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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.

Applications of the genome editing system CRISPR are appearing at a furious pace, and gathering momentum toward therapeutic use in human cells. Indeed, Chinese scientists recently began a human clinical trial using CRISPR-edited cells to fight lung cancer, and U.S. clinical trials are slated to begin in 2017. But leading up to this exciting milestone, researchers performed some editing on the CRISPR system itself.

Lab-grown meat could be on your plate within the next five years. For the past few years, the barrier to getting test-tube meat into the hands of consumers has been the cost of production. In 2013, it was around $325,000 to make this stuff in a lab, but the process has been refined, and the cost now is just $11.36.

The Military Balance 2017 is the annual assessment of global military capabilities and defence economics from the IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies, London)

In the recent work, Stanford researchers improved on all three variables related to extracting uranium from seawater: capacity, rate and reuse. Their key advance was to create a conductive hybrid fiber incorporating carbon and amidoxime. By sending pulses of electricity down the fiber, they altered the properties of the hybrid fiber so that more uranyl ions could be collected.

Nuclear energy's share of Ukraine's electricity mix is "rapidly approaching" 60%, President Petro Poroshenko said at a meeting of the country's National Security and Defence Council yesterday, according to a statement on the presidential website. The president did not give a date by which the increase would be achieved.

The outer wings of 32 carrier-based F-35C-models need to be replaced to carry the Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder, the aircraft’s primary dogfighting weapon.

A new cease-fire began in eastern Ukraine as international diplomacy to resolve the nation’s conflict with Kremlin-backed insurgents gathers pace.

China's universal second-child policy implemented early 2016 was a major factor in raising the number of births in China to 17.86 million last year, an increase of 7.9 percent and the highest annual number since since 2000, according to the top health authority.

NASA has selected proposals for the creation of two multi-disciplinary, university-led research institutes that will focus on the development of technologies critical to extending human presence deeper into our solar system.

Cellphones and other devices could soon be controlled with touchless gestures and charge themselves using ambient light, thanks to new LED arrays that can both emit and detect light.

For the past several years, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been developing a class of walking "bio-bots" powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical and optical pulses. Now, Bioengineering Professor Rashid Bashir’s research group is sharing the recipe for the current generation of bio-bots. Their how-to paper is the cover article in Nature Protocols.

The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is slated to receive its second batch of ten Sukhoi Su-35 multirole fighter jets in 2017 The first four Su-35 fighter jets arrived on December 25 at a flight training center of the PLAAF in Cangzhou in Hebei province in northern China.

Fitch Ratings says in its latest Global Housing and Mortgage report that while the rate of home price increases is likely to slow in 2017, continuing government macro-prudential efforts to dampen unsustainably rapid price rises, such as mortgage lending restrictions, are being overpowered by a fundamental excess demand for home purchases.

Fitch estimated that China's GDP growth would slow to 6.4 percent in 2017 and 5.7 percent in 2018.

SpaceX on Sunday successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket a day after aborting the mission seconds before launch.

President Donald Trump complained that Boeing was building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but the costs are out of control and were projected to be more than $4 billion.

Russia’s RSK-MiG is working on a new lightweight fifth-generation stealth fighter to replace the Mikoyan MiG-29 and MiG-35 Fulcrum series fighters.

Russia’s Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA fifth-generation stealth fighter may enter service in 2018, but the Kremlin is not in a particular hurry to buy the expensive new jet in large numbers. Meanwhile, Russia is continuing to develop new engines for the T-50, which is currently powered by interim Saturn AL-41F1 afterburning turbofans.

A U of T Engineering innovation could make printing solar cells as easy and inexpensive as printing a newspaper. Dr. Hairen Tan and his team have cleared a critical manufacturing hurdle in the development of a relatively new class of solar devices called perovskite solar cells. This alternative solar technology could lead to low-cost, printable solar panels capable of turning nearly any surface into a power generator.

China Daily describes the case for how high speed rail is boosting economic growth in China.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has warned a deadly pathogen could easily wipe out 30 million people in a year, and that the example of Ebola was one to heed.

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell confirmed today that SpaceX is now targeting the year 2020 for the Mars trip, a move that will allow the company to better focus on its other ambitious projects. Spacex will focus more heavily on their crew program and their Falcon Heavy program.

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) present a new method that should enable controlled drug delivery into the bloodstream using DNA computers. In the journal Nature Communications the team, led by biomedical engineer Maarten Merkx, describes how it has developed the first DNA computer capable of detecting several antibodies in the blood and performing subsequent calculations based on this input. This is an important step towards the development of smart, ‘intelligent’ drugs that may allow better control of the medication for rheumatism and Crohn’s disease, for example, with fewer side-effects and at lower cost.

President Donald Trump suggested that a larger purchase of Boeing Co.’s F/A-18 Super Hornet may be in the offing. “We are looking seriously at a big order,” Trump said Friday of the fighter jet, with another Boeing plane, the newest 787 Dreamliner, looming in the background. “I think we may get there.”

Elon Musk indicated at a recent conference that to some degree, we are already cyborgs. You think of the digital tools that you have, the applications that you have. You can ask a question and instantly get an answer from Google. You already have a digital tertiary layer. I say ‘tertiary’ because you think of the animal brain or the primal brain, and then the cortex, the thinking brain, and then your digital self as the third layer.

While discussing creating a hybrid elephant - wooly mammoth using CRISPR genome editing, Harvard's George Church predicted that reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years.

There is a 261 page report that reviews the ethics of genome editing

A new design reduces converter’s resting power consumption by 50 percent.