Here is a link to a 16 page unclassified Summary of A Threat to America’s Global Vigilance, Reach, and Power High-speed maneuvering weapons The U.S. lead in the technologies of high-speed flight is in question, particularly as it pertains to military applications. Several countries around the world have been quite busy establishing their own capabilities, …
BAE Systems officials said an electromagnetic rail gun firing a kinetic energy warhead could be a real option for the Army’s next generation Future Fighting Vehicle, which the service hopes to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Following the cancellation of the Ground Combat Vehicle, Army officials said they want the defense industry to offer a …
Some question the value of higher speed internet access and the linkage of studies which indicate that higher broadband speeds are correlated with a boost in GDP. The US has a broadband definition of 1 megabit per second download speed. About 90% of adults have access to broadband at that speed. But some surveys indicate …
Japanese firm Softbank has unveiled a robot called Pepper, which it says can read human emotions. It uses an “emotional engine” and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones. The firm said people could communicate with it “just like they would with friends and family” and it …
The Starship is still about 100 years away, but we will begin building it this century. This was the message that Gregory Benford and his mirror-twin, James Benford, were proclaiming together, with the help of notables of both science and science fiction. Futurist Peter Schwarz covered three basic scenarios, though many more can be generated. …
University of Arizona researcher Hao Yan has made new 2-D and 3-D objects that look like wire-frame art of spheres as well as molecular tweezers, scissors, a screw, hand fan, and even a spider web. The twist in their ‘bottom up,’ molecular Lego design strategy focuses on a DNA structure called a Holliday junction. In …
Elon Musk says he’s still waiting for a call from Boeing to fix the jumbo jet maker’s overheating Dreamliner battery problem. For the past few months, Boeing’s 787 fleet has been grounded in the United States following a lithium-ion battery that caught fire in flight. The National Transportation Safety Board was unable to determine the …
Diginfo – This surveillance camera system can search through data on 36 million faces in one second. Developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric, the system can automatically detect a face from either surveillance footage or a regular photo, and search for it. With this system, it’s assumed that faces are turning within around 30 degrees in …
Atomic metallic hydrogen, if metastable at ambient pressure and temperature could be used as the most powerful chemical rocket fuel, as the atoms recombine to form molecular hydrogen. This light-weight high-energy density material would revolutionize rocketry, allowing single-stage rockets to enter orbit and chemically fueled rockets to explore our solar system. To transform solid molecular …
A guest article for Next Big Future by Joseph Friedlander When history, tech and industrial capacity studies collide, you get an awesome venue for geeky statistical comparisions. I was just comparing the bomber forces of the USA during World War II and the Cold War and trying to come up with a measure of just …
A group of scientists from the University of Gothenburg and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) have become the first group in the world to demonstrate that theories about nanoscale spin waves agree with observations. This opens the way to replacing microwave technology in many applications, such as mobile phones and wireless networks, by components …