NextBigFuture.com

The Carnival of Space 518 is up at Everyday Spacer Blasting News – Moon Express reveals its plans for private lunar exploration The first probe Moon Express intends to launch is the Lunar Scout, which the company hopes to launch before the end of 2017 as part of its quest to win the Google Lunar XPrize. The probe will carry a number of payloads, including, “the International Lunar Observatory, “MoonLight” by the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati and the University of Maryland, a Celestis memorial flight.” Lunar Scout will also attempt to fulfill the terms of the Google Lunar XPrize

Researchers have created a brain implant that stimulates persistent aggression. Winners in social dominance experiments are mice that are not stronger but are just more persistently aggressive. The brain circuits of a winner Social dominance in mice depends on their history of winning in social contests. Zhou et al. found that this effect is mediated by neuronal projections from the thalamus to a brain region called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Selective manipulation of synapses driven by this input revealed a causal relationship between circuit activity and mental effort–based dominance behavior. Thus, synapses in this pathway store the memory of previous

The Planetary Habitability Lab at the University of Puerto Rico is conducting a scientific campaign from the Arecibo Observatory to observe red dwarf star with planets. These observations might provide information about the radiation and magnetic environment around these stars or even hint the presence of new sub-stellar objects including planets. So far, they observed Gliese 436, Ross 128, Wolf 359, HD 95735, BD +202465, V* RY Sex, and K2-18. Only Gliese 436 and K2-18 are known to have planets. Observations were done between April and May 2017 in the C-band (4 to 5 GHz). Two weeks after these observations,

Glen Robertson has over 30 years of advanced propulsion research experience and development for the NASA – Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL as an Aerospace Technologist. He helped establish the Advanced Propulsion Research Center and conducted/supported many advanced propulsion projects over his NASA career. He holds 10 patents and has published over 20 papers on propulsion and power generation and currently supports the SLS program and plans to retire by end of 2018. Acceleration Mechanics for New Propellant-less Space Drives It has been shown that the mechanism of acceleration is hidden within known physics, much like a Chameleon

1. Damien Turchi is a graduate of Drexel University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, founder and former president of the Icarus Interstellar Drexel University Student Chapter and lead coordinator of the first Interstellar Hackathon at Starship Congress 2015 at Drexel University, PA. He is currently a director of Icarus Interstellar. On the Development of a Permanent Lunar Settlement: A Micro-Literature Review and Suggested Action Since the 1960s, humanity seriously discusses the idea of a permanent lunar settlement. In both academic and professional literature, many designs for an initial settlement are proposed to varying fidelity. NASA published a comprehensive review of

An analysis by John Bucknell (x-Spacex senior engineer) describes an 11 meter diameter robotic vehicle with a 6,000-megawatt nuclear thermal rocket in a NTTR arrangement. The rocket would be single stage to orbit and would be immediately be able to refly after landing and refueling much like todays airliners. Even fully reusable Spacex rockets where all stages are resused would need to be re-assembled. He describes SSTOH missions to place a 21 meter minor and 214 meter major diameter toroidal habitat in space, capable of full terrestrial gravity simulation by spinning at 3 rpm. The habitat begins as two thin

London and New York are replacing outdated phone booths with Wi-Fi kiosks that have embedded computing tablets, USB charging ports, keypads for making phone calls, and large screens that display relevant information to passersby. New York started installing its “LinkNYC” kiosks in 2016, currently has more than 900 activated across all five boroughs and plans to increase that number to 7,500. The U.K. just started erecting its “InLinkUK” kiosks in London and intends to deploy up to 1,000 across the country. Today, people use the Links primarily to charge their smartphones, take advantage of the fast Wi-Fi, make Internet (VoIP)

The researchers, led by University of Washington assistant professor of materials science and engineering Peter Pauzauskie, published a paper on July 17 in the journal Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering describing their supercapacitor electrode and the fast, inexpensive way they made it. Their novel method starts with carbon-rich materials that have been dried into a low-density matrix called an aerogel. This aerogel on its own can act as a crude electrode, but Pauzauskie’s team more than doubled its capacitance, which is its ability to store electric charge. These inexpensive starting materials, coupled with a streamlined synthesis process, minimize two common barriers

Mathematicians at the Universities of York, Munich and Cardiff have identified a unique property of quantum mechanical particles – they can move in the opposite way to the direction in which they are being pushed. In everyday life, objects travel in the same direction as their momentum – a car in forward motion is going forwards, and certainly not backwards. However, this is no longer true on microscopic scales – quantum particles can partially go into reverse and travel in the direction opposite to their momentum. This unique property is known as ‘backflow’. Physical Review A – Quantum backflow and

A truck-fired 50 kW laser weapon — an upgrade of the lumbering HEL-MTT — will be test fired in 2018. A 100 kW weapon on a more mobile vehicle — perhaps an 8×8 Stryker or tracked Bradley — will be test-fired in 2022. Currently the army is testing 5 to 10 kilowatt weapons on trucks and the Stryker. Moving up in power will mean being able to take out helicopters, low flying planes and possibly cruise missiles. Current weapons are targeting quadcopters and mortars. The new dates are slippage by one year from the schedules announced in 2016. The US

US defense leaders should consider developing limited-production prototypes deployed to operational environments as “one off” weapon systems tailored to specific missions. For prototyping to become a relevant component of military doctrine, promising weapon systems will need to be delivered quickly to the operational forces in limited quantities, with the option of building or modifying the base design for future use. These prototypes may be produced at a lower cost and may only need to be operational for a short time period. The technology exists today to manufacture and deploy a system while in an operational environment. A 2015 prototype produced

Google Glass has been optimized for industrial, healthcare and other workplaces where workers need help with complex tasks. Complex assembly, done faster AGCO manufactures complex agricultural machines at low volume with the goal of helping make today’s farms more productive and more profitable. All AGCO solutions are custom, which can require over 1,000 precise steps to build correctly. Quality is key. Glass really gives their operators the ability to do their jobs faster, smarter, and safer. Rewiring productivity GE partnered with Upskill to implement the Skylight platform with Glass in warehouses and manufacturing facilities globally. At Renewable Energy in Pensacola,

Russians have added porosity to aluminum so that it can be lower density than water. Ships with porous aluminum foam would be unsinkable even with holes in the hull so long as the water that leaks in does not go beyond the buoyancy of the aluminum foam. Aluminum foam is produced by adding foaming gas into liquid metal during re-melting of the aluminum material. The porous materials can be used for increase of structures stiffness and sound and heat insulating proprieties, said the SPbPU’s Media-center. “High porosity level can be used to decrease the density of structural elements, e.g. sheets.

MIT 3-Sigma Sports aims to solve the biggest engineering problems across sports. The program connecting students and faculty with alumni and industry partners who work together to improve athletic performance by using engineering to enhance endurance, speed, accuracy, and agility in sports. Graduate students and former varsity athletes Sarah Fay and Jacob Rothman have both found ways to bridge their personal passions with their academic pursuits. Fay, who played squash and field hockey as an undergraduate at MIT, is working to identify the optimal weight for squash rackets by modeling the swing of a racket based on a person’s height

A US Congressional report shows that From FY2007 to FY2016, obligations for all DOD-funded contracts performed with in the Iraq and Afghanistan areas of operation totaled approximately $249 billion in FY2017 dollars. For the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, CENTCOM reported 42,592 contractor personnel working for DOD within its area of responsibility, which included 28,189 individuals located in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of the Obama administration contractors outnumbered US soldiers in Afghanistan by 3 to 1. For the fourth quarter of FY2016, DOD reported 3,053 private security contractors in Afghanistan, with 813 categorized as armed private

The pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology will make far smaller cameras. His team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices

Martin Landau played a master of disguise on the Mission: Impossible TV series, Commander John Koenig and as a broken-down Bela Lugosi in his Oscar-winning performance in Ed Wood, has died. He was 89. He attended the Actors Studio, becoming good friends with James Dean, and was later in the same class as Steve McQueen. In 1957, he made his Broadway debut in Middle of the Night. Landau made his first major film appearance in 1959, as Leonard, right-hand man of a criminal mastermind, in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. He had featured roles in two 1960s epics, Cleopatra and

The US House of representatives passed H.R. 2810, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2018 with a vote of 344-81 (so a lot of democratic support). * troops got their biggest pay raise in eight years * $18.5 billion above the President’s FY 2018 Budget request for base national defense spending, as well as an additional $10 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding. * they would build on the current two a year production rate of Virginia class submarines and help the Navy to go even higher in the next block contract by authorizing up to

Supercritical CO2 can increase the efficiency of heat to energy conversion by up from 39% to as high as 50-60%. Materials with corrosion resistance are needed. Alloy 740 (titanium, nickel, chromium, aluminum) loses abut 1 to 2 microns per year at 750C. The DOE announced October, 2016 that it was building a prototype power plant that uses supercritical CO2 turbines. When the $80 million project goes online in about six years, it will generate 10 megawatts of energy—about enough to operate a few thousand homes. Supercritical CO2 turbines may start replacing traditional steam turbines en masse after about a decade.

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) is researching a thermal-to-electric power conversion technology in a configuration called the recompression closed Brayton cycle (RCBC) that uses supercritical carbon dioxide (s-CO2) as the working fluid, rather than steam, thereby dramatically increasing conversion efficiency compared to the steam Rankine cycle. Sandia is working towards a 10 MWe 500 degree celsius system for 2019. The primary reason for improved power conversion efficiency is simply that the use of s-CO2 as the working fluid in a Brayton cycle requires less work to convert a given thermal input to electricity. In general, increased efficiency represents increased output for

Jodie Whittaker has been announced as Doctor Who’s 13th Time Lord – the first woman to get the role. She was revealed in a trailer that was broadcast on BBC One at the end of the Wimbledon men’s singles final.

An Avengers Infinity War teaser trailer was shown at D23. It was exclusive to the event and presented solely for those lucky enough to get into the panel. There are verbal descriptions by youtubers online and there is a description of the teaser at CBR.com and many other places. There are some minor spoilers. There is a lot of action and almost all the Marvel movie characters are given some cuts in the teaser. The film arrives in theaters May 4, 2018.

Debug Fresno is a study in the summer of 2017, pending approval from state and federal regulators, to test a potential mosquito control method using sterile insect technique. The study would be conducted by Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District, MosquitoMate, and Verily, and this video is intended to inform residents of the possible activities of this study. Verily, the life sciences arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, will release about 20 million lab-made, bacteria-infected sterile mosquitoes upon Fresno, California. Verily’s male mosquitoes were infected with the Wolbachia bacteria, which is harmless to humans, but when they mate with and infect their

Obike has been told to remove its “obstructive” bicycles from some London streets, just days after it launched a cycle-hire scheme to rival ‘Boris Bikes’ in London. Apparently Amsterdam which is the granddaddy of bikesharing has had issues with bikes in canals for a while.

The US-Australia Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HiFIRE) program had at least one successful hypersonic flight at Woomera testing range in South Australia last week. A round of experiments concluded on 12 July, confirmed Australian defense minister Marise Payne. UQ hypersonics researchers collaborated with the Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) and US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Boeing, and BAE Systems for test flights in July 2017. This vehicle is a free-flying hypersonic glider, designed to fly at Mach 8 (8000 km/hr). It is designed to separate from its rocket booster in space and perform controlled manoeuvres as

Two Star Wars-inspired lands are currently under construction at the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts. A Christmas 2018 soft opening remains in the realm of possibility. If both Star Wars Lands are going to open in 2019 (as Disney has announced), it seems likely Disneyland’s Star Wars Land will have a longer soft opening period beforehand.

Bangladesh will domestically build 6 guided missile frigates and has ordered two submarines from China. They have two Chinese Ming-class submarines on order which are to be delivered by 2019. The total submarine order is about $200 million. In the past, the Bangladesh Army has been equipped with Chinese tanks, its navy has Chinese frigates and missile boats and the Bangladesh Air Force flies Chinese fighter jets. Bangladesh’s regional neighbors Myanmar, Thailand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka also depend on Chinese military supplies; as do other Muslim-majority countries of similar size, including Egypt, Nigeria and Sudan. Bangladesh initially looked to acquire

The US Marines and the Army are working together to design a new plate carrier called the Plate Carrier Generation III. The new design is “less bulky, lighter in weight, and provides a smaller overall footprint than the current plate carrier while maintaining the same soft armor coverage and protection level. The new model is 23 percent lighter. The Marine Corps is also looking to develop lighter body armor.

Defense spending by NATO countries has generally been declining as a percent of GDP for the last 25 years. Canada is currently spending at 1% of GDP and most NATO countries are below a 2% of GDP agreement. Canada plans to increase annual defense spending from $18.9 billion in Canadian dollars in 2016-2017 to $32.7 billion in 2026. (That’s the equivalent of an increase from $13.99 billion in the US to $24.2 billion.) Canada has a GDP of about C$2.1 trillion. Canada will probably have an economy of about C$2.5 trillion in constant dollars in 2026. Canada would go from

In May, 2017, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced they successfully fired hypersonic projectiles with an enhanced Guidance Electronics Unit (GEU). They were successful in tests during multiple firings from their three mega joule (3 MJ) Blitzer™ railgun system. The enhanced GEU containing a new battery configuration and running GA-EMS developed Guidance, Navigation, and Control software, completed testing at launch accelerations over 30,000 Gees at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. “We’re continuing to test at an impressive pace, building on the successes over the past year to advance both our Blitzer railgun systems and hypersonic projectile capabilities,”

Within six months the US military will start using commercial AI algorithms to sort through its masses of intelligence data on the Islamic State. “We will put an algorithm into a combat zone before the end of this calendar year, and the only way to do that is with commercial partners,” said Col. Drew Cukor. Existing commercial AI technology will be integrated onto existing government systems. “We’re not talking about three million lines of code,” Cukor said. “We’re talking about 75 lines of code… placed inside of a larger software (architecture)” that already exists for intelligence-gathering. The AI will help

China still has an official policy of peaceful unification with Taiwan, but China President Xi Jinping has in several recent speeches signaled that he wanted to see the Taiwan matter resolved between 2021 and 2049, marking the centennials of the founding of the Communist Party and its successful revolution. In mainland China, patience is wearing thin over the continued stalemate over unification, and many there see “increased economic integration has not created any political spillover.” This led to the imposition of tough economic sanctions and its arm-twisting of other nations to boycott the island’s products and further isolate Taiwan internationally,

Canada’s oil-sands companies including Devon Energy Corp., Suncor Energy Inc. and Cenovus Energy Inc. have ramped up operations and production. Their thermal production sites are running as much as 30 percent above capacity this year, squeezing barrels from existing production sites to maximize revenue. Oil sands will be second to shale as the biggest contributor to global supply growth over the next two years with half a million barrels a day of production scheduled to enter the market, according to IHS Energy. Canada oilsand producers are driving down costs. Devon’s Jackfish oil-sands wells pumped 128,000 barrels a day in April,

The Army Research Lab is launching the Human Variability Project to gather massive amounts of biophysical data. Patrick Tucker at Defense One indicates that the Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and their special operations forces are also funding research to collect biophysical data from soldiers, sailors, Marines, and pilots. The goal is to improve troops’ performance by understanding what’s happening inside their bodies, down to how their experiences affect them on a genetic level. Over the past two years, the military bought more than $2 million worth of FitBits and other biomedical tracking devices. Consumer devices aren’t good enough for

Most smartphones have a built-in accelerometer that can record steps and Stanford researchers used anonymous data from more than 700,000 people who used the Argus activity monitoring app. They analyzed 68 million days’ worth of minute-by-minute data showed the average number of daily steps was 4,961. Hong Kong people walk the most. Hong Kongers averaged 6,880 steps a day, while Indonesia was bottom of the rankings with just 3,513 steps per day. The smartphone data showed that cities like New York and San Francisco were pedestrian friendly and had “high walkability”. Whereas you really need a car to get around

The United States Air Force is suffering a global air superiority crisis after 26 years of combat operations. Today, the service possesses just under 1,000 aircraft capable of air-to-air combat — F-15s, , F-22s, and F-35s. That is down more than 65 percent since the end of the Cold War. Given the global demands of our national security strategy, operational considerations, and force rotation factors, this amounts to fewer than 100 fighter aircraft available in a particular location at any given time. Fighters are employed in a rotational fashion—with one third of aircraft on station, another third returning to base,

Designers can extend Moore’s Law scaling beyond the 5-nanometer node by choosing two-dimensional anisotropic (faster with the grain) materials such as monolayers of black phosphorus, according to Imec (Leuven, Belgium). Monolayer black phosphorus based FETs with different device designs can fulfill the high-performance logic energy-delay requirements till sub-5 nm gate lengths. Although the monolayer black phosphorus is reported to be unstable under ambient conditions and efforts to have the stable BP are ongoing, we infer that lower transport effective mass 2D material such as monolayer BP (with proposed device designs) perform better than higher effective mass 2D materials. To boost the

Due to magnetism iron should – theoretically – be a poor superconductor. Nevertheless certain iron based materials possess fine superconducting properties. Why? Because the five unbound electrons found in iron – as a result of individual modes of operation, it turns out – facilitate superconductivity. “This may come in very handily in future attempts to ‘tailor’ new superconductors”, says Brian Møller Andersen, condensed matter physicist at NBI and one of the scientists behind the research. Brian Møller Andersens field is ‘exotic’ phases in condensed matters – i.e. phases and conditions where materials display reactions markedly different from what is seen

Engineers have worked made drones the size of a bumblebee and loaded them with even tinier sensors and cameras. Almost every part of a drone has been made smaller, except for the brains of the entire operation — the computer chip. Standard computer chips for quadcoptors and other similarly sized drones process an enormous amount of streaming data from cameras and sensors, and interpret that data on the fly to autonomously direct a drone’s pitch, speed, and trajectory. To do so, these computers use between 10 and 30 watts of power, supplied by batteries that would weigh down a much

Researchers used laser light to link caesium atoms and a vibrating membrane. The research, the first of its kind, points to sensors capable of measuring movement with unseen precision beyond Heisenberg limits. A number of experiments – demonstrate that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to some degree can be neutralized. This has never been shown before, and the results may spark development of new measuring equipment, new and better sensors. Professor Eugene Polzik, head of Quantum Optics (QUANTOP) at the Niels Bohr Institute, has been in charge of the research – which has included the construction of a vibrating membrane and an

John Becknell designer of the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket (NTTR) and x-senior engineer on the Space Raptor engine is answering questions at nextbigfuture. He is answering on the previous article on his air enhanced nuclear thermal rocket that has 5 times the ISP of a chemical rocket and 10 times the payload. The increased payload is from having ten times higher payload fraction. ” target=blank>In 2015, Bucknell presented the Nuclear Thermal Turbo rocket which added air-breathing to a nuclear thermal rocket. Buchnell design would have 1664 ISP. 60% more than the best prior nuclear thermal rocket designs. At next months’s

DARPA announced NESD (neural engineering system design) in January 2016 with the goal of developing an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world. Such an interface would convert the electrochemical signaling used by neurons in the brain into the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology, and do so at far greater scale than is currently possible. The work has the potential to significantly advance scientists’ understanding of the neural underpinnings of vision, hearing, and speech and could eventually lead to new treatments for people living with sensory deficits. “The

John Bucknell was Senior Propulsion Engineer for the Raptor full-flow staged combustion methalox rocket at Spacex and is currently the Senior Propulsion Scientist for Divergent3D in Torrance, CA developing additively manufactured vehicle technologies. In 2015, Bucknell presented the Nuclear Thermal Turbo rocket which added air-breathing to a nuclear thermal rocket. Specific impulse (usually abbreviated Isp) is a measure of the efficiency of rocket and jet engines. By definition, it is the total impulse (or change in momentum) delivered per unit of propellant consumed and is dimensionally equivalent to the generated thrust divided by the propellant mass or weight flow rate.

Researchers used data on hand grip strength from more than 140,000 participants in the UK Biobank study, combined with 50,000 additional individuals from the UK, Netherlands, Denmark and Australia, to identify sixteen common genetic variants that are associated with muscle strength. A UK study from 2010 using the phenotype approach to defining frailty found a prevalence of 8.5% in women and 4.1% in men aged 65 –74 years. Frailty in the elderly can be avoided and mitigated. Many of these variants were located within or near to genes known to play a role in biological processes highly relevant to muscle

The smallest star yet measured has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge. With a size just a sliver larger than that of Saturn, the gravitational pull at its stellar surface is about 300 times stronger than what humans feel on Earth. The star is likely as small as stars can possibly become, as it has just enough mass to enable the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. If it were any smaller, the pressure at the centre of the star would no longer be sufficient to enable this process to take place. Hydrogen

Six leading US technology companies will receive $258 million in funding from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as part of its new PathForward program. This money is to accelerate the research necessary to deploy the nation’s first exascale supercomputers in about 2021. The $258 million in funding will be allocated over a three-year contract period, with companies providing additional funding amounting to at least 40 percent of their total project cost, bringing the total investment to at least $430 million. The award recipients: · Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) · Cray Inc. (CRAY) · Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

China plans to turn the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau greater bay area into the world’s largest bay area in terms of GDP by 2030. This would mean surpassing Tokyo, New York and the San Francisco bay area economies. In 2016 combined regional GDP of the greater Guandong-Hong Kong and Macao bay area was 9.35 trillion yuan (US$1.38 trillion). China’s overall 2016 GDP of the Chinese mainland at 74.41 trillion yuan last year (about US$12 trillion). The average GDP (107,011 RMB) in 2015 was 2.2 times higher than China’s national average (49,992 RMB). Shenzhen’s per capita GDP with around 26,000 USD$ in 2015

Hyperloop One completed the world’s first successful Hyperloop full systems test. They completed systems test at their DevLoop site in the desert north of Las Vegas. They installed almost 1,000 feet of the linear motor in a 1,640-foot-long tube capable of reducing the air pressure down to the equivalent of 200,000 feet above sea level. Top speed was around 250 mph. They also unveiled XP-1, the pod they’ll be using for those full systems tests over the next several months at DevLoop. XP-1 is comprised of a carbon fiber and aluminum aeroshell atop our levitating chassis, which is the business

Scientists have designed and constructed a prototype for a new solar cell that integrates multiple cells stacked into a single device capable of capturing nearly all of the energy in the solar spectrum. The new design converts direct sunlight to electricity with 44.5 percent efficiency, giving it the potential to become the most efficient solar cell in the world. The approach is different from the solar panels one might commonly see on rooftops or in fields. The new device uses concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) panels that employ lenses to concentrate sunlight onto tiny, micro-scale solar cells. Because of their small size—less

Researchers have made improved artificial spider silk, and it is ‘spun’ from a material that is 98% water. The fibers, which resemble miniature bungee cords as they can absorb large amounts of energy, are sustainable, non-toxic and can be made at room temperature. This new method not only improves upon earlier methods of making synthetic spider silk, since it does not require high energy procedures or extensive use of harmful solvents, but it could substantially improve methods of making synthetic fibers of all kinds, since other types of synthetic fibers also rely on high-energy, toxic methods. The fibers are pulled