NextBigFuture.com

We could soon have the quantum computing hardware that would has the potential to provide a large speedup in computer performance. There needs to be more quantum algorithms that can provide a speedup...

In 2019, you may check your email with the help of a balloon 12 miles up in the sky. Google Project Loon uses high-altitude solar-powered balloons instead of the usual land-based cell towers to...

Researchers are developing new protective coatings for large silver-based telescope mirrors by adapting a technique widely used in the microelectronics industry. According to Phillips, most...

Gen-Xers and Millennials are the first generations in history born to the video gaming age. And they’ve been ‘gamified’ from birth, with 2.6 billion people playing video games worldwide, and it is...

The Americas has eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus (MNT), a disease that used to be responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 newborns every year in the Americas. The elimination of the...

Reaction Engines Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Reaction Engines, today announced that it has received a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to conduct...

China showed off crude models of a planned robotic military ship the D3000. It would have a trimaran tumblehome hull, with armament that includes autocannons and anti-ship missiles, as well as...

A team of researchers from the UK and Russia have successfully demonstrated that a type of ‘magic dust’ which combines light and matter can be used to solve complex problems and could eventually...

Japanese scientists have invented an approach to quantum computing that renders a far larger number of calculations more efficiently than existing quantum computers. They believe the technological building blocks exist and that the quantum loops can be experimentally realized with current technology. Their theoretical works suggests this can scale to millions of qubits for a universal quantum computer. Above the Loop-based architecture for universal quantum computing is shown, featuring a homodyne detector (HD), displacement operation (Disp.), a phase shifter (PS) and a variable beam splitter (VBS). Under the new method, many pulses of light, each carrying information, are allowed to

Ray Kurzweil discusses the potential for Artificial Intelligence to eliminate jobs. a prescient futurist in 1900 would say 38% of you work on farms; 25% of you work in factories. That’s two-thirds of...

There is a critical DoD need to explore potential new approaches of on-demand manufacturing through the concept of a flying missile rail (FMR). A new advanced monolithic aircraft typically requires...

Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, estimates that cash transactions made up only 15 percent of all retail transactions last year, down from 40 percent in 2010, thanks in large part to massively popular mobile payment services. Riksbank and the central banks of other countries are taking a serious look at blockchain, the technology that makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies run. These systems, also called distributed ledgers, rely on networks of computers, rather than a central authority like a bank, to verify and record transactions on a shared, virtually incorruptible database. Government bankers across the world believe this has the potential to

CRISPR gene-editing technology has the potential to treat—and possibly cure—any number of diseases and there are currently five ways it can be delivered into humans. 1. Gels and creams for anti-HPV....

Fission fragment direct energy conversion (FFDEC) into electricity can dramatically improve the specific mass of fission-based electric propulsion rocket. An EPRI study by A. G. Tarditi, J. H. Scott focused on the conversion via traveling wave DEC (direct energy conversion), that has the advantage of being able to generate high frequency power (MHz range) and does not require high voltage technology, unlike electrostatic energy conversion. The fission fragment direct energy conversion (FFDEC) is considered as a best fit to an accelerator-driven fission core to improve the efficiency and the overall specific mass. This proposed approach is complementary to the fission

The problem with space nuclear propulsion is NOT raw power, but how to eliminate waste heat. The more efficiently we can generate thrust, the less waste heat produced. Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we have a non-thermal nuclear propulsion minimizing waste heat? * Yes. By making the fuel into dust. There is the original dusty fission fragment version. These systems can have ISP of 500,000 to 1.5 million. However multi-gigawatt systems would have only a few dozen newtons of thrust. The systems could potentially reach 5% of the speed of light. There is also afterburner

Advanced fission power systems can dramatically enhance space exploration capabilities in the near and farther term. Energy conversion options that are usually considered are heat engines (Rankine cycle, Brayton cycle and Magnetohydrodynamic – MHD) and direct conversion engine (the so-called Traveling Wave Direct Energy Convertor – TWDEC). There was a proposal for Traveling Wave Direct Energy Convertor that also surveyed advanced nuclear fission space power concepts. Low specific mass (less than 3 kg/kW) in-space electric power and propulsion can drastically alter the paradigm for exploration of the Solar System, changing human Mars exploration from a 3-year epic event to an

DARPA’s Mobile Force Protection (MFP) program seeks scalable, modular, and affordable approaches with small footprints in terms of size, weight, power, and number of people needed for operation. With...

A Brane Craft is an ultra-thin spacecraft (~55 microns) • It weighs about 80 grams, yet can deorbit up to 2 kg • It may be mass-produced • Potential 100X decrease in orbit cleanup costs • Many other potential uses: – Asteroid inspectors – Asteroid re-directors (multiple per asteroid, dock or high speed impact) – Planetary and lunar orbiters • Significant technology development is required in NASA NIAC Phase II An initial concern was that thin-film solar cells and electronics could not provide a radiation tolerance of up to 10 megarads total integrated dose (TID). Thin film Copper Indium Gallium

Dana Andrews had looked at a near term system for achieving 2% of the speed of light. It used an advanced ion drive and a couple of small nuclear reactors. It would weigh 4000 tons which is about the...

There a great deal of concern about automation eliminating human jobs. Spinning a sign seems to boost the attention that people give to signs by about 80%. Sign spinners are paid about $50 to 150 per...

US Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein has added urban warfare to his list of top focus areas. * The US Air Force may not be well equipped to handle precise urban warfare. * 80 percent of...

PitchBook has an update for Q3 2017 of ICOs and venture capital investment in the blockchain. * regulatory statements in China and the US have yet to temper market enthusiasm for the red-hot cryptocurrency and ICO market. Regulatory action against secondary exchanges in China may put short-term downward pressure on an overheated market, but will ultimately prove bullish. * SEC recognition that some tokens are securities and some are not is a sensible approach that will encourage the best ideas to continue in a sandbox, while less-innovative projects will face more scrutiny. * VC investment in blockchain companies has remained

The amount of used nuclear fuel will continue to increase, reaching around 1 million tonnes by 2050. The uranium and plutonium that could be extracted from that used fuel would be sufficient to...

Researchers estimate the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great...

For emerging countries, the OECD raised by 0.2 percentage point its forecast for China’s economy to expand this year, to 6.8 per cent. The outlook for 2018 was similarly raised, to 6.6 per...

If you restructure aluminum at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum that’s lighter...

Lockheed has released a video of the 30-kilowatt Advanced Test High Energy Asset or ATHENA laser. The footage is from a test in New Mexico last month, where ATHENA took out 5 unmanned drones during...

US Shale oil production is over 6 million barrels per day and overall US crude oil production is at 9.51 million barrels per day.

In March, 2017, construction has been underway for the last couple of years for the California High speed rail. They are working on more than 119 miles of the system from Silicon Valley to the...

HRL Labs has made a breakthrough with a technique for successfully 3D printing high-strength aluminum alloys—including types Al7075 and Al6061—that opens the door to additive manufacturing of...

Stephen Hsu reports on his team work to use novel machine learning methods (“compressed sensing”) to ~500,000 genomes from UK Biobank, resulting in an accurate predictor for human height...

A team of HTC talent will join Google as part of the hardware organization. These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we’ve already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says if he could go back in time, there’d be something more intuitive than the two-handed Ctrl-Alt-Delete command to interrupt a process. In 2013 Gates said it...

China plans to more than double its atomic power capacity in the next decade, bucking the trend of consolidation in western Europe and North America. The Asian nation’s expansion will contribute to a...

Carnival of Space 527 is up at The Evolving Planet. Universe Today – Cassini Conducts a Final Flyby of Titan Before Crashing into Saturn The NASA Cassini spacecraft made hundreds of passes over...

Kymeta’s mTenna® technology and KĀLO services will enable a realm of brand new experiences from anywhere in the world that characterize what the truly connected car should be capable of. The...

Flytrex is 13 person Israeli startup that has implemented a food delivery drone service in Iceland. Flytrex will setup drone services for client companies. They use commercial drones $2000-8000....

The US Air force Special ops command will ground demo a combat laser intended for a AC130 gunship in 2018 and then go airborne with shooting the laser a couple of years after that. Webb’s...

Spacex has trademarked the name Starlink for its planned 4000 satellite global internet delivery network. The system will also provide earth imaging.

When finished sometime in the first half of the 2020s, tens of billions of dollars would have been spent and passengers will be able to travel between Kunming and Singapore in just 10 hours. A more...

Double precision exaflop/second has been the traditional definition of general purpose exaflop supercomputer. There are domain-specific machines and even the American DoE Summit and Sierra...

Satoshi Matsuoka‏ tweeted out details of a technical presentation on upgrades to the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2A (improved from 56 petaflops to 95 petaflops).

China is upgrading its number two supercomputer with new Chinese-made Matrix-2000 GPDSP accelerators. They will replace the existing Intel Knights Corner Xeon Phi coprocessors that were installed in...

Scientists at The University of Manchester have created the world’s first ‘molecular robot’ that is capable of performing basic tasks including building other molecules. The tiny robots, which are a...

The US Navy is performing planned midlife refueling and technology upgrades to the Nimitz aircraft carriers. Carriers are planned to operate for 50 years and halfway they get nuclear refueling and...

A mission concept, known as the Asteroid Touring Nanosat Fleet, would require 50 esail powered probes to return for a flyby of Earth after asteroid flybys, as the nano-spacecraft would only be able...

The e $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE is funded by a group of donors including the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Econet Foundation, Scott Hassan, the Merkin Family Foundation, John...

As recently as 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had indicated that there we would CO2 emissions would soon exceed the level where 1.5 degree celsius warming over the...

ASEAN’s combined nominal gross domestic product (GDP) is already over US$2.8 trillion (S$3.8 trillion) and if counted as a single entity, it would rank sixth in the world, behind the United...

Columbia University researchers have made a self-contained soft actuator three times stronger than natural muscle, without the need of externals, signals a breakthrough in soft robotics. Researchers...