NextBigFuture.com

Harvard's George Church has been involved in starting many successful biotech companies. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence (the human pathogen, H. pylori). He helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. George invented the broadly applied ... Read more

Many experts predict that practical fault tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) will require millions of physical quantum bits (qubits) but in August, 2023 IBM scientists published the discovery of new error correction codes that work with ten times fewer qubits. Practical error correction is far from a solved problem. However, these new codes and other advances ... Read more

Breakthrough Starshot is a research and engineering project by the Breakthrough Initiatives to develop a proof-of-concept fleet of light sail interstellar probes named Starchip. It is funded by billionaires Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg. Caltech is the doing a lot of the research and design and they have generated some designs for the probes which ... Read more

The Gayle & Max Dillard Science & Engineering Research Centre (SERC) at the US Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas will research and develop molten salt nuclear reactors. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing ACU's August 2022 application to construct a 1 MWt low-power molten salt research reactor - MSRR - at the ... Read more

Boeing will develop and test technologies a hypersonic interceptor prototype for DARPA's Glide Breaker program as part of a four-year effort. Boeing will perform computational fluid dynamics analysis, wind tunnel testing and evaluation of aerodynamic jet interaction effects during flight tests. Hypersonic interceptors will destroy a threat traveling at over five times the speed of ... Read more

IBM showed it's possible to build analog AI chips that can handle natural-language AI tasks with an estimated 14 times more energy efficiency. Researchers from IBM labs around the world presented their prototype analog AI chip for energy-efficient speech recognition and transcription. Their design was utilized in two AI inference experiments and the analog chips ... Read more

United Kingdom armed forces will receive its first 15 KW laser weapon in October 2023. A subsidiary of RTX's Raytheon UK, the high-energy laser weapon system will be integrated into the UK's Wolfhound armored vehicle. The UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD) Land Demonstrator Program has developed a 15-kilowatt laser to prevent aerial threats from unmanned ... Read more

China's top naval scientist, Ma Weiming, has designed a nuclear-powered warship with rail gun, laser and high-powered microwave weapons. US aircraft carriers have been nuclear powered for many decades and the newest Ford supercarrier has electromagnetic launchers. What is new in the Weiming designs are the extensive integration of rail guns, lasers, and high-powered microwave ... Read more

Elon Musk reads Nextbigfuture. This was revealed when he referenced a 2018 article on Nextbigfuture which described the $1 billion per mile cost of subways. Boring Company is tunneling and building underground transportation in Las Vegas for $10-15 million per mile. US subways and tunnels costs of $600M to $4B per mile and most cost ... Read more

Today, there are some scientists who study human aging who say that 122 years of age is the at or near the limit of human longevity. The official record of a longest lived human (with verified evidence) is Jeanne Calment who lived 122 years. The 4 minute mile for running was believed for decades by ... Read more

Agility Robotics is making a 70,000 square foot factory to mass produce 10,000 humanoid Digit robots per year. The factory is about half the size of a Costco. They will use the humanoid robots in their own warehouses and factories. They are focused on warehouse and delivery robots. They have switched to large language model ... Read more

Tesla has released new video of the Optimus Teslabot. They are showing vastly improved balance and hand control. The critical thing is like the FSD (full self driving ) for cars, all of the training is all neural nets and video in and capabilities out. Tesla could begin mass producing Teslabots in November with Tesla ... Read more

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described using Oracle using Tesla Cybertruck as a next-generation police car. He says it will be very safe, very fast and it already has all of the cameras and screens that Oracle's software needs. The details will be disclosed when the Cybertruck is fully revealed. Oracle has created emergency vehicles and ... Read more

Computational physicists have a new paper that says if we made better LK99 samples with mostly high-symmetry phase then it would make the claimed room-temperature superconductors at ambient pressure. All the experimental attempts to replicate LK99 room temperature superconductors have not worked. However, the attempts at replication have been for bulk samples of copper doped ... Read more

Chinese researchers have proposed a theory for understanding the LK99 superconductor. This paper assumes the south Korean LK99 claims are correct for critical temperature and critical current. The conventional superconducting mechanisms and theories (BCS and BR-BCS) used to understand other superconductors would not explain LK99. LK99 has the apparent contradiction between an extremely high critical ... Read more

Nextbigfuture commenter, Goat Guy, verified the resolution of very large hypertelescopes and optical interferometers. The highest angular resolutions for telescopes can be achieved by arrays of telescopes called astronomical interferometers. Hypertelescopes are being worked on that would combine many, many telescopes into very large arrays of tens, hundreds and even space based arrays of one ... Read more

Robin Hanson has come up with a plan to use the massive national debt of most countries to fund the large enough payments to make $300,000 to $700,000 payments to encourage couples to have enough babies to stop population decline. The U.S. national debt is now officially $33T, but add in promises to pay social ... Read more

Elon Musk was a having a discussion on X with Warren Redlich. They were talking about Boring Company. Elon Musk talked about subways and public trams and surface trains surface trains costing $1 billion per mile. It was a deep cut to a 2018 nextbigfuture article. Subways and light rail cost two to seven times ... Read more

Ukraine shot 100 drones and 24 Storm shadow with Russia's Crimean base targets, ships and airplanes. It is being reported that Russia had to move its navy ships and planes from Crimea. About 25% of the drones and a dozen of the storm shadow missiles got through to hit targets and the rest were intercepted. ... Read more

On Day 10 of the Runonless real world tests, the truck 1 Pepsi Tesla Semi drove 841 miles with one 96% recharge during the day. It drove at about 60 mph and got 841 miles from 175% charge. On Day 11, the truck 1 was driven for 853 miles and the other each for over ... Read more

Lockheed CEO James Taiclet said Ukrainian forces the Patriot-invented in the 1970s but upgraded many times to shoot down a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile. This was done in May, 2023. Software upgrades can sometimes enable an existing system to deal with a more advanced threats. The Defense Department is still holding too many competitions in ... Read more

At the beginning of the Ukraine War, Russian Air Forces flew into Ukraine's ground air defenses and did significant damage at the cost of 75 planes. Russia has reduced the loss of planes but had to fly low and less effectively. From March 2022, the VKS (Russian Air force) lost the ability to operate in ... Read more

In 2023, there were 1,900 known ransomware cases in just four countries. On average, a new file-locking attack strikes a victim every 11 seconds. As many as 72.7% of businesses claim ransomware has affected them. The simple truth is that no business is safe from it. Banks, police, schools, casinos, hospitals, and governments have all ... Read more

The James Webb Space Telescope had a weak detection of the microbial life biomarker, dimethyl sulfide. There is a 1 in 66 chance that it was instrument noise. There will be a follow up analysis with the MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) on the James Webb. This should scan the exoplanet K2-18B at the wavelengths for ... Read more

The first new B-21 Stealth bomber will be having test flights this year and there should be 24-30 operational B-21 stealth bombers by 2030. There should be more operational B-21 stealth bombers than B-2 stealth bombers by 2028 or 2029. There were only 21 B-21 stealth bombers ever built and several have stopped flying and ... Read more

There are aspects of effective airplane security strategy that can be replicated with School, public education and hospital security. Reinforced cockpit doors and secondary barriers are one of the most cost effective and effective measures for deterring and foiling hijackings. There are companies offering military grade security doors that designed to look like ordinary doors. ... Read more

The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship is already the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Elon tweeted that future versions will be 10% to 20% longer. If the 20% longer development happens then the stacked rocket will be 144 meters long. Adding 24 meters would be over 60% of the length of the Space Shuttle ... Read more

Hypertelescope capable of direct high-resolution imaging with a high limiting magnitude have been built and tested on Earth. The Hypertelescope group have proposed giant telescopes 10-25 kilometers across in lunar impact craters. Many small mirrors can be dilutely arrayed in a lunar impact crater spanning 10 to 25km. The light from two Keck telescopes were ... Read more

Run on Less data has been collected from 22 trucks operating out of 10 fleet depots. This data and additional work has been used identify the current state of electric trucking. Mike Roeth, NACFE's executive director, gives Key Points of Electrifying Truck Depots: * Small depots are ready for electrification now and electrification at large ... Read more

Being the World currency is similar to like have the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones. The holder of the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones has won critical battles and has powerful Bannermen and allies/friends. The final loss of the crown comes at the end of a long and obvious erosion of trust and ... Read more

The Run on Less Event has proven that those who doubted the Tesla Semi truck doubters were wrong. They said that the Tesla Semi could not carry 44,000 lbs of payload. This is despite eleven 4000 lbs ten foot cement jersey barriers being carried on the demo run. The Tesla Semi was show on video ... Read more

10.4 GWh of sodium ion capacity shold be installed by the end of 2023 (per Benchmark Materials). Benchmark forecasts a utilization rate of just 24%, representative of 2.5 GWh of production. It is mainly Tier 1 battery makers like CATL, BYD, Farasi. In 2024, there is an additional 63 GWh of capacity set to be ... Read more

The US marines have lost two fighter jets and an expensive military transport helicopter in less than 30 days. This is without any combat operations. The F-35B costs over $100 million, the F-18D costs $50 million and the MV-22B Osprey costs $84 million. The US military lost over $234 million of combat air vehicles in ... Read more

Tesla is heading to a few big lego pieces put together by Teslabots in less than one hour. This is the unboxed process and the progression of casting large and complex pieces. In 2020, the Tesla Model 3 had 10,000 parts and took about ten hours to build from the start of the carbuild in ... Read more

There is now real world driving data on the Tesla Semi and other electric Semi trucks from the Runonless testing event. The World has a global fleet of about 30 million Semi trucks and about 3 million are purchased every year. 70% of the large and Semi trucks are bought and used in Asia. Nearly ... Read more

I, Brian Wang, will be talking with Warren Redlich and @Anything Tesla about the Next Great Power. China vs USA vs India. I will be making a case for ASEAN and Canada. We will discuss demographics, immigration-emigration and people, money and technology. I would say that China is already a Great Power. We will have ... Read more

University of Hawaii at Mnoa planetary scientist Shuai Li, led research that high energy electrons in Earth's plasma sheet (part of the magnetosphere) are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon's surface and the electrons may have aided the formation of water on the lunar surface. To my surprise, the remote sensing observations showed that ... Read more

Huawei's Kirin 9000S system-on-chip powers Huawei's new Mate 60 Pro smartphone reportedly is using 2nd generation 7nm-class fabrication process and stacking made by China-based SMIC. Huawei was known to have been stockpiling chips from its HiSilicon unit before TSMC cut ties to comply with US sanctions. TSMC started making 7 nanometer chips back in 2017. ... Read more

One of Tesla Semi trucks drove 1600 miles over two days. This required two different drivers on each day. Truck drivers in the US are limited to 10 hours of driving without a long break. Semi trucks need to operate long distances day after day. Tesla Semi outrange the competing electric Semi by three to ... Read more

Most people would say that it is impossible for Canada GDP at $2.2 trillion today to pass China's GDP which is $18.8 trillion. The last year Canada was ahead of China's GDP was in 1978. Canada's economy as 33% larger than China's in 1976. China had 930 million people in 1976 and Canada had 23 ... Read more

HuggingFace has rankings of the best large langauge models based upon the votes of over 70,000 users. OpenAIS GPT-4 is still number one and is followed by three versions of Anthropics Claude. Fifth is GPT3.5 Turbo and then the first Open Source model in the list Vicuna-33B. Seventh is Meta's LLAMA2 70b Chat. The HuggingfAce ... Read more

NASA's James Web found trace of dimythyl suflide (DMS) in th atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b and DMS is a biomarker of life. K2-18b's atmosphere consists of mainly hydrogen, along with small amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. On Earth, the DMS molecule is only associated with microbial life. We have to wait for the existence ... Read more

There has been official reporting that Tesla Semi is able drive over 420 miles on one charge with 80,000 pounds of total load (including the weight of the truck and trailer). This was a heavily disputed capability. The range was with driving speeds of 65 mph which has 15% less range than trucks driving at ... Read more

Morgan Stanley raised their target on Tesla on Sunday to $400 and this caused Tesla shares to surge about 10% on Monday. I, Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture, talked Herbert Ong about how I see FSD Income growth unfolding over the next few years. This is a follow up to my Monday breakdown of what the ... Read more

Reuters reports that Tesla has combined a series of innovations to make a technological breakthrough for single casting of the complex underbody of the car. Tesla already can gigacast the front and the rear of its cars. This would mean a further reduction in parts and complexity. This will enable faster and cheaper car production ... Read more

The FAA says that SpaceX could get license for second Starship orbital launch attempt in October. The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship is stacked and ready to go on the launch pad. SpaceX needs to secure the necessary regulatory approvals, including a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). We're working well with them ... Read more

The SpaceX Raptor engine already enables the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship to have more than double the thrust of the Saturn V. Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography talked about the SpaceX 1337 having critical breakthoughs beyond the SpaceX Raptor. Elon Musk and SpaceX are looking at extreme ideas like deleting the whole hot fuel gas ... Read more

Thousands of members of the United Auto Workers went on strike at three U.S. assembly plants of General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, after the union and the automakers failed to reach a deal on a new labor contract Thursday night. The facilities are GM's midsize truck and full-size van plant in Wentzville, Missouri; Ford's ... Read more

Japan and South Korea and many other countries are experiencing national demographic crisis due to falling birth rates. In 2023, Japan's fertility rate was 1.367, which is far below the 2.1 children per woman needed for population stability. South Korea's fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.7 in the second quarter of 2023. ... Read more