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Air Force 2018 budget shows United Launch Alliance launch the “unit cost” of a single rocket launch in fiscal year 2020 is $422 million, and $424 million for a year later while Spacex cost $83 to 97 million each. SpaceX sells basic commercial launches of its Falcon 9 rocket for about $65 million. But, for military launches, there are additional range costs and service contracts that add tens of millions of dollars to the total price.

Researchers at Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics are one step closer to producing commercially viable, chemical-free, long-lasting, safe batteries. Professor Baohua Jia and Dr Han Lin lead a team developing the Bolt Electricity Storage Technology (BEST) battery – a graphene oxide-based supercapacitor offering high performance and low-cost energy storage. The technology could, according to one investor, make chemical batteries a thing of the past. “The battery is very thin, it’s carbon based and it’s environmentally friendly,” Professor Jia says. “We filed a patent on the technology last year.” The technology is on the brink of becoming a commercial prototype. Investment in

Oil has extended its slump below $50 a barrel as concerns grow that rising U.S. supplies will offset the production curbs by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies including Russia. Output at major American shale fields will reach a record in July, according to the EIA. West Texas Intermediate for July delivery slid $1.73 to settle at $44.73 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest close since Nov. 14. Total volume traded was about 71 percent above the 100-day average. The U.S., Brazil, Canada and other producers outside OPEC will increase output next year by

Solar power, once so costly it only made economic sense in spaceships, is becoming cheap enough that it will push coal and even natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. That’s the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group estimated solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India. The scenario suggests green energy is taking root more quickly than most experts anticipate. It

Production of the fossil fuel coal dropped by a record amount in 2016, according to BP Plc’s annual review of global energy trends. China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, burned the least coal in six years and use dropped in the U.S to a level last seen in the 1970s, the company’s data show. However, BP indicates that global coal consumption fell by 53 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe), or 1.7%, the second successive annual decline. Coal’s decline has been driven largely by competition from cheap shale gas, prompting skepticism that the country’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement

Researchers have developed a solar paint that can absorb water vapor and split it to generate hydrogen – the cleanest source of energy. The paint contains a newly developed compound that acts like silica gel, which is used in sachets to absorb moisture and keep food, medicines and electronics fresh and dry. But unlike silica gel, the new material, synthetic molybdenum-sulphide, also acts as a semi-conductor and catalyses the splitting of water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen. RMIT lead researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: “We found that mixing the compound with titanium oxide particles leads to a sunlight-absorbing paint that

Spacex is estimating they wil be able to achieve $140,000 per ton for the trips to Mars. If a person plus their luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately drop below $100,000. Cost will be brought down 5 million percent with * fully reusable rocket * orbital refueling * Propellent production on Mars * CH4 / O2 DEEP-CRYO Methalox fuel The Spacex ITS (Interplanetary Transport Systme) rocket booster is really a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 booster. There are a lot of similarities, such as

Rolls-Royce’s director of technology and engineering, John Molyneux gave more details on Rolls-Royce’s new reactor design and the next steps in its development when speaking to the European Young Nuclear Generation Forum event in Manchester, organised by the European Nuclear Society and the UK Nuclear Institute. Still without a publicized name, Rolls-Royce’s design is a pressurized water reactor in a close-coupled four-loop configuration. A team of about 150 people have been working on it for around two years. The first months were taken with major design decisions including the use of a light-water as coolant and moderator and to select

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Made In Space is putting 3D printing into space and is working on other space based manufacturing. They are looking to make large light structures as well. They call these systems Archinaut. It is an alternative approach to the Tether unlimited spiderfab. In November 2015, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) announced its selection of the Made In Space project proposal for utilizing public-private partnerships to advance Tipping Point Technologies. The NASA funded project, designated Archinaut™, is designed to develop the necessary technologies and subsystems which will enable the first additive manufacturing, aggregation, and assembly of large and complex systems

Juergen Schmidhuber is the father of Deep learning Artificial Intelligence. Since age 15 or so, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. His lab’s Deep Learning Neural Networks (NNs) (since 1991) and Long Short-Term Memory have transformed machine learning and AI, Deep Learning since 1991 – Winning Contests in Pattern Recognition and Sequence Learning Through Fast and Deep / Recurrent Neural Networks and are now (2017) available to billions of users through the world’s most valuable public companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. In 2011,

Westinghouse Electric Company yesterday announced the formal launch of its “accident-tolerant fuel solution”, EnCore Fuel, during the company’s Fuel Users’ Group Meeting. EnCore Fuel is intended to offer “design-basis-altering safety, greater uranium efficiency and estimated economic benefits up to hundreds of millions of dollars” to Westinghouse’s nuclear fuel customers. Delivered in two phases, the initial EnCore Fuel product consists of coated cladding containing uranium silicide pellets, which Westinghouse says distinguishes the fuel from other accident-tolerant fuel solutions thanks to their higher density and higher thermal conductivity. “We are leveraging the breadth and depth of our resources, combined with US Department

US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) researchers recently demonstrated that nontoxic liquid metals can create multifunctional, reconfigurable electronics and flexible power connections for nontraditional electronics. The advance may help lead to self-healing electronics, shape-shifting antennas and clothing woven with conductive threads to electronically connect devices. Christopher Tabor, a research scientist in the nanoelectronics branch of AFRL’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, and his team demonstrated that liquid metal alloys could be flowed through channels embedded in structural aerospace components. The result: physically reconfigurable electronic material able to change antenna and electrical circuit characteristics, virtually on demand. The team is in the

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel , makes the case at Tom Dispatch that the USA is behaving much like the Soviet Union before its collapse. Nextbigfuture thinks the USA is not in any danger of collapsing but there is excessive military spending especially when including the spending on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The costs in the wars is increased by the million dollars per soldier that will be spent on increased veteran health costs. The USA would be far stronger now and in the future with less military spending for a decade or more. The USA has spent

Lithium is the hottest commodity on the planet right now, and investors trying to profit from it don’t understand how to invest in it. MOST ARE MAKING A CRITICAL MISTAKE and investing in the wrong companies. Sponsored post That’s because, in this game, lithium GRADE is the key to profitability. Why? First, lithium… Lithium is the most important component of electric vehicles, high-energy batteries, power storage, a vast menu of consumer electronics—and even Nirvana-reaching drugs. Even today’s hyper-growth EV industry is just the tip of the iceberg compared with where it is headed to. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that

China’s developing a hypersonic weapon that has triple the range of existing Chinese air-to-air missiles. The premise: a ramjet engine that can turn already deadly missiles into weapons that have greater range, maneuverability, and speed. In a May 31 report, the Science and Technology Daily announced that the 4th Research Institute of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has twice successfully tested a ramjet engine aimed to power air-to-air missiles. Song said the ramjet engine could more than triple the range of Chinese BVRAAMs. The PL-12’s range, for example, could increase from 62 miles to over nearly 200

Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with 54 per cent of the world’s population residing in urban areas in 2014. By 2050, 66 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban. The world will need to shift to a focus on the degree of urbanization. There will be the same rural definition. There is small towns and suburbs. There is no unified definition small towns where some countries say it is 2500 people or more and other 20,000 people or more. There there will be city dwellers, but there should be splits

A recent study, affiliated with UNIST has engineered a new type of carbon nanomaterials, capable of changing shapes and colors depending on the type of solvents used. Such materials have attracted much attention owing to their unique optical properties and structures. In the study, the joint research team, led by Professor Byung Soo kim and Professor Oh Hoon Kwon has presented a unique design and synthesis of hybrid carbon nanosheets (CNSs), which show a strong solvatochromic behavior with wide color tunability ranging from blue to orange and even to white in various solvents. Hybrid carbon nanosheets (CNSs) in different solvents

Dr Su Metcalfe is a woman who could be on the verge of curing multiple sclerosis. MS, an auto-immune condition which affects 2.3 million people around the world, attacks cells in the brain and the spinal cord, causing an array of physical and mental side effects including blindness and muscle weakness. At the moment there’s no cure, but Su and her company, LIFNano, hope to change that. “Some people get progressive MS, so go straight to the severe form of the disease, but the majority have a relapsing or remitting version,” she says. “It can start from the age of

HERO. LEGEND. KING. Watch Marvel Studio’s Black Panther teaser trailer now. Black panther movie will be out February, 2018.

The Pentagon has their annual report to Congress on the China’s military. The 2017 report is 106 pages long. The Federation of American Scientists have summarized the report. The most sensational nuclear news in the report is the conclusion that China is developing a new strategic nuclear bomber to replace the aging (but upgraded) H-6. If China creates a nuclear strategic bomber sometime in the mid-2020s then it would change China’s nuclear posture into a formal Triad of air-, land- and sea-based nuclear capabilities, similar to U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals. China has an aircraft carrier pier at Hainan Island.

Eight years ago, Ted Adelson’s research group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) unveiled a new sensor technology, called GelSight, that uses physical contact with an object to provide a remarkably detailed 3-D map of its surface. Now, by mounting GelSight sensors on the grippers of robotic arms, two MIT teams have given robots greater sensitivity and dexterity. The researchers presented their work in two papers at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation last week. In one paper, Adelson’s group uses the data from the GelSight sensor to enable a robot to judge the hardness of

MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan. The vehicle can carry 10 to 20 pounds of communications equipment while flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Weighing in at just under 150 pounds, the vehicle is powered by a 5-horsepower gasoline engine and can keep itself aloft for more than five days — longer than any gasoline-powered autonomous aircraft has remained in flight, the researchers say. The team

In 2016, Purdue University and Microsoft have signed a five-year agreement to develop a useable quantum computer. Purdue is one of four international universities in the collaboration. Michael Manfra, Purdue University’s Bill and Dee O’Brien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy, professor of materials engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead the effort at Purdue to build a robust and scalable quantum computer by producing what scientists call a “topological qubit.” The team assembled by Microsoft will work on a type of quantum computer that is expected to be especially robust against interference from its surroundings, a

SureFly is a personal helicopter/VTOL aircraft designed for safe and easy flight. With eight independent motors each driving a single carbon fiber propeller, a backup battery power system, and a ballistic parachute to safely land in the event of emergency, the SureFly provides unparalleled safety for a personal aircraft. SureFly is changing the helicopter industry. Now is the time to discover the affordable, easy-to-pilot, safe answer to personal flight. * Electric Driven Props: 2 props per arm, contra rotating. Eight motors, each driving a single propeller * Piloted Vehicle designed to carry pilot and passenger or pilot and cargo *

Lockheed Martin reports they plan to fly a flight research vehicle (FRV) of the mach 6 hypersonic SR-72 in the early 2020s. They have plans to build an FRV the size of an F-22 that can be flown either manually or remotely. Lockheed Martin reports they plan to fly a flight research vehicle (FRV) of the model in the early 2020s. They have plans to build an FRV the size of an F-22 that can be flown either manually or remotely. If the demo successful then it seems likely a full-sized SR-72 (as big as the SR-71) could be operational

A technology developed by Purdue researchers could provide an “instantly rechargeable” method that is safe, affordable and environmentally friendly for recharging electric and hybrid vehicle batteries through a quick and easy process similar to refueling a car at a gas station. The innovation could expedite the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles by eliminating the time needed to stop and re-charge a conventional electric car’s battery and dramatically reducing the need for new infrastructure to support re-charging stations. John Cushman, Purdue University distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary science and a professor of mathematics, presented the research findings “Redox

Zhe Fei pointed to the bright and dark vertical lines running across his computer screen. This nano-image, he explained, shows the waves associated with a half-light, half-matter quasiparticle moving inside a semiconductor. “These are waves just like water waves,” said Fei, an Iowa State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. “It’s like dropping a rock on the surface of water and seeing waves. But these waves are exciton-polaritons.” Exciton-polaritons are a combination of light and matter. Like all quasiparticles, they’re created within a solid and have physical properties

Stansberry Churchouse makes a bullish case for China’s future economy. They basically make the case for China to sustain GDP growth of 5% per year from now to 2030 and then 4% per year from 2030-2055. China would then have per capita income equal to what the USA has today. The USA would have about double its per capita income today in 2050. At half the US per capita income then China would be at the level of Italy today. By 2022, McKinsey and other research suggests, more than 75 percent of China’s urban consumers will earn 60,000 to 229,000

The World population is about 7.5 billion today and should reach 10 billion in 2050-2055. Africa’s population is 1.25 billion today and will reach 2.5 billion by 2050. The number of people in the Americas will rise by only 223 million to 1.2 billion. Asia will gain about 900 million to 5.3 billion, while Europe registers a decline from 740 million to 728 million. Oceania (which includes Australia and New Zealand) would rise from 40 million to 66 million. India should have the highest population by 2022. The countries ranked by the highest total births and net annual population increase

The use of graphene as an additive can give mechanical and electrical benefits to composite materials, making them multifunctional. In a novel fermentation method, Graphene Flagship researchers have developed graphene-containing rubber foams with unusual mechanical and electrical behaviors: when stretched, the composite foams expand and become more conductive. These unexpected properties could be promising for use in smart filters and medical devices. Published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the research was performed by researchers at the University of Perugia, Italy and the University of Trento, Italy, in collaboration with Graphene Flagship partner Queen Mary University of London, UK. The

Adam West, the iconic star of the campy 1960s “Batman” TV series, died Friday at the age of 88 in Los Angeles after a short battle with leukemia. Although he was already immortalized as the Caped Crusader, a younger generation had embraced West for his role voicing the corrupt, crackpot Mayor Adam West in the animated comedy TV series “Family Guy.” The “Batman” series spawned a 1966 movie version and an array of merchandise, including lunchboxes, dolls and toy Batmobiles. Both nights of “Batman” were rated in the top-10 list of shows for the 1965-66 season. But as with any

EU Graphene Flagship researchers from ICFO (The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona) have shown that it is possible to integrate graphene into a CMOS integrated circuit. In their paper published in the journal Nature Photonics they combine this graphene-CMOS device with quantum dots to create an array of photodetectors, producing a high resolution image sensor. When used as a digital camera this device is able to sense UV, visible and infrared light at the same time. This is just one example of how this device might be used, others include in microelectronics, sensor arrays and low-power photonics. “The development

J.P. Brouwer, along with his father and two brothers at Sunalta Farms in central Alberta, runs the first commercial dairy farm contributing data to the Genome Canada project. One part of the project aims to increase feed efficiency—growing cows as big as possible with as little food as possible—and reduce emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 30 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. Farming livestock – cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens – contributes around 6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) to the atmosphere each year. Farm animals are responsible

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has two NASA grants. Princeton satellite systems and Princeton Plasma Physics Lab will work on the two projects. Phase I STTRs of $125,000 each will run for one year, at which point we have the opportunity to propose Phase II work up to $750,000. 1. High Efficiency RF Heating for Small Nuclear Fusion Rocket Engines 2. Superconducting Coils for Small Nuclear Fusion Rocket Engines The aim for the fusion drives is to get about 1 kilowatt of power per 2.2 lbs. (1 kilogram) of mass. A 10-megawatt fusion rocket would therefore weigh about 11 tons (10

The U.S. Air Force has grounded 55 of its F-35 Joint Strike Fighters at Arizona’s Luke Air Force base following five incidents in which pilots experienced symptoms of oxygen deprivation. The pilots “reported physiological incidents while flying” but a backup oxygen system turned on, allowing them to land safely.

What new trends will emerge in the next several years with the potential for explosive growth in about five years’ time? The Churchill Club’s most anticipated events of the year: the 19th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends debate provided some answers. Speakers: Mike Abbott, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers Steve Jurvetson, Partner, DFJ Rebecca Lynn, Co-founder and General Partner, Canvas Ventures Sarah Tavel, Partner, Benchmark Hans Tung, Managing Partner, GGV Capital Masters of Ceremonies: Quentin Hardy, Head of Editorial, Google Cloud Mike Perlis, CEO, Forbes Media Looking ahead to 2022, Jurvetson now envisions a world that extends intelligence to

DARPA’s Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operations (N-ZERO) program has been working to overcome the power limitations of persistent sensing by developing wireless, event-driven sensing capabilities that would allow physical, electromagnetic and other sensors to remain dormant—effectively asleep yet aware—until an event of interest awakens them. To achieve these goals, the program intends to develop underlying technologies to continuously and passively monitor the environment and activate an electronic circuit only upon detection of a specific signature, such as the presence of a particular vehicle type or radio communications protocol. N-ZERO seeks to exploit the energy in signal signatures to

A subsidiary of SoftBank has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG). The transaction aligns with SoftBank’s investments in paradigm-shifting technologies and its vision of catalyzing the next wave of smart robotics. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., said, “Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities. Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are

DARPA is funding a non-von-Neumann processor called a HIVE — Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit with $80 million. HIVE is not von Neumann because of the sparseness of its data and its ability to simultaneously perform different processes on different areas of memory simultaneously,” Trung said. “This non-von-Neumann approach allows one big map that can be accessed by many processors at the same time, each using its own local scratch-pad memory while simultaneously performing scatter-and-gather operations across global memory. DARPA’s new arithmetic-processing-unit (APU) optimized for graph analytics plus the new memory architecture chips are specified to use 1,000-times less power than

PolarityTE™, Inc. (NASDAQ: COOL) today announced pre-clinical results demonstrating that the Company’s lead product, SkinTE™, regenerated full-thickness, organized skin and hair follicles in third degree burn wounds. The findings represent the first known successful regeneration of skin and hair in full-thickness swine wound models, the standard animal model for human skin. The Company expects to initiate a human clinical trial evaluating the autologous homologous SkinTE™ construct in the third quarter of 2017. In pre-clinical models of full-thickness burns and wounds, SkinTE™ demonstrated scar-less healing, hair follicle growth, immediate complete wound coverage, and the progressive regeneration of all skin layers including

The Spacex Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world that will be currently flying. There have been more powerful rockets but they are no longer flying. The Falcon heavy will be capable of launching 64 metric tons into Low Earth Orbit. This was relatively recent improvement from improved design and improved engines. Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, delivered more payload to orbit than Falcon Heavy. The Russian Energia rocket had the capacity to launch 100 tons into low earth but only had two launches which did not launch large payloads. The

Many people who use computers and other digital devices are aware that all the words and images displayed on their monitors boil down to a sequence of ones and zeros. But few likely appreciate what is behind those ones and zeros: microscopic arrays of “magnetic moments” (imagine tiny bar magnets with positive and negative poles). When aligned in parallel in ferromagnetic materials such as iron, these moments create patterns and streams of magnetic bits—the ones and zeros that are the lifeblood of all things digital. These magnetic bits are stable against perturbations, such as from heat, by a form of

Boeing and Huntington Ingalls Industries are teaming on the design and production of Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) in support of the U.S. Navy’s Extra Large UUV program. “This partnership provides the Navy a cost-effective, low-risk path to meet the emergent needs that prompted the Navy’s Advanced Undersea Prototyping program,” said Darryl Davis, president, Boeing Phantom Works. “We are combining Boeing’s preeminent UUV maritime engineering team with our nation’s leading shipbuilder and Navy technical services company to get operational vehicles to the Navy years ahead of the standard acquisition process.” Boeing is currently testing its newest and

China plans to spend $360 billion on renewable energy by 2020. China has built the world’s largest floating solar farm with 166,000 panels on a lake created when a nearby mine collapsed. While not an entirely unique idea — similar facilities are working in Japan, the U.K. and Israel — the project’s scale represents a step forward for China in shaping the future of energy. In Anhui, Sungrow’s 40-megawatt solar farm in a district of Huainan city called Panji features panels fixed to floats on the surface of a lake that formed after the ground surrounding an old coal mine

Japanese and German researchers have found evidence that suggests the middle of Earth’s mantle holds as much water as the planet’s oceans. If scientists can prove without doubt that the middle mantle is filled with water, it calls into question theories that suggest water arrived on Earth from comets. An open question for solid-earth scientists is the amount of water in Earth’s interior. The uppermost mantle and lower mantle contain little water because their dominant minerals, olivine and bridgmanite, have limited water storage capacity. In contrast, the mantle transition zone (MTZ) at a depth of 410 to 660 km is

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has predicted that the global economy is set to grow 3.5 percent in 2017, followed by an increase to 3.6 percent in 2018 as confidence is increasing and investment and trade are picking up from low levels. Although the OECD upped its forecasts for global growth for 2017, it downgraded its estimates for the United States, despite a weaker dollar boosting exports and tax cuts supporting household business investment. The growth forecast for U.S. was downgraded to 2.1 percent this year and 2.4 percent next year, down from estimates in March of 2.4

The US Army has selected the Israeli Trophy APS anti-missile system for the M1 Tank and other military vehicles. The Trophy system, designed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, is the only APS in testing that has seen combat and actually defeated advanced anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) threats. The Army is also evaluating the Israeli-made Iron Fist APS and the U.S.-made Iron Curtain. “We intend to field those to first responding units, and we will eventually field them throughout the force for the entire total Army — Guard, Reserve and active,” Milley said. Trophy intercepts and destroys incoming missiles and rockets