NextBigFuture.com

China announced plans to invest 81.2 billion yuan (US$12 billion) in four new nuclear reactors for the first time since 2016. CNNP’s reactors are planned in Zhangzhou city, Fujian province, while CGN...

The picture above is California Highway sign is from the quarterly Metro Transportation Commission report. I have personally never seen the digital sign mention the Flex Fastrak transponder. You will...

If Elon Musk and SpaceX hit the targets for the Starhopper and the SpaceX Starship then SpaceX will have accelerated rocket development by about four times. This would be accelerating the rate of...

There was a video where Elon Musk chat about the history of Elon Musk and SpaceX that has led to the SpaceX Crew Dragon. They also talk to the astronaut crews who will fly on the SpaceX Crew Dragon....

China’s Belt and Road has some questionable economic return potential. However, the Belt and Road is providing geopolitical returns. The Belt and Road has successful projects in Pakistan,...

Planet Labs received $168 million in funding and some of the funding will be to launch many more satellites. On April 1, 2019 they will launch 20 next-generation Dove satellites – Flock 4a – are...

Cost-benefit climate change analyst Bjorn Lomborg has the following analysis of the costs. Bjorn is taking the UN panel report as being mostly credible and accurate. Bjorn does believe that sea...

The bootstrapped LPP Fusion dense plasma focus nuclear fusion project will be starting a potentially big year of testing. They are completing work on their beryllium electrode. If everything goes...

SpaceX will begin test firing the Starhopper. The Starhopper will be tethered and the hops will not be visible from offsite. This will likely be only a few feet or less of lift in the initial tests....

Caltech and Northrop Grumman are continuing to make research progress towards space-based solar power. In 2018, the aerial density of the 1-meter solar tiles in 600 grams. This is an improvement from...

SpaceX will not build a new nosecone for the Starhopper. Elon Musk tweeted that the new nosecone is being built for the orbital Starship. Elon has previously indicated that the orbital version of the...

China is working on magnetized plasma artillery which could enable hypersonic projectiles from a tank. This technology is different than railguns. China has started testing railguns on large navy...

Stanford has a new measurement technique for quantum dots. Uncertainty about the quality of quantum dots are holding back the use of quantum dots. Above – A close-up artist’s rendering of...

A prototype device has been developed that is able to transfer heat using ‘muscles’ made from nickel-titanium. Nickel-titanium (aka nitinol) is a shape-memory material that releases heat to its...

Some people believe that successful antiaging would have a huge impact on social security and Medicare. They believe that if breakthrough medicine reduced the death probability each year three times,...

SpaceX is installing the first Raptor engine into the Starhopper. There is video and pictures of the Raptor engine beside the Starhopper. Vivian Okoy shared a tweet with a picture of the Raptor...

In April, aging research expert Norman E. (Ned) Sharpless, MD will become the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Sharpless is a 2003 Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career...

A panel of national security experts say China is leading the world in hypersonic technology due to Beijing setting a clear investment strategy to its industrial base. Hypersonic glide weapons are a...

CoinCasso, a hybrid cryptocurrency exchange, announces today its public launch with a successful crowdsale raise of USD 2.5 million by selling 6 million CCX tokens in total. CoinCasso is a...

The Tesla Model Y will have three rows of seats and hold seven passengers. Each second-row seat folds flat independently, creating flexible storage for skis, furniture, luggage and more. The liftgate...

Verizon is launching 5G in Chicago and Minneapolis and then they will follow with 30 more US cities. The Verizon 5G will only be available in a few parts of those first cities. Service will start...

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has testified at a hearing that the Space Launch System will likely not be ready for a June 2020 launch of the Exploration Mission-1. The Orion capsule is ready and...

John Preskill, Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, presented an overview of quantum technology at the 2018 Q2B Conference. He indicates...

Quantum Supremacy is defined as the point when quantum computers become faster than regular computers. Quantum computers can become thousands of times more powerful when the number of qubits are...

Murray Thom is VP of software and cloud services at D-Wave Systems. D-Wave currently sells a 2000 qubit quantum annealing machine and provides access to the system via a cloud service. D-Wave will...

The Air Force Research Laboratory and Generation Orbit Launch Services is developing the Mach 8 hypersonic X-60A vehicle. It is an air-dropped liquid rocket specifically designed as a hypersonic...

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) Board of Directors approved a recommendation to select Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC) to design, construct and operate a people mover for...

1. Universe Today – Hayabusa2 Left a Dark Spot Where it Touched Down on Ryugu. Engineers Aren’t Sure Why An image taken a minute after the spacecraft had reached an altitude of 25 km (15.5 mi)...

Global emissions must be reduced by 60% before 2050 to avoid 2 degrees of global warming. However, energy consumption is doubling in the next 40 years due to an increasing world population and...

A Brookings research paper calculates that from 2008 to 2016, China has been overstating its GDP growth by about 1.7% per year. This would mean that China is now overstating its GDP by 20%. The...

The World of Oil will be dominated by a second wave of US Shale oil according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The United States will be the source of 70% of the total increase in global...

China’s National Bureau of Statistics has released GDP for each province for 2018. The provinces that are as rich as Guangdong and above the World Bank per capita $12,055 GNI per capita level...

The SpaceX Starhopper is on a cement launch pad. Elon Musk has indicated the Raptor engine delivery and installation will start next week. SpaceX will one or three engines and begin hop tests. It is...

In 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Privacy is Dead and for people to get over it. In 2010, Mark said if he were to create Facebook again then all user information would by default be public....

Most people fear plane crashes, airplane terrorism and nuclear power accidents. However, these fears have resulted in stupid policies that increase deaths. Planes are far safer than cars. The TSA and...

Last month, OpenAI announced that they had made an AI system could be used for next-generation super spam and a tsunami of fake news. They chose to keep the super-spam system secret to prevent misuse...

It could finally be the beginning of the end for the Space Launch System/Orion. The Office of Management and Budget March 11 propose to defer work on the Block 1B version of the SLS. Block 1B would...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has observed water molecules moving around the dayside of the Moon. The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) measurements of the sparse layer of molecules...

The Saturn V rockets used to take man to the moon had the largest payload capacity to low earth orbit. They could take 118 tons into low earth orbit. China is planning to build the Long March 9...

Russia has modernized 35 brigades (over 80,000 soldiers) active military combat personnel with new body armor and weapons. Russia calls this equipment Ratnik-2. Russia is promising to develop...

The term ‘Disruptive Technologies’ has become a catchphrase to many traders and investors. It evokes that proverbial call to action, requiring a sense of urgency on the part of the business...

The USA does not have enough missiles and antimissiles to beat China over Taiwan and Russia over the Baltics according to RAND thinktank wargames. Precision long-range missiles will be the critical...

Tesla bought Maxwell Technologies for their dry battery technology. Maxwell proved 300 Wh/kg energy density is which 20-40% better than current Tesla batteries. Maxwell has a path with 15-25%...

Cowboy Dan reports that the SpaceX StarHopper is slowly making her way down Highway 4 on a self-propelled module transporter to the Hopper Test Pad area this morning. Above is a screenshot of...

Globalisation has brought down many barriers to trade. No longer do you have to pay high import/export tariffs making new international markets accessible ready for your offering. It is quite easy to...

Ariane is working on a reusable rocket engine called Prometheus and they created animation of the Themis reusable rocket design. The Themis project will build a multiple-engine first-stage rocket...

India will pass China’s population level in 2020 or 2021. China had 7 million few babies in 2018 than expected. China only had 15.2 million babies in 2018 versus an expectation of 21-23...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite have more precisely weighed the Milky Way galaxy. Above – On the left is a Hubble Space Telescope image...

Synthetic, sound-silencing structures—acoustic metamaterials can block 94% of sounds. This ring of materials will be able to make vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, fans and other devices and...

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. IBM created the Quantum Volume metric to measure the power of quantum computers. Quantum Computers have the potential to be vastly more...