NextBigFuture.com

Philip Lubin, University of California, Santa Barbara, Directed Energy for Interstellar Study Starting at 26 minutes of this video. They are making progress with laser locking over kilometer distances. They are making 2 gram starchip prototypes. they are looking at making ultrathin starchips that would be a meter across but very lightweight. Arxiv – A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight Lubin’s designs would enable wafersats to reach 25% of lightspeed and a 100 ton spaceship to reach 1000 kilometers per second.

David Kirtley, MSNW, LLC, Magnetoshell Aerocapture for Manned Missions and Planetary Deep Space Orbiters The Magnetoshell deploys a simple dipole magnetic field containing a magnetized plasma. It is...

A 100 meter to 150 meter solar array that is attuned to the lithium ion will be about 70% efficient. JPL is working on the gridded lithium ion arrays to achieve 60,000 ISP. There is work on 60 meter...

I tried out the Alienwheels hoverboard. ($298) I was able to take about twenty minutes to get standing and balanced on the board and fairly comfortable with basic control. Control is with shifting...

Bitcoin is at $5750 and some exchanges had bitcoin at $5800. Bitcoin has an overall market valuation of $95 billion. Investors believe the momentum is warranted given the results of the last hard...

More than 10,000 firefighters are now battling 16 large wildfires that have burned more than 330 square miles (214,000 acres) of California neighborhoods, forests and businesses since Sunday, with...

The X3 thruster was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force. It is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a...

China’s state news agency Xinhua reported last month that a Chinese ship had conducted a successful test of a trading route along the Arctic Northwest Passage. The announcement from Beijing confused...

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been the largest and strongest R and D industry sector. Artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, machine learning, and deep learning have...

The primary challenge with microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) involved the spin torque oscillator (STO)— and those issues have now been solved thanks to Western Digitals innovative STO...

Almost 40% of american adults are obese. 42.8% of those aged 40–59 (42.8%) 35.7% of those aged 20–39 (35.7%). 41.0% of those aged 60 and over (41.0%) Above picture – Prevalence of obesity among...

Watch the new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and see it in theaters December 15.

A cryptocurrnecy hard fork is a software upgrade that introduces a new rule to the network that isn’t compatible with the older software. You can think of a hard fork as an expansion of the...

Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, values Spacex at about $46 billion, which is on par with Tesla ($60 billion). His range is pretty wide, though, and spans between $5 billion and $120...

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The nuclear-powered submarine. Ultra-advanced stealth bombers and fighters. These all represent the most lethal, sophisticated and expensive weapons in the US...

Scaled Composites has flown a new experimental aircraft called the Model 401. It has new features, including signature reduction design features. It is similar to the General Atomics Predator C...

3D System on a chip technology at 7 nanometer lithography can provide a 1000X speed up for machine learning and other applications. The S3S 2017 program includes a paper by MonolithIC 3D Inc which will present a monolithic 3D technology that is low cost and ready to be rapidly deployed using the current transistor processes. In that talk they will also describe how such an integration technology could be used to improve performance and reduce power and cost of most computer systems, suggestive of a 1,000x total system benefit. In an effort to initiate resurgence of the U.S. electronics industry,

DSG Technology has 12.7 mm supercavitating ammunition which give them unique capabilities from standard weapons* air to water, water to water and water to air, with exceptional materiel penetration...

Bitcoin has an intraday high of $5280 and ended yesterday at $5226. Week-on-week, BTC is up 18.75 percent, while month-on-month it’s up 23 percent. The new record broke a previous all-time high...

A research team at the University of Central Florida has demonstrated the fastest light pulse ever developed, a 53-attosecond X-ray flash. The group led by Professor Zenghu Chang beat its own record...

SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 today. This was the 15th rocket launch for Spacex of this year. It carried a satellite with a dual-purpose mission for both EchoStar and SES. The rocket was...

Origami-inspired bots that can fold into a number of different shapes have been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

Here is a link to the Calfire incident reports on the various California fires. Overnight fire conditions were very active on several fronts forcing additional evacuations across Northern California. Firefighters are battling 22 large wildfires that have burned nearly 170,000 acres. Firefighters are bracing for the winds to shift this evening and increase in speed. 17 21 people are confirmed to have died in the wildfires this week. 11 people alone died in the Tubbs Fire, making it the 6th deadliest fire in our state’s history. While damage assessment continues on all the fires, it is estimated that at least

California-based property analytics firm CoreLogic chimed in with a rough assessment of how bad the fire damage could get in the Northern California area. Working in Oakland, I can personally say...

Yellowstone National Park is famous in the volcanology community for being the site of three explosive supereruptions, the last of which was 631,000 years ago. During that eruption, approximately...

Saudi Arabia ($45 billion) and Abu Dhabi (Mubadala, $15 billion) have invested a total of $60 billion of their oil generated funds info Softbank Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. Masayoshi has been...

Intel announced the delivery of a 17-qubit superconducting test chip for quantum computing to QuTech, Intel’s quantum research partner in the Netherlands. The new chip was fabricated by Intel and...

Alibaba will more than double research and development spending to $15 billion over the next three years to develop next-generation technology, drive its sprawling business and explore moonshot...

But “if you’re really concerned about coral reefs, biodiversity food production in very poor regions, we’re going to have to deploy negative emission technology at scale,” said Bill Hare of Climate...

Masayoshi Son is raising a $100 billion Vision Fund and is rapidly investing in startups, doing deals with established companies and buying out larger companies. Masayohshi is already talking about a...

The Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) needs to be smarter and leaner than the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle— and completely reimagined, said Maj. Gen. Eric Wesley, who commands the...

On 37 hectares (nearly 4 million square feet) in Hefei, Anhui Province, China is building a $10 billion research center for quantum applications. This news comes on the heels of the world’s...

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence...

Walmart had inadequate response to Amazon.com for years but the $3 billion acquisition of jet.com and overhaul of its marketplace last year, and better integration of its stores with its digital...

Japanese researchers have developed a platinum resistance thermometer that can precisely measure temperature at around 1000 °C. * Achieved by optimizing thermal treatment of platinum wires and sensor...

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Kansai in Osaka Prefecture has succeeded in making hens lay eggs that contain a pharmaceutical agent that can be used to...

The Russian Armata program, a universal chassis system that is intended to be the foundational element for Russia’s future armor force and includes the third-generation T-14 main battle tank (MBT),...

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield notes that Mars has 5 million cubic km of ice, enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 35 meters or 115 ft. Mars has 5 million cubic km of ice, enough to...

A top achievement in China President Xi Jinping’s first five years is military reform. President Xi Jinping’s efforts have centered on marginalizing the four so-called “general departments” of the PLA that functioned as a virtual arm of government and had undermined the authority of the civilian-led Central Military Commission (CMC). He also transformed China’s military operations from a Russian-style, army-centric system toward what analysts call a “Western-style joint command”; and swiftly promoted “young guards” to top positions in the officer corps. Judging from the list of military and police delegates to the forthcoming congress where China’s future leaders are to

SpaceX successfully launched 10 communications satellites into low-Earth orbit today (Oct. 9) and landed the spent Falcon 9 first-stage rocket booster on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. The SpaceX...

European Utility Requirements (EUR) has approved modifications Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co Ltd (KHNP) has made to its APR1400 reactor design, according to Reuters. The approval by EUR –...

DARPA has an agreement with Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop and ground test a hypersonic advanced full range engine under the agency’s Advanced Full Range Engine (AFRE) program. They will conduct a...

The Carnival of Space is up at Universe Today. Universe Today – New Clues Emerge for the Existence of Planet 9 Above – Artist’s impression of Planet Nine, blocking out the Milky...

A piece of research in which the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country has participated confirms that merely observing a flow of energy or particles can change its direction. In a classical...

Arxiv – A Search for Warm / Hot Gas Filaments Between Pairs of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies Two teams found the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. “The missing baryon problem is solved,” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader

The Pentagon has launched a $700 million cash program to combat ISIS’ lethal fleet of drones. ISIS is increasingly using drones on the battlefield, and the Pentagon hopes that the new cash...

Rajeev Suri, president and CEO of Nokia, said Nokia expects 5G networks to be deployed in 2019, with widespread trials next year. 5G technology will enable carriers to provide solutions to a greater...

JILA physicists have created an entirely new design for an atomic clock, in which strontium atoms are packed into a tiny three-dimensional (3-D) cube at 1,000 times the density of previous...