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China’s economy had higher growth for a second-straight quarter as investment picked up, retail sales rebounded and factory output strengthened amid robust credit growth and further strength in property markets. Gross domestic product increased 6.9 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, compared with a 6.8 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. It was the first back-to-back acceleration in seven years. China, which produces half the world’s steel, churned out a record quantity in March as production of crude steel expanded 1.8 percent from a year earlier. Coal production rebounded in March after the government said it

Russia has made a humanoid robot which can shoot a handgun from each arm. FEDOR stands six foot tall, weighs between 106-160 kg depending on extra equipment – and can lift up to 20 kg of cargo. Its creators claim that teaching them to shoot will help improve their motor skills and decision-making abilities. Russia will also use the robot to fly a new unmanned spacecraft.

Russia’s new hypersonic anti-ship Zircon missile has reached eight times the speed of sound (about 6100 mph) during the test, a source with Russia’s defense sector told TASS. The source noted that Zircon missiles can be launched from universal launching platforms 3C14 which are also used for the Onyx and Caliber missiles. It is expected that the new missiles will be installed at the heave nuclear-powered cruisers Peter the Great and Admiral Nakhimov. The expected range with a new type of fuel is about 1000 km (600 miles) at Mach 5-6. The export version will be limited to 400 kilometers

A theorist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that, if quantum computer are fully realized, there may be fewer limits to their speed than previously put forth. The findings—described as a “thought experiment” by NIST’s Stephen Jordan—are about a different aspect of quantum computing speed than another group of NIST researchers explored about two years ago. While the previous findings were concerned with how fast information can travel between two switches in a computer’s processor, Jordan’s new paper deals with how quickly those switches can flip from one state to another. The rate of flipping

A NIST-led research team spent more than 18 months collecting data from four different smartphone models to facilitate the development of indoor navigation apps. The data, which includes smartphone sensor readings, radio frequency (RF) signal strengths and GPS fixes, should help developers create better apps to assist users in finding their way inside unfamiliar buildings. Such “indoor localization” tools could help emergency responders find victims—or each other—when seconds count. They also could assist with locating specific works of art in large museums or misplaced equipment in hospitals, factories, or warehouses. In the future, if you ask your smartphone where you

Arxiv- Half Petabyte Simulation of a 45-Qubit Quantum Circuit Near-term quantum computers will soon reach sizes that are challenging to directly simulate, even when employing the most powerful supercomputers. Yet, the ability to simulate these early devices using classical computers is crucial for calibration, validation, and benchmarking. In order to make use of the full potential of systems featuring multi- and many-core processors, we use automatic code generation and optimization of compute kernels, which also enables performance portability. We apply a scheduling algorithm to quantum supremacy circuits in order to reduce the required communication and simulate a 45-qubit circuit on

Star Wars had its 40th anniversary. There was a five minute tribute to Carrie Fisher who died at the age of 60. Mark Hamill’s Tribute to Carrie Fisher Panel FULL – Star Wars Celebration 2017 Orlando Fans remember her not only as their princess or general, but as part of the Star Wars Celebration family. Join Mark Hamill as he remembers the talent, humor and enduring legacy of one of the Star Wars galaxy’s most luminous beings, Carrie Fisher. From Star Wars Celebration Orlando 2017.

The world’s oldest person has died in Italy at the age of 117, reports say. Emma Morano was born on 29 November 1899 in the Piedmont region of Italy. She was officially the last person born in the 1800s still living. She had attributed her longevity to her genetics and a diet of three eggs a day, two of them raw. Ms Morano was the oldest of eight siblings, all of whom she has outlived. She died at her home in the northern city of Verbania. Her life not only spanned three centuries but also survived an abusive marriage, the

There are reports that Kris Marshall will be the new Doctor Who. There has been a lot of speculation about who will take on the role of the 13th Doctor after Peter Capaldi announced he was quitting the show. Kris’s representatives have refused to comment. Bookies Ladbrokes stopped taking bets on him becoming the next Time Lord after a huge rush from punters. Ladbrokes spokesman Alex ­Donohue admitted: “A surge of punters have backed Marshall so we’ve had no choice but to close the book.” However, a BBC Spokesperson said: “No casting decisions have yet been made on series 11.”

A report compares directed-energy and railgun weapons systems with hypersonic systems in terms of technical readiness, investment strategies, and plausible applications of these systems by the separate armed services. These weapon systems may not be sufficient by themselves to accomplish a revolutionary change in American military operations, but they indicate whether such changes are possible and perhaps necessary to facilitate a third offset strategy. A preliminary appraisal of one of those technologies—hypersonic weapons systems—frequently nominated as a “gamechanging” capability that might serve as the centerpiece of and a pathway toward a more complex and complete offset strategy. The US seeks

A new NASA NIAC funded proposal seeks to develop a new type of soft robotic spacecraft which is specifically designed to move efficiently on the surface of, and in proximity to, rubble pile asteroids. These new spacecraft are termed Area-of-Effect Soft-bots (AoES) as they have large surface areas which enable mobility that is especially effective at small asteroids. The surface mobility is enabled by using adhesion between the soft robot and the asteroid surface. The adhesive forces also allow the AoES to anchor themselves in order to liberate material from the asteroid and launch it off the surface for collection

Optical mining of Asteroids will provide affordable space mission consumables and radiation shielding. An exciting program of human exploration beyond LEO might include an outpost at the top of the Earth-Moon gravity well or on the surface of the Moon; human exploration of Near Earth Objects in their natural orbits; and/or a series of human missions to the Mars system. Water, oxygen, propellant, and shielding can be made in space from resources known to be plentifully available in asteroids and probably in the Martian moon Deimos. Optical Mining technology is a breakthrough approach to harvesting these materials from asteroids, boulders,

Final Frontier Medical Devices was announced the highest performing team and received $2.5 million for their achievement and Dynamical Biomarkers Group received $1M for 2nd place. Both teams exceeded the competition requirements for user experience, nearly met the challenging audacious benchmarks for diagnosing the 13 disease states, and with their prototypes, have taken humanity one step closer to realizing Gene Roddenberry’s 23rd century sci-fi vision. XPRIZE congratulates Final Frontier Medical Devices and Dynamical Biomarkers Group on their amazing achievements. In celebration of efforts that inspire others to take risks and strive for “moonshots”, even if ultimately they do not win

Seth Baum makes the statement that colonizing the galaxy is the highest good. People are currently concerned with global disasters and pollution and other problems. We can learn to overcome all of these problems which are caused by old and inferior technology and processes. Air and water pollution are mostly from 18th century coal and oil for energy and dirty industrial processes. We can convert to closed cycle nuclear fission and solar power. Closed cycle nuclear fission is where we use up all of the uranium and plutonium with onsite or offsite reprocessing or with new nuclear reactor designs. Nuclear

The Star Wars: Episode 8: The Last Jedi will come out this Christmas 2017.

China has revealed the first known images of an indigenous scramjet test that it says was successfully conducted at speeds up to Mach 7 and altitudes up to 30 km, in December 2015. Credit: National Natural Science Foundation of China. Studies of a folding-wing hypersonic boost-glide vehicle designed for deployment from a launcher at Mach 5 and 30-km altitude show dramatic changes in the center of pressure on release. Credit: China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology Tests of a magneto-hydrodynamic heat shield system showed performance could be boosted by seeding the flow with potassium particles. Credit: College of Aerospace Science

InnovaSea Systems has raised $15 million to develop an all-in-one system for farming fish in the open ocean. They plan to bring the product to market in 2018. They will test its technology at fish farms in Panama and Mexico.

These are three primary reasons why it is important for NASA to develop better ways to locate and characterize Near Earth Objects (NEOs). 1. NEOs are an impact hazard to the Earth and Congress has mandated that NASA find 90% of all the objects over 140 meters by the end of 2020. NASA will fail to meet this mandate because of the high cost of current asteroid survey approaches. 2. Measuring the NEO population distributions in space will unlock the answers to critical questions dealing with the formation and evolution of the solar system. 3. NEOs are exciting candidates as

Two veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other “ocean worlds” in our solar system and beyond. The findings are presented in papers published Thursday by researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and Hubble Space Telescope. In the papers, Cassini scientists announce that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Hubble researchers report additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa. “This is the closest we’ve come, so far, to identifying

Japan’s PD Aerospace and China’s Kuang-Chi Science are among Asia’s homegrown private firms planning to offer spaceflight services to civilians. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have a dominant global presence in the New Space Industry. Shuji Ogawa, CEO of PD Aerospace, acknowledges that it’s unlikely Asian companies can rival SpaceX, Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin, but he said there’s more than enough demand to go around. PD Aerospace is developing a reusable sub-orbital space plane featuring a propulsion system that alternates between jet and rocket mode. It’s expected to carry eight people —

A sensor package that “floats” just above the surface of Phobos, suspended by a tether from a small spacecraft operating at the Mars/Phobos Lagrange 1 (L1) Point would offer exciting opportunities for science (SMD), for human exploration (HEOMD) and for advancements in space technology (STMD). Detailed information on the Martian moon Phobos is limited even though it is considered an important destination for near term human exploration. A PHLOTE spacecraft would perform fixed point station keeping at the Mars/Phobos L1 point to allow a tethered sensor package to “float” just above the moon’s surface and also park instruments on the

Google Glass is becoming successful in the workplace “It’s a big market today, and it will be an even bigger one in the future,” said Brian Ballard, founder and chief executive officer at Upskill, a Google Glass partner that makes augmented reality apps for workers in the field. Its customers — and as of recently, its investors — include industrial giants like Boeing and GE. Google has several corporate partners for Google Glass at work. Upskill works with other smart glasses makers as well, like Intel, Microsoft and Vuzix. Ballard declined to comment on how many units it has deployed,

Robert Youngquist, NASA Kennedy Space Center, proposes to develop a novel high temperature coating that will reflect up to 99.9 % of the Sun’s total irradiance, roughly a factor of 80 times better than the current state-of-the-art. This will be accomplished by leveraging off of their low temperature coating, currently being developed under NIAC funding. They will modify the existing models to determine an optimal high temperature solar reflector, predict its performance, and construct a prototype version of this coating. This prototype will be sent to their partner at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where it will be tested

NASA recognizes within its roadmaps (specifically TA 3.1.6) that development of aneutronic fusion (such as p-11B) reactors with direct energy conversion (over 80%) would be an enabling technology to achieve low specific mass (kg / kW) through the elimination of shielding and potentially the need for dedicated radiators. In addition, material activation due to neutron capture could be avoided. The challenge is of course to develop a plasma confinement system that is far less massive than the current leading (magnetic/inertial) approaches, but consumes less power than is generated by the fusion process – a feat that has yet to be

The two fundamental prerequisites for large-scale economic use of space resources are: 1. in-space manufacture of propellants from nonterrestrial bodies, and 2. in-space manufacture of heat shields for low-cost capture of materials into Earth orbit. The former has been the subject of recent NIAC investigations. The latter would expand by a factor of 30 to 100 time the number of asteroids from which resources could be returned cost-effectively to Earth orbit. With vastly larger populations from which to choose, return opportunities will be much more frequent and targets can be selected where operations would be highly productive, not merely sufficient.

Slava Turyshev of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposes to study a mission to the deep regions outside the solar system that will exploit the remarkable optical properties of the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) focus to effectively build an astronomical telescope capable of direct megapixel high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy of a potentially habitable exoplanet. Although theoretically it seems feasible, the engineering aspects of building such an astronomical telescope on the large scales involved were not addressed before; we propose to do that. Our main question for this study is not “how to get there?” (although it will also be addressed), but

NASA advanced innovative concepts has funded Michael LaPointe, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center to develop a fusion propulsion system. It is an innovative modification to magneto-inertial fusion is proposed in which the pulsed, high current magnetic field coil and stationary central fuel target are replaced with a fast moving fusion fuel target fired axially into a static, high gradient magnetic field. As the target passes through the magnetic field gradient it effectively experiences a rapidly changing axial magnetic field, which induces strong azimuthal currents in the target liner to implode the fuel and reach fusion conditions. Among other advantages, eliminating

Researchers propose to overcome some of the limitations of current technologies for Mars exploration and even extend current operational capabilities by introducing the concept of a vacuum airship. This concept is similar to a standard balloon, whereas a balloon uses helium or hydrogen to displace air and provide lift, a vacuum airship uses a rigid structure to maintain a vacuum to displace air and provide lift. A vacuum airship made of a homogenous material cannot withstand the atmospheric pressure on Earth for any material humans have yet discovered, which can be proven using the critical buckling load of a sphere.

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 1 MW of power to the

This effort will further develop the active membrane spacecraft concept called “Brane Craft” initially studied in a NIAC Phase I grant. The Brane Craft is an essentially two-dimensional spacecraft with integrated solar cells, power system, communications, command and control, attitude determination, attitude control, electric propulsion, and shape control systems. The Phase II effort will analyze and document the benefits, limitations, mission operations, and size-scaling of Brane Craft for removal of orbital debris, and will attempt laboratory demonstrations of thin film electronics for communications, command and control, power conditioning, sensing, and shape control. They will identify the most promising fabrication technologies,

John Brophy at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory combines a near term 100 megawatt laser beamed power system to enable an ion drive with 70 megawatts of power and 58000 ISP. They propose a new power/propulsion architecture to enable missions such as a 12-yr flight time to 500 AU—the distance at which solar gravity lensing can be used to image exoplanets—with a conventional (i.e., New Horizons sized) spacecraft. This architecture would also enable orbiter missions to Pluto with the same sized spacecraft in just 3.6 years. Significantly, this same architecture could deliver an 80-metric-ton payload to Jupiter orbit in one year,

NASA is funding Mach effect propulsion in the latest round of advanced concept projects. Nextbigfuture has covered Woodwards Mach effect propulsion in dozens of articles. They propose to study the implementation of an innovative thrust producing technology for use in NASA missions involving in space main propulsion. Mach Effect Thruster (MET) propulsion is based on peer-reviewed, technically credible physics. Mach effects are transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes. They are predicted by standard physics where Mach’s principle applies – as discussed in peer-reviewed papers spanning 20 years and a recent

NASA is preparing for a future that could include soft robotic spacecraft with flexible surfaces that can anchor to an asteroid, and an artificial gravity device for long-duration, deep space missions, along with other technologies that so far has been limited to the realm of science fiction. The agency is investing in 22 early-stage technology proposals that have the potential to transform future human and robotic exploration missions, introduce new exploration capabilities, and significantly improve current approaches to building and operating aerospace systems. The 2017 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) portfolio of Phase I concepts cover a wide range of

A powerful new array of radio telescopes is being deployed for the first time this week, as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile joins a global network of antennas poised to make some of the highest resolution images that astronomers have ever obtained. The improved level of detail is equivalent to being able to count the stitches on a baseball from 8,000 miles away.

In November 2016 the International Business Times claimed the U.S. government was testing a version of the EmDrive on the Boeing X-37B and that the Chinese government has made plans to incorporate the EmDrive on its orbital space laboratory Tiangong-2. In 2009 an EmDrive technology transfer contract with Boeing was undertaken via a State Department TAA and a UK export licence, approved by the UK MOD. The appropriate US government agencies including DARPA, USAF and NSSO were aware of the contract. However, prior to flight, the propulsion experiment aboard the X-37B was officially announced as a test of a Hall-effect thruster built by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The worldwide number of domestic household robots will rise to 31 million between 2016 and 2019. The sales value of robots cleaning floors, mowing lawns, and cleaning swimming pools will grow to about 13 billion US dollars in this period.