NextBigFuture.com

Tropical forests store about a third of Earth’s carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose...

Terrapower and Bill Gates are pulling back from a pilot project in China because of the trade war and bad US-China relations. TerraPower has a traveling-wave reactor (TWR) which would run on depleted...

Nanosatellites the size of milk cartons arranged in a spherical (annular) configuration were able to capture images that match the resolution of the full-frame, lens-based or concave mirror systems...

GlaxoSmithKline has invested $300 million into 23andMe. GSK and 23andMe will partner to develop new medicines. They will split costs and profits equally. 23andMe raised $250 million at a $1.75...

NASA OSIRIS-REx Will Sample Return from an Asteroid On the afternoon of December 31, NASA OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around asteroid Bennu. About 70 million miles away from Earth, Bennu broke the...

China’s rover Yutu 2 has begun exploring the far side of the moon after making a soft landing with the lander. The rover will used ground-penetrating radar to map the moon’s inner structures,...

Destination Moon was a 1950 film, which won the Academy Award for Visual Effects. The rocket ship in the movie looks very similar to the planned SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. The film’s premise...

Austin Bernard has more photos of the construction progress of the SpaceX Starhopper. Here is a shot with the nosecone, middle section and the base. Two of the pieces will be Lifted and then...

The US Navy will block buy two Ford-class aircraft carriers at a time. The US Navy will buy and build the third and fourth new Ford aircraft carriers at the same time in order to get up to a 10%...

How fast can Tesla and China complete Gigafactory 3? The money, permits and a local government-owned construction company are all in place. China can build large factories in weeks. Tesla built an...

On January 1 New Horizons encountered the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Some 6.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, Ultima Thule is the most distant world ever explored by a spacecraft...

A Chinese spacecraft on Thursday made the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon. The lunar explorer Chang’e 4 touched down at 10:26 a.m. China Central Television said in a brief announcement...

Tesla produced and delivered at electric cars at the rate of nearly 1,000 vehicles per day. Production in Q4 grew to 86,555 vehicles, 8% more than their prior all-time high in Q3. This included:...

Many space plans propose different space vehicles for different roles and activities. There is a launcher that goes from Earth to low earth orbit or the launcher goes directly to higher orbits with...

The University of Southern California has course ASTE 527. It takes an architectural approach to complex engineering concepts generation. It is a graduate elective course offered by the Department of...

Instanbul Airport in Turkey and Daxing Airport in Beijing will both open in 2019 to add huge competition for international airport megahubs. The airports are state-supported and will provide airport...

Clothing embedded with tiny solar cells the size of a flea will allow wearers to generate electricity on the move and charge items like mobile phones and smartwatches. Nottingham Trent University has...

Zoltan Toroczkai and collaborators have been working toward developing a novel analog mathematical approach that will help advance computation beyond the digital framework. They have a mathematical,...

There previously was a wall covering the base of the SpaceX Starship Hopper. The wall has been removed to reveal three Raptor engines. The Starhopper could be shorter than the final Starship. The...

China has built a giant radio antenna that uses five times the area of New York City. It will be used to communicate with submarines. The Wireless Electromagnetic Method (WEM) project took 13 years...

Yesterday all copyrighted works published in 1923 fell into the public domain, with only a few exceptions. Internet grassroot organizations and companies like Google and Reddit now oppose copyright...

New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) provided the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt...

China’s space agency said its control center in Beijing would choose a suitable time to try the landing, but the Smithsonian Institution, the American museums and research centers group, reported...

China’s is performing more sea trials of its navy ship with a railgun. They have also made progress on 20 Megawatt power modules to power more railguns. Long time no see, the railgun test ship...

Elon Musk indicated there would be cool pictures of the demo Starship in around 4 weeks of a December 8th tweet. The polished body of the nosecone will be stacked onto the cylinder main body section...

William Falconer-Beach has rendered some images of the SpaceX Starship with a mirror polished stainless steel body. Elon Musk has reported that SpaceX is building the body of the Starship out of...

There is about 70% support among Americans to use human gene editing to cure or correct diseases. The support among people in China for using human gene editing to cure disease was similar in a...

Frequently reported advances in artificial intelligence make some people curious, and others nervous. While some people picture their next smart appliance purchase being an AI robot, others wonder if...

China was planning to use Westinghouse AP1000 and french EPR (Evolutionary Power Reactor) nuclear reactors. China normally completes nuclear reactors in 4-5 years and at a half or a third of the...

In 2014 the New Horizons team found an object that is now called Ultima Thule. It is located in the Kuiper belt in the outermost regions of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune. On January...

In about seven weeks, SpaceX will launch a Beresheet which is SpaceIL’s small ~600 kg (1300 lb) lunar lander. SpaceIL competed the Google Lunar XPrize. This launch is about a year too late for...

D-Wave Systems announced a developer preview of D-Wave Hybridâ„¢, a simple, open-source hybrid workflow platform for building and running quantum-classical hybrid applications. D-Wave Hybrid will...

RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science has constructed a hybrid quantum device made from two different types of qubits. They have created a device that can be quickly initialized and read out, and...

Russia has provided China with critical navy engine technology which will enable China’s newest destroyers to have enough electrical power for large railguns. China will fix and upgrade...

Disk rotating detonation engines could provide engines that are 10% more efficient, which could enable hypersonic planes. The USA, China, and Russia will be ramping up hypersonic weapon and...

There are many bunkers and facilities that are very deep underground. Iran has its Furdow Nuclear Facility which is 80 meters under hard rock and special hardened cement. Iran claims to have built a...

China’s H-20 stealth bomber will join the J-20 fighters, Y-20 airlifters and Z-20 helicopters in the Chinese Air Force’s “20” series of new aircraft. Many observers believe the “20” means they...

Russian had another successful hypersonic glide weapon test. Putin says the weapon is impossible to intercept. Currently, no military power has the means to intercept the mach 5+ hypersonic weapons...

China has completed and is now operating an advanced french designed EPR nuclear reactor with 1750 MW of power. This is the most energy from a single nuclear reactor. The main design objectives of...

Three new Swarm satellites were launched into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on the SpaceX SSO-A on December 3. Swarm now has a constellation of seven satellites. The Federal Communications Commission settled...

Venezuela will struggle to produce 1 million barrels per day through 2019. The IMF and most other analysts expect the reported November production of 1.137 million barrels per day to drop by 18% or...

The SpaceX Starship is being made from stainless steel. The skin will get too hot for paint. The stainless steel will have a mirror finish for maximum reflectivity. It will require much less...

Huawei shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2018. Their top sellers were the P20, Honor 10 and Mate 20 series. In 2017, Huawei shipped 153 million phones. Samsung shipped about 300 million phones....

The first exchange of a few photons per pulse has been performed between two different satellites 20,000 kilometers apart. This was between the Russian GLONASS constellation and the Space Geodesy...

SpaceX had 21 successful launches in 2018. They ended 2018 by launching a GPS satellite. SpaceX had 18 launches in 2017. In 2016, SpaceX won a $83 million contract to launch this GPS satellite. This...

MAGMA is a small drone which will use a unique blown-air system to move the aircraft and it will enable stealthier aircraft designs. The supersonic blown air means moving wing flaps and other...