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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

The Guardian UK describes how a 16 year old began working at a brothel two years ago to pay for food. She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of...

Mercedes Benz has new home battery modules. The Mercedes Benz battery modules start with a capacity of 2.5 kWh and up to eight battery modules can be combined for a total energy storage capacity of...

Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab (SLAC) scientists were able to observe “diamond rain” for the first time as it formed in high-pressure conditions. Extremely high pressure squeezes hydrogen and carbon...

Despite its imperfections, the interest yield curve in China has been useful in signaling acceleration and slowdowns in economic growth over the past decade. China’s yield curve is signaling a coming...

The Carnival of Space 524 is up at Urban Astronomer. Universe Today – Mars Express Captures Mars’ Moving Bow Shock For many decades, astronomers have been aware that bow shocks form upstream of...

It was estimated that in 1998, LaserDisc players were in approximately 2% of U.S. households (roughly two million). By comparison, in 1999, players were in 10% of Japanese households and a total of...

Neither HTC nor Facebook/Oculus has released sales figures for their respective VR (Virtual Reality) headsets. Analyst estimates are less than 500,000 units apiece. This means that Facebook paid $3...

Nature Physics – Efficient generation of energetic ions in multi-ion plasmas by radio-frequency heating Researchers describe a new technique for the efficient generation of high-energy ions...

National magnet lab reached a record of 41.4 teslas at 1:10 p.m. on Aug. 21 with a resistive magnet. It was the culmination of two and a half intense years of design and development. In so doing, the...

An international research team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and Hanyang University in South Korea has developed high-tech yarns that generate electricity when they are...

For the last two decades, researchers started comparing the health of diabetics on metformin to those taking other diabetes drugs. Metformin-takers tended to be healthier in all sorts of ways. They...

In May, the LPP Fusion research team’s ongoing effort to clean off the oxides from the electrodes of our FF-1 experimental fusion device has made progress, but is not completed yet. they have succeeded in doubling the temperature of the microwave-heated plasma that does the cleaning. They also have convincing evidence that the oxides are still the source of the great majority of the impurities in the plasma. But to remove all the oxides, we need to increase our microwave power to get still higher plasma temperature, which is what we are doing now. In March, we initially upgraded the

Researchers report on D-D fusion neutron emission in a plasma device with an energy input of only 0.1 Joules, within a range where fusion events have been considered very improbable. The results...

An animated data-driven documentary about war and peace, The Fallen of World War II looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends...

Bill Nye alleges that Disney has withheld $28 million in profits from distribution of the show “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. Bill Nye and two producers launched the show in 1992, in...

The Microbiome Immunity Project is a new, IBM-facilitated citizen science project by scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California...

The US Air Force is finalizing technology requirements for a new fighter jet to enter service sometime in the 2030s. Known as “Penetrating Counter Air,” the new fighter will replace the...

Automotive, aerospace and defence applications require metallic materials with ultra-high strength. However, in some particular high-loading structural applications, metallic materials shall also...

Japan’s nuclear regulator today approved the ‘construction plans’ for strengthening Ohi units 3 and 4 and Genkai unit 3. The plans are the second of three applications required during the restart process. The units must undergo further inspections before being permitted to restart. Under Japan’s reactor restart process, plant operators are required to apply to the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) for: permission to make changes to the reactor installation; approval of its construction plan to strengthen the plant; and, final safety inspections to ensure the unit meets new safety requirements. Operators are required to add certain safety-enhancing equipment within five

France deployed the first versions of combat armor with the FELIN combat system. FÉLIN (Fantassin à Équipement et Liaisons Intégrés, Integrated Infantryman Equipment and Communications) is the name...