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Elon Musk will likely reveal more details about the Interplanetary Transport system on the one year anniversary of the first announcement at the 2016 International Astronautical conference. IAC2017, hosted by the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA) will take place in Adelaide, Australia from 25 – 29 September 2017. @elonmusk Eta on the ITS/BFR/MCT architecture changes? — RITSpaceExploration (@RITSPEX) May 22, 2017 Robert Zubrin, Longtime Mars Colonization advocate, gave a Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System. Zubrin was struck by many good and powerful ideas in the Musk plan. However, Musk’s plan assembled some of those good ideas in

The US Special Forces is building the TALOS (tactical assault light operator suit) exoskeleton. The suit has : * physiological and biological sensors * actuators that serve as the muscles to power the suit * processors and computers, * and a durable exoskeleton that offers support to the operator. * the helmet has thin, transparent glass with ballistic protection and a heads-up display It will provide protection against shrapnel and small arms fire, but could be targeted by an electromagnetic pulse weapon. Special force exoskeletons have need to operate under for shorter times than Army exoskeletons would. Powered knee joints

Researchers have shown that lymphatic vessels extend into the brain. It has major implications for a wide variety of brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke and traumatic brain injury. Researchers have identified two networks: the vessels that lead into and surround the brain, and those within the brain itself. The first is known as the lymphatic system for the brain, while the latter is called the glymphatic system. The “g” added to “lymphatic” refers to glia, the kind of neuron that makes up the lymphatic vessels in the brain. The glymphatic vessels carry cerebrospinal fluid and immune cells into

Deeplearning AI Alphago has defeated Ke Jie, the world’s number one human Go player, in the first game of a three-part match. Despite defeat, Ke’s strategy suggested that the 19-year-old Chinese prodigy has actually learned from AlphaGo’s often unorthodox approach. AlphaGo won by just half a point, the closest margin possible, but that’s characteristic of its playing style. The AI doesn’t appear to care about the margin of victory, instead choosing moves that it has determined are the most likely to lead to a win. The result was technically close, but AlphaGo looked like winning from a relatively early stage

By sifting through the genetics of nearly 80,000 people, researchers have uncovered 40 genes that may make certain people smarter. That brings the total number of suspected “intelligence genes” to 52. , The genetic variants identified account for about 5 percent of individual differences in intelligence. Their calculations show that the current results explain up to 4.8% of the variance in intelligence and that on average across the four samples there is a 1.9-fold increase in explained variance in comparison to the most recent GWAS on intelligence. Intelligence is associated with important economic and health-related life outcomes. Despite intelligence having

DARPA will soon select a company to build its robotic XS-1 space plane. After downselect, a critical design review shuold take place in 2018, and a series of flights could be made as early as 2020. The XS-1 space plane will consist of a reusable booster vehicle and an expendable upper stage. According to the DARPA website, the XS-1 program has four primary technical goals: 1. Fly 10 times in a 10-day period, to demonstrate efficient, aircraft-like access to space. 2. Fly fast enough to allow the use of a small (and therefore cheap) expendable upper stage. 3. Launch a

By 2027 to 2037 scientists will likely be able to create a baby from human skin cells that have been coaxed to grow into eggs and sperm and used to create embryos to implant in a womb. The process, in vitro gametogenesis, or I.V.G., so far has been used only in mice. But stem cell biologists say it is only a matter of time before it could be used in human reproduction — opening up mind-boggling possibilities. With I.V.G., two men could have a baby that was biologically related to both of them, by using skin cells from one to

The next human versus Artificial intelligence battle will be in the Starcraft video game. Starcraft is a space-war computer game. It is widely regarded as the ultimate challenge for AI programs due to its complexity and rapid pace. Expectations for a match-up between a professional StarCraft player and sophisticated AI ratcheted up last year after an AI program beat a highly ranked human player at Go, one of the world’s most difficult board games. At the time, a number of AI experts pointed to StarCraft as the next target for an AI-versus-man showdown. Among them: Demis Hassabis, the founder and

China Railway began construction on the 78.2km Beijing – Bazhou high-speed line, which will serve the city’s new international airport at Daxing, 46km south of the capital. The line will include four new stations, including an underground station at the airport, and is expected to cost Yuan 27.4bn ($US 4billion), including Yuan 800m for rolling stock. The Beijing – Daxing International Airport section will have a design speed of 250km/h, with the remainder of the line south to Bazhou being constructed for 350km/h operation. Construction began on the new airport in December 2014 and the project is due to be

Methane hydrates, also called “flammable ice”, hold vast reserves of natural gas. China has for the first time extracted gas from the ice-like methane hydrate from under the South China Sea considered key to future global energy supply. Many countries including the US and Japan are working on how to tap those reserves, but mining and extracting are extremely difficult. It is believed that there is as much as 10 times the amount of gas in methane hydrates than in shale for instance. The size of the oceanic methane clathrate reservoir is poorly known, and estimates of its size decreased

The U.S. has reached a $6 billion deal for Saudi Arabia to buy four Littoral Combat Ships made by Lockheed Martin in a package of major arms purchases as President Donald Trump travels to the kingdom, people familiar with the transaction said. Defense stocks took off on Monday after President Donald Trump signed a nearly $110 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal will be worth $350 billion over 10 years.

Professor Zaza, University of Georgia, hase extended the idea of Freeman Dyson and has shown that a supercivilization has to use ring-like megastructures around pulsars instead of a spherical shell. He reexamined the same problem in the observational context and he shows that facilities of modern IR telescopes (VLTI and WISE) might efficiently monitor the nearby zone of the solar system and search for the IR Dyson-rings up to distances of the order of 0.2kpc, corresponding to the current highest achievable angular resolution, 0.001mas. In this case the total number of pulsars in the observationally reachable area is about 64

UBS analysts tore down the Chevy Bolt, the world’s first mass-market electric vehicle (EV) with a range well above 200 miles. They gained key insights to understanding the content and profitability of EVs, especially Tesla’s upcoming Model 3. Their findings expand beyond the autos industry to include technology, capital goods, chemicals and commodities. Tesla to lose $2,800 on entry-level versions of its soon to be introduced Model 3 but think customers will opt for extra cost options that will raise the average selling price to $41,000 — $6,000 more than the base price. Tesla will be able to break even

Computational models and simulations can be enormously helpful when designing complex military systems such as new aerospace vehicles and engines, reducing development costs and times. However, realistic, high-fidelity models require enormous amounts of computing power in order to be able to accommodate all of the different factors that may affect predictive accuracy. To mitigate this computational cost, researchers often use simplified models, but these models contain assumptions, ambiguities, incomplete information, and inputs that vary unpredictably. This problem is exacerbated when these uncertainties interact with each other in a complex system. As a result, engineers typically rely on extensive testing to

Stanford University researchers funded by DARPA’s Neuro Function, Activity, Structure, and Technology (Neuro-FAST) program have developed new optical imaging and analysis techniques that allowed them to decode the neural activity of awake mice engaged in an adaptive, decision-making task. The findings of the Stanford team, made in collaboration with researchers at the California Institute of Technology and detailed this week in the journal Neuron, give researchers new insight into how the mammalian brain coordinates neural activity to complete voluntary behaviors. The team’s overall results advance DARPA’s goal of building a knowledge base and toolkit with which the neurotechnology community can

Brillouin Energy has been working on low energy nuclear reactions aka cold fusion aka Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) process for many years. Nextbigfuture has covered them for many years. In 2015, Nextbigfuture covered what a 35 page third party analysis of Brillouin energy systems. There has been some work with Brillouin and SRI. I have not seen a final report from SRI where there was any definitive confirmation. There has been no commercial product yet. There has been many papers from what appears to be sober researchers trying to determine what is happening and if beyond-chemical energy is being

For years, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues have been waiting for the mysterious light dips to happen at Tabby’s star so that they could collect more data and try to get to the bottom of the mystery. The star is finally dimming by about 1% per day for the last two days. It has dimmed 2% so far and could continue to dim. One of the proposed possibilities for the dimming had been an alien Dyson swarm. ALERT:@tsboyajian's star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please! — Jason

. But less than four months after Trump took office, Mattis said the operational and tactical difference has been clear.Two significant changes resulted from President Trump’s review of our findings.

Supply chain optimization software vendor ServicePower can handle optimizations problems that need to analyze up to 1 million variables. Each variable is represented by a virtual Qubit. They simulate their quantum annealing using parallelization on standard server farms using normal computer hardward to make up for the slower speed compared to D-Wave’s specialized quantum hardware. DWave’s quantum hardware currently has 2048 qubits which is unable to handle the larger simultaneous optimizations. Dwave has been doubling the qubits every year. ServicePower is also adapting the algorithm to other NP-Hard problems in the financial sector, machine learning, simulations of molecular interactions, protein

The Google IO keynote discussed on device AI. It is at about 1:22 in the video of the Keynote. – Google is making tensorflow lite (open source machine learning) to put AI onto devices – It will have new hardware acceleration of AI for android smartphones and tablets. DSPs designed for neural network inference and training – On device next generation speech processing, visual search and augmented reality.

The Air Force Research Lab are working on a lighter Mother of All bombs which still has similar explosive power. The Advanced Ordnance Technologies program will make bombs structured to be lighter by using 3D-printed reconstructed loads within the bomb instead of in the casing — plus distributed blast yields, said Dr. John Corley, the core technical competency lead for ordnance sciences at AFRL. They will also use 3D printing for distributed fusing for more survivable bombs and greater options and control for the explosions. Separating the fuse from the case could make the bomb more flexible of when it

The US Navy railgun program is making great technical progress according to the Office of Naval Research program manager Tom Boucher. The Navy is now working towards installing railguns at permanent land-based test sites which would provide more and better data for fewer dollars than an ad hoc installation aboard a repurposed fast transport. New 32-megajoule railguns have been installed and fired in Virginia and New Mexico. White Sands (New Mexico) tests the long-range performance of the projectile, Dahlgren (Virginia) will work on the weapon itself. Previous test weapons were only firing a few times per day. The Dahlgren team

Nextbigfuture talked to an attendee of 2017 Google IO and he reported that Google will be putting mini versions of the second generation TPU (tensor processing unit) into all new google cellphones. The TPU is optimized for artificial intelligence and deep learning. The new TPU has 180 teraflops of processing power. It was not revealed how powerful the mini versions would be but they would need to use less power and no cooling. The server versions use about 80 watts of power and have cooling units that were very tall.

China’s Navy will have a larger number of ships and submarines than the US Navy in 2030. China’s navy will be approaching 500 ships by 2030 and the US Navy will have between 300 and 350 depending upon which budgets get adopted. China’s navy will be a Blue-Water Naval Power by 2030: China is rapidly transforming itself from a continental power with a focus on its near seas to a great maritime power with a two-ocean focus. The PLAN is looking beyond the san hai – the Yellow Sea, South China Sea, and East China Sea – and out toward

1. India has approved the construction of ten indigenously designed pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR). India approved the construction of ten 700 MWe units in a “significant decision to fast-track India’s domestic nuclear power program”. The Cabinet’s announcement did not give any timeline or locations for the new plants, but said the project would result in a “significant augmentation” of the country’s nuclear generation capacity. India has 6780 MWe of installed nuclear capacity from 22 operational reactors with another 6700 MWe expected to come on stream over the next five years, the cabinet noted. It said the ten new units

1. Chandra X-ray space telescope blog – Observatories Combine to Crack Open the Crab Nebula Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the powerful X-ray glow as seen by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. And, in between, the Hubble Space Telescope’s crisp visible-light view and the infrared perspective of the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other

US Special Ops is looking to put Captain America Supersoldiers into HALO exoskeleton Armor. Amendment 15 of their BAA for Advancement of Technologies for Use by Special Operations Forces talks about wanting to enhance soldier performance with drugs and more. Innovative solutions that will optimize human performance, reduce recovery time, and increase peak performance sustainability, including increased endurance, strength, energy, agility, enhanced senses, provide restorative effects of sleep, and enhance tolerance to environmental extremes. The technologies can be demonstrated through studies that provide proof of concepts or through solutions demonstrated in humans that quantify operational performance improvements. Technologies should not

Star Trek Discovery is set ten years before the first Kirk and Spock space mission. The CBS All Access Original Series arrives this Fall. Set roughly ten years before the events of the original Star Trek, the series follows the crew of the USS Discovery as they discover new worlds and civilizations, while exploring the franchise’s signature contemporary themes. The season-long storyline revolves around “an incident and an event in Star Trek history that’s been talked about but never been explored From Emmy Award-winning executive producer and creator Seth MacFarlane (FAMILY GUY, “Ted”) and directed by Jon Favreau (“The Jungle

The cheapest advertised price to launch people to LEO is a bit over $26 million/seat on a Falcon 9/Dragon which includes a stay at a Bigelow space station , also in development. Current estimates are that space colonists would need about 17 tons per person for their share of space station habitat. The cheapest advertised price today for delivering mass to orbit is the Falcon Heavy, in development, at $90 million for 53 tons to LEO , or $1.7 million per ton. For 17 tons that is about $29 million. Combining these two costs gives us (rounding up)

Dong Energy has built over 1000 large offshore wind turbines. They will be building new taller and bigger wind turbines. They will go to 195 meters tall and 8 Megawatts and larger. In the United States today, a loose convention draws the lower limit for a skyscraper building at 150 meters. An extremely tall skyscraper, particularly one that is taller than 300 meters (1,000 ft), is sometimes colloquially referred to as a supertall. Hotels tend to have one floor every 3.1 meters and office buildings one floor every 3.9 meters. A 195 meter hotel would have about 63 floors. Dong

Japan is restarting unit 4 of its Takahama nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture. The reactor – which together with unit 3 has been offline since March 2016 – is expected to re-enter commercial operation next month. The company said the 830 MWe (net) pressurised water reactor (PWR) was restarted at 3.00pm today and is expected to achieve criticality tomorrow. Kansai plans to resume electricity generation at Takahama 4 and reconnect it to the grid on 22 May “as the final stage of the periodic outage inspection following various types of tests”. It added that “full-scale operation” of the unit

HPE announced that it has created the largest single-memory computing system the world has ever seen, capable of holding 160 terabytes of data. In 2014, HPE introduced The Machine research project—the largest and most complex research project in our company’s history—designed to deliver the world’s first Memory-Driven Computing architecture. They believe this new computer will enable critical leaps in performance, allowing us to extract insights from data like never before. In 2016, we delivered the first prototype. And, in just six months, they have scaled the prototype 20 fold. HPE has invested billions (pretty all of their research budget) and

China One Belt, One Road is promising more than $1 trillion in infrastructure and spanning more than 60 countries from now to 2021. * power plants in Pakistan are part of an expected $46 billion worth of investment * tunnels and bridges and a 260-mile railway in Laos is a $6 billion project * hundreds of other projects across Asia, Africa and Europe * a third of the $23.7 billion cost of the UK Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant * about $50 billion in investment has been deployed so far The Asian Development Bank estimated that emerging Asian economies

Currently there are 3486 confirmed exoplanets (mainly from the Kepler Space telescope survey) and there are 4496 exoplanet candidates and 581 multiplanet systems. We are within about 11 months of the launch of the TESS space telescope. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range

Canada nuclear fusion energy startup General Fusion is working with Microsoft to analyse its fusion energy experimental results using cloud-based big data techniques. General Fusion will work with Microsoft’s Developer Experience Team to build a new, cutting-edge computational platform that will enable General Fusion to mine over 100 terabytes of data from the records of its 150,000 experiments. General Fusion injects plasmas into a liquid metal vortex and then creates a compression shockwave using massive physical pistons.

Simon Fried, Nano Dimension CBO, describes the next five years of industrial 3D printing. It will be meeting more needs. In mechanical terms, that means 3D printing will use a broader range of materials or a higher quality of materials. We also expect greater flexibility in combining materials – creating objects made of different types of metals, for instance, within the same print. Or printing metals and polymers, or metals and ceramics in one print job. With that capability, for instance, companies can begin deploying addition functionality within parts, such as electrical capabilities to mechanical objects. That’s the case with

1. Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet and Lyft are teaming up to road test autonomous cars in a potential challenge to Uber Technologies. In its statement, Lyft said Waymo holds ‘‘today’s best self-driving technology.’’ The two plan to work together to bring autonomous vehicles into the mainstream with pilot projects and product development. Lyft is Uber’s biggest rival in the United States and the second-largest ride-hailing provider in the country. 2. A federal judge barred Uber from using technology taken by an X-Waymo engineer. This will hurt the Uber’s self-driving car research. Waymo showed “compelling

An experimental device lets you whisper in the ear of someone up to 30 meters away. The wearable tech uses ultrasound to beam a speaker’s words directly to a targeted individual without anyone else overhearing what is being said. It currently requires a large speaker mounted on your forehead and the electrodes stuck around your mouth. There is further investigation in increasing its reach with more powerful directional speakers and make it work underwater with water-coupled ultrasonic transducers. The accuracy in discriminating words still has to be improved if these systems had to be used in real scenarios, they hope

Popular Mechanics talks about the difficulty, cost and delays of switching the design of the Gerald Ford Carrier to old and reliable steam launchers. The Nimitz aircraft carriers are still more advanced than any aircraft carrier from Russia, China or any other country. Nimitz carriers cost about $8.5 billion versus the $12+ billion of the Gerald Ford carrier. The last Nimitz was launched in 2006. It was the George H.W. Bush. If the Gerald Ford designs were not truly ready for another ten years to work out technology and manufacturing issues, then the US Navy could continue to work out

NASA has delayed the first launch of its heavy-payload rocket until 2019 and decided against an idea floated by the White House to put astronauts aboard the capsule that is set to fly around the moon, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had already delayed the original launch target of Dec 2016 (set in 2010) to November 2018. The rocket will send the deep-space Orion capsule on a high lunar orbit. Adding systems to support a crew would have cost NASA $600 million to $900 million more and would likely have delayed the

The Bladerunner sequel is coming out October 6, 2017. Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.

Al Globus and Joe Strout have an analysis that space settlements in low (~500 km) Earth equatorial orbits may not require any radiation shielding at all. This is based on a careful analysis of requirements and extensive simulation of radiation effects. This radically reduces system mass and has profound implications for space settlement, as extraterrestrial mining and manufacturing are no longer on the critical path to the first settlements, although they will be essential in later stages. It also means the first settlements can evolve from space stations, hotels, and retirement communities in relatively small steps. This huge reduction in

Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. In October 2015, Moon Express announced that it had signed the worlds’ first multi-mission launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 lunar missions between 2017 and 2020. Moon Express sees the moon as critical for humanity to become a multi-world species, and that our sister world, the Moon, is an eighth continent holding vast resources than can help us enrich and secure our future. MoonEx had been planning to place the International Lunar Observatory (ILO)

On May 3, 2017, US Air Force senior leaders met to consider options to accelerate hypersonics research and development to break even more speed barriers and ensure continued technological superiority. Hypersonics refers to flying at five times the speed of sound, also known as “Mach 5,” or higher. From an Air Force perspective, it is a game-changing capability which can amplify many of the enduring attributes of airpower including speed, range, flexibility and precision. “We must push the boundaries of technology in every area,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. “Our adversaries aren’t standing still. They

Weekly US oil production is back to 9.3 million barrels per day and is nearing the 9.6 million barrel peak in mid-2015. OPEC raised its outlook for U.S. production growth by 285,000 barrels a day to 820,000 a day in 2017. The number of drilling rigs operating in the country has more than doubled since May, data from Baker Hughes Inc. shows, as shale explorers emerge from a two-year rout buoyed by the initial price gains after OPEC announced its plan. OPEC members are still sticking with their pledge to reduce output, the report showed. Production from all 13 members