The New York Federal Reserve released its quarterly report on US household credit and debt for Q4 2013 Delinquency rates improved for most loan types in 2013Q4. As of December 31, 7.1% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, compared with 7.4% in 2013Q3. About $820 billion of debt is delinquent, with$580 billion …
Nigeria is to “rebase” its gross domestic product (GDP) on Sunday 6 April, which should push it above South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy. The United Nations defines rebasing as the “process of replacing present price structure [base year] to compile volume measures of GDP with a new or more recent base year”. Basically, …
The Atlas humanoid robot, unveiled last year by Boston Dynamics, a company later acquired by Google, is a marvel. It can clamber over rubble and operate power tools. But these abilities don’t come cheap. Atlas has a price tag well above a million dollars, and it consumes around 15 kilowatts of electricity when in operation, …
Working with Sungkyungkwan University’s School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) has uncovered a new method of synthesising graphene without damaging its electric and mechanical properties. In the past, researchers have found that multi-crystal synthesis – the process of synthesising small graphene particles to produce large-area graphene – deteriorated …
One of the many analysis of wealth distribution is a study by the Congressional Research Service – An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010 Political calculations has a fairly representative wealth distribution curve for the United States based on 2010 data. There are differences between the Federal Reserve and IRS and other …
Nextbigfuture had pointed out that the bottom 720 million people in the world each have negative net worth. The US has 7.5% of the bottom decile, but has only 0.21% of the second decile and 0.16% of the third. Net worth = assets minus debts. The net worth of the world’s bottom decile is minus …
Terrestrial Energy (TIEs) has the objective of commercializing its proprietary Molten Salt Reactor technology in Canada by 2021. Molten Salt Reactor technology represents a revolution in nuclear safety, waste and proliferation resistance, and in energy cost-competitiveness. TEI’s Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) is a small modular design, with models ranging from 29 MWe to 290 …
A court in Guangzhou ruled that the Family Planning Commission of Guangdong Province — China’s most populous — must disclose the specifics of its own accounting data within 15 days. Across China an estimated 2 trillion yuan ($320 billion) in social maintenance fees have been paid since 1980, according to one study. Family Planning Commission …
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has officially launched a new atomic clock, called NIST-F2, to serve as a new U.S. civilian time and frequency standard, along with the current NIST-F1 standard. NIST-F2 would neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years, making it about three …
Debashis Chanda at the University of Central Florida may have just cracked the barrier to a practical large scale metamaterial cloak in the visual spectrum. The cover story in the March edition of the journal Advanced Optical Materials, explains how Chanda and fellow optical and nanotech experts were able to develop a larger swath of …
Since his election in 2008, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou has presided over uneven growth and has had to deal with some of the lowest popularity polls in Taiwan’s political history. Ma now has to defuse tensions after students occupied the legislature in Taipei to protest his latest proposal, a deal with Beijing to open Taiwan’s …