24 Cities in northern China have issued air pollution red alerts and low visibility is causing flight cancellations

Heavy smog has engulfed large parts of northern China for a fourth straight day, with the environment ministry warning that some firms in the region were continuing to flout emergency restrictions and dozens of flights out of Beijing cancelled. Some power plants and chemical producers in the region had not scaled back operations in line …

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Russia suspending and withdrawing from US nuclear agreements including reduction of weapons grade plutonium

Russia has suspended its 2000 agreement with the USA to reduce their surplus weapons-grade plutonium. The two countries were each required to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons grade plutonium under a weapons reduction agreement signed in June 2000. They reconfirmed the deal in 2010, but President Barack Obama’s FY2017 budget submission proposes a “dilution …

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World’s first 1,000-processor chip

A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. The KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI …

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Vertical Farming not because we need it to feed people but because we will want it for fresher and better tasting food

I have shown that regular farming using 100 year old techniques can increase agricultural production by 50% over the next 20-30 years and by 100% over the 50 years. I have also shown that single story greenhouses can be built for $20-60 per square meter, which would provide a doubling of food from about 1 …

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