NextBigFuture.com

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.”

Most batteries are composed of two solid, electrochemically active layers called electrodes, separated by a polymer membrane infused with a liquid or gel electrolyte. But recent research has explored the possibility of all-solid-state batteries, in which the liquid (and potentially flammable) electrolyte would be replaced by a solid electrolyte, which could enhance the batteries’ energy density and safety.

There is an improved build strategy for the second Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. The Kennedy carrier (CVN-79)is being built using more modular construction, a process where smaller sections of the ship are welded together to form large structural units, equipment is installed, and the large units are lifted into the dry dock using the shipyard’s 1,050-metric ton gantry crane. The modules can weigh over 1000 tons.

Developing efficient photoreversible color switching systems for constructing rewritable paper is of significant practical interest owing to the potential environmental benefits including forest conservation, pollution reduction, and resource sustainability. Here we report that the color change associated with the redox chemistry of nanoparticles of Prussian blue and its analogues could be integrated with the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 nanoparticles to construct a class of new photoreversible color switching systems, which can be conveniently utilized for fabricating ink-free, light printable rewritable paper with various working colors. The current system also addresses the phase separation issue of the previous organic dye-based color switching system so that it can be conveniently applied to the surface of conventional paper to produce an ink-free light printable rewritable paper that has the same feel and appearance as the conventional paper. With its additional advantages such as excellent scalability and outstanding rewriting performance (reversibility over 80 times, legible time over 5 days, and resolution over 5 μm), this novel system can serve as an eco-friendly alternative to regular paper in meeting the increasing global needs for environment protection and resource sustainability.

The quantity and quality of satellite-geodetic measurements of tectonic deformation have increased dramatically over the past two decades improving our ability to observe active tectonic processes. We now routinely respond to earthquakes using satellites, mapping surface ruptures and estimating the distribution of slip on faults at depth for most continental earthquakes. Studies directly link earthquakes to their causative faults allowing us to calculate how resulting changes in crustal stress can influence future seismic hazard. This revolution in space-based observation is driving advances in models that can explain the time-dependent surface deformation and the long-term evolution of fault zones and tectonic landscapes.

Until now, the high cost of graphene production has been the major roadblock in its commercialiZation. Previously, graphene was grown in a highly-controlled environment with explosive compressed gases, requiring long hours of operation at high temperatures and extensive vacuum processing. Australian CSIRO scientists have developed a novel “GraphAir” technology which eliminates the need for such a highly-controlled environment. The technology grows graphene film in ambient air with a natural precursor, making its production faster and simpler.

The microwave trapped ion universal quantum computer design work features a new invention permitting actual quantum bits to be transmitted between. individual quantum computing modules in order to obtain a fully modular large-scale machine capable of reaching nearly arbitrary large computational processing powers.

Of the three types of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, only the US Navy's carrier-launched F-35C is at risk of being replaced by Boeing’s F-18 Super Hornet, the Marine Corps’s top pilot said today. It’s not on the table to substitute Hornets for either the land-based F-35A variant or the vertical-takeoff-and-landing F-35B, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, deputy Commandant for aviation said today.

Lockheed Martin and the United States Air Force have been working on improving the performance of the F-22 Raptor’s stealth coatings.

China flight tested a new variant of a long-range missile with 10 warheads in what defense officials say represents a dramatic shift in Beijing's strategic nuclear posture.

While the USA has been extremely concerned about losing jobs (particularly manufacturing jobs to China), China performed a survey of businesses in the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing and found that 25% had moved or were planning to move their businesses out of China. Half were going to other Asian countries and 40% to America, Canada or Mexico.

Denis Villeneuve has been nominated for Oscars for his movie "Arrival" and his "Blade Runner 2049" sequel arrives in October. Denis has been hired to make a new feature movie version of the science fiction classic Dune.

The Breakthrough Starshot is an effort backed by US$100 million from Russian investor Yuri Milner to vastly accelerate research and development of an interstellar space probe.

Researchers doubt the Harvard claim that solid metallic hydrogen has been created Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, both physicists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first posted a report of their results on the arXiv preprint server last October, which attracted immediate criticism. A peer-reviewed version of the report was published on 26 January in Science2, but sceptics say that it includes little new information. Silvera and Dias say that they wanted to publish their first observation before making further tests on their fragile material.

Beijing's second aircraft carrier was "taking shape" after two years and nine months of construction, mainland Chinese media reported - a move likely to further unnerve Taiwan and other neighbors about their growing military assertiveness. Construction of the Shandong, named after province in China's east coast, began in 2014, the mobile app of Shandong television and radio said in a report seen on Tuesday.

Libratus, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University, made history by defeating four of the world’s best professional poker players in a marathon 20-day poker competition, called “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante” at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh.

Lava-covered piece of continent is an ancient remnant, left over from the break-up of the supercontinent, Gondwana, which started about 200 million years ago.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis last week directed his deputy to conduct a review of the F-35 fighter program with an eye to reducing the cost of the Pentagon’s biggest weapon program.

Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

China's One Belt One Road has proved to be a boon for trans-Eurasian rail transport, as these new rail lines would become its vanguard, establishing physical links between many of the key countries and a platform of cooperation from which to drive closer diplomatic and economic ties. What started out as two regular routes emerging from booming high-tech zones in Chongqing and Chengdu rapidly grew into a 39 route network linking together dozens of cities in China and Europe.

1. Universe Today - Here’s the Highest Resolution Map of Pluto We’ll Get from New Horizons

Here is a 50 page 2017 terahertz science and technology roadmap from the Journal of Physics D- Applied Physics

An international consortium is working to implement a new approach to increase the accuracy of optical radar's function.

Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac Silvera and postdoctoral fellow Ranga Dias have long sought the material, called atomic metallic hydrogen. In addition to helping scientists answer some fundamental questions about the nature of matter, the material is theorized to have a wide range of applications, including as a room-temperature superconductor.

Experimental and theoretical research has shown 'spherical' tokamaks to be a "fast route to fusion" compared with more "conventional" tokamak devices such as Joint European Torus (JET), according to David Kingham, chief executive of Tokamak Energy.

BP says that while the world economy will almost double between 2015 and 2035, energy demand will increase by only around 30%. Energy consumption, it says, is expected to grow less quickly than in the past: 1.3% per year in the 2015-2035 period, compared with annual growth of 2.2% in 1995-2015.

A research team led by Professor YongKeun Park of the Physics Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has come up with a solution and developed a 3D holographic display that performs more than 2,600 times better than existing 3D holographic displays. This study is expected to improve the limited size and viewing angle of 3D images, which were a major problem of the current holographic displays