NextBigFuture.com

The pre-COVID UN 2019 population forecast was for Asia’s population to grow from about 4.6 billion to about 5.3 billion around 2055. Recent census for India and China have reported sharper...

India’s national Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has fallen below the replacement level for the first time. India’s national Total Fertility Rate has dropped 1.6 in cities and to 2.1 in rural...

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has reported that Russia has increased troop levels on the border with Ukraine to about 115000. US intelligence indicates Russia could invade early next year with a...

Physicists, engineers and technicians at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Particle Accelerator Laboratory, led by Henryk Piekarz, just demonstrated the world’s fastest magnetic ramping...

Xiaomi will build a vehicle plant with an annual output of 300,000 vehicles in two phases. The first and second phases will have a production capacity of 150,000 vehicles respectively. It is expected...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an interview with WSJ’s Joanna Stern at the CEO Council Summit. The main highlights: Elon Musk does not know about anything special happening on December 9, 2021 The Cybertruck...

Apple has about 13-15% of the total smartphone market in terms of unit sales but has 75% of the smartphone profits. Apple has over 85% of the corporate market value for the smartphone industry....

Here is an update on the main chinese BEV (battery electric vehicle) companies: BYD, Xpeng and Nio through November 2021. There is also the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV but which has many units but is...

Nuclear winter is the theory that severe and prolonged global climatic cooling will happen after a large-scale nuclear war. This assumes that fires can inject soot into the stratosphere. This would...

The current nuclear arsenal will not kill all humans and the pattern of nuclear explosions for a nuclear war between the largest nuclear powers will not destroy civilization, let alone kill all...

BloombergNEF reports that volume-weighted average battery prices only fell 6% to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021. This is down from $140/kWh in 2020 (in real 2021 dollars). The 6% drop was less than...

SpaceX had another successful launch which is their 27th launch of 2021. The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, and five...

Cancer biologist Yibin Kang has disabled a key cancer gene MTDH in mice and in human tissue. A human treatment will be ready for human trials in a few years. This could be the key to preventing or...

Past technology adoption S curves all point to rapid accelerated adoption after 10% adoption is crossed. Battery electric car adoption has reach 13% in Europe and China. Norway’s electric car...

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on a technology called a metasurface,...

Plug-in electric car sales in China in October 2021 more than doubled October 2020 to over 325,000. Battery electric cars are now over 13% of China’s total new car market. The share of battery...

China EV startups have announced November deliveries. Xpeng has pulled ahead of Nio by a lot. Nio and Xpeng had both been making about 10,000 cars per month for the past few months, but Xpeng has...

Elon Musk seemed to have been dropping hints that there would be a big announcement on Dec 9, 2021. This had the Tesla community speculating that it could be a stock split but there is some evidence...

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced it has closed on more than $1.8 billion in Series B funding to commercialize fusion energy. This money will be used construct, commission, and operate...

Grace Tao, vice president of Tesla China, said Giga Shanghai could reach its 500,000 vehicle production target this year. This means Tesla China will make at least 195,000 cars. It will also mean...

Elon Musk immediately rallies all employees to get all hands on deck to fix potential Raptor engine production delays. Boeing and Grumman have a decade of SLS delays to get to a first launch and they...

Elon Musk emailed SpaceX employees that there is a crisis in Starship Raptor engine production. SpaceX could face a ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ if they cannot achieve Starship flight rate of once...

The USA is increasing its lead in per capita income (Purchasing power parity and nominal income) versus major European countries, Japan and Latin American and central american countries. Only faster...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is ready for flight, and launch preparations are resuming toward Webb’s target launch date of Wednesday, Dec. 22, at 7:20 a.m. EST. The James Webb Space Telescope...

It is often a popular belief that technology cannot be both elegant and functional; both streamlined and repairable. However, we are beginning to see a shift towards modularity that should be...

Tesla China is expanding to produce 1.5 million cars per year in 2022. Tesla is starting a US$188 million expansion that will complete in April 2022. Today (Nov. 26) the media learned from the...

Purdue University engineers have invented a new, patent-pending charging station cable that would fully recharge certain electric vehicles in under five minutes. Today, chargers are limited in how...

Purdue University has a new 5.2 petaflop AI Anvil supercomputer. It will enable new discoveries in fields ranging from hypersonics and deep learning to archeological reconstruction and bone...

China is developing a megawatt nuclear reactor for moon and Mars missions according to the South China Morning Post. Jiang Jieqiong, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of...

Alex Tolley has written up an analysis of an improved plasma magnet sail concept called Wind Rider. Centauri Dreams covered the work. Nextbigfuture notes that the design looks very simple and...

As of September, Guinness World Records was still verifying Lola Francisca Susan’s documents. The Philippines claims she was officially 124 when Lola Francisca Susan died. Once verified, she would...

Tesla sold more cars of any kind than all other carmakers other than Toyota and Honda in California in the third quarter of 2021. California passed 10% for EV sales in the third quarter. Passing 10%...

Stanford research on whale feeding highlights how the precipitous decline of large marine mammals has negatively impacted the health and productivity of ocean ecosystems. Nextbigfuture had a video...

Elon Musk is being interviewed by the Space Studies Board. Talks first about the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. He expects the first orbital flight will be January 2022. This will be the largest rocket...

IBM announced a new 127-quantum bit (qubit) ‘Eagle’ processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021. The ‘Eagle’ processor is a breakthrough in tapping into the massive computing...

QuEra Computing Inc. emerged from stealth mode has revealed a completed 256 qubit device. QuEra Computing Inc. emerged from stealth mode today with $17 million in funding from Rakuten, Day One...

A recent NASA audit reveals Boeing and Grumman cut of Space Launch System contracts. It also reveals that NASA Artemis will end up costing $93 billion through 2025. $29 billion will have gone to SLS....

NASA Office of Inspector General – Office of Audits IG-22-003 (A-20-008-01) says NASA Artemis program will not land humans on the moon before 2027. The NASA Artemis program had been targeting...

Both nuclear reactors of the High-Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor-Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) at the Shidaowan plant in China’s Shandong province have reached criticality for the first time. The HTR-PM...

French President Emmanuel Macron said France will build six new nuclear reactors. This will keep France’s energy costs at a “reasonable” level and reduce dependence on imports....

Elon Musk believes that blockchain and bitcoin will make the world more fair. To speed up the process of cryptocurrency mass adoption, SpaceX decided to run Bitcoin & Ethereum giveaway. Elon...

Stealth startup, Spinlaunch, has come out of stealth and revealed that they have launched a suborbital test. They spin a projectile to high speed and then fire out the projectile. It is kind of like...

The adiabatic theorem – a fundamental achievement of quantum mechanics – was first formulated by Max Born and Vladimir Fock at the dawn of quantum mechanics. The theorem ensures that the evolving...

A paper in Nature reports that a Braingate Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enabled a man paralyzed from the neck down to have his thoughts translated to text with 94% accuracy. An intracortical BCI...

Robert Zubrin was interviewed on the History Unplugged podcast about the critical transformation of humanity with from a new age of discovery. I will review Zubrin key points to understand old age of...

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is asking the FCC to launch more than 4500 satellites. Amazon’s old plan was for 3236 satellites. If the new request is approved they will launch a total of 7774...

In real life when you need to transport something, you place it inside a container. It can then travel on a boat, on a train or even be pulled on the road by a truck, enabling it to get to its...

Elon Musk had a twitter poll to determine if he will sell 10% of Tesla. The poll was 58% for yes Elon should sell 10% of his Tesla shares. Elon has about 170 million shares of Tesla. This sale will...

BYD battery EV sales rose 176% to 41,232 units year over year and 13% from September, 2021. October PHEV sales increased from 7,126 units in 2020 to 38,771 in 2021. BYD has also sold over 1000...

A friend of mine, Angie Apperson, asked on Linkedin Who are on your list of most admired female leaders in tech? Here is my list of my five most admired female leaders in Technology and innovation....