NextBigFuture.com

Blue Origin has successfully launched a first commercial payload. It was a sub-orbital launch with the New Shepard rocket. The New Shepard system took 8 NASA-sponsored research and technology...

Blue Origin has started building a BE-4 rocket-engine production facility in Huntsville, Alabama. It will cost more than $200 million and employ about 300 when it opens in March 2020. This was...

Brazil’s mining company Vale has had its second iron tailings dam collapse in the last four years. An iron tailing dam burst on Friday. There are forty confirmed dead and about 200 people are...

Germany has announced that they will close down all coal power plants by 2038 according to Clean Energy Wire. Germany plans to close 25% of existing coal-burning plants (12.5 gigawatts) by 2022. This...

The Wall Street Journal featured Tesla’s Gigafactory in China. China is already Tesla’s second largest market. Tesla sold 14,000 cars in China in 2018, but China plans is for the new...

China will not approve wind and solar power projects unless they can compete with coal power prices. China stopped subsidizing large scale solar projects in May, 2018. This was reported by John...

One of the problems preventing the Multi-billion dollar ITER nuclear fusion project from scaling to provide commercial energy are disruptions of the plasma. Disruptions are sudden events that can...

Quantexa has developed revolutionary Entity Resolution and Network Analytics technology that enable deeper insights into complex financial and real-world criminal problems like human trafficking....

SpaceX continues to march ahead with the Starhopper. They are recovering from the wind damaged nose cone for the Starhopper and they placed fuel tanks into the bottom half of the Starhopper. Elon...

Scott Galloway and Maureen Mullen had mostly successful predictions for digital technology in 2018. They predicted that Amazon would be the strongest of the big 4 (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google)....

SpaceX has completed a static firing for a Falcon 9 rocket with the crew dragon capsule. They are targeting a February launch. If this flight is successful then there will be a flight abort test in...

The US has funded Quantum Science and Engineering with the $1.2 billion National Quantum Initiative Act. The funding is spread of 5 years. This funding is for all quantum related science and...

Quantum Circuits (QCI) is using superconducting qubits in a modular, robust, and scalable architecture. They are a spinout from Yale University. QCI’s unique software platform harnesses the...

A Columbia University-led team has developed a new method to finely tune adjacent layers of graphene—lacy, honeycomb-like sheets of carbon atoms—to induce superconductivity. Above – Applying...

Researchers demonstrated thermal lithography. They used a probe heated above 100 degrees Celsius to outperform standard methods for making metal electrodes on 2D semiconductors such as molybdenum...

Boeing successfully completed the first test flight of its autonomous passenger air vehicle (PAV) prototype in Manassas, Virginia. Boeing NeXt, which leads the company’s urban air mobility...

Deep Mind has a StarCraft II program AlphaStar. It is the first Artificial Intelligence to defeat a top professional human player. In a series of test matches held on 19 December, AlphaStar...

Austin Bernard has footage of the SpaceX work to repair the half of the Starhopper which was blown over in 50 mph winds. documentation:1-24-19welders already working hard on either restoring or...

An Alibaba backed open research think tank (the Luohan Academy) has published a 22-page report which says that AI, mobile internet, e-commerce are not destroying more jobs than they create....

Porphyromonas gingivalis (Pg) – the bacterium commonly associated with chronic gum disease – appears to drive Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology. University of Louisville researcher has strong...

Rocketstar LLC plans to launch a 3D printed aerospike rocket to over 50 miles altitude on February 7, 2019. Aerospike engines will use 25–30% less fuel at low altitudes. Rocketdyne did a lot of tests...

United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched a Delta IV Heavy on January 19, 2019. It was their 132nd successful launch. The launch was NROL-71. The rocket was probably carrying a large spy...

Canada, Brazil, Peru and Colombia have joined the USA in recognizing Juan Guaido in Venezuela. This is reported by the Global News in Canada. The Miami Herald reported crowds amassed in Sucre, in...

In 2018, Reaction Engines has been building two test facilities which they will use to validate the performance of key parts of the SABREâ„¢ spaceplane hypersonic engine. In the US test facility (TF2)...

Scientists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) and the University Hospital Tübingen now show that a protein found in the...

The New York Magazine describes how President Trump offered some people at NASA to imagine and propose an Apollo-style crash program to get humans to Mars. NASA described getting to humans to Mars in...

SpaceX has changed the design of the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship to stainless steel. However, the design changes are more complicated than just using stainless steel instead of carbon fiber or...

Isotropic Systems is developing breakthrough satellite and satellite receiving technology. They recently received $14.4 million dollars in series A funding in a round led by Boeing HorizonX Ventures....

Ariane is cutting the prices for a launch with the Ariane 5 rocket by 40%. Ariane can launch two large satellites in the same mission by stacking them. Arianespace is competing for two major launch...

Fifty-mile per winds broke the moorings and blew over the SpaceX Starhopper. It will take a few weeks to repair according to Elon Musk. The SpaceX Starhopper is designed to test three new Raptor...

In 2019 e-marketer.com forecasts that China will pass the US in total retail sales for the first time. China has more than half of the world’s retail e-commerce sales. Alibaba has more than...

Euler Hermes is an Allianz company that provides financial analysis and trade insurance. They have provided a global economic analysis and an analysis of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in...

Is it good or bad to have a country with billionaires? Is an economy better without billionaires? Is there less poverty or richer people when there are no billionaires? Representative Alexandria...

The European Space Agency ESA and ArianeGroup, as prime contractor of a consortium of Arianegroup, Space Application Services and PTScientists, have signed a contract to study and prepare ESA’s...

Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla is working on Sentry Mode for 360° dashcam surveillance. The car cameras will record activity like someone hitting a Tesla car parked in a parking lot. More software and...

There was a report that Tesla had signed up Tianjin Lishen as a battery supplier but Elon Musk said this is not true. Tesla is looking to expand its battery supplier base outside of Panasonic, which...

Elon Musk explained to Popular Mechanics why SpaceX switched to a 300 series alloy of stainless steel. Advanced carbon-fiber structure made very slow progress and the cost per kilogram was $135....

LPP Fusion is working on dense plasma focus fusion. LPP Fusion Technical Milestones in 2018: Completed experiments with tungsten electrodes Observational confirmation of the destruction of filaments...

Nextbigfuture was emailed a correction for TAE Technologies. In a video, the CEO of TAE Technologies said that TAE Technologies would commercialize within 5 years. TAE Technologies clarified in an...

The MBIR is a sodium-cooled fast reactor with 150 megawatts of thermal power and will have a design life of up to 50 years. It will be a multi-loop research reactor capable of testing lead,...

DARPA is seeking to create new software and hardware architectures that provide physically provable assurances around data security and privacy. Keeping a system completely disconnected from all...

Three days ago when CERN announced the Future Collider, Nextbigfuture described the obvious benefits for Elon Musk’s Boring Company to dig the 100-kilometer tunnel. Today, Elon Musk has tweeted...

SpaceX is initially building a launch pad for the Starhopper at Boca Chica, Texas. However, SpaceX has to build a lot more for the orbital Super Heavy Starship launches. There are older plans and...