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According to the US Navy, 53 percent of all Navy aircraft can’t fly — about 1,700 combat aircraft, patrol, and transport planes and helicopters. Not all are due to budget problems — at any given time, about one-fourth to one-third of aircraft are out of service for regular maintenance. But the 53 percent figure represents about twice the historic norm.

Young Bae of Advanced Space and Energy Technologies in Tustin, California, has improved his photonic laser thruster. was developed with NASA funding. His thruster works because light exerts pressure when it hits something. In theory, it is possible to move an object like a CubeSat by nudging it with a laser beam. In practice, however, the pressure which light exerts is so small that a device able to do a useful amount of nudging would require a laser of unfeasibly large power.

Lady Gaga opened the halftime show at Super Bowl LI in front of Intel’s drone swarm. Lady Gaga Halftime Drone Swarm show was pretaped to shield the crowd (no drones or planes were allowed near the stadium on the day of the game)

In 2000, the U.S. cash equities trading desk at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters employed 600 traders, but today there are only two equity traders left. Automated trading programs have taken over the rest of the work, supported by 200 computer engineers.

Experiments that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain cells

The People's Liberation Army's Navy is growing fast but we should expect it to grow even faster. The UK Royal United Services Institute expects China to reach a 500 ship navy.

When costs are levelized across the lifecycle, nuclear is one of the most cost-effective methods of power generation. Indeed, OECD research shows that nuclear is the lowest levelized cost option for power generation for all OECD countries under certain capital cost projections. Regional differences in the cost of capital for nuclear projects mean that while cost can be a challenge for greenfield nuclear projects in Europe and North America, it is seen as less of an issue in Asia, where economies of scale, lower labour costs and more recent experience in building reactors all have an impact. In economies where financing traditional greenfield projects is seen as challenging, SMRs are often cited as the future because their size and the fact that they are ready to install keep investment costs low.

Early indicators suggest that a post-ISIS Sunni insurgency may be forming in Iraq and al Qaeda (AQ) is trying to gain traction within it.

In the spring of 2017, Russia may test a rocket mounted Zircon Hypersonic missile for the first time. The launch is said to be conducted within the scope of the global non-nuclear deterrence strategy.

George Friedman is the founder of Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence firm and author of two books about the global future: "The Next Decade" and "The Next 100 Years," New York Times bestsellers. Prior to joining the private sector, Friedman regularly briefed senior commanders in the armed services as well as the Office of Net Assessments, SHAPE Technical Center, the U.S. Army War College, National Defense University and the RAND Corporation, on security and national defense matters.

Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), however, were inspired by medieval mail armor when producing a new metamaterial with novel properties. They succeeded in reversing the Hall coefficient of a material.

Princeton engineering researchers have illuminated another path forward for LED technologies by refining the manufacturing of light sources made with crystalline substances known as perovskites, a more efficient and potentially lower-cost alternative to materials used in LEDs found on store shelves.

Researchers at Princeton University have drastically shrunk much of the equipment for terahertz wave generation: moving from a tabletop setup with lasers and mirrors to a pair of microchips small enough to fit on a fingertip.

The leading projects for developing a hypersonic spaceplane are Reaction Engines of the UK and Hypermach.

Facebook is closing around 200 of 500 demo stations for its virtual reality headset Oculus at Best Buy stores across the country Workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups said that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. A Best Buy worker in California reportedly said that frequent software issues with the Oculus often made the headset unusable.

Can helium bond with other elements to form a stable compound? Students attentive to Utah State University professor Alex Boldyrev’s introductory chemistry lectures would immediately respond “no.” And they’d be correct – if the scholars are standing on the Earth’s surface.

Tesla has told suppliers it planned to begin test-building its Model 3 sedans on Feb. 20, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that could allay concerns about the company meeting its target to start production in July.

Engineers at the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, or ARDEC, have been making advancements in an initiative called "Component Miniaturization."

Mark Moore wrote a paper in 2011 that described how to make Vertical Takeoff and Landing craft using electric propulsion.

On Thursday, February 2, 2017, Tepco posted images recorded inside the thick steel-reinforced concrete pedestal that supports the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) of Fukushima Daiichi unit #2. A company spokesperson explained what the images visually indicated, and mentioned that radiation had caused “flickers” in the pictures which were used to estimate the possible radiation levels inside the pedestal. No pictures or video had ever been taken inside an F. Daiichi RPV pedestal before. The spokesperson said an estimated radiation level of 530 Sieverts per hour was located immediately inside the pipe used to insert the video recording device. Two deeper locations were estimated at 20 and 50 Sv/hr, respectively. Only the 530 Sv/hr report resonated with the Press.

Offensive and defensive laser weapons for Air Force fighter jets and large cargo aircraft have been in development for several years now. However, the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) has recently embarked upon a special five-year effort, called the SHIELD program, aimed at creating sufficient on-board power, optics and high-energy lasers able to defend large platforms such as a B-52 bomber.

The US Census estimated California's population in mid-2016 at 39.25 million.

The actor received a Golden Globe nomination in 1979 for playing Captain Apollo.

The government of Canada has released immigration plan for 2017, and the news looks good for individuals looking to immigrate to Canada through one of the economic or family sponsorship programs.

PwC ranked 32 countries by their projected global gross domestic product, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Innocorp has a new drone that is a flying submarine. It is an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone and iot can transitio from water to air to land without any individual or multiple deployments, fission of elements, (as in rockets), or complicated maneuvering.

Elon Musk indicates that about 75 percent of the vehicle’s costs are in the first stage booster. After a test-firing in late January, 2017 one the boosters that have been successfully landed by Spacex is now being transported to Cape Canaveral in preparation for the SES launch, tentatively scheduled for March. Other SpaceX rockets not slated for re-launch have undergone as many as seven test-firings.

Few scenes capture the U.S. Navy’s prowess as effectively as the rapid-fire takeoff and recovery of combat jets from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The ability to carry air power anywhere in the world, and both launch those aircraft to flight speed and bring them to a stop over extremely short distances, has been essential to carriers’ decades-long dominance of naval warfare. To help provide similar capabilities—minus the 90,000-ton carriers—to U.S. military units around the world, DARPA’s SideArm research effort seeks to create a self-contained, portable apparatus able to horizontally launch and retrieve unmanned aerial systems (UASs) of up to 900 pounds.

Over the past several years, DARPA-funded researchers have pioneered RNA vaccine technology, a medical countermeasure against infectious diseases that uses coded genetic constructs to stimulate production of viral proteins in the body, which in turn can trigger a protective antibody response. As a follow-on effort, DARPA funded research into genetic constructs that can directly stimulate production of antibodies in the body DARPA is now launching the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, aimed at developing that foundational work into an entire system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines—a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges.

Spacex plans to launch its Falcon 9 rockets every two to three weeks.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have demonstrated the world’s first laser based on an unconventional wave physics phenomenon called bound states in the continuum. The technology could revolutionize the development of surface lasers, making them more compact and energy-efficient for communications and computing applications. The new BIC lasers could also be developed as high-power lasers for industrial and defense applications.

A Ukrainian Antonov 124 cargo plane delivered engines to a stranded Swiss Air Boeing 777 in Alaska

For more than two years, Ukraine has been outgunned battling Russian-backed rebels and Russian soldiers in Crimea. Given that peace agreements have failed to end the conflict and Russia consistently lies about not helping rebels fight Ukrainian forces, should America give lethal weapons—specifically Javelin anti-tank missiles—to Kyiv?

China's installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity more than doubled last year, turning the country into the world's biggest producer of solar energy by capacity, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Saturday.

-Hiroshima University, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and Panasonic Corporation announced the development of a terahertz (THz) transmitter capable of transmitting digital data at a rate exceeding 100 gigabits (= 0.1 terabit) per second over a single channel using the 300-GHz band. This technology enables data rates 10 times or more faster than that offered by the fifth-generation mobile networks (5G), expected to appear around 2020. Details of the technology will be presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2017 to be held from February 5 to February 9 in San Francisco, California

Africa is urbanizing at an alarmingly fast rate, nearly twice the rate of China. According to the African Development Bank, over five hundred million people will move into Africa’s cities in the next thirty-five years. Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, is urbanizing at a rate quadruple the global average. Urbanization has had a tremendous effect on increased productivity. It has reduced transaction costs and increased access to more educational, medical and sanitation facilities.

A new deal has the price of the F35A jet below $100 million for the first time

Apps for Bicycle sharing are huge in China Customers use an app to release a bike's lock for rides costing as little as 1 yuan (15 cents) an hour. Bikes can be left anywhere for the next user.

The Hubble constant — the rate at which the Universe is expanding — is one of the fundamental quantities describing our Universe. A group of astronomers from the H0LiCOW collaboration, led by Sherry Suyu, Max Planck professor at the Technical University Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes in space and on the ground to observe five galaxies in order to arrive at an independent measurement of the Hubble constant.

Your FedEx package might someday be delivered by a robot.

Elon Musk has tweeted out a picture of his tunneling machine.

Nearly a century ago, German chemist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a process to generate ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The process, still in use today, ushered in a revolution in agriculture, but now consumes around one percent of the world's energy to achieve the high pressures and temperatures that drive the chemical reactions to produce ammonia.

The Google Word Lens app is now available in Japanese. You’ll never have to worry about taking a wrong turn on a busy Shibuya street or ordering something you wouldn't normally eat.

In April last year, billionaire Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. He plans to invest 100 million US dollars in the development of an ultra-light light sail that can be accelerated to 20 percent of the speed of light to reach the Alpha Centauri star system within 20 years. The problem of how to slow down this projectile once it reaches its target remains a challenge. René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen and his colleague Michael Hippke propose to use the radiation and gravity of the Alpha Centauri stars to decelerate the craft. It could then even be rerouted to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like planet Proxima b.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry used one of the world’s most powerful electron microscopes to map the precise location and chemical type of 23,000 atoms in an extremely small particle made of iron and platinum. Insights gained from the particle’s structure could lead to new ways to improve its magnetic performance for use in high-density, next-generation hard drives.

The electronic data connections within and between microchips are increasingly becoming a bottleneck in the exponential growth of data traffic worldwide. Optical connections are the obvious successors but optical data transmission requires an adequate nanoscale light source, and this has been lacking. Scientists at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) now have created a light source that has the right characteristics: a nano-LED that is 1000 times more efficient than its predecessors, and is capable of handling gigabits per second data speeds. They have published their findings in the online journal Nature Communications.

China’s rapid nuclear expansion will result in it overtaking the U.S. as the nation with the largest atomic power capacity by 2026, according to BMI Research.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has made trips to Trump Tower. He met with Trump and the Washington Post has ben reliably told, discussed Mars and public-private partnerships.

The Wall Street Journal indicates a forthcoming report from the US Government Accountability Office focuses most closely on issues with turbopumps in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The report has found a "pattern of problems" with the turbine blades within the turbopumps, which deliver rocket fuel into the combustion chamber of the Merlin rocket engine. Some of the components used in the turbopumps are prone to cracks, the government investigators say, and may require a redesign before NASA allows the Falcon 9 booster to be used for crewed flights. NASA has been briefed on the report's findings, and the agency's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, told the newspaper that he thinks “we know how to fix them.”