NextBigFuture.com

The Gen IV international forum had an updated presentation on super-critical water nuclear reactors in 2017 by Laurence Leung. * Potential for cost reduction • Fuel cost is lower, but capital cost is...

China’s nuclear power is much cheaper (420 renminbi per 1000 kWh) than solar and wind renewables and is close to coal-fired power. China investment in nuclear plants is projected to increase...

Oasis Labs is building a privacy-first, high-performance cloud computing platform on blockchain. Oasis created the Ekiden platform. Ekiden is a system for highly performant and...

Researchers have demonstrated the first single-photon transistor using a semiconductor chip. The device has numerous holes in it, making it appear much like a honeycomb. Light entering the chip...

Bloomberg is forecasting sales of electric vehicles (EVs) increasing from 1.1 million worldwide in 2017, to 11 million in 2025 and then surging to 30 million in 2030 as they become cheaper to make...

Ionic Materials received an investment from Hyundai Cradle. Ionic Materials has a polymer electrolyte that can make higher performing and safer solid-state batteries. Prototype batteries with Ionic...

Russia is cancelling the Su-57 (aka T-50) stealth fighter. They built 11 planes in early production but India has dropped out as a partner. Russia will apply the stealth technology and other...

Bitcoin, altcoins, and cryptocurrencies, in general, are always in the news – for the right/wrong reasons depending on whom you ask. Cryptocurrencies still generate a fair mix of support and...

In 2016, RAND wargamed scenarios which showed that Russia could overrun Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia in about 60 hours. RAND has a 2018 analysis of how Russia is continuing to outmatch NATO and...

SpaceX appears to be on track to begin testing the SpaceX BFR and BFS starting in the first half of 2019. SpaceX has installed a large rocket fuel tank at its Boca Chica, Texas launch facility. Elon...

Russia has been using nuclear power projects to gain economic influence around the world. Russia has 60% of recent global nuclear reactor sales. Russia is building or has contracts to build 35...

In September, the Hong Kong to Guangzhou high-speed rail line will open and cut the travel time from 120 minutes to 48 minutes. The Express ticket will cost 260 hong kong dollars (US$33). The giant...

Chinese police have broken up an illegal World Cup gambling ring hosting more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) worth of cryptocurrency bets. The gambling ring ran on the dark web and only...

McKinsey analysis is that blockchain technologies are 3 to 5 years from having the technical maturity to have meaningful scale for mainstream impact. Blockchain technical configurations are a series...

Most European policies have to work out in order for Europe to achieve sustained 2-3 % GDP growth. The alternative is Japan levels of 1% slow economic growth. The EU had 2.5% GDP growth in 2017 and...

California had a massive drop in projected population since a reforecast in 2014 and the forecasted future population in Texas has been increasing. The newest combined estimates are that Texas could...

There will be big demographic milestones for the USA in 2030 and 2035. * In 2030, all baby boomers will be older than 65. This will expand the size of the older population so that one in every five...

The Carnival of Space 569 is up at Urban Astronomer. Planetaria – Enceladus’ water plumes contain life clues New analysis shows that the plumes also contain much more complex organics. This...

Arxiv – Observation of the Meissner effect at room temperature in single-layer graphene brought into contact with alkanes There are claims of synthesis of a room temperature superconductor....

The higher education movement in the USA gave the USA a GDP growth advantage from 1871 to 2012. It appears to have spearheaded a higher long-term rate of growth in per capita income in the US...

Drugs were created to block a protein called the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and it boosted the immune system by about 40% in elderly people. They safely reducing infections in elderly...

Roving cancer tumor cells have been genetically engineered to secrete a protein that triggers a death switch in resident tumor cells they encounter. The cancer-fighting cancer cells also have a...

Lockheed is 3D printing titanum fuel tank for Lockheed Martin’s largest satellites. Using this manufacturing method, tank delivery time went down from two years to three months (nine times...

SpaceX has improved the boat that will catch Falcon rocket nose cone shell. SpaceX made the catching net four times larger. The nose cone shells are called payload fairings. Once outside the...

Twelve members of russian intelligence were indicted for trying to hack the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary...

Hygon, chinese semiconductor company, is now making Zen-based x86 CPUs using a licensing agreement it signed with AMD in 2016. Dhyana” x86 processors are essentially identical with AMD’s own...

The World of supercomputers is shifting rapidly with most of the compute power coming from GPU acceleration. In June 2018, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs...

The China New Era Technology Fund is raising 100 billion Chinese yuan ($15 billion) to invest globally in technology companies. The new company with the backing of the Chinese government will be...

DARPA Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is seeking information on new capabilities that could be enabled by current and next-generation quantum computers for understanding complex physical systems,...

A 2048 qubit D-Wave 2000Qâ„¢ quantum computer was used to predict phase transitions within a particular quantum mechanical system known as the transverse field Ising model. This work has significantly...

Hubspot has a suite of products to organize, track and manage leads, sales and marketing. They have an interesting completely free to use CRM offering. Hubspot is offering a basic CRM product for...

In the World Bank’s ranking by 2017 GDP, the largest economy is the United States, followed by China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. In the rankings of 2017 GDP released in early July,...

At intensities around 1024 Watts per square centimeter the field should be strong enough to start to break the mutual attraction between some of the electron-positron pairs. This is basically...

In 2006, the RAND corporation found that from 1965-2005 the US Navy had 7-11% annual inflation for its ships which is worse than the inflation for US college tuition and US healthcare. This was...

Russia claims that will soon put a new hypersonic mach 6 Vympel R-37M air-to-air missile onto its fighter planes. The claimed specifications are * a range of 188 miles * 132 lbs of explosives in the...

Isreali startup SpaceIl plans to launch a lunar lander and robotic rover to the moon in December, 2018. SpaceIL had been competing in the Lunar Xprize contest. The Lunar XPrize had a few deadline...

Loon (stratospheric balloon internet) and Wing (drone delivery) are graduating Google’s X-lab to become two new independent businesses within Alphabet. Loon will work with mobile network...

Millions of Chinese are using assisted reproductive (IVF and egg freezing). The market could potentially be worth around US$15 billion. For decades, couples in urban China were only allowed to have...

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) project will cost about $40 billion from now to 2030 and will produce a chemical rocket about 1000 times more expensive to launch than a SpaceX BFR. SLS will...

Elon Musk made a serious attempt to provide another rescue option for the boys trapped in the Thai cave with a mini-sub. His newest commitment is to fund fixing Flint water contamination. Elon Musk...

Self-driving cars were expected to eliminate millions of driving jobs over the next few years but Uber just fired 100 self-driving operators (reported by Quartz.com). The Uber self-driving operators...

A paper by MIT’s David Autor and Utrecht University’s Anna Salomons determined that overall automation created more jobs than it destroys over 47 years of data from 28 industries in 19 countries....