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IBM and Google both aim to commercialize quantum computers within the next few years (Google specified five years.)

Wellhead breakeven prices have dropped significantly among all shale plays over recent years and since 2014, the average decrease has been around 46% within the main shale oil plays. The main cause has been a reduction in unit prices, which represented approximately 57% of the total decrease. However, acreage high grading and efficiency improvements have also played their part, contributing approximately 19% and 26% respectively.

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were flat for a third straight year in 2016 even as the global economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency, signaling a continuing decoupling of emissions and economic activity. This was the result of growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, as well as structural changes in the global economy.

X-energy yesterday announced the start of work on the conceptual design of its Xe-100 high temperature gas-cooled pebble bed modular reactor, following a review of the company's readiness by an external panel of industry experts.

Lockheed Martin has completed the design, development and demonstration of a 60 kW-class beam combined fiber laser for the U.S. Army.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. is considering “all options” to counter North Korea’s nuclear threat while criticizing China over moves to block a missile-defense system on the peninsula.

Advances in production technology and materials science, particularly for new types of high-tech steel, mean that an old concept called “twin-roll” is being taken up successfully. An alternative system that casts liquid steel directly onto a single horizontally moving belt is also being tried. Both techniques could cut energy consumption—one of the biggest costs in steelmaking—by around 80%. Other savings in operating and capital costs are also possible. If these new processes prove themselves, steelmaking could once again be transformed.

A researcher with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Matsumoto is deeply involved in the design of the space sail that will pick up where Japan’s IKAROS left off. Launched in 2010, the latter was a square sail 14 meters to the side that demonstrated the feasibility of maneuvering a sail on interplanetary trajectories. JAXA has talked ever since about going to Jupiter, but the challenges are formidable, not the least of which is the question of generating enough power to operate over 5 AU from the Sun.

Russia and the United Arab Emirates will fund efforts to develop a light fifth generation jet, Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov said on Monday.

Last year Bryan Johnson, founder of the online payments company Braintree, starting making news when he threw $100 million behind Kernel, a startup he founded to enhance human intelligence by developing brain implants capable of linking people’s thoughts to computers.

Figures released by the Russian Federal Treasury have confirmed that Russia's defence budget has been cut by 25.5% for 2017, falling from RUB3.8 trillion (USD65.4 billion) to RUB2.8 trillion.

European researchers have created a cheaper and more efficient superconducting tape which could one day be used to double the potency of wind turbines.

Kalashnikov, famous small arms weapon maker, will create a tank-like robot weighing 20 tons. Kalashnikov’s BAS-01G Soratnik is a seven ton unmanned vehicle that can carry a machine gun and quartet of antitank missiles, but they want one three times bigger. It would be about the same size as a U.S. Army M1126 Stryker ICV.

Semiconductor chip makers TSMC and Global Foundries are finally committed to dates for the commercialization of EUV lithography. Global foundries will use Free electron lasers to boost EUV volume production and lower costs.

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) disclosed plans for an enhanced 7nm FinFET node using extreme ultraviolet lithography, a 12nm upgrade of its 16nm process and a 22nm planar technology — its answer to fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI).

Valleytronics is exciting as a potential avenue to quantum computing. Like spintronics, valleytronics offers a tremendous advantage in data processing speeds over the electrical charge used in classical electronics.

Massive and complete automation could enable industrializtion of the moon and space. By using some larger human colonies along with the robots then it would be more robust and less dependent on perfect automation.

If all the solar incident on Mars were to be captured with 100% efficiency, then Mars would warm to Earth-like temperatures in about 10 years. However, the efficiency of the greenhouse effect is plausibly about 10%, thus the time it would take to warm Mars would be ~100 years. This assumes, of course, adequate production of super greenhouse gases over that entire time. The super greenhouse gases desired for use on Mars would be per fluorinated compounds (PFCs) as these are not toxic, do not destroy ozone, will resist degradation by ultraviolet life, and are composed of elements (C, S, and F) that are present on Mars. Fluorine has been detected on Mars by Curiosity.

Construction and installation work formally started yesterday at the site of unit 2 of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, Atomproekt, the reactor design subsidiary of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, announced today. The first foundation stone for units 2 and 3 of the plant was laid in a ceremony held at the construction site in southern Iran in September last year.

A Tesla Model 3 prototype was spotted and capture on video. In the background you'll also see the SpaceX Hyperloop test track.

Israel is working on two large procurement deals with the United States for jet fighters and helicopters to upgrade two IAF squadrons.

In the TV show Game of Thrones, there is a common warning - Winter is Coming. It refers to an impending war and attack of Zombies.

According to French newspaper Le Figaro, Israel has already put its tiny F-35 Lightning II fleet to use as early as mid-January of this year, having only taken full delivery of the first F-35s in their 75-strong order in mid-December of last year. Reporter Georges Malbrunot, Le Figaro‘s Middle East correspondent, the F-35’s supposed initial foray into combat occurred in the late night/early morning hours of January 12-13 in an airstrike on Mezzeh Military Airport, Syria, where facilities housing surface-to-air missiles destined for use with Hezbollah, an Islamist terror organization based in Lebanon.

In June of 2016, China newest supercomputer, the Taihu Light system, nearly triple the previous record-setting numbers of another Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe -2. These results were achieved using a Chinese designed and fabricated 28nm System -on -Chip (SOC) architecture. This announcement was coupled with impressive advancements in indigenously developed system software and high performance computing ( HPC) applications , as shown by having three Chinese research teams as finalists for the 2016 Gordon Bell prize. These results indicate that China has attained a near -peer status with the U.S. in HPC. The U.S. asserted its intention to maintain a leadership position in HPC in the July 2015 Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI).

2022 will be the year of decision for the Army’s nascent Next Generation Combat Vehicle, officials told the Association of the US Army conference here today. That’s when “at least two” NGCV demonstrators get field-tested by real troops. Those soldiers’ feedback, in turn, will inform Army leaders’ decision: whether to fund a full-up program to field a new armored vehicle by 2035, or put off a fresh start — again — and just keep updating 1970s designs.

Scientists from the Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) and University of Liverpool have announced a landmark database of lifespan-extending drugs and compounds called DrugAge.

A new study by Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb at Harvard says that fast radio bursts (FRBs) could come from extraterrestrial radio beams being used as beacons or to power alien light sails.

Radiation from cosmic rays is one of the biggest health risks astronauts will face on long space missions, such as a proposed trip to Mars or settlement on the moon. A 2013 study suggested that a return trip to Mars would expose astronauts to a lifetime’s dose in one go.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have created an atomic force microscope on a chip, dramatically shrinking the size — and, hopefully, the price tag — of a high-tech device commonly used to characterize material properties.

Hypersonic glide vehicles are a growing factor in strategic stability calculations. These systems are characterized by speed, precision and manoeuvrability, which can be applied to defeat missile defences. Traditional calculations of strategic stability rely on the ability to undermine an opponent’s nuclear deterrent capability, and hypersonic glide vehicles are seen as providing this assurance.

With U.S. President Donald Trump promising the U.S. will boost the buildup of Navy ships, Wang Weiming, deputy chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, told Xinhua that China is speeding up the development of a marine corps, adding destroyers and frigates and will step up air and sea patrols.

New nanologic machines consist of individual phosphorous atoms that are precisely positioned and embedded in a silicon crystal at a density of about 200 billion atoms per square centimeter. Single electrons randomly move in and out of the atoms due to quantum tunneling. Since each atom can hold one or two of these electrons, and each electron can occupy a few different energy levels, each atom can occupy one of four possible states. Each atom is constantly transitioning between its four states according to a certain set of probabilities, corresponding to the random movement of electrons tunneling in and out of the atom and changing their energy levels.

D-Wave Systems, who has commercial 2000 qubit quantum adiabatic computing systems, announced that Google, NASA, and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have elected to upgrade their D-Wave 2Xâ„¢ quantum computer to the new D-Wave 2000Qâ„¢ system, under the terms of their multi-year agreement, to support QuAIL's pioneering research on how quantum computing can be applied to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and difficult optimization problems.

Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, commander of AfriCom, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he expected the Chinese base on the Horn of Africa to be operational later this summer.

The efficient characterization of quantum systems, the verification of the operations of quantum devices and the validation of underpinning physical models are central challenges for quantum technologies and fundamental physics. The computational cost of such studies could be improved by machine learning enhanced by quantum simulators. Here researchers interface two different quantum systems through a classical channel—a silicon-photonics quantum simulator and an electron spin in a diamond nitrogen–vacancy centre—and use the former to learn the Hamiltonian of the latter via Bayesian inference. Researchers learn the salient Hamiltonian parameter with an uncertainty of approximately. Furthermore, an observed saturation in the learning algorithm suggests deficiencies in the underlying Hamiltonian model, which we exploit to further improve the model. They implement an interactive version of the protocol and experimentally show its ability to characterize the operation of the quantum photonic device.

The Carnival of Space 500 is up at Links Through Space.

A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile. Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘transportation cloud’ – will quickly become dominant form of transportation – displacing far more than just car ownership, it will take the majority of users away from public transportation as well. With their $41 billion valuation, replacing all 171,000 taxis in the United States is well within the realm of feasibility – at a cost of $25,000 per car, the rollout would cost a mere $4.3 billion.

Chip making giant Intel is purchasing Israeli-based sensor company Mobileye in a $15.3 billion deal.

Strontium optical lattice clocks have the potential to simultaneously interrogate millions of atoms with a spectroscopic quality factor Q ≈ 4 × 10^17. Previously, atomic interactions have forced a compromise between clock stability, which benefits from a large atom number, and accuracy, which suffers from density-dependent frequency shifts. Here, researchers demonstrate a scalable solution which takes advantage of the high, correlated density of a degenerate Fermi gas in a three-dimensional optical lattice to guard against on-site interaction shifts. Using a state-of-the-art ultra-stable laser, they achieve an unprecedented level of atom-light coherence, reaching Q = 5.2 × 10^15 with 1 × 10^4 atoms. They investigate clock systematics unique to this design; in particular, they show that contact interactions are resolved so that their contribution to clock shifts is orders of magnitude lower than in previous experiments, and they measure the combined scalar and tensor magic wavelengths for state-independent trapping along all three lattice axes.

5G should be 10 to 20 times faster than today’s cell-phone networks. 5G will operate in a high-frequency portion of the radio spectrum, known as millimeter wave. It has a lot of available bandwidth and should make it possible for wireless devices to process data with minimal delays. But since its wavelengths are much shorter, it is more easily obstructed. And because it has never been used for consumer mobile services, carriers are still learning how 5G signals will behave in different types of terrain and weather. “We need to look at how the signals are affected by things like snow, rain, sleet, hail, maple trees, oak trees, and spruce trees, because each of those will be different,” says AT&T research engineer Bob Bennett.

Researchers find that there exist fundamental limitations to the joint measurability of time along neighboring space–time trajectories, arising from the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Because any quantum clock must be in a superposition of energy eigenstates, the mass–energy equivalence leads to a trade-off between the possibilities for an observer to define time intervals at the location of the clock and in its vicinity. This effect is fundamental, in the sense that it does not depend on the particular constitution of the clock, and is a necessary consequence of the superposition principle and the mass–energy equivalence. They show how the notion of time in general relativity emerges from this situation in the classical limit.

New quantum technology will enable the following:

A new UCLA study could change scientists’ understanding of how the brain works — and could lead to new approaches for treating neurological disorders and for developing computers that “think” more like humans.

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