed Squad Automatic Weapons currently on the market but with 4x's the firepower.

Aerojet Rocketdyne has successfully completed initial testing of a nearly flight-weight and production-ready configuration of its next-generation RL10C-X upper-stage rocket engine that contains major...

The spire of Notre Dam was previously destroyed around 1789 during the French revolution. Notre Dam was rebuilt in the 1840s and that rebuilding included a new spire. The good news is that Notre Dam...

Israeli researchers have printed the world’s first 3-D vascularized, engineered heart using human tissue. They used a patient’s own cells and biological material and the heart has blood vessels. The...

Apple will pay Qualcomm license fees that they withheld. They reached a six-year license agreement, effective as of April 1, 2019, including a two-year option to extend, and a multiyear chipset...

By 2025, Texas oil production will double and US and gas production will increase by around 50%. Enterprise Partners forecasts that Texas will surpass 10 million barrels per day of crude oil...

Elon Musk indicates that the Falcon Heavy central core booster’s engines could be recovered and reused pending inspection.

Researchers have discovered new properties of supercooled water. It has long been known that clean water with no particulates that is placed in a smooth enough container can be cooled below its...

The Carnival of Space 607 is up at Urban Astronomer. Universe Today – Hayabusa2 Fires an Anti-Tank Warhead at Asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft had to break up the surface material by shooting it...

Video’s and pictures from Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory show metal wall and roof framing. The factory building and site appear on track for May 2019 completion. Tesla will keep up the...

Self-driving car expert Brad Templeton does not believe that Tesla is close to having its software ready for full self-driving cars. Brad has lengthy assessment of the current capabilities of the...

SpaceX had successfully landed the Falcon Heavy center core but the center core fell over and into the sea due to large waves.

Medium voltage (about 12000 volt) DC power distribution that is reliable and affordable is the key to having the power for futuristic technology like railguns and electromagnetic launchers.

Elon measures the fundamental good of Tesla should be measured by the number of years by which it accelerates the transition to sustainable transport.

LIGO and Virgo are publicly announcing candidate gravitational wave triggers with a high likelihood of astrophysical origin within minutes of the waves arriving in the three detectors (LIGO Hanford,...

Trucks are the backbone of the supply-chain delivery system. 70% of goods are delivered by truck. The U.S. trucking industry generated $700.3 billion in economic activity in 2017. Self-driving trucks...

There is no fundamental restrictions to increasing the baseline length of radio telescope arrays. A global array with baseline lengths up to 10 000 km gives an angular resolution of 4 mas @ 21cm and...