NextBigFuture.com

The number of unique mobile subscribers around the world will surpass 5 billion later this year, according to a new GSMA study. The 2017 global edition of the GSMA’s ‘Mobile Economy’ report reveals that the 5 billion-subscriber milestone will be achieved by mid-year 2017 and will increase to 5.7 billion by the end of the decade. By that point, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will be subscribed to a mobile service. Subscriber growth over this period will be driven primarily by large Asia markets such as India, which alone is forecast to add 310 million new unique subscribers by 2020.

The South Korean K2 Black Panther tank development started in 1995 and cost $260 million. South Korea designed a tank that on paper appears to be at equal or better than the specifications of current NATO tanks.

A super-material that bends, shapes and focuses sound waves that pass through it has been invented by scientists.

Scientists have found that a superconducting current flows in only one direction through a chiral nanotube, marking the first observation of the effects of chirality on superconductivity. Until now, superconductivity has only been demonstrated in achiral materials, in which the current flows in both directions equally.

The Carnival of Nuclear Energy blogs has changed its name to Nuclear Energy News Weekly.

Michael Shellenberger explains how less nuclear energy has meant higher costs and less clean energy overall.

Preliminary budget outlines are usually little-noticed administrative exercises, the first step in negotiations between the White House and federal agencies that usually shave the sharpest edges off the initial request.

Elon Musk said the Model 3 Design Studio will go online shortly before the car officially goes on sale, and first deliveries will be “Founders Series” Model 3 that go to company employees.

The Carnival of Space 498 is up at Urban Astronomer

Scientists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), CIEMAT (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research), Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, in collaboration with the firm BioDan Group, have presented a prototype for a 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin. This skin is adequate for transplanting to patients or for use in research or the testing of cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical products.

Hans Rosling (1948–2017), physician and epidemiologist, famously upturned assumptions widely held by the public and by the development community — assumptions that, thanks to US President Donald Trump, are back in the spotlight. A recurring theme of Rosling's was that family sizes have been shrinking even though child survival rates have improved.

Actor Bill Paxton, age 61, has died due to complications from surgery.

China's J-20 stealth fighter has been seen with four auxiliary fuel tanks (aka, drop tanks or "bags") under its wings.

Audio recordings of a UK Reaction engines presentation are in the NASA Spaceflight forum. Reaction Engines is making hypersonic planes and spaceplanes. Their key technology is a precooler.

In a white paper published in March 2014, Transatomic Power proclaimed its molten salt reactor "can generate up to 75 times more electricity per ton of mined uranium than a light-water reactor."

DARPA is creating a GPS-like technology that works in the deep ocean called Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation, or POSYDON.

In World War II, the U.S. Navy made extensive use of small aircraft carriers, ranging from very small carriers escorting convoys (CVEs) to light aircraft carriers (CVLs) that were essentially downsized models of the iconic big carriers (CVs).

A Chinese company has built a machine that has a creative way of setting girders into place for high speed rail bridges.

On 10 February 2017, the London-based charity Cancer Research UK announced that a team of molecular biologists, astronomers and game designers would receive up to £20 million (US$25 million) over the next five years to develop its interactive virtual-reality map of breast cancers. Currently there are animations for tumor that allow virtual flew throughs. However, they are mock-up. The real models will include data on the expression of thousands of genes and dozens of proteins in each cell of a tumor. The hope is that this spatial and functional detail could reveal more about the factors that influence a tumor’s response to treatment.

China is close to completing and launching its second aircraft carrier. It will begin service by 2020.

Researchers developed an alteration to the lithium-sulfur battery that could make it more than competitive with the industry standard lithium-ion battery.

A randomized trial shows cycles of a five-day fasting diet designed by a USC researcher safely reduces the risk factors for age-related diseases.

The epigenome is the broad array of chemical marks that decorate DNA and its protein scaffold. These marks act like a chemical notation, telling the cell which genes to express and which to keep silent. As such, the epigenome helps to explain how cells with identical DNA can develop into the multitude of specialized types that make up different tissues. The marks help cells in the heart, for example, maintain their identity and not turn into neurons or fat cells. Misplaced epigenetic marks are often found in cancerous cells.

China has made drones with flamethrowers to clear garbage from power lines.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering and Applied Science are using artificial intelligence, called fuzzy logic, to get drones to navigate and land themselves on moving platforms. This holds promise for commercial uses such as delivering packages.

Under mild static compression (15 GPa), graphite preferentially turns into hexagonal diamond, not cubic diamond, the selectivity of which is against thermodynamics. Here researchers via novel potential energy surface global exploration, report seven types low energy intermediate structures at the atomic level that are key to the kinetics of graphite to diamond solid phase transition. On the basis of quantitative kinetics data, they show that hexagonal diamond has a facile initial nucleation mechanism inside graphite matrix and faster propagation kinetics owing to the presence of three coherent graphite/hexagonal diamond interfaces, forming coherent nuclei in graphite matrix. By contrast, for the lack of coherent nucleus core, the growth of cubic diamond is at least 40 times slower and its growth is inevitably mixing with that of hexagonal diamond.

NASA NEXTSTep program awarded Ad Astra Vasimr plasma propulsion a three-year, $9 million contract in 2015. Ad Astra must fire its plasma rocket for 100 hours, at a power level of 100 kilowatts in 2018.

In a Stanford-led research report, three participants with movement impairment controlled an onscreen cursor simply by imagining their own hand movements.

A new organic artificial synapse made by Stanford researchers could support computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies.

A proposed planet definition - a planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters.

Tesla was aiming for at least a 30% reduction from its battery cost for Gigafactory and it now claims a “35% cost reduction” in a new promotional video.

Here is the list of top ten breakthrough technologies for 2017

Seven Earth-sized planets have been observed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope around a tiny, nearby, ultra-cool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Three of these planets are firmly in the habitable zone. Over 21 days, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope measured the drop in light as each planet passed in front of the star. Spitzer was able to identify a total of seven rocky worlds, including three in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be found. The video features interviews with Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center, Caltech/IPAC; Nikole Lewis, James Webb Space Telescope project scientist, Space Telescope Science Institute; and Michaël Gillon, principal investigator, TRAPPIST, University of Liege, Belgium. The system has been revealed through observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescope, as well as other ground-based observatories. The system was named for the TRAPPIST telescope. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency has launched a study of innovative ways to counter advanced missile threats such as ultra-high-speed maneuvering hypersonic missiles.

Our #1 Best-Selling Drone--Meet the Dark Night of the Sky!

The University of Pennsylvania has a life expectancy calculator based upon on a statistical regression of more than 400,000 data samples. The data was collected by the National Institute of Health and AARP.

If you have to depend upon heroic healthcare to extend your life you are in trouble and it will not help most people.

The Methuselah Foundation wants to extend healthy life - By advancing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, they want to create a world where 90-year olds can be as healthy as 50-year olds—by 2030.

Average life expectancy is set to increase in many countries by 2030 – and will exceed 90 years in South Korea, according to new research. The gains will be mainly from improved life expectancy for those over 65. There are no longer many improvements possible from the prevention of early deaths in the developed world.

Existing silicon-photonic devices rely on different physical mechanisms than the high-end optoelectronic components in telecommunications networks do. The telecom devices exploit so-called second-order nonlinearities, which make optical signal processing more efficient and reliable.

DARPA sees three waves of artificial intelligence -

For the first time ever, a single flexible fiber no bigger than a human hair has successfully delivered a combination of optical, electrical, and chemical signals back and forth into the brain, putting into practice an idea first proposed two years ago. With some tweaking to further improve its biocompatibility, the new approach could provide a dramatically improved way to learn about the functions and interconnections of different brain regions.

As Russia and other adversaries stock up on drones, rockets, and missiles, the US Army is building up defenses to shoot them down. But that Short-Range Air Defense force has been devastated by a decade of cuts. The service’s plan to revive SHORAD involves

Researchers demonstrate that superconductor critical temperature can be raised above room-temperature to ≈ 400K in cuprates by precise control of the spatial separation of dopants. Hence, there still remains substantial “latent” Tc in cuprates. Their proposed doping strategy and superconducting mechanism is not restricted to cuprates and may be exploited in other materials.

Australia has supercapacitors made from graphene oxide. They can can store as much energy per kilogram as a lithium battery, but charges in minutes, or even seconds, and uses carbon instead of expensive lithium.

The Nanode™ is a three-dimensional, nano-structured, porous electrode that will overcome the limitations of today’s batteries by storing as much as 50% more energy than existing technologies. This allows the batteries to last longer between charges while also charging faster. These achievements are due to both the material structure and the use of tin as the active material. Tin is known to have much higher energy density than the current graphite technology, but until now its commercial success has been limited due to its tendency to swell during charging, causing stress in the electrode material and leading to a rapid loss in energy. Current commercial lithium ion batteries employ a foil/particle system as the electrode structure. The capability of such electrodes to deal with volume expansion of high energy materials is limited, because as the particles swell, the electrode expands.

1414 Degrees had its origins in patented (Australian) CSIRO research and has built a prototype molten silicon storage device which it is testing at its Tonsley Innovation Precinct site south of Adelaide.

With five U.S. patents issued and dozens more filed and pending around the world, On Target Laboratories LLC is working to advance its revolutionary fluorescent imaging technology that could help surgeons pinpoint and remove more cancerous tissues than has ever been possible while preserving more healthy tissue for patients.

John Hawkes has that he does not believe that a wooly mammoth embyro will be created within two years.