NextBigFuture.com

The best time to take out the North Korean ICBMs are before launch during the 3-4 minutes of the boost phase when they are first launched. Taking out the ICBMs when they are about to hit their target is a far harder problem. The ICBMs can deploy decoys and they can alter course. Hitting the North Korean ICBM during boost phase is still very hard. We will need faster missiles or we have quickly flood North Korean airspace with drones and fighters during the early stage of a conflict. There are 90 to 120 seconds for an intercept after detection

Bill Gates talked about improving the world for the poor. Go from 5% who die before the age of 5 down to 2.5% or less Rotovirus vaccine and Pnuemococcus vaccines will save 500,000 lives per year Rotating crops, money for fertilizer, farmer education system, more improved seeds will boost African agricultural productivity up by 1.5 times. Gates is pro-GMO food. There is improvement from regular breeding but GMO will provide a big boost to Africa. However, it is there decision. Gates can provide assistance to their safety commissions. We need to boost food productivity by double by 2050. Mobile phone

Patrick Tucker at Defense One reports that tests started October 2014 show that F35 could spot and track ICBMs to help Navy missiles shoot them down. In October 2014, Northrop and MDA launched...

DARPA is funding $100 million to develop gene drive, which can wipe out dangerous animals and insects. It could get rid of malarial mosquitoes and invasive rodents. The DARPA program is discussed in...

NVIDIA TITAN V is the most powerful graphics card ever created for the PC, driven by the world’s most advanced architecture—NVIDIA Volta. NVIDIA’s supercomputing GPU architecture is now here for your...

Dr. Dario Gil is a leading technologist and senior executive at IBM. As Vice President of Science and Solutions of IBM Research, Dr. Gil directs a global organization of some 1,500 researchers across...

Andy Weir who wrote the Martian has now written about a future lunar city in his new book Artemis. Weir started with a basic question: Why would anybody go to the trouble of building a town on the...

Japan Center for Economic Research has forecasted the Asian economies out to 2030. The center released its third Medium-Term Asian Economic Forecast for 2017 through 2030. The report, titled...

Germany’s Social Democratic party has put out a list of demands if they are to form a coalition government with Angela Merkel. Martin Schulz called for 1. the creation of a “United States of Europe”...

China’s power consumption in October rose 5 percent from a year ago to 513 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), according to data from the National Energy Administration (NEA) on Wednesday....

Could we cure climate change? Geoengineering researcher Tim Kruger wants to try. He shares one promising possibility: using natural gas to generate electricity in a way that takes carbon dioxide out...

The price of Bitcoin has surpassed $17000 in last few minutes. Bitcoin is up 20% in the last 24 hours. It has more than doubled in the last two weeks. It is up 21 times over the last 12 months.

Exotec Solutions, a French AI robotics startup, today announced the launch of the Skypod Robots and associated system. Cdiscount, the top French e-commerce vendor, is now using Skypods to prepare...

According to a reports, Disney and Fox are closing the deal that would bring the X-Men, Fantastic Four and related characters into the MCU. The terms are mainly agreed and it will be officially...

In 2011, President Obama set a U.S. energy target: produce 80 percent of electricity from clean energy sources by 2035. Reaching that goal would involve removing two thirds of coal usage in the USA....

The AlphaZero program developed by Google and DeepMind took four hours of playing against itself to create chess knowledge beyond any human or other computer program. It could beat any person and beat the best World Computer Champion Stockfish 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case. Self-play games are generated by using the latest

“China stopped being a low-cost manufacturing country many years ago,” Apple CEO Cook told the Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou, capital of the southern Guangdong province, on Wednesday. He said the...

Elon Musk tunneling company has released a map of planned tunnels in Los Angeles. Red shows the proposed Phase 1 proof-of-concept tunnel for which The Boring Company has filed an excavation permit...

Bitcoin is up to $14,300 which is nearly 18 times more that it was one year ago. The total value of all bitcoin is $240 billion.

298 people with Type 2 diabetes were put on an All-liquid diet and they were each able to lose an average of 30 pounds of weight and half of them no longer had to take diabetes medication. They spent...

Chinese online retailer JD.com has entered the autonomous driving fray and will invest 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) in a project in Changsha, an equipment-manufacturing hub in Hunan province. The...

A Tencent Research Institute report indicates that are currently only a supply 300,000 Artificial intelligence professionals when there is a demand for millions. Competition for the top tier of talent is the most intense, as there are fewer than 1,000 people who are considered capable of steering the direction of AI research and development. The US leads other countries in both the quantity and quality of AI personnel, and China won’t be able to immediately solve the talent shortage despite elevating AI to a national priority, Tencent said in the report co-authored with Beijing-based recruitment portal zhipin.com. About one-third of

A drug called erenumab can cut the number of days with migraine symptoms for 50 per cent of patients. Across the UK, an estimated 8.5 million people live with migraine and research suggests the...

From 2008-2011, Sandia National Labs and Northrop Grumman designed nuclear drones that would be able to fly for many months. China has put $3.3 billion into making new highly compact nuclear reactors...

On November 28, 2017, China National Nuclear Corporation officially launched a project to create a 400 Megawwatt Yanlong deep pool-type low-temperature heating reactor. A 400 megawatt Yanlong...

ThorCon is a liquid-fuel fission power plant, under development in the US, to be built in a far-east shipyard, then floated to Indonesia, with testing starting in 2021. It generates emission-free electric power, cheaper even than from a coal-fired plant. Its full-time electric power will improve developing nations’ economies and lifestyles, while also dissuading them from burning fossil fuels which emit CO2. New energy is being mainly built in Asia (China, India, South and South East Asia) and the developing world. There is very little net new power being built in the USA, Europe, and Japan. Thorcon logically will focus

Carnival of Space 537 is up at Cosmoquest. Universe Today – Station Astronauts Unload Cygnus Science; Antares Launch Gallery Above- The Orbital ATK Cygnus OA-8 spacecraft is pictured after it...

Shenzhen had the largest economy in southern China’s Guangdong province last year after a new method of calculating gross domestic product saw it overtake local rival and provincial capital...

Recently , Terrestrial Energy Inc.’s (TEI) announced the completion of the first phase of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s (CNSC) pre-licensing vendor design review. They...

Everyone’s heard the story about the government’s promise to spend $1 trillion on fixing America’s aging critical infrastructure. But there’s another big money story that few investors know of…...

There has been proposal in China to switch from fossil fuel burners to “swimming pool” nuclear reactors. Wang Naiyan, honorary chairman of the China Nuclear Society and a lead scientist at the China...

China will spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) on two prototype molten salt nuclear reactors. Two molten salt nuclear reactors will be built in the Gobi Desert in northern China. * Molten salt reactors can produce one thousandth of the radioactive waste of existing nuclear reactors because of deep burn. More complete conversion of the nuclear fuel. * Molten salt reactors can have designs that are proof against nuclear meltdowns * The chinese reactors could use thorium. China has some of the world’s largest reserves of the thorium metal. The Chinese project has been funded by the central government and

Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics because of the state sponsored doping scandal. • Vitaly Mutko, former sports minister and 2018 World Cup chief, banned for life • Some athletes...

China ranked second after the United States in an internet development index released on Monday that gauges six dimensions from internet infrastructure to application among 38 countries. China has...

Chen Zhao, Chief Global Strategist at Alpine Macro, makes the case that China has a low risk of a debt crisis. Chen says that China’s debt to GDP level is safe. I will relate what Chen Zhao...

A fast-moving, wind-fueled wildfire swept into the city of Ventura early Tuesday, burning 31,000 45,500 acres, destroying homes and forcing 27,000 people to evacuate.At least 150 structures —...

Japan Airlines has made a $10 million investment and pre-order of 20 Boom supersonic passenger jets. JAL is helping Boom deliver something further: a mainstream supersonic airliner, which is...

The Economic Boom of the 1920s was driven by the Assembly line and the mass production of consumer goods such as the Ford Model T Automobile and luxury labor saving devices and access to easy credit...

Variety reports Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams are making plans for a new “Star Trek” movie at Paramount. Tarantino and Abrams are waiting until a solid script is in place before committing...

Together with EPFL scientists, our IBM Research team has developed a scheme for training big data sets quickly. It can process a 30 Gigabyte training dataset in less than one minute using a single...

In October, 2017, Delphi Automotive acquired self-driving startup NuTonomy for $450 million, speeding up its plans to supply carmakers with autonomous vehicle systems. NuTonomy will add more than 100...

Elon Musk’s vision of electric self driving cars has won as all major car companies are making multi-billion dollar investments on electric self driving cars. The robotic ride sharing vision of...

There are currently about 100 self-driving Volvos self-driving Volvos on Swedish roads. In November, 2017, Volvo Cars, the premium car maker, signed a framework agreement with Uber, the ride sharing...

General Motors plans to introduce an autonomous ride-sharing service to several big cities in 2019. GM outlined its vision to reinvent itself. GM wants a future with zero crashes, zero emissions, and...

NASA is pushing forward on testing a key energy source that could literally “empower” human crews on the Mars surface, energizing habitats and running on-the-spot processing equipment to transform...

Venezuela is creating its own “petrocurrency,” backed by reserves in oil, gas, gold and diamonds. It will enable Venezuela “to advance in monetary sovereignty, carry out its financial transactions to...

The Winklevoss twins, who were ousted from Facebook, are now Bitcoin Billionaires. The twins won a $65 million settlement with Facebook after claiming Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. They invested...

Amazon has a patent to self destruct rogue delivery drones into tiny pieces. Directed fragmentation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is described. In one embodiment, the UAV includes various...

The US Navy’s fleet of amphibious ships has declined by half in the last 25 years, from 62 in 1990 to 31 today, with current shipbuilding plans calling for four additional amphibious ships to be added by fiscal year 2024, increasing the total number of amphibious ships to 35. The shortage reduces the ability of joint naval forces to train, particularly in large-scale formations, which harms readiness. The US Navy and marines need as many as 38 amphibious ships to meet rising operational demands, but the service likely won’t be able to reach that number until 2030 due to budget