NextBigFuture.com

Two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are leading companies that are creating new space flight capability. However, adventurous billionaires could be very important to the first manned flights to Mars.

“At this point I’m highly confident that it’s possible to achieve at least 100-fold reduction in the cost of space access,” Musk said after yesterdays demonstration of a reusable first stage booster.

A new company, Gravity has unveiled of its first product, the Daedulus flight suit. The company claims Daedulus should be able to fly at speeds up to several hundreds of miles per hour, although Browning hasn't been able to find a large enough test flight area to get it going that fast just yet.

After 14 years of development, Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Autonomous Mobility Applique System, a kit that allows vehicles and convoys to operate with little or no human input, is a strong candidate for rapid fielding.

Dragonfly Pictures' DP14 Hawk, a dual-rotor unmanned aerial system, could one day evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield. It resembles a miniature CH-47 Chinook helicopter, can carry 430 pounds in its six-foot by 20-inch cargo space for about 2.4 hours. It has a cruising speed of about 82 miles per hour and is capable of flying in crosswinds up to 46 mph.

In collaboration with OpenAI, DeepMind, YC Research, and others, Google has announced the launch of Distill, a new open science journal and ecosystem supporting human understanding of machine learning. Distill is an independent organization, dedicated to fostering a new segment of the research community.

Today Spacex has started the age of reusable rockets. They reused a first stage rocket and then successfully landed it. This was a lower cost rocket. They charged 10% less than an unused rocket.

SpaceX has successfully re-flown a first stage booster from one of its Falcon 9 rockets and they successfully landed it again.

At the moment, EU industry provides about 5% of HPC resources worldwide, but consumes one third of them. In April 2016 in the European Cloud Initiative – part of the EU's strategy to digitise European industry – the Commission urged Member States to step up cooperation in HPC to boost Europe's scientific capabilities and industrial competitiveness. It also committed to develop a high-performance computing ecosystem based on European technology, including low power chips. The goal is to have exascale supercomputers based on European technology in the global top 3 by 2022.

Rice University laboratory of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, in collaboration with NASA, has developed “fuzzy fibers” of silicon carbide that act like Velcro and stand up to the punishment that materials experience in aerospace applications.

The Navy and Missile Defense Agency are leveraging prototyping programs to incrementally pursue complex ideas such as a laser weapon integrated into the Aegis Combat System and a high-power laser for boost-phase kill in missile defense, officials said today at the 2017 Directed Energy Summit.

Intel remains confident about scaling CMOS and extending Moore's law beyond 2024

The autopilot function on newer Tesla cars will function at speeds up to 80 mph. New software to enable the improvement started streaming into its vehicles on Wednesday.

Architects have a system is referred to as the Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS). It calls for placing a large asteroid into orbit over earth, a high strength cable can be lowered towards the surface of earth from which a super tall tower can be suspended.

New technologies, including better land mapping, prefabricated construction and cheaper solar power, have begun bringing the costs of housing down 20 percent to 30 percent, say experts.

Though the exact value of China's spending on its space programs remains shrouded in secrecy, many analysts peg its civilian space budget at around $3 billion annually in recent years, a fraction of the $19.3 billion the United States allocated to NASA in 2016. There a push within China's government to triple spending on space science (from $700 million to $2.1 billion) as well as the emergence of a small but growing group of privately backed space start-ups suggest that both Chinese industry and government see long-term economic benefits in their investments in space technologies.

There is evidence for subsurface oceans within nearly a dozen bodies (planets, asteroids and moons) in the solar system.

Research publish in the Journal Nature indicates the subsurface ocean on Pluto under Sputnik Planitia region could be filled with ammonia, similar to what scientists have detected to one of Pluto's moon, Charon.

Crime does pay — and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. According to a new report from Global Financial Integrity, transnational crime groups currently rake in an estimated $1.6 trillion to $2.2 trillion in annual revenue.

Jeff Bezos has leapt past Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the world’s second-richest person.

Basic development of the level that has been mostly achieved in Europe today will be norm throughout the world by about 2080.

Russia is expected to begin serial production of hypersonic missile Tsirkon or Zircon soon. The missile boasts of speed five times than that of speed of sound. Reports say the missile can travel with a speed of upto 4,600 mph or 7,400 km/h, which makes it almost impossible to be stopped.

Measuring brain activity with precision is essential to developing further understanding of diseases such as epilepsy and disorders that affect brain function and motor control. Neural probes with high spatial resolution are needed for both recording and stimulating specific functional areas of the brain. Now, researchers from the Graphene Flagship have developed a new device for recording brain activity in high resolution while maintaining excellent signal to noise ratio (SNR). Based on graphene field-effect transistors, the flexible devices open up new possibilities for the development of functional implants and interfaces.

Researchers are currently developing the environment-friendly solar cells of the future, which will capture twice as much energy as the cells of today. The trick is to combine two different types of solar cells in order to utilize a much greater portion of the sunlight.

A future when solar cells can be sprayed or printed onto the windows of skyscrapers or atop sports utility vehicles -- and at prices potentially far cheaper than today’s silicon-based panels could begin in 2018.

Rigetti Computing, a leading quantum computing start-up, announced it has raised $64 million in Series A and B funding.

Blue Origin has its first BE-4 rocket engine fully assembled and ready for testing -- and they pushed two more out the door recently.

NASA is leading the next steps into deep space near the moon, where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems needed for challenging missions to deep space destinations including Mars. The area of space near the moon offers a true deep space environment to gain experience for human missions that push farther into the solar system, access the lunar surface for robotic missions but with the ability to return to Earth if needed in days rather than weeks or months.

The Robo-Mate exoskeleton can reduce the effort to lift a load by ten times. It is able to reduce the effort needed to lift a load and protects the spine from heavy lifting and sudden movements.

The partially reusable Falcon 9 and fully reusable Skylon are explored in this episode of Stan Draws Spaceships.

China has almost double the CO2 emissions of the United States for the latest figures from 2015.

"Made in China 2025" is an initiative to comprehensively upgrade Chinese industry. The initiative draws direct inspiration from Germany's "Industry 4.0" plan, which was first discussed in 2011 and later adopted in 2013. The heart of the "Industry 4.0" idea is intelligent manufacturing, i.e., applying the tools of information technology to production. In the German context, this primarily means using the Internet of Things to connect small and medium-sized companies more efficiently in global production and innovation networks so that they could not only more efficiently engage in mass production but just as easily and efficiently customize products.

China's outbound Merger and Acquisition activity surged in 2015 and 2016 with a broad universe of acquirers executing transactions with an increase in pace and deal size.

Novartis found that giving low doses of a drug called everolimus to people over 65 increased their response to flu vaccines. It did, by about 20 percent. Yet behind the test was a bigger question about whether any drug can slow or reverse the symptoms of old age. Novartis’s study on everolimus, which looked at whether the immune system of elderly people could be made to act younger, has been called the “first human aging trial.”

The New Yorker magazine looks at silicon valley's anti aging activities. It covers the usual work and ideas of Aubrey de Grey (SENS repairing 7 kinds of aging related damage) and Ray Kurzweil (Singularity and uploading).

India and Russia have failed to make progress on one of their most prestigious defense deals—the co-development and production of the Sukhoi/HAL Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA), known in India as the Perspective Multi-role Fighter (PMF).

The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk has revealed that he started a brain-computer interface company called Neuralink. The company has no public presence. It will creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain for mind computer interfaces.

The largest dinosaur print ever recorded: a 5-foot-9-inch print from a sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur was found in Australia. The tracks provide the first evidence that spiky tailed stegosaurs lived in the land down under.

MIT plans a one-megawatt demonstration molten salt reactor. It would be incapable of sustaining a fission reaction on its own, the researchers believe they could avoid building a standalone experimental prototype, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission generally requires. That site selection and licensing process can take a decade or longer, so the hope is that this approach could cost hundreds of millions of dollars less and take half as much time to build.

After taking in about 400,000 deposits at $1,000 a piece, Musk ramped up production plans. And then he ramped them up some more. Now, three months from the official start of production, the billionaire Tesla CEO seems to think he can not only match the performance of those top luxury brands (BMW 3 Series and the Mercedes C Class), but outsell them in the U.S., too—in just one year.

Last week, SpaceX announced it has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon in 2018. According to the company, the mission will use SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, a spacecraft designed deliver to large payloads to orbit inside a composite fairing.

SpaceX is now targeting 6 p.m. Thursday for its first re-launch of a used Falcon 9 rocket booster, a mission that aims to loft a commercial communications satellite to orbit from Kennedy Space Center.

The Carnival of Space 502 is up at Urban Astronomer.

Four ASEAN Countries will become trillion dollar economies by 2030 Southeast Asia is expected to be one of the world’s fastest growing regions, with four ASEAN nations – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand – expected to join the ranks of Asia’s group of nations that have a GDP exceeding $1 trillion by 2030. “This will help to increase the geopolitical and economic importance of ASEAN as a political and economic grouping in international diplomacy and the global dialogue on trade, investment and international standards-setting,” Biswas said.

The DC movies have been underwhelming other than the Dark Knight Series and a few of the Batman movies before them and the first Superman movie.

Patients in Norfolk with severe Sepsis were treated with intravenous vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine. In 47 patients with sepsis treated in Norfolk General’s ICU, four died in 2016, an 8 percent mortality rate. Of those four, none died of sepsis but rather the conditions that led to sepsis in the first place. The previous year, 19 of 47 septic patients died, a 40 percent mortality rate. They have written up the study in the Journal Chest.

Uber has taken $12 billion over 15 rounds of investment, and has a reported valuation of nearly $70 billion. There have been several different leaks of Uber's financial data over the years, covering income from 2012 through Q4 2016.

Uber is suspending its self-driving car program after one of its autonomous vehicles was involved in a high-impact crash in Tempe, Arizona, the latest incident for a company reeling from multiple crises.