NextBigFuture.com

Nextbigfuture has surpassed 100 million cumulative pageviews.

Some 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in Alaska, marking the biggest onshore discovery in the U.S. in three decades.

A possible venue for big announcements is for the “One Belt, One Road” summit of more than 20 leaders in May. It will be hosted in Beijing by President Xi to showcase his most important foreign policy innovation to date.

Several companies will collectively be launching about 20,000 satellites over the next few years. SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, O3b Networks and Theia Holdings — all told the FCC they have plans to field constellations of V-band satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits to provide communications services in the United States and elsewhere. So far the V-band spectrum of interest, which sits directly above Ka-band from about 37 GHz to the low 50 GHz range, has not been heavily employed for commercial communications services.

There is a $19.5 billion funding bill that has been approved by the US congress. This is a slight increase from last years $19.3 billion funding.

Under newly proposed California self-driving car rules, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles will let companies test autonomous vehicles that lack the steering wheel. Three years ago Google's self driving car project (now Waymo) introduced a self driving car with no steering wheel.

Tests of the second-stage engine for Russia’s fifth-generation PAK FA fighter jet have been delayed a year and will start in 2018. Previously trials of the PAK FA main engine were due to begin in 2017, with the entire project to be completed by 2020.

Roughly 25 out of 30 panels installed on it broke within a week after developers pumped $3.9 million into it over 6.5 years of development.

Today, the global middle class, numbering about 3.2 billion in 2016, may be considerably larger — by about 500 million people than in 2010. Within a few years over half of the world’s population could have middle-class or rich lifestyles for the first time ever. The most dynamic segment of the global middle-class market is at the lower end of the scale, among new entrants with comparatively low per capita spending. Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institute has provided a detailed analysis.

Researchers at the Guangzhou Medical University have used CRISPR gene editing on viable human embryos. Two other research groups in the UK and Sweden are working on CRISPR-editing viable human embryos. The New Scientist also notes rumors that three or four studies on the use of CRISPR in human embryos have been completed but not yet published.

China has a new larger Type 055 destroyer. I has an estimated displacement of 12,000 tons and and overall length of 180 meters. The latest USA Arleigh Burke Flight IIA weighs in at 9,200 tons, with an overall length of 155 meters. The proposed Flight III upgrade adds an estimated 600 tons displacement without any changes to LOA or beam dimensions.

China's state media reports that that the fifth-generation J-20 stealth fighter has been put into active military service and this is two years earlier than previously expected. China's military has not confirmed this.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) announced today that it has developed a High Energy Pulsed Power Container (HEPPC) that provides twice the energy density than existing railgun pulsed power solutions. The HEPPC can reduce the number of pulsed power containers required to launch projectiles or hybrid missiles from a railgun weapon system, providing greater flexibility for future Navy and Army railgun applications.

LLNL researchers and their colleagues are developing a new technique for creating powerful magnetic fields inside NIF hohlraums. Simulations and experiments have shown that magnetized hohlraums could significantly enhance NIF’s implosion performance.

During a House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, ranking member Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) asked the panelists – representing the studies conducted by a Navy team, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the MITRE Corporation – what the first investments ought to be to achieve the teams’ visions of a future Navy fleet.

China is developing an advanced new rocket. This spaceship is expected to be able to be operable both in the lower orbit of Earth, as well as capable of landing humans on the moon.

Physicist Edward Boyda of St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga and colleagues fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into the D-Wave 2X processor, which contains 1152 qubits. The researchers asked the computer to consider dozens of features—hue, saturation, even light reflectance—to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree.

For artificial general intelligence (AGI) it would be efficient if multiple users trained the same giant neural network, permitting parameter reuse, without catastrophic forgetting. PathNet is a first step in this direction. It is a neural network algorithm that uses agents embedded in the neural network whose task is to discover which parts of the network to re-use for new tasks. Agents are pathways (views) through the network which determine the subset of parameters that are used and updated by the forwards and backwards passes of the backpropogation algorithm. During learning, a tournament selection genetic algorithm is used to select pathways through the neural network for replication and mutation. Pathway fitness is the performance of that pathway measured according to a cost function.

Iran test-fired Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missiles about 155 miles away, destroying a targeted floating barge in one case. Iran tested a medium-range ballistic missile in February, in apparent violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution; the incident led to U.S. economic sanctions against 13 people and 12 businesses in Iran.

China’s foreign minister urged North Korea to halt its nuclear activities and the U.S. to suspend nearby military drills, as a way to quell growing tensions and get Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table.

Structures seem to be microfossils formed around hydrothermal vents as much as 4.28 billion years ago have been found embedded in crystal. Stalks of iron-rich minerals, each a fraction the size of an eyelash, may be evidence of the earliest life-forms to inhabit the newborn planet Earth. The tiny hematite tubes are as much as 4.28 billion years old, according to the scientists announcing the find, and they are stunningly similar to structures produced by microbes living around undersea hydrothermal vents.

The International Potato Center (CIP) launched a series of experiments to discover if potatoes can grow under Mars atmospheric conditions and thereby prove they are also able to grow in extreme climates on Earth. This Phase Two effort of CIP’s proof of concept experiment to grow potatoes in simulated Martian conditions began on February 14, 2016 when a tuber was planted in a specially constructed CubeSat contained environment built by engineers from University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima based upon designs and advice provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Ames Research Center (NASA ARC), California. Preliminary results are positive.

In October, Adair demonstrated a new technology she thinks could democratize access to gene therapy. Tweaking a cell-processing device sold by German instrument maker Miltenyi, she mostly automated the process of preparing blood cells with a gene therapy for HIV that her center is also testing. Cells dripped in one end came out the other 30 hours later with little oversight needed. She even added wheels. Adair calls the mobile lab “gene therapy in a box.”

Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, a MIT system can detect if a person notices an error as a robot performs an object-sorting task. The team’s novel machine-learning algorithms enable the system to classify brain waves in the space of 10 to 30 milliseconds.

Softbank is about to sell 25 percent of ARM — roughly $8 billion — to a new, Saudi-backed $100 billion investment fund, the Financial Times reported today. The Japanese shelled out $32 billion to purchased ARM only six months ago. In the global semiconductor industry. Mubadala (Abu Dhabi / UAE state-backed), which owns 100 percent of Globalfoundries, reportedly wanted the $100 billion Vision Fund to own a portion of ARM.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan adopted a sweeping policy of modernization in pursuit of parity with the industrial West, under the slogan fukoku kyōhei: “enrich the country, strengthen the military.” Growth in Japan’s per capita GDP between 1870 and 1940 reflects the economic success of this campaign, which continued through the prewar era. As the graph indicates, Japan was steadily catching up with Britain and the United States, two of the world’s most advanced industrial economies. Japan’s per capita GDP grew from 23% of Britain’s and 30% of America’s in 1870 to 42% of Britain’s and 41% of America’s on the eve of the Pacific War.

Russia is developing a 100 megaton nuclear bomb that is put into a robotic submarine drone. It would explode in bay or off of a coast and trigger and megatsunami. It might also include cobalt 60 to spread radioactive fallout in the tsunami. Some have questioned the 400+ page analysis in the Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions by the US Department of Defense by Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. The report, published in 1996, exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the ocean waves created by nuclear explosions.

The South China Morning Post reports that China will not adopt highly advanced electromagnetic take-off technology on its second domestically built aircraft carrier but instead rely on a conventional steam system, naval experts say.

The U.S. Navy has 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. That's below the number mandated by Federal law, but the Navy was granted a waiver while it waited for the Gerald R. Ford to enter the fleet. The Ford has seen repeated delays. The Navy expects Ford to enter the fleet this Spring, but hasn't yet set a commissioning date.

Russia will start modernizing its sole aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov before July. The ageing warship will undergo a massive refit that will modernize her problematic and unreliable propulsion system along with other upgrades. The exact plan will be determined over the next 6 months.

Speaking at the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum, Dr Brad Perkins, chief medical officer, Human Longevity, said: “Right now the most daunting and expensive human health problem that the world is facing is age related chronic disease. Our hypothesis at Human Longevity is that genomics and the technologies that support its application in medicine and drug discovery are going to be the next accelerant in extending a high performance human lifespan

a former Tesla top manager Peter Carlsson will build Europe's largest battery factory - in Sweden. The project is estimated to cost 40 billion krona (US$4.4 billion) and is expected to create thousands of jobs.

Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks began its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

Neuromorphic (brain-like brain inspired chips) chips require far less power to process AI algorithms. For example, one neuromorphic chip made by IBM contains five times as many transistors as a standard Intel processor, yet consumes only 70 milliwatts of power. An Intel processor would use anywhere from 35 to 140 watts, or up to 2000 times more power.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have—in just two years—nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels.

Researchers propose a space-based gravitational wave detector consisting of two spatially separated, drag-free satellites sharing ultra-stable optical laser light over a single baseline. Each satellite contains an optical lattice atomic clock, which serves as a sensitive, narrowband detector of the local frequency of the shared laser light. A synchronized two-clock comparison between the satellites will be sensitive to the effective Doppler shifts induced by incident gravitational waves (GWs) at a level competitive with other proposed space-based GW detectors, while providing complementary features. The detected signal is a differential frequency shift of the shared laser light due to the relative velocity of the satellites, and the detection window can be tuned through the control sequence applied to the atoms' internal states. This scheme enables the detection of GWs from continuous, spectrally narrow sources, such as compact binary inspirals, with frequencies ranging from ~3 mHz - 10 Hz without loss of sensitivity, thereby bridging the detection gap between space-based and terrestrial optical interferometric GW detectors. Our proposed GW detector employs just two satellites, is compatible with integration with an optical interferometric detector, and requires only realistic improvements to existing ground-based clock and laser technologies.

Machine learning is a fascinating and exciting field within computer science. Recently, this excitement has been transferred to the quantum information realm. Currently, all proposals for the quantum version of machine learning utilize the finite-dimensional substrate of discrete variables. Here we generalize quantum machine learning to the more complex, but still remarkably practical, infinite-dimensional systems. Researchers present the critical subroutines of quantum machine learning algorithms for an all-photonic continuous-variable quantum computer that achieve an exponential speedup compared to their equivalent classical counterparts. Finally, they also map out an experimental implementation which can be used as a blueprint for future photonic demonstrations.

A U.S. Navy surveillance ship was harassed by an Iranian fast attack craft while entering the Persian Gulf on Saturday, a defense official confirmed to USNI News on Monday.

Hyperloop Technologies, which is building a super-fast transportation solution based on an idea by billionaire Elon Musk, is in initial talks with the Indian government and companies to partially build and operate the vehicle on some routes, its chief executive officer said.

1. Universe Today - 7 Questions For 7 New Planets

Bigelow Aerospace founder Robert Bigelow‘s company makes in-space habitats. One (the BEAM adds 16 cubic meters of living area to the ISS) is now attached to the International Space Station and he and his company are developing permanent, stand-alone habitats to serve as private space stations in orbit around the Earth, ready to house private astronauts.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard Team is the winner of Aviation Week’s 60th Annual Space Laureate. New Shepard is only the first step in fulfilling Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos’ vision of using ever larger reusable rockets to send an entire economy into Earth orbit and beyond. Following the Laureate Award presentations held at Washington’s National Building Museum on March 2, Bezos talked to Aviation Week and Space Technology Editor-in-Chief Joe Anselmo and the audience at the awards dinner about the importance of expanding into the solar system.

Reports from Russia indicate a new drone submarine will be armed with a 100-megaton nuclear warhead.

IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build a commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.

An inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind and allow the Martian atmosphere to thicken overtime.

The US has implemented revolutionary new technologies as part of nuclear modernization. These will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

The claimed solid metallic hydrogen sample has been lost on February 11. It was being stored at temperatures around 80 Kelvin (-193 degrees Celsius and -316 degrees Fahrenheit), and at incredibly high pressures between two diamonds in a type of vice.

IDC sees widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. According to a new Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide from International Data Corporation (IDC), the market for cognitive/AI solutions will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.1% over the 2016-2020 forecast period.