NextBigFuture.com

There was a long period of stronger productivity growth from 1917 to 1973 driven by low-cost oil and increasing usage of cars and more efficient factories. We are entering a new period of stronger...

University of Michigan researchers created a reservoir computing system that reduces training time and improves capacity of similar neural networks. A new type of neural network made with memristors...

Japanese RIKEN researchers are trying to adapt existing the silicon metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) to integrate qubits with current electronics, offering the potential...

Thermoelectric (TE) materials could play a key role in future technologies. Although the applications of these remarkable compounds have long been explored, they are mostly limited to...

Making the wakes of ocean ships brighter could cool the Earth by 0.5°C and help combat global warming, according to a new modeling study. Other geoengineering studies have examined how greenhouse gas...

Protests are spreading unpredictably fast in several cities in Iran. They are protesting against high unemployment, a stagnant economy with inflationary prices and expensive overseas military...

Makerbot has created lesson plans to help kids work toward a project with a real-life application. Jackson Sanborn is helping them find “A problem that we can create a fix for.” This year, one high...

Construction of China’s 600 MWe demonstration fast reactor at Xiapu, Fujian province, has officially begun with the pouring of the first concrete for the reactor’s basemat. The reactor is...

OneWeb is launching a global 2.5 gigabit per second satellite internet service by 2021. OneWeb received permission from the FCC in June to deploy a global network of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites...

Another Cryptocurrency doubles in one week. This time it was Ripple. Ripple is used for transactions on Ripple’s open-source RippleNet cryptocurrency network, reached $1.82. The price rally...

ARPA-E has announced funding for about $199 million for which atomically precise catalysts and atomically precise membranes could qualify. ARPA-E announced up to $100 million in funding for new...

SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket is now vertical on launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The fully-assembled 229-foot-tall rocket will be the most powerful in the world when it blasts...

The (noisy) 50-100 qubit quantum computer is coming soon. (NISQ = noisy intermediate-scale quantum computer). NISQ devices cannot be simulated by brute force using the most powerful currently...

China carried out the first flight-tests of a new kind of ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) in November. The DF-17 is the first hypersonic glide vehicle-equipped missile...

Virgin Hyperloop One, a Los Angeles company, announced it has raised $50 million from foreign venture capital investors and made Richard Branson the chairman of its board of directors. The new round...

China has a $1 billion to $1.5 billion virtual reality theme park that has a 174-foot tall statue of a Transformer made of 750 tons of steel. The theme park is set to open in February 2018. The...

Like sandblasting at the nanometer scale, focused beams of ions ablate hard materials to form intricate three-dimensional patterns. The beams can create tiny features in the lateral dimensions—length...

A new NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) spectrometer measures single photons with great precision. The device could help bring about “quantum communications” networks, which would...

In September, the Department of Energy awarded Lawrence Berkeley Labs of $3 million per year to construct a quantum computer and the software needed to operate it. Siddiqi’s team have already...

Material and engineering researchers at East China’s Zhejiang University unveiled a “super” aluminum-graphene battery that can be fully charged in 5 seconds and then last for two...

The SpaceX BFR (Big Falcon Rocket or Big Fucking Rocket) has a planned payload of 150,000 kg (330,000 lb) when flying reusable or 250,000 kg (550,000 lb) when flying expendable, making it a super...

7 of India’s biggest IT companies including Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant are laid off 56,000 engineers in 2017. 2017 layoffs were double the level in 2016. This is because they are not prepared...

Researchers detail an artificial molecular machine that moves a substrate between different activating sites to achieve different product outcomes from chemical synthesis. This molecular robot can be...

The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation: LEAF has an update of SENS research progress against the 7 kinds of aging damage. Senescent Cells Senescent cell clearance has been all the rage for the past...

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission a preliminary report on a new uranium fuel that will enable the conversion of six US...

The MIT Camera Culture group present a new approach to time-of-flight imaging that increases its depth resolution 1,000-fold. That’s the type of resolution that could make self-driving cars...

China will extend a tax rebate on the purchase of new-energy vehicles (NEV) until the end of 2020, in a continuation of policy support for the shift away from the internal combustion engine. The...

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) forecasts that China’s economy will pass the USA in exchange rate terms by 2030. The report by the Centre for Economics and Business...

If schedules hold, Florida’s Space Coast could see up to three dozen launches in 2018 thanks to government and commercial payload missions that will fly on SpaceX and United Launch Alliance...

Data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its first pass over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this iconic feature penetrates well below the clouds. Other...

Crispr/Cas9 is a riboprotein complex composed of a short strand of RNA and an efficient DNA-cutting enzyme. Crispr/Cas9 sometimes cuts in the wrong places. And it has no off-switch. Epigenetic...

A Stanford-led group of leading AI thinkers called the AI100 has launched an index that will provide a comprehensive baseline on the state of artificial intelligence and measure technological...

IBM, Dwave Systems, Google, Rigetti, Intel and others are computing to develop faster quantum computing systems. In November, 2017, IBM announced a 50 qubit prototype quantum computer chip. IBM,...

Rigetti has demonstrated unsupervised machine learning using 19Q, their new 19-qubit general purpose superconducting quantum processor. We did this with a quantum/classical hybrid algorithm for...

Researchers deliver CRISPR-Cas9 directly into the inner ear hair cells of mice, preventing hearing loss in animal model of genetic progressive deafness. Above – Credit : Gao et al./Nature 2017....

There are various economic projections related to the tax cut bill and other policies. The projections are created by the US government agencies, Universities, and independent groups. The differences...

Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) announces today its plans toward the popularization of electrified vehicles for the decade 2020-2030. Toyota’s electrified vehicle strategy centers on a...

South Australia’s giant battery is already showing its worth, state Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis says. The world’s largest lithium-ion battery, built by tech billionaire Elon Musk,...

Supersonic business jet company Aerion and Lockheed Martin announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) today to define a formal and gated process to explore the feasibility of a joint development...

The construction of the first section of the Thailand-China railway line officially began on Thursday with a ground-breaking ceremony in the northeastern Thai province of Nakhon Ratchasima. The...

The Very Large Telescope’s GRAVITY instrument is online and already gathering data from the extreme environment surrounding our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A S2’s...

The US Air Force has recently released UFO videos which has caused a surge of speculation about aliens. There is also the possibility that the sightings were of something other than alien spaceships....

A ceasefire between pro-Russian forces and Ukraine has been re-established after a flare-up in the fighting. The US recently agreed to provide Ukraine with anti-tank and other weapons. Above –...

New super global warming resistant corals could be tested on the Great Barrier Reef within a year as part of a global research effort to accelerate evolution and save the “rainforests of the seas”...

This is a long (14 page) interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey by Ariel Feinerman. You can donate to SENS at this link. Ariel is a polymath. He started his carrier as an entomologist and studied...

Norad has a Santa tracking website and Santa tracking apps. For over 60 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s flight. On December...

Boeing revealed its MQ-25 unmanned refueling drone. Refueling drones would extend the combat range of deployed Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet, Boeing EA-18G Growler, and Lockheed Martin F-35C fighters....

China must take urgent action on birth controls to cope with the “grim” reality of its rapidly aging society. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the country must consider either relaxing...

China’s new economy – internet-based business ranging from e-commerce to car-hailing services – grew twice as quickly as overall gross domestic product in the 10 years to 2016. The number of new jobs...

Nature Nanotechnology – A quantum-dot spin qubit with coherence limited by charge noise and fidelity higher than 99.9% Jun Yoneda, Kenta Takeda, Tomohiro Otsuka, Takashi Nakajima, Matthieu R....