SpaceShipTwo’s pilot ejected as disaster struck and suffered moderate to severe injuries, it has been revealed. His co-pilot was killed in the crash. Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft SpaceShipTwo has crashed during a test flight following what the firm has called a ‘serious anomaly.’ One of the two pilots on board is reported to have died and …
A Hong Kong scientist who invented a simple blood test to show pregnant women if their babies have Down syndrome is now testing a similar technology for cancer. Yuk Ming “Dennis” Lo says screening for signs of cancer from a simple blood draw could cost as little as $1,000. The test works by studying DNA …
A nuclear triad refers to a nuclear arsenal which consists of three components, traditionally strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The purpose of having a three-branched nuclear capability is to significantly reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all of a nation’s nuclear forces in a first-strike attack; this, …
Hewlett-Packard finally is making a big bet on 3D printing. Although HP is targeting a crowded market, the company’s inkjet technology — announced today — looks so revolutionary to analyst Terry Wohlers that he predicts “it could even put some other companies out of business.” HP’s Multi Jet Fusion TM technology can offer new levels …
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are many times lighter than proteins, while still capable of achieving similar local structure. A protein that absorbs one uranium atom extracts less than one-tenth of one percent of its final mass. A MOF cage offers similar three-dimensional connectivity as the protein, but weighs around 100 times less and may have multiple …
Roger Shawyer made a presentation of the controversial EMdrive. At the IAC 2014 conference in Toronto, Roger Shawyer stated that 8 sets of test data have now verified EmDrive theory. These data sets resulted from thrust measurements on 7 different thrusters, by 4 independent organisations, in 3 different countries. The NASA experiments did not show …
Graduate student Alec Momont of TU Delft has designed an unmanned, autonomously navigating mini aeroplane that can quickly deliver a defibrillator to where it is needed. A network of such drones could significantly increase the chance of survival following a cardiac arrest: from 8% to 80%. When the emergency services receive a cardiac arrest call, …
China is expected to pass a military milestone this year when it sets a different type of sub to sea—a “boomer,” carrying fully armed nuclear missiles for the first time—says the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI. Chinese already has nuclear-powered submarines and hunter killer submarines. China has fulfilled its four-decade quest to join …
A team at the University of Cambridge and Georgia Institute of Technology are exploring whether the element thorium could help to meet the new design’s fuel needs. As well as being three to four times more abundant than uranium, thorium could potentially produce electricity more fuel efficiently and therefore more cheaply. The aim of the …
Arxiv – Google Deepmind researchers have extended the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results …
ACS Nano – Giant Plasmene Nanosheets, Nanoribbons, and Origami Monash University researchers have developed Plasmene— in analogy to graphene—as free-standing, one-particle-thick, superlattice sheets of nanoparticles (“meta-atoms”) from the “plasmonic periodic table”, which has implications in many important research disciplines. Here, they report on a general bottom-up self-assembly approach to fabricate giant plasmene nanosheets (i.e., plasmene …