NextBigFuture.com

China is has nearly completed build up of missile shelters, radar/communications facilities, and other infrastructure on Fiery Cross, Mischief, and Subi Reefs. In February, AMTI (Asian Maritime Initiative, CSIS) identified eight hardened shelters with retractable roofs at each of the Big Three, which Reuters had earlier reported would house missile launchers. China has now built four additional shelters at Fiery Cross. The annual Pentagon military assessment expects China to base three regiments of military aircraft on the various island bases. The US military has had numerous close passes of the islands to show the US exercises freedom of navigation. A

Michael Hippke has calculated how to have multi-megabyte communication speeds between a laser pushed sail probe and a telescope at our solar systems gravitational lensing point. Previously Hippke had determined how to use stellar photon pressures of the stellar triple α Cen A, B, and C (Proxima) together with gravity assists to decelerate incoming solar sails from Earth. Hippke works out the problems of interstellar communication and communication using the gravitational lensing points in more detail. There have been past work on interstellar communication using gravitational lens for improved performance as reported here at Nextbigfuture. There was a 238 page

China continues to have an economy that is growing at about 6 to 6.5% over the next three years and about 5-6% for a few years afterward. China’s middle and affluent classes continue to grow. This has and will continue to see a growing insurance and financial market. China is shifting from family and village support to insurance and other developed approaches. China’s health and life insurance markets will more than double by 2030. It will likely double by about 2026 from 2017 levels. The Chinese insurance market has grown at a furious pace in recent years. Between 2000 and

Stars exploding as supernovae are the main sources of heavy chemical elements in the Universe. In these star explosions, radioactive atomic nuclei are synthesized in the hot, innermost regions during the explosion and can thus provide insights into the unobservable physical processes that initiate the blast. Using elaborate computer simulations, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) and the research institute RIKEN in Japan were able to explain the recently measured spatial distributions of radioactive titanium and nickel in Cassiopeia A, a roughly 340 year old gaseous remnant of a nearby supernova. The computer models

Errors in how scientists account for water loss from leaves may be skewing estimates of how much energy plants make through photosynthesis and cause errors in the models of how individual leaves function and even of the global climate. The errors are particularly pronounced when a plant’s water supply is limited — a condition of increasing interest as plant breeders and climate scientists grapple with the effects of global warming. Researchers have long assumed that the main way that plants lose water is through leaf pores called stomata. When water is abundant, the stomata open wide to let carbon dioxide

IBM scientists have made carbon nanotube transistors smaller and faster silicon transistors. Carbon nanotube transistors have long had the potential to be better than silicon, but this is the first time when that promise has been realized. Now IBM and others will have to scale up superior carbon nanotube devices. IBM scientists have been experimenting with carbon nanotubes, rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms just 1 nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, in diameter. But difficulties working with the material have meant that, for optimal performance, nanotube transistors have to be even larger than current silicon transistors, which are about

Lockheed Martin is using turbine rocket combined cycle (TRCC) to build a mach 6-10 hypersonic plane. The TRCC is an engine that switches between turbofan, ramjet and scramjets for subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flight. The TRCC engine will be tested on a fighter-sized flight testbed by 2020. They would then try to develop a Mach 6, unmanned spyplane by 2030 that would perform the same role as the old SR-71 Blackbird. The hypersonic spyplane would enter highly contested and defended airspace at altitudes of 18 and 62 miles, using its speed to outrun enemy defenses. Hypersonic planes could fire hypersonic

At asphalt volcanoes in the Gulf of Mexico that spew oil, gas and tar, mussels and sponges live in symbiosis with bacteria providing them with food. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and colleagues from the USA have now discovered deep-sea animals living in symbiosis with bacteria that use oil as an energy source and appear to thrive on short-chained alkanes in the oil. According to the researchers, bacteria closely related to the symbionts, which bloomed during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, used this ability to degrade the oil in the sea. Oil forms the basis for

The United States announced six goals to achieve global energy dominance. 1. Revive and expand nuclear energy sector 2. Address barriers to financing of overseas coal energy plants 3. Build an oil pipeline to Mexico 4. Sell more American natural gas to South Korea 5. Approve two long-term applications to export additional natural gas from the Lake Charles LNG terminal in Louisiana 6. Release new offshore oil and gas leasing program. The US will perform a complete review of US nuclear energy policy to help find new ways to revitalize nuclear energy. Nuclear Energy Institute president and CEO Maria Korsnick

Carnegie Mellon University scientists can now use brain activation patterns to identify complex thoughts, such as, “The witness shouted during the trial.” This latest research led by CMU’s Marcel Just builds on the pioneering use of machine learning algorithms with brain imaging technology to “mind read.” The findings indicate that the mind’s building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are formed by the brain’s various sub-systems and are not word-based. Published in Human Brain Mapping and funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the study offers new evidence that the neural dimensions of concept representation are universal across people

Scientists working in „connectomics“, a research field occupied with the reconstruction of neuronal networks in the brain, are aiming at completely mapping of the millions or billions of neurons found in mammalian brains. In spite of impressive advances in electron microscopy, the key bottleneck for connectomics is the amount of human labor required for the data analysis. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, have now developed reconstruction software that allows researchers to fly through the brain tissue at unprecedented speed. Together with the startup company scalable minds they created webKnossos, which turns researchers into

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam found that hidden dimensions – as predicted by string theory – could influence gravitational waves. In a recently published paper they study the consequences of extra dimensions on these ripples in space-time, and predict whether their effects could be detected. LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves from a black-hole binary in September 2015 has opened a new window onto the universe. Now it looks like with this new observing tool physicists cannot only trace black holes and other exotic astrophysical objects but also understand gravity itself.

New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by about 300 thousand years ago important changes in our biology and behavior had taken place across most of Africa. The first of our kind. Two views of a composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) based on micro computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils. Dated to 300 thousand years ago these early Homo sapiens already have a modern-looking face that falls within

MIT engineers have fabricated a functional dialysis membrane from a sheet of graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms, linked end to end in hexagonal configuration like that of chicken wire. The graphene membrane, about the size of a fingernail, is less than 1 nanometer thick. (The thinnest existing memranes are about 20 nanometers thick.) The team’s membrane is able to filter out nanometer-sized molecules from aqueous solutions up to 10 times faster than state-of-the-art membranes, with the graphene itself being up to 100 times faster. “Only 10 percent of the membrane’s area is accessible, but even with that

Roger Shawyer, SPR Ltd, invented the EMdrive and recently gave an EMdrive presentation to the UK Defence Academy Shrivenham. EmDrive is the first true Propellantless Propulsion technology. High frequency electrical energy is directly converted to thrust. It is a resonant microwave cavity, shaped to obtain different group velocities at each end, and thus achieve a force difference as the EM wave reflects off each end plate. EmDrive is not a reactionless thruster, it is simply a new class of electrical machine. Conventional microwave technology limits the maximum Q of resonators to around 50,000, giving a specific thrust of 200 mN/kW

The nuclear industry brought more than 9 GWe of new plant on line last year, the largest annual increase in 25 years putting it on track to achieve the Harmony goal of providing 25% of electricity in 2050 using 1000 GWe of new capacity. In the World Nuclear Performance Report 2017, the Association detailed power generation and construction achievements for the previous year. The ten new reactors which came on line in 2016 added 9.1 GWe to global capacity and took the total nuclear capacity supplying electricity to the grid past 350 GWe for the first time ever. This does

Phase 1 of DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program concluded recently following a series of obstacle-course flight tests in central Florida. Over four days, three teams of DARPA-supported researchers huddled under shade tents in the sweltering Florida sun, fine-tuning their sensor-laden quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during the intervals between increasingly difficult runs. DARPA’s FLA program is advancing technology to enable small unmanned quadcopters to fly autonomously through cluttered buildings and obstacle-strewn environments at fast speeds (up to 20 meters per second, or 45 mph) using onboard cameras and sensors as “eyes” and smart algorithms to self-navigate. Potential applications for

A BAE railgun system is undergoing multi-shot rep-rate operations at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, in Virginia. Railgun firing test will continue over the next three years. The railgun system has been tested at Dahlgren’s railgun advanced research facility since November. The Navy has successfully tested a next-generation 32-megajoule railgun. The US Navy is gradually increasing the railgun firing rate and energy level. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on seapower and projection forces, said * the pulsed power units, the batteries are getting smaller and are getting more efficient * more shots are

GTM Research has found that India’s system competitive bidding, has produced record low solar pricing. India has utility PV system pricing of 65 cents per watt. This is 11 cents per watt cheaper than in China. Solar energy cost in the USA and Germany are nearly double the price of solar in India. The project is for the global price of solar power installations to continue to fall at about 4.4% per year. However, policy changes in regions or countries like the USA could increase prices where the policy has an impact.

Chinese battery companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s enough to supply batteries for around 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles or 13.7 million Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids per year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In 2018, Tesla’s Gigafactory will produce up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually. Roughly 55 percent of global lithium-ion battery production is already based in China, compared with 10 percent in the U.S. By 2021, China’s share is forecast

A study in the journal nature makes the case for maximum human lifespan increasing to 125 without radical life extension. Some previous work by other researchers argue that there is a limit to human lifespan of around 115 years, with their main rationale being that the maximum reported age at death (MRAD) in Japan, France, the United Kingdom. It is 53 years until years until 2070. Researchers looked at how many 72 year old Japanese women there are now and used age specific actuarial model to forecast that at least one of those women should be alive in 2070. The

Space Battleship Yamato is a major anime movie series. The original Yamato movie in Japan eclipsed that of the local release of Star Wars. It was followed by over a dozen movie sequels. After aliens attack in 2199, the Earth secretly builds a massive spaceship inside the ruins of the gigantic Japanese battleship Yamato which lies exposed at the former bottom of the ocean location where she was sunk in World War II. This becomes the “Space Battleship Yamato” for which the story is titled. The new ship gets a space warp drive, called the “wave motion engine”, and a

1. Facebook has reached 2 billion users 2. Google's YouTube’s 1.5 billion 3. Facebook's WhatsApp 1.2 billion 4. Facebook Messenger 1.2 billion 5. WeChat had 938 million users in May 2017 (23% growth YoY) 6. QQ 861 million in Q1 2017, a decrease of 2% YoY 7. Instagram 700 million 8. Weibo 340 million 9. Twitter’s 328 million 10. Skype is at about 300 million 11. Snapchat 255 million 12. Line 217 million at Jan 2017

Microsoft has commented on the newest ransomeware attack. The attack is effecting airlines, banks, and utilities across Europe. “Our initial analysis found that the ransomware uses multiple techniques to spread, including one which was addressed by a security update previously provided for all platforms from Windows XP to Windows 10 (MS17-010),” a spokesperson said in a statement. “As ransomware also typically spreads via email, customers should exercise caution when opening unknown files. We are continuing to investigate and will take appropriate action to protect customers Kapersky indicated that is it a new strain of ransomeware virus The latest from @kaspersky

A new interactive design tool developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute enables both novices and experts to build customized legged or wheeled robots using 3-D-printed components and off-the-shelf actuators. Using a familiar drag-and-drop interface, individuals can choose from a library of components and place them into the design. The tool suggests components that are compatible with each other, offers potential placements of actuators and can automatically generate structural components to connect those actuators. Once the design is complete, the tool provides a physical simulation environment to test the robot before fabricating it, enabling users to iteratively adjust the design

U.S. Navy’s future unmanned tanker will use the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System developed for F35 and other jet landings on US aircraft carriers. The Navy will use the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System, or JPALS for short, to land the MQ-25 unmanned aircraft onto carriers without a human at the controls. Known as the Stingray, the Navy’s future unmanned carrier aviation air system will provide inflight refueling to the U.S. fleet’s fighters, allowing them to operate at far greater ranges than before. “When you’re talking about auto-landing a flying unmanned tanker onto an aircraft carrier, then the

OneWeb Satellites, a 50-50 joint venture between would-be constellation operator OneWeb and satellite manufacturer Airbus, has inaugurated the first serial-production line for its planned 900 communications satellites for OneWeb’s low Earth orbit constellation. “This facility is a pivotal step toward our mission to build a new global knowledge infrastructure, accessible to everyone,” said OneWeb founder and Executive Chairman Greg Wyler. “Over the past year, and thanks to the energizing support of our partners, we’ve greatly accelerated our technical progress. With this facility, we will be able to continuously iterate on the design of our satellites, launch new satellites within hours

For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they’ve been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth – a discovery more than a decade in the making. UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma Bansal is the first-author on the paper, ‘Constraining the Orbit of the Supermassive Black Hole Binary 0402+379’, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. She, along with UNM Professor Greg Taylor and colleagues at Stanford, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, have been studying

Spacex had two successful launches this past weekend and successfully recovered the first stages of each launch. New titanium grid fins worked even better than expected. Should be capable of an indefinite number of flights with no service. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2017 Launch at 1:25 delivering 10 satellites for Iridium. Droneship repositioned due to extreme weather. Will be tight. https://t.co/6ZcSG29B74 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2017 via GIPHY

Stable flight of a laser sail is an essential requirement of beam-driven propulsion. Centauri Dreams talked to James Benford about work towards stable beam flight. It places considerable demand upon the shape of the sail and beam. James Benford takes a hard look at where we are now in the matter of sail stability. He and his brother Gregory have analyzed it in laboratory work. There is a great deal we still don’t know. There is the need for a dedicated test facility in which deep analysis and experimentation can proceed. Dr Benford is the Chairman of the Sail Subcommittee

A high energy laser mounted on an Apache AH-64 attack helicopter acquired and hit an unmanned target. The test was conducted by Raytheon and the U.S. Army Apache Program Management Office in collaboration with U.S. Special Operations Command at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was the first time a fully integrated laser system successfully shot a target from a rotary-wing aircraft over a wide variety of flight regimes, altitudes and air speeds, proving the feasibility of laser attack from Apache. The system tracked and directed energy on a stationary target at a slant range of 1.4 kilometers. (Slant

Caltech engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image. Lenses have a curve that bends the path of incoming light and focuses it onto a piece of film or, in the case of digital cameras, an image sensor. The OPA has a large array of light receivers, each of which can individually add a tightly controlled time delay (or phase shift) to the light it receives, enabling the camera to

At the Symposium on Computational Geometry in July, Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of a quest that began with a 1999 paper: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams. “In 1999, we proved that you could fold any polyhedron, but the way that we showed how to do it was very inefficient,” Demaine says. “It’s efficient if your initial piece of paper is super-long and skinny. But if you were going to start with a square piece of paper, then that old method would

Nearly 3,500 exoplanets have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led study, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes. The team used data from NASA’s Kepler mission and the W. M. Keck Observatory. “This is a major new division in the family tree of planets, analogous to discovering that mammals and lizards are distinct branches on the tree of life,” says Andrew Howard, professor of astronomy at

China’s economy is not falling into a black hole. Wheels are in motion for economic reforms. China’s mainland equities — known as the A-shares — will be included in the massive MSCI Emerging Markets Index starting in June 2018. Some 222 Shanghai and Shenzhen listed companies made the cut. For now, the weighting is under 1%. In the not so distant future, it will rise to 5%. Brendan Ahern, CIO of KraneShares in New York predicts China A-shares allocation will hit 17% at full inclusion in several years. That additional 17% allocated to China will raise its weight to over

New program aims to develop advanced battle management/command and control tools and a comprehensive interactive virtual environment to test novel concepts for future expeditionary combat operations. As nation-state and non-state adversaries adapt and apply commercially available state-of-the-art technology in urban conflict, expeditionary U.S. forces face a shrinking operational advantage. To address this challenge, a new DARPA program is aiming to create powerful, digital tools for exploring novel expeditionary urban operations concepts—with a special emphasis on coastal cities, where future such battles are deemed most likely to occur. The program will test the new tools and concepts in an integrated virtual

Russian will start operational evaluation of the most advanced Armata tank starting in 2019 and they will have laser guided missiles with 3 times the range of the newest American tank. The T-14 Armata is equipped with an unmanned turret and all the crew is located at the front of the hull. The new unmanned remote turret of Aramata T-14 would be equipped with a new generation of 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore gun with an automatic loader and 32 rounds ready to use. The main gun can fire also new laser-guided missile with a range from 7 to 12 km. The

Another week and another F35 grounding. This time it was a bad software upgrade to the ALIS ground support system has grounded the Marine Corps F-35B squadron based in Yuma, Arizona, the F-35 Joint Program Office announced. The Air Force’s F-35As did not have the faulty upgrade, but the F35s have problems with the pilot’s air supply at high altitude. This problem temporarily grounded the F-35As at Luke Air Force Base, before they returned to flight under a restriction to low altitudes only. Air supply — drawn from the engine intakes the On-Board Oxygen Generation System (OBOGS) — has proven

IBM and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) announced they are collaborating on a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing system powered by a 64-chip array of the IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System. The scalable platform IBM is building for AFRL will feature an end-to-end software ecosystem designed to enable deep neural-network learning and information discovery. The system’s advanced pattern recognition and sensory processing power will be the equivalent of 64 million neurons and 16 billion synapses, while the processor component will consume the energy equivalent of a dim light bulb – a mere 10 watts to power. IBM researchers believe the brain-inspired,

Researchers at the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a novel design approach for exoskeletons and prosthetic limbs that incorporates direct feedback from the human body. The findings were published this week in Science. This technique, called human-in-the-loop optimization, customizes walking assistance for individuals and significantly improves energy economy during walking. The algorithm that enables this optimization represents a landmark achievement in the field of biomechatronics. “Existing exoskeleton devices, despite their potential, have not improved walking performance as much as we think they should,” said Steven Collins, an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering. “We’ve seen improvements related

In May, 2016, Elon Musk’s net worth according to Forbes had climbed to $15 billion, but Tesla stock has risen about 20% and is at $18.6 billion. Elon has 33.6 million shares of Tesla (about 19% of the company) worth $12.86 billion at todays $383 per share. Spacex had filings with a valuation of $10 billion and Elon owns 54% of Spacex. However, Fidelity had claimed that Spacex was worth $15 billion in 2016. This would put Elon’s Spacex stake at $8.1 billion. The combined amounts should actually put Elon Musks net worth at about $21 billion. Spacex value could

Thyssenkrupp has built the first rope (cable) free elevator. This will enable system like the Star Trek Turbolift which can move up down and side to side. This is elevator industry’s holy grail. It ends the 160-year reign of the rope-dependent elevator. MULTI harnesses the power of linear motor technology to move multiple cars in a single shaft both vertically and horizontally! * magnetic system enables faster elevators to be built * horizontal movement allows more than one cabin per shaft * horizontal movement allows more efficient routing where there was no routing flexibility before * magnetic and ropeless system

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully made its second trip to space June 23. It launched to Bularia’s first communications satellite. The BulgariaSat-1 launch marks the Falcon 9’s second flight this year, and may kick off a double-header with a Sunday SpaceX launch as well. SpaceX has successfully landed one of these rocket stages 12 times out of 17 tries. It is the seventh time Spacex has landed at sea on the droneship. Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used almost all of the emergency crush core), but otherwise good — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2017

China’s aircraft carrier technology is still far behind the USA. China only has one refurbished Soviet aircraft carrier and a domestic submarine based on the Soviet carrier will be operational in 2020. China’s next aircraft carriers could start getting up to the level of 1980 era US carriers in size and some technology in the late 2020s. China’s submarine technology is more rapidly closing the technology gap and also could have numeric superiority by 2025. China’s operational undersea force has 63 vessels – five nuclear-powered attack submarines, four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and 54 diesel-powered attack submarines. However, in fewer

John Martinis, one of Google’s quantum computing gurus, laid out Google’s “stretch goal”: to build and test a 49-qubit (“quantum bit”) quantum computer by the end of 2017. This computer will use qubits made of superconducting circuits. Each qubit is prepared in a precise quantum state based on a two-state system. The test will be a milestone in quantum computer technology. In a subsequent presentation, Sergio Boixo, Martinis’ colleague at Google, said that a quantum computer with approximately 50 qubits will be capable of certain tasks beyond anything the fastest classical computers can do. Researchers say that quantum computers promise

ORA sound uses the amazing properties of graphene in our proprietary nano-composite formulation to build unique, high performance loudspeaker membranes. Prototypes already exist and reviewers indicate that they can hear the sound quality improvement. GrapheneQ provides audiophile sound quality from smaller, more efficient loudspeakers. Graphene provides significant benefits for loudspeaker performance: * Instant improvements in sound quality * Immediate extension of battery life, up to 70% * More volume from small speakers * Unrivaled high frequency response for improved localization cues GrapheneQ reacts more accurately than other materials which allows it to truthfully recreate the original recording without additional artifacts.