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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...

The US, Japan and South Korea have not killed North Koreans in the 21st century. Israel has killed about 170 North Koreans and injured 2000 in relations to nuclear weapons from an incident in 2004...

China is moving rapidly towards using nuclear power as an industrial heat source and as a direct replacement for coal, Yulong Wu, CEO of Chinergy, told a side event at the International Atomic Energy...

The previous estimates of the amount of CO2 that could be released before world temperature rose to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was 70 billion tonnes of Carbon after 2015 but a reassessment...

A 40-foot (12.19-meter) electric bus from Proterra Inc traveled 1,101.2 miles (1,772.21 km) at low speed without recharging, cruising to a new electric vehicle range record, the California...

Economists and analysts are now projecting Chinese yuan is likely to remain stable for the next couple of years — the median of analysts’ end-2018 forecasts is 6.8, and for end-2019 it is 6.7....

Joe Cirincione makes the easonable case that the USA could not successfully shoot down the North Korean ICBMs. Joe Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund and the author of Nuclear Nightmares:...

Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum. He projects that Ethereum will have Visa scale transaction per second in a couple of years. Currently Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second...

The next big war in the Middle East will be another war between Hezbollah and Israel. It will begin because Hezbollah has vastly increased the size and sophistication of its arms (missiles) in Lebanon despite clear and consistent warnings from Israel and the international community not to do so. Hezbollah has about thirty times the number of missiles as were fired during the 2006 war. For the past several years, Israel has been warning Hezbollah, first indirectly and then publicly, about its “red lines” in Syria, which included the transfer of sophisticated weapons from Syria into Lebanon. Outgoing Israeli air

LinkSpace Aerospace Technology Group. was established in January 2014. Research and development are mainly distributed in China’s Beijing, Guangdong, Shandong and Shaanxi. They want to create...

Luke Nosek is leaving Founders Fund, the venture capital firm he co-founded more than a decade ago with Peter Thiel, Axios reported. Luke was previously a founding exec at PayPal. UPDATE – The...

Slack successfully raised $250 million from investors and most of it was from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The latest round puts the company’s total funding raised to $841 million and its valuation...

In November, 2015, Israeli officials believed that the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has amassed around 150,000 rockets, including a number of long range Iranian-made missiles capable of...

Canada moved up to fifth last year on a list of countries with the most millionaire households, according to a Boston Consulting Group report that shows the United States was again at No. 1. There...

The USA, Singapore and Canada regulators have all issued some warning and guidelines for cryptocurrency and fintech. They are in general regulating tokens similar to securities. On August 24, the...

DARPA has new sensor that use virtually zero stand-by power. Then ovel sensors could improve situational awareness for warfighters, add smarts to Internet of Things. A research team at Northeastern...

The U.S. Navy is preparing to take full control of the Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program and procure a second craft. A third might also be built as the...

Harry Dean Stanton died at the age of 91. He was in nearly 200 movies. He was in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Dillinger (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974) (small role as FBI...