The Harvard Business Review looked at success that Spacex has achieved and appears likely to achieve by radically reducing the cost of space travel. Spacex has made single use rockets that are about half the cost of competitors. Spacex appears on the verge of making reusable rockets that will lower costs up to 100 times. …
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, entered the space industry several years ago. He faced a problem about where to innovate, given the restrictions and mandatory performance criteria for space travel. Musk quickly zeroed in on the one area ripe for innovation: cost reduction. He gathered a team with a wide cross-section of expertise and put them …
Lockheed Martin recently entered into an agreement with Beijing based Reignwood Group to develop and build a 10-megawatt Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) pilot power plant off the coast of southern China. The offshore plant, to be designed by Lockheed Martin, will be the largest OTEC project developed to date, supplying 100 percent of the …
University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers have developed a structural nanofiber that is both strong and tough, a discovery that could transform everything from airplanes and bridges to body armor and bicycles. Dzenis and colleagues developed an exceptionally thin polyacrilonitrile nanofiber, a type of synthetic polymer related to acrylic, using a technique called electrospinning. The process …
If China’s leader Xi were preparing for radical reform, we probably would not know it yet. Mr Jiang took eight years before he and his premier, Zhu Rongji, were able to launch sweeping economic changes in 1997. It could be years before Mr Xi consolidates his power. His crackdown on corruption has gone further than …
China will build a second, larger aircraft carrier capable of carrying more fighter jets, the official Xinhua news service reported late Tuesday, quoting a senior officer with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy. Chinese officials denied foreign media reports in September 2012 that China was building a second carrier in Shanghai. China currently has one …
Starship Century is a symposium (May 21-23, 2013 in San Diego) coordinated by the new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination in collaboration with Gregory and James Benford, presenting ideas from their anthology of science and science fiction. Scientists address the challenges and opportunities for our long‐term future in space, with possibilities envisioned by: …
US daily crude oil production increased by 118,000 bpd to 7.326 millions bpd. This is an increase of over 20% (1.2 million bpd) from the same time last year. Getting to over 7.5 million bpd will be a crude oil production level last seen in the late 1980s. (This is likely to happen this summer) …
Japan’s industry minister Toshimitsu Motegi revealed that some of the country’s offline nuclear reactors may be restarted by autumn this year at the earliest if they pass the new safety assessment put in place by Japan’s nuclear regulators. The majority of the country’s nuclear power plants were shut down after the Fukushima disaster, forcing Japan …
Ray Kurzweil joined Google to develop a truly intelligent computer ( one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own.). It will require nothing less than Google-scale data and computing power. Kurzweil was attracted not just by Google’s computing resources but also by the startling progress the company has made …
As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson — it’s simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers …