NextBigFuture.com

New solar water coolers may sharply lower the cost of industrial-scale air conditioning and refrigeration. The new water coolers are panels that sit atop a roof, and they’re made of three components....

China’s central bank has declared that initial coin offerings are illegal and should be halted immediately. More than $1.8 billion has been raised through the 135 initial coin offerings listed...

Some researchers want to know why quantum mechanics has the form it does, and they are engaged in an ambitious program to find out. It is called quantum reconstruction, and it amounts to trying to...

China and the USA will have increased their combined share of world nominal GDP over the next 15 years. Japan in third place will drop to about one fourth the nominal GDP of the second place country...

Motorized molecules driven by light have been used to drill holes in the membranes of individual cells, including cancerous ones. The technique shows promise for either bringing therapeutic agents...

For 20 years the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) has supplied independent economic forecasting and analysis to hundreds of private firms and public organisations. They have annual forecasts of world GDP and GDP per capita. In 2016, CEBR forecasts : India is now starting to catch up with China and will eventually overtake in the second half of the century. Korea is overtaking most of the European countries and will be one of the world’s top 5 economies at some point in the 2030s. Nextbigfuture notes that a lot has to go right for India to achieve that

Each acre in the greenhouse yields as much lettuce as 10 outdoor acres and cuts the need for chemicals by 97 percent. The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300...

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign against inflated economic data is starting to catch on, with Liaoning Province reporting a plunge in nominal gross domestic product that likely reflects...

An international team of researchers, including scientists from Shinshu University (Japan) and the director of Penn State’s ATOMIC Center, has developed a graphene-based coating for desalination...

IBM, Georgia Tech and DARPA developed a new cooling technology to overcome the thermal barrier of stacking chips, an on-chip solution that could help to even cool off entire datacenters. The...

Hours after the North’s sixth nuclear detonation, an announcer on its official Korean Central Television declared: “The hydrogen bomb test was a perfect success.” Earlier monitors measured a...

China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation announced plans on Wednesday to research a futuristic train network that would first run at 1,000km per hour between cities, eventually developing to...

The UK submarine force is also being modernized. The Royal Navy maintains a fleet of ten nuclear-powered submarines, currently comprised of three types. The four Vanguard Class Strategic Ballistic...

Last Saturday, a telescope in a remote area of West Virginia picked up those 15 bright radio burst signals from a distant corner of the universe, and yesterday, a group of astronomers and...

Nextbigfuture interviewed Iain Kerr at the Singularity University Global Summit. Iain Kerr is with the Ocean Alliance. Ocean Alliance has been pioneering methods of studying and learning about the...

Bitcoin briefly surged past $5,000 on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index but then sold off. The total value of all publicly traded cryptocurrencies was $166 billion. The total values was down more than...

Several of the world’s largest banks have today revealed a series of steps to advance a project aimed at making it easier for central banks to issue currencies on a blockchain. Called Utility...

In 2016, A satellite image showing peculiar hexagonal clouds over the ocean area known as the Bermuda Triangle is prompting speculation about whether they may represent a recurring phenomenon...

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have for the first time shown that neural networks – a form of artificial intelligence – can...

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday announced what the agency calls a “historic action” — the first approval of a cell-based gene therapy in the United States. The FDA approved...

China Science and Technology Exchange Center has a new 87 page report with a comprehensive analysis and rating of the national innovative competitiveness of the BRICS countries last year, with China on top, followed by Russia, South Africa, Brazil and India. The BRICS group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) represent approximately 42% of the world population and occupy 30% of the earth’s territory with a combined nominal GDP of approximately 23% of the world GDP and a combined trade volume of approximately 16% of the world trade. Over the past decade, the BRICS countries have contributed

In 2018, Spacex could fully master reusable rockets that require no refurbishment for relaunch after landing. Spacex is already the low cost launch leader. Fully reusable (all stages) generation one...

China’s naval modernization effort encompasses a wide array of platform and weapon acquisition programs, including anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), submarines,...

There is a revolution coming coming for low cost small payload launching. CubeCab will use standard Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) technologies to enable less expensive and quicker launch platforms without compromising quality in order to simplify processes and bring down overall costs to launch for the customer. For example, rather than complex cryogenic fuels and their associated hardware and insulation, our fuels are room-temperature storable. Because our rockets are small, we can 3D print most of their components in few pieces, keeping the parts count down and reliability up. And our air launch platform is the time-tested F-104, in

The central Bank of Papua New Guinea is running blockchain trials. Central Bank Governor Loi Bakani described the blockchain trials underway at the Bank of PNG and introduced the PNG Digital Commerce...

Nextbigfuture interviewed Rob Topol about 5G. Rob is general manager of Intel’s client and IOT business and systems architecture group. Rob Topol, general manager of Intel’s client and IOT business...

Parkinson’s disease causes the progressive loss of nerve cells that release dopamine, a chemical that helps control body movement. The researchers triggered a similar loss of cells in macaque...

One of the largest flatbed trucking fleets in the US has joined the Blockchain in Trucking Alliance (BiTA). PS Logistics, LLC, a leading national transportation and logistics company, joined as a...

Here are the top fifteen cryptocurrencies by capitalization. In the top 15, 12 have over a billion dollars in market capitalization and three others are very close to a billion dollar market cap....

Bitcoin touched $4600 in price on Tuesday. Two days ago prior to the price spike, prominent financial analyst and the host of RT’s Keiser Report Max Keiser stated that the demand for bitcoin will...

Working with the U.S. Air Force, Spacex has developed autonomous rocket-tracking technology that makes it possible to fly its next-generation launch vehicle. Spacex has also dramatically cuts the...

The world has had enough of paper money. Now that consumers are done with physical wallets, the multi-billion-dollar mobile pay app market is minting new digital barons at breakneck speed. And we’ve just identified one company at the forefront of the revolution which has a very compelling story. Glancepay is already the no. 1 mobile payment app in Canada, ranking at over 92 percent of mobile payment app downloads. It’s also making big waves across North America, where it ranks 37 percent of all mobile payment app downloads. This could be a timely opportunity for early investors who understand what’s

The Defense Ministry is drafting a new plan to thwart a full-fledged North Korean military offensive and occupy Pyongyang within weeks without waiting for U.S. troop reinforcements. * preemptive...

A prequel short film “in-world” piece that explains what happened in the world of Blade Runner between the first movie, set in 2019, and this sequel, set in 2049. The short film “Nexus:...

CaseIH provides market leading agricultural solutions and services. Case IH is rethinking productivity. The Case IH Autonomous Concept Vehicle has the potential to revolutionize farming. Case IH and...

Spacex Chief tech officer Tom Mueller discussed the next-gen Falcon 9, called the “Block 5,” which will have a reusable thermal protection that won’t burn up the heat shielding. It will also have...

Translational Flextronics Group aims to develop technologies for high performance flexible and stretchable electronic devices by using high quality nano-scale materials, which enable new biomedical...

On August 16th General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) flew a MQ-9B SkyGuardianâ„¢ Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) from Laguna Airfield at Yuma Proving Grounds, Ariz., through National...

Elon Musk’s Neuralink will invest $100 million on a high bandwidth brain computer interface. Neuralink has raised the $26.96 million of a technically still-open funding round that could grow to...

The IMF has a relatively smooth forecast for nominal GDP growth out to 2022 for all countries. The forecast China to close the gap from $7 trillion less than the USA in nominal GDP in 2020 to $6...

Ashley Dove-Jay, PhD researcher in Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol, analyzed the launch costs of fully reusable Spacex rockets against the also in development Skylon spaceplanes. UPDATE...

DroNc-Seq — a technology that merges single-nucleus RNA sequencing with microfluidics — brings new scale to gene expression studies in complex tissues. Last year Broad researchers described a...

China Life and Baidu (China Search engine company) will set up a US$1 billion investment fund in Artificial Intelligence and Fintech. China Life on Thursday said it had teamed up with internet search...

Peter Thiel is backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine. Thiel invested $7 million in the ongoing vaccine research, according to the U.S. company behind it. Southern Illinois...

Intel today introduced its new Movidius™ Myriad™ X vision processing unit (VPU), advancing Intel’s end-to-end portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to deliver more autonomous...

Researchers led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Columbia Engineering, along with colleagues at the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, and...

An Arxiv paper, presents the first, 15-PetaFLOP Deep Learning system for solving scientific pattern classification problems on contemporary HPC architectures. Intel researchers and parters developed supervised convolutional architectures for discriminating signals in high-energy physics data as well as semi-supervised architectures for localizing and classifying extreme weather in climate data. Our Intelcaffe based implementation obtains ∼2TFLOP/s on a single Cori Phase-II Xeon-Phi node. We use a hybrid strategy employing synchronous node-groups, while using asynchronous communication across groups. They use this strategy to scale training of a single model to ∼9600 Xeon-Phi nodes; obtaining peak performance of 11.73-15.07 PFLOP/s and sustained performance

Researchers have created a thin film material that allows them to control the size and density of magnetic skyrmions. This is progress towards a skyrmion-based memory device. The potential memory that is smaller by an order of magnitude and uses less power. The next hurdles the researchers must clear is fabricating devices while ensuring consistency of magnetic properties. The details of the physical mechanisms governing the stabilization of skyrmions in nanostructures, and their reading and writing, remain to be fully established. Left: Multilayer stack with a sequence of Ir, Fe, Co, and Pt layers. Right: Zoom-in of one Ir/Fe/Co/Pt stack.

DigitalGlobe will launch the WorldView Legion constellation of satellites from 2020 to 2021. called Scout—can snap a photo of a high-demand spot (say the Port of Shanghai) 40 times a day. Scott...

The World Bank defines the global middle class within a large income range anywhere between $11 and $110 a day. Homi Kharas, an expert on the global middle class at the Brookings Institute, estimated in a recent study that 3.2 billion people, or 42 percent of the total world population, are now in the global middle class. The group’s size increases by 160 million people a year. The 3.2 billio is 500 million more than Kharas had previously estimated 7 years ago. This implies that in two to three years there might be a tipping point where a majority of