NextBigFuture.com

Russia is getting ready to invest US$50 billion in Iran’s oil and gas industry. A Russian oil company has signed an agreement with Iran worth US$4 billion, and that deal “will be implemented soon.”...

It is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Ground telescopes have been much bigger than the...

A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher could more than double the performance of solar sails by creating diffractive metafilm sails. This will initially be used to raise cubesats to higher...

DARPA has admitted that stealth technology has reached its limit and the US may no longer be able to asset air dominance against China and Russia. DARPA wants to accomplish its goal without air...

Russ George was interviewed by the ecologist. He describes how iron fertilization could be used to remove one trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Russ George was involved in the fertilizing of...

The Iranian nuclear program is spread across dozens of sites over an area that is bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined and located 1,000 miles away from Israel. Israel could and did use...

Mastercard has a patent managing fractional reserves of blockchain currency. The Mastercard patent deals with: * storing, in a first central account, a fiat amount associated with a fiat currency; *...

A Glasgow University team has developed medical sensors powered by a porous foam of graphene and silver, an advance with potential applications in the wearable device market. They used a commercially...

Texas oil output (Permian and Eagle Ford) is expected to 5.6 million barrels per day in 2019, according to HSBC. Texas will be more nearly half of America’s total crude oil production. EIA...

The Marvel comics character of Natasha Romonava was created in 1964 as a red-head russian spy. There are now two famous example red-head female russian spies in real life. Maria Butina is another...

Productivity growth (a.k.a. “automation”) has been very weak for the last decade, averaging just over 1.0 percent annually. The Congressional Budget Office is only forecasting 1.8% per...

Fast-food wages began rising in 2014, and have been increasing faster than overall wages. * US unemployment is at a 17-year low which is causing all businesses to struggle to find workers. * In 2000,...

Oisin Biotechnology is a leader in removing senescent cells for antiaging. They have shown p16 positive senescent cells can be killed on demand in both in vitro and in vivo environments. Now they...

1. Planetaria – These 2 exoplanets might have seasons and stable climates There might indeed be some alien worlds that are quite similar to Earth in terms of their seasons and stable climates....

10 new small moons have been found around Jupiter, bringing its total to 79. One of the finds is an oddball that moves in the opposite direction from its neighbors. The newfound moons are small,...

The UK plans to have a new stealth fighter flying by 2035. The British plane would be a sixth-generation fighter. It would be able to operate with a pilot or as a drone. The United States might be...

DivvyCloud, a cloud security and compliance company, is expanding to support Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. More businesses are shifting to the cloud globally, DivvyCloud’s...

Dogecoin can now be bought commission-free on Robinhood Crypto. Robinhood Crypto supports buying, selling and real-time market data for: Bitcoin (BTC) Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Dogecoin (DOGE) Ethereum...

Netflix is spending $8 billion producing or buying content in 2018. Hulu is spending about $2.5 billion. Netflix will have around 1,000 originals total on the service by the end of 2018, with 470 of...

Venezuela only paid the interest on $19 billion in loans from China for the past two years. Some sources say the outstanding debt is $23 billion and other reports $50 billion in loans. Venezuela sent...

A new study suggests that 120 to 150 kilometers (75 to 93 miles) under the Earth’s surface there is 1000 trillion tons of diamonds. The diamonds are in the “roots” of cratons, which...

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,...