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Professor Zaza, University of Georgia, hase extended the idea of Freeman Dyson and has shown that a supercivilization has to use ring-like megastructures around pulsars instead of a spherical shell. He reexamined the same problem in the observational context and he shows that facilities of modern IR telescopes (VLTI and WISE) might efficiently monitor the nearby zone of the solar system and search for the IR Dyson-rings up to distances of the order of 0.2kpc, corresponding to the current highest achievable angular resolution, 0.001mas. In this case the total number of pulsars in the observationally reachable area is about 64

UBS analysts tore down the Chevy Bolt, the world’s first mass-market electric vehicle (EV) with a range well above 200 miles. They gained key insights to understanding the content and profitability of EVs, especially Tesla’s upcoming Model 3. Their findings expand beyond the autos industry to include technology, capital goods, chemicals and commodities. Tesla to lose $2,800 on entry-level versions of its soon to be introduced Model 3 but think customers will opt for extra cost options that will raise the average selling price to $41,000 — $6,000 more than the base price. Tesla will be able to break even

Computational models and simulations can be enormously helpful when designing complex military systems such as new aerospace vehicles and engines, reducing development costs and times. However, realistic, high-fidelity models require enormous amounts of computing power in order to be able to accommodate all of the different factors that may affect predictive accuracy. To mitigate this computational cost, researchers often use simplified models, but these models contain assumptions, ambiguities, incomplete information, and inputs that vary unpredictably. This problem is exacerbated when these uncertainties interact with each other in a complex system. As a result, engineers typically rely on extensive testing to

Stanford University researchers funded by DARPA’s Neuro Function, Activity, Structure, and Technology (Neuro-FAST) program have developed new optical imaging and analysis techniques that allowed them to decode the neural activity of awake mice engaged in an adaptive, decision-making task. The findings of the Stanford team, made in collaboration with researchers at the California Institute of Technology and detailed this week in the journal Neuron, give researchers new insight into how the mammalian brain coordinates neural activity to complete voluntary behaviors. The team’s overall results advance DARPA’s goal of building a knowledge base and toolkit with which the neurotechnology community can

Brillouin Energy has been working on low energy nuclear reactions aka cold fusion aka Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) process for many years. Nextbigfuture has covered them for many years. In 2015, Nextbigfuture covered what a 35 page third party analysis of Brillouin energy systems. There has been some work with Brillouin and SRI. I have not seen a final report from SRI where there was any definitive confirmation. There has been no commercial product yet. There has been many papers from what appears to be sober researchers trying to determine what is happening and if beyond-chemical energy is being

For years, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues have been waiting for the mysterious light dips to happen at Tabby’s star so that they could collect more data and try to get to the bottom of the mystery. The star is finally dimming by about 1% per day for the last two days. It has dimmed 2% so far and could continue to dim. One of the proposed possibilities for the dimming had been an alien Dyson swarm. ALERT:@tsboyajian's star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please! — Jason

. But less than four months after Trump took office, Mattis said the operational and tactical difference has been clear.Two significant changes resulted from President Trump’s review of our findings.

Supply chain optimization software vendor ServicePower can handle optimizations problems that need to analyze up to 1 million variables. Each variable is represented by a virtual Qubit. They simulate their quantum annealing using parallelization on standard server farms using normal computer hardward to make up for the slower speed compared to D-Wave’s specialized quantum hardware. DWave’s quantum hardware currently has 2048 qubits which is unable to handle the larger simultaneous optimizations. Dwave has been doubling the qubits every year. ServicePower is also adapting the algorithm to other NP-Hard problems in the financial sector, machine learning, simulations of molecular interactions, protein

The Google IO keynote discussed on device AI. It is at about 1:22 in the video of the Keynote. – Google is making tensorflow lite (open source machine learning) to put AI onto devices – It will have new hardware acceleration of AI for android smartphones and tablets. DSPs designed for neural network inference and training – On device next generation speech processing, visual search and augmented reality.

The Air Force Research Lab are working on a lighter Mother of All bombs which still has similar explosive power. The Advanced Ordnance Technologies program will make bombs structured to be lighter by using 3D-printed reconstructed loads within the bomb instead of in the casing — plus distributed blast yields, said Dr. John Corley, the core technical competency lead for ordnance sciences at AFRL. They will also use 3D printing for distributed fusing for more survivable bombs and greater options and control for the explosions. Separating the fuse from the case could make the bomb more flexible of when it

The US Navy railgun program is making great technical progress according to the Office of Naval Research program manager Tom Boucher. The Navy is now working towards installing railguns at permanent land-based test sites which would provide more and better data for fewer dollars than an ad hoc installation aboard a repurposed fast transport. New 32-megajoule railguns have been installed and fired in Virginia and New Mexico. White Sands (New Mexico) tests the long-range performance of the projectile, Dahlgren (Virginia) will work on the weapon itself. Previous test weapons were only firing a few times per day. The Dahlgren team

Nextbigfuture talked to an attendee of 2017 Google IO and he reported that Google will be putting mini versions of the second generation TPU (tensor processing unit) into all new google cellphones. The TPU is optimized for artificial intelligence and deep learning. The new TPU has 180 teraflops of processing power. It was not revealed how powerful the mini versions would be but they would need to use less power and no cooling. The server versions use about 80 watts of power and have cooling units that were very tall.

China’s Navy will have a larger number of ships and submarines than the US Navy in 2030. China’s navy will be approaching 500 ships by 2030 and the US Navy will have between 300 and 350 depending upon which budgets get adopted. China’s navy will be a Blue-Water Naval Power by 2030: China is rapidly transforming itself from a continental power with a focus on its near seas to a great maritime power with a two-ocean focus. The PLAN is looking beyond the san hai – the Yellow Sea, South China Sea, and East China Sea – and out toward

1. India has approved the construction of ten indigenously designed pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR). India approved the construction of ten 700 MWe units in a “significant decision to fast-track India’s domestic nuclear power program”. The Cabinet’s announcement did not give any timeline or locations for the new plants, but said the project would result in a “significant augmentation” of the country’s nuclear generation capacity. India has 6780 MWe of installed nuclear capacity from 22 operational reactors with another 6700 MWe expected to come on stream over the next five years, the cabinet noted. It said the ten new units

1. Chandra X-ray space telescope blog – Observatories Combine to Crack Open the Crab Nebula Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the powerful X-ray glow as seen by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. And, in between, the Hubble Space Telescope’s crisp visible-light view and the infrared perspective of the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other

US Special Ops is looking to put Captain America Supersoldiers into HALO exoskeleton Armor. Amendment 15 of their BAA for Advancement of Technologies for Use by Special Operations Forces talks about wanting to enhance soldier performance with drugs and more. Innovative solutions that will optimize human performance, reduce recovery time, and increase peak performance sustainability, including increased endurance, strength, energy, agility, enhanced senses, provide restorative effects of sleep, and enhance tolerance to environmental extremes. The technologies can be demonstrated through studies that provide proof of concepts or through solutions demonstrated in humans that quantify operational performance improvements. Technologies should not

Star Trek Discovery is set ten years before the first Kirk and Spock space mission. The CBS All Access Original Series arrives this Fall. Set roughly ten years before the events of the original Star Trek, the series follows the crew of the USS Discovery as they discover new worlds and civilizations, while exploring the franchise’s signature contemporary themes. The season-long storyline revolves around “an incident and an event in Star Trek history that’s been talked about but never been explored From Emmy Award-winning executive producer and creator Seth MacFarlane (FAMILY GUY, “Ted”) and directed by Jon Favreau (“The Jungle

The cheapest advertised price to launch people to LEO is a bit over $26 million/seat on a Falcon 9/Dragon which includes a stay at a Bigelow space station , also in development. Current estimates are that space colonists would need about 17 tons per person for their share of space station habitat. The cheapest advertised price today for delivering mass to orbit is the Falcon Heavy, in development, at $90 million for 53 tons to LEO , or $1.7 million per ton. For 17 tons that is about $29 million. Combining these two costs gives us (rounding up)

Dong Energy has built over 1000 large offshore wind turbines. They will be building new taller and bigger wind turbines. They will go to 195 meters tall and 8 Megawatts and larger. In the United States today, a loose convention draws the lower limit for a skyscraper building at 150 meters. An extremely tall skyscraper, particularly one that is taller than 300 meters (1,000 ft), is sometimes colloquially referred to as a supertall. Hotels tend to have one floor every 3.1 meters and office buildings one floor every 3.9 meters. A 195 meter hotel would have about 63 floors. Dong

Japan is restarting unit 4 of its Takahama nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture. The reactor – which together with unit 3 has been offline since March 2016 – is expected to re-enter commercial operation next month. The company said the 830 MWe (net) pressurised water reactor (PWR) was restarted at 3.00pm today and is expected to achieve criticality tomorrow. Kansai plans to resume electricity generation at Takahama 4 and reconnect it to the grid on 22 May “as the final stage of the periodic outage inspection following various types of tests”. It added that “full-scale operation” of the unit

HPE announced that it has created the largest single-memory computing system the world has ever seen, capable of holding 160 terabytes of data. In 2014, HPE introduced The Machine research project—the largest and most complex research project in our company’s history—designed to deliver the world’s first Memory-Driven Computing architecture. They believe this new computer will enable critical leaps in performance, allowing us to extract insights from data like never before. In 2016, we delivered the first prototype. And, in just six months, they have scaled the prototype 20 fold. HPE has invested billions (pretty all of their research budget) and

China One Belt, One Road is promising more than $1 trillion in infrastructure and spanning more than 60 countries from now to 2021. * power plants in Pakistan are part of an expected $46 billion worth of investment * tunnels and bridges and a 260-mile railway in Laos is a $6 billion project * hundreds of other projects across Asia, Africa and Europe * a third of the $23.7 billion cost of the UK Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant * about $50 billion in investment has been deployed so far The Asian Development Bank estimated that emerging Asian economies

Currently there are 3486 confirmed exoplanets (mainly from the Kepler Space telescope survey) and there are 4496 exoplanet candidates and 581 multiplanet systems. We are within about 11 months of the launch of the TESS space telescope. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range

Canada nuclear fusion energy startup General Fusion is working with Microsoft to analyse its fusion energy experimental results using cloud-based big data techniques. General Fusion will work with Microsoft’s Developer Experience Team to build a new, cutting-edge computational platform that will enable General Fusion to mine over 100 terabytes of data from the records of its 150,000 experiments. General Fusion injects plasmas into a liquid metal vortex and then creates a compression shockwave using massive physical pistons.

Simon Fried, Nano Dimension CBO, describes the next five years of industrial 3D printing. It will be meeting more needs. In mechanical terms, that means 3D printing will use a broader range of materials or a higher quality of materials. We also expect greater flexibility in combining materials – creating objects made of different types of metals, for instance, within the same print. Or printing metals and polymers, or metals and ceramics in one print job. With that capability, for instance, companies can begin deploying addition functionality within parts, such as electrical capabilities to mechanical objects. That’s the case with

1. Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet and Lyft are teaming up to road test autonomous cars in a potential challenge to Uber Technologies. In its statement, Lyft said Waymo holds ‘‘today’s best self-driving technology.’’ The two plan to work together to bring autonomous vehicles into the mainstream with pilot projects and product development. Lyft is Uber’s biggest rival in the United States and the second-largest ride-hailing provider in the country. 2. A federal judge barred Uber from using technology taken by an X-Waymo engineer. This will hurt the Uber’s self-driving car research. Waymo showed “compelling

An experimental device lets you whisper in the ear of someone up to 30 meters away. The wearable tech uses ultrasound to beam a speaker’s words directly to a targeted individual without anyone else overhearing what is being said. It currently requires a large speaker mounted on your forehead and the electrodes stuck around your mouth. There is further investigation in increasing its reach with more powerful directional speakers and make it work underwater with water-coupled ultrasonic transducers. The accuracy in discriminating words still has to be improved if these systems had to be used in real scenarios, they hope

Popular Mechanics talks about the difficulty, cost and delays of switching the design of the Gerald Ford Carrier to old and reliable steam launchers. The Nimitz aircraft carriers are still more advanced than any aircraft carrier from Russia, China or any other country. Nimitz carriers cost about $8.5 billion versus the $12+ billion of the Gerald Ford carrier. The last Nimitz was launched in 2006. It was the George H.W. Bush. If the Gerald Ford designs were not truly ready for another ten years to work out technology and manufacturing issues, then the US Navy could continue to work out

NASA has delayed the first launch of its heavy-payload rocket until 2019 and decided against an idea floated by the White House to put astronauts aboard the capsule that is set to fly around the moon, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had already delayed the original launch target of Dec 2016 (set in 2010) to November 2018. The rocket will send the deep-space Orion capsule on a high lunar orbit. Adding systems to support a crew would have cost NASA $600 million to $900 million more and would likely have delayed the

The Bladerunner sequel is coming out October 6, 2017. Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.

Al Globus and Joe Strout have an analysis that space settlements in low (~500 km) Earth equatorial orbits may not require any radiation shielding at all. This is based on a careful analysis of requirements and extensive simulation of radiation effects. This radically reduces system mass and has profound implications for space settlement, as extraterrestrial mining and manufacturing are no longer on the critical path to the first settlements, although they will be essential in later stages. It also means the first settlements can evolve from space stations, hotels, and retirement communities in relatively small steps. This huge reduction in

Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. In October 2015, Moon Express announced that it had signed the worlds’ first multi-mission launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 lunar missions between 2017 and 2020. Moon Express sees the moon as critical for humanity to become a multi-world species, and that our sister world, the Moon, is an eighth continent holding vast resources than can help us enrich and secure our future. MoonEx had been planning to place the International Lunar Observatory (ILO)

On May 3, 2017, US Air Force senior leaders met to consider options to accelerate hypersonics research and development to break even more speed barriers and ensure continued technological superiority. Hypersonics refers to flying at five times the speed of sound, also known as “Mach 5,” or higher. From an Air Force perspective, it is a game-changing capability which can amplify many of the enduring attributes of airpower including speed, range, flexibility and precision. “We must push the boundaries of technology in every area,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. “Our adversaries aren’t standing still. They

Weekly US oil production is back to 9.3 million barrels per day and is nearing the 9.6 million barrel peak in mid-2015. OPEC raised its outlook for U.S. production growth by 285,000 barrels a day to 820,000 a day in 2017. The number of drilling rigs operating in the country has more than doubled since May, data from Baker Hughes Inc. shows, as shale explorers emerge from a two-year rout buoyed by the initial price gains after OPEC announced its plan. OPEC members are still sticking with their pledge to reduce output, the report showed. Production from all 13 members

SpaceX said it plans to launch thousands of satellites on Falcon 9 rockets beginning in 2019 to establish what would one day become a global broadband internet constellation. Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice president of satellite government affairs, told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that the company is aiming to launch 4,425 small satellites to low Earth orbit beginning in 2019, with full deployment expected by 2024. All would launch in phases on Falcon 9 rockets. Spacexwill start testing the satellites themselves, launch one prototype before the end of the year and another during the “early months” of

SpaceX is on track for a Monday evening (May 15, 2017) launch of an Inmarsat-5 communications satellite. If the launch is successful then it would be the sixth Spacex launch in four months. Spacex could launch again at the beginning of June a cargo supply mission to the International Space Station. SpaceX could be on pace for as many as 18 to 24 launches this year. Spacex may end up having six booster relaunches this year.

The carcass of a giant sea creature has washed up in Indonesia. It was originally thought to be a type of giant squid but it seems to have bones and a fin. This would suggest it is some kind of whale. The video seems to show a dead whale which has grown almost unidentifiable because of decay. This shows that if zombie whales existed that they would be quite scary.

China has lent $100 billion so far for One Belt and One Road projects. The Hassyan clean coal project in the United Arab Emirates received two loans worth $2.3 billion, a gas transporter based in Azerbaijan secured $600 million and Pakistan won $400 million. Other debtor countries include Oman, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and Tajikistan. Thomas Hugger, chief executive officer and founder of Asia Frontier Capital Ltd., expects Pakistan to gain “significantly” from the initiative, thanks to the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, which has lured $46 billion in investment commitments from China. “Besides Pakistan, the Central Asian economies especially Kazakhstan should benefit.

Heartbeat measurement app Cardiogram and the University of California, San Francisco used the Apple Watch for 97 percent accurate detection the most common abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an AI-based algorithm. The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch heart rate data. About a quarter of strokes are caused by an

China 2020 urbanization plan centers around megacities. Jing-Jin-Ji is designed to hold 110 million people and merge outer parts of Beijing, Hebei and Tianjin. In April, China announced plans to create Xiongan, an enormous new city 60 miles south of Beijing which sits within the Jing-Jin-Ji urban megaregion. While details are still emerging about the future of Xiongan – which will cover the counties of Xiongxian, Rongcheng and Anxin, as well as the Baiyangdian wetlands – reports envisage a city that will grow to three times the size of New York. It will incorporate universities, institutions and residents from the

China has conducted a number of weapons tests, which included the launch of a new missile type in the northeastern Bohai Sea close to the Korean Peninsula, the Information Bureau of China’s Ministry of National Defense announced on May 9. Speculations about the missiles test fired range from * a new variant of the intermediate-range DF-26 ballistic missile, the DF-26B * a new submarine-launched ballistic missile dubbed the JL-3 * a DF-21D medium range ballistic missile

In a Nature Communications publication, the results of the collaboration between scientists of the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), the University of Parma, ISIS and the University of Manchester, the (Cr7Ni)2 dimer has been used as a benchmark system to demonstrate the capability of ‘four-dimensional’ inelastic neutron scattering to investigate entanglement between molecular qubits. By utilising high-quality single crystals and the full capabilities of the time-of-flight spectrometer IN5, the team was able to demonstrate and quantify the entanglement through the huge amount of data they were able to extract from the 4D phase space (Qx,Qy,Qz,E), where Q is the momentum-transfer vector and

Elon Musks Boring company wants to do just three things to get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and beyond that. 1. Cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we’re attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and

Rethinkx has a new report Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the ICE Vehicle and Oil Industries. By 2030, 95% of U.S. car miles traveled will be in self–‐driving, electric, shared vehicles. Nextbigfuture has discussed similar concepts in prior articles. Rethinkx has put together a comprehensive report and analysis. Nextbigfuture also interviewed the authors. Tony Seba: Report co-author, RethinkX co-founder, author of “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation,” and instructor at Stanford Continuing Studies. James Arbib, report co-author, RethinkX co-founder, technology investor and philanthropist. It is the combination of self driving cars, electric cars and

NVIDIA today launched Volta™ — the world’s most powerful GPU computing architecture, created to drive the next wave of advancement in artificial intelligence and high performance computing. The company also announced its first Volta-based processor, the NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 data center GPU, which brings extraordinary speed and scalability for AI inferencing and training, as well as for accelerating HPC and graphics workloads. “Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest technology advances in human history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, who unveiled Volta at his GTC keynote. “It will automate intelligence and spur a wave of social