NextBigFuture.com

The U.S. conducted a high-explosive experiment at a nuclear test site in Nevada hours after Russia revoked a ban on nuclear weapons testing. Wednesday's test used chemicals and radioisotopes to validate new predictive explosion models"\ that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy. Russian lawmakers announced their ... Read more

NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines of Houston contracts for science and exploration missions to the South Pole of the moon in 2024. The commercial delivery is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and the Artemis program. IM-1 Mission The IM-1 mission launch is currently scheduled for a six-day period that opens November ... Read more

The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will help scientists search for water at the lunar South Pole, and will be the first in-situ resource utilization demonstration on the Moon. PRIME-1, which will be mounted to a lunar lander, is made up of two components - The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain ... Read more

NASA's Artemis lunar rover [called VIPER], the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will explore the South Pole of the Moon in late 2024 on a 100-day mission. It will assess how much water is available and determine how we get and use the Moon's resources for future human space exploration. Above - An artist's concept ... Read more

State channels have emerged as one of the most important blockchain scaling technologies. They make it possible to reduce the data that's processed by the blockchain mainnet and can therefore facilitate much faster transaction speeds with instant finality. One of the major advantages of state channels is that they do not require any changes to ... Read more

There are six B-21 Raider stealth bombers currently completed or under construction. They will soon be starting flight tests. The B-21 Stealth Bomber is smaller than the B-2 Stealth Bomber and uses updated engines. It uses 4 decades of advancement in stealth materials since the B-2 was made. The stealth coatings are lighter versions of ... Read more

At one hour and 2 minutes of the Senate Space subcommittee meeting, This year, we're going to attempt to fly 100 flights," Bill Gerstenmaier, the vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said on Wednesday (Oct. 18) during a hearing of the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Space and Science. As we look to ... Read more

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is a Halley-type periodic comet that was first discovered by Jean-Louis Pons on July 12, 1812 and then independently rediscovered by William Robert Brooks in 1883. It has an orbital period of about 71.3 years. Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will make its return in 2024 and it is expected to reach its maximum brightness (potentially ... Read more

Over all the decades of Star Wars shows, who are the most iconic characters and relevant toys? Google Trends confirms it is Vader, Yoda, Jedi and for a while Mandalorian. Five years ago I wrote how Disney was failing at the basics of Star Wars merchandising. They were making movies and shows with very little ... Read more

Twitter user Greggertruck has reported the Tesla Cybertruck Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) specifications. GVWR is the weight of vehicles, passengers and payload. The Tesla Cybertruck seems like it will be able to handle 1000 to 1500 lbs more payload than the Ford F150 and the Rivian R1T. The GM Hummer is about double the ... Read more

Federal Reserve reports that mean net worth of the average American household, even adjusting for inflation, was $1.06 million last year. Compared with 2019, that figure was up 23%. IF inflation is at the level of the last three years then the median White family will be millionaires within 20 years. House and stock appreciation ... Read more

Using gut microbiota transplants, an international team of researchers has shown memory impairments in humans with Alzheimer's can be passed on to young, healthy rats. This confirms that gut bacteria are involved in causing Alzheimers. Specific bacteria in the gut are directly linked to cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients. Gut microbiota actually play a causal ... Read more

The B-21 Stealth Bomber is an updated version of the 40 year old B-2 bomber. The B-2 stealth bomber architecture and choices have proven to be enduring. The two updated engines in the B-21 are about 50-60% more powerful than the four engines in the B-2. They are 27,000 lbs of thrust vs 17,300 lbs ... Read more

If you were to sit in a room with Tomas Gorny, you'd never guess that he, an unassuming Polish emigre, sits atop a multibillion-dollar tech company. Nor would you likely guess that the company exists solely because Gorny believes so strongly in the transformative power of communications and customer experience. Nevertheless, that's an accurate description ... Read more

NASA has a catalog of many large comets and some of them are nearly as large or larger than the Chicxulub impactor (Dinosaur killer). Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle takes 133 years to orbit the Sun once. Swift-Tuttle last reached perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) in 1992 and will return again in 2125. Swift-Tuttle is a large ... Read more

SpaceX is cleaning up the concrete debris from the inaugural Starship launch! Personnel from the Fish & Wildlife Service and Texas Parks have been spotted onsite, likely overseeing the process. Felix Schlang and John Cargile of What About It report this information and provide photos. Fish & Wildlife approval is main obstacle to SpaceX getting ... Read more

2023 has been a relatively good year for the benchmark S&P 500 and growth stock-fueled Nasdaq Composite. The S&P 500 is widely viewed as the best benchmark of Wall Street's health. It's a market cap-weighted index comprised of 500 generally profitable, time-tested companies, a few of which have multiple classes of shares. All told, the ... Read more

US Senator Ted Cruz is putting pressure on the FAA and the other regulatory agencies (Fish and Wildlife) for delaying the SpaceX Starship launches and tests. SpaceX has been ready for weeks with the next Starship and Super Heavy booster and they repaired and built a new launch pad and water deluge protection.

Tachyum is a startup that will make Prodigy processors will enable hyperscale data centers that have 25% of the cost (4X lower cost) and will saving each hyperscale customer billions of dollars per year. First-generation Prodigy data centres will offer 3.3 EF of FP64, three times the performance of existing supercomputers, and also deliver around ... Read more

An huge volcanic comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks, has violently exploded for the second time in four months and it is heading towards the Earth. It will not hit the Earth but we could see it in the night sky around April 21, 2024. It has a solid nucleus, with an estimated diameter of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers), ... Read more

They say that engineers love to solve problems. And if there were ever a phrase that summed up the entrepreneurial journey of engineer Hari Ravichandran, that would be it. He's been solving problems for people since the mid-1990s when he traded a chance at a graduate-level electrical engineering degree from Stamford for the challenges offered ... Read more

Tesla has officially announced the Cybertruck delivery day as November 30, 2023. Official Tesla Cybertruck delivery event poster! Deliveries begin on November 30th at Giga Texas. pic.twitter.com/nish17kc2k - Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 18, 2023

In August 2022, more than one-fifth of the 1,000 rockets fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group toward Israel failed and landed in Gaza. These rockets caused one-third of the 44 deaths recorded. Here is a map of the rockets fired from Palestinian groups that have landed in Gaza so far in the current ... Read more

There was an argument last night about a hospital in Gaza that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other sources claimed was destroyed. They also instantly reported at least 500 dead. This is surprising because usually it takes time to dig through wreckage and count the dead. There was a blast at al-Ahli ... Read more

China has made thousands of high density high rise living areas. It is the main form of housing in modern China, Hong Kong and Singapore and many other asian countries. There is no talk of inhumane living conditions in Manhattan or for the Asian high rise developments. There can be very comfortable population density of ... Read more

In 2018, Egypt announced they had destroyed 37 Gaza infiltration tunnels by flooding them with water and sewage. Egypt has in the past flooded Hamas tunnels along the Gaza Strip with sea-water or sewage, and has destroyed hundreds of homes on the Egyptian side of Rafah to remove the tunnels. The Egyptian military began cracking ... Read more

Tachyum's first chip Prodigy has not completely finished its design but one customer will buy hundreds of thousands of Universal chips to build a 50 exaFLOPS supercomputer. Tachyum(R) announced that it has accepted a major purchase order from a US company to build a large-scale system, based on its 5nm Prodigy(R) Universal Processor chip, which ... Read more

The Department of Energy (DOE) is making a $10 million investment in three projects to develop novel technologies to manufacture high-performance superconducting tapes in the United States. Superconductivity can transmit energy with almost zero wasted electricity. UH's Selva Research Group received $2 million for a three-year project, titled Low-Cost, High-Rate Fabrication of High-Performance, Uniform, Long ... Read more

Sandy Munro and his Dad worked in the US Car industry inside and outside of the UAW. Sandy explains that making the US car industry less competitive contributed to the General Motors shrinking from over 50% market share to less than 16%. The UAW auto industry members shrank from 1.5 million in 1979 to 180,000 ... Read more

The United States Air Force (USAF) plans to award the contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program and for new fighter engines in 2024. The NGAD is a sixth-generation fighter jet that will replace the F-22 Raptor. The Air Force hopes to have the NGAD in production by the end of the decade. ... Read more

There is fighting along a second front with Israel. The main activity has been in the South with Israel, Gaza and Hamas. Hezbollah has announced the Death of 4 of their Terrorists as a result of Clashes with the IDF along the Border with Lebanon throughout today. Hezbollah has about three to six times the ... Read more

South Africa is undergoing rapid collapse. South Africa used to have abundant energy and could sell energy to neighboring African countries. However, there was incompetent government and starting in 2007 there has been an energy crisis. There has been chronic shortages of electricity. This has reached the level where there are a constant schedule of ... Read more

Marc Lowell Andreessen is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that ... Read more

Critical challenges and technology development for colonizing and developing the moon are being performed. This includes getting oxygen, water, and metals like Aluminum from the lunar soil. There is In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) related to water-ice and other materials in lunar Permanent Shadowed Regions (PSRs) and extracting O2 and metals (or metalloids) from regolith in ... Read more

U.S. Defense Officials have reportedly convinced the Israeli Government not to launch a Preemptive Strike on Hezbollah Forces in Lebanon, with them promising that U.S. Naval Assets in the Eastern Mediterranean including the USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier will provide Military Assistance if Hezbollah does launch a Major Attack against Israel. According to the ... Read more

There will be heavy price for ultimate peace. Hamas is Gaza has fired 6000 out of 20,000 or more rockets, so Iran has supplied and Hamas has made a lot of weapons. There explosives, mortars, missiles and drones. There are 30,000 to 200,000 equipped soldiers. They do not have tanks but they are an equipped ... Read more

What became DARPA helped create the Internet standards that become the commercial internet and ecommerce and now DARPA is coordinating standards and efforts to commercialize the moon. A robust lunar economy within the next decade is coming quickly into focus. It's clear that many shareable, scalable commercial systems will be needed to support a future ... Read more

Over 43 startups companies are working on nuclear fusion and they have received over $6 billion in funding. This does not include the international and national Tokomak fusion programs. The IEEE Spectrum reviewed five of the nuclear fusion companies that are working on Aneutronic fusion. 1. TAE (TriAlpha Energy) is working towards Proton-Boron fusion. 2. ... Read more

Blinkov has excellent analysis of all wars and military situations. He provides coverage of the military situation for Israel and Gaza.

There is an online military map of the Israel-Hamas war. It is at liveuamap.com. #UPDATE: IDF and Shin Bet says they have killed overnight Billal al-Qedra, a Hamas commander in the Nukhba force in the South Khan Younis battalion who is responsible for the attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz and Nirim - ELINT News (@ELINTNews) ... Read more

Lockheed Martin has a US Army contract to develop and deliver up to four 300 kW-class laser weapon systems to the Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) prototype program. The IFPC-HEL system complements other layered defense components to protect soldiers from stressing threats, unmanned aerial systems, rocket, artillery and mortars, along with rotary and ... Read more

While a Tesla owner was at the Tesla service center, two Cybertrucks that Tesla had been testing in rough off-road conditions in Baja California arrived. The owner mentioned that Cybertruck drivers told her the cyberrtruck will be able to go 500 miles on a single charge. While a Tesla owner was at the Tesla service ... Read more

DARPA selected RTX Corporation, Draper, and BEAM Co to design prototype lop wireless optical power relays. The Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program, aimed at revolutionizing energy distribution through airborne wireless power transfer. The optical energy relays designed in POWER's phase one will be demonstrated on the ground. In the second phase, they will ... Read more

PepsiCo's best-performing Tesla Semi traveled an average of 574 miles per day over the course of 18 days at the RunonLess Real World data tracking event. The next best non-Tesla vehicle was WattEV's Nikola Tre BEV, which traveled an average of 255 miles per day. OK Produce's Freightliner eCascadia averaged 181 miles per day, and ... Read more

If you read the conditions under which you can use the Mercedes Drive Pilot Level 3 self driving then you will see the obvious silliness of it. It will only work on highways at less than 45 miles per hour and with another car in front of you. This obviously means it only works for ... Read more

Starlink satellites will soon be offering Direct to Cell capabilities to enable texting, calling, and browsing everywhere on Earth. SpaceX will start satellite-based text messaging in 2024 and expand to voice and text support in 2025. They will offer cellular connectivity to IoT devices in 2025. The service will work with existing LTE phones without ... Read more

The suspended dust generated when lunar rovers move across the lunar soil is a significant risk for lunar missions as it can affect the systems of the exploration vehicles. One solution to mitigate this problem is the construction of roads and landing pads on the Moon. 12 kilowatt laser(s) have melted simulated regolith in the ... Read more

SpaceX has applied to the ITU to place an additional 29,988 new satellites into orbit. SpaceX is using the Pacific island state of Tonga as its regulatory source and using TongSat which is looking to profit from the satellite industry. SpaceX has about 4200 active satellites now out of 5100 launched. The satellites will operate ... Read more

On Sept. 24, 2023 NASA recovered a 250-gram dust sample from the Bennu asteroid, marking the first sample return of its kind in America and concluding the seven-year OSIRIS-REx mission. The asteroid sample mission was launched in 2016 and traveled an estimated 3.86 billion miles before it first landed on the Bennu asteroid in 2020. ... Read more

Matloff and Joseph Meany conceptualize a large solar sail made of aerographite which would only use the Sun to power a long term interstellar mission. It is based on an inflatable, hollow-body sail. This is updating concepts that goes back at least to the 1980s. Matloff and Meany set up an aerographite-graphene variant using a ... Read more