The Pentagon said on Monday it would shrink the U.S. Army to pre-World War Two levels, eliminate the popular A-10 aircraft and reduce military benefits in order to meet 2015 spending caps. The military has been ordered to be prepared to decisively win one conflict while holding off an adversary’s aspirations in a second until …
Glenn Beck has read Ray Kurzweil’s books and Eric Schmidt’s new book. Glenn expects Eric to defend or discuss the broader goals of human level or greater than human level Artificial General Intelligence. Eric in the interview speaks cautiously that AGI is really hard and we don’t know many things about how or if we …
Rolls-Royce is designing unmanned cargo ships. Control centers will command hundreds of crewless ships. Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says. They might be deployed in regions such as the Baltic Sea within a decade, while regulatory hurdles …
The International Academy of Astronautics has just published its 300+page multi-year study about Space Elevators. The conclusion was “Space Elevators Seem Feasible”. With carbon nanotubes or graphene the Earth Based space elevators are feasible but they need millions of tons of mostly atomically precise material. They achieve access to orbit for the cost of electricity …
Three weeks ago we covered some predictions for the 2014 Winter Olympics medal count. The Olympics are done The distribution of events did make it tougher to extrapolate as Russia did far better in the last half of the games. Russia outperformed. Russia picked up 2 to 5 extra medals (or at least higher medals) …
Singularity Hub – Stem cell therapy could be used to help older patients recover from muscular injuries, for example from falls, or perhaps even weakness following surgery. Making old stem cells as productive as young stem cells A biological process called the p38 MAP kinase pathway, which cues stem cells to become muscle progenitor cells, …
Startup Hampton Creek’s mission is to find plant proteins that can replace eggs in spreads, sauces, baked goods, and breakfast favorites. With the help of a few million in venture funding, and an investment from Bill Gates, the company’s scientists have spent the last year scouring the world’s flora with start-up scrappiness. So far, they’ve …
Global growth has strengthened as expected in recent months, largely driven by advanced economies, where easier financial market conditions and gradually improving consumer and business confidence have supported growth. While emerging economies have benefited from the stronger external demand, domestic demand has remained weaker than expected in many of them, reflecting in part tighter financial …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 197 is up at Hiroshima Syndrome ANS Nuclear Cafe – Persistent Prejudice Against Nuclear – Can Anything Be Done? Part 2 The second of a series by guest writer Jim Hopf. Unjustified beliefs and attitudes exist concerning nuclear power, regardless of what the scientific community says. Unjust criticism threatens the …
An international team led by The University of Texas at Dallas has discovered that ordinary fishing line and sewing thread can be cheaply converted to powerful artificial muscles. The new muscles can lift a hundred times more weight and generate a hundred times higher mechanical power than the same length and weight of human muscle. …
Boston University is developing a targeted method for delivering drugs directly to cancer tumor cells. Colby and Ekladious are working with polymer-based nanoparticles, originally crafted by Aaron Griset (ENG’10) in 2008, that are absorbed by tumor cells, expand, and release chemotherapy drugs—like microscopic Trojan horses. The nanoparticles design is comparable to spaghetti and meatballs. Each …