Synthetic molecules are the foundation for many products critical to the Department of Defense’s mission—from active pharmaceutical ingredients found in a medic’s kit to materials in modern batteries and fuel cells. Current processes for designing and producing new synthetic molecules, however, are very slow and can take years between the initial design of a molecular …
Lexus announced Wednesday it has created a hoverboard. “It works. It’s not a hoax,” says spokesman Moe Durand. Lexus says it won’t be sold. It’s for demonstration purposes. It operates using magnetic levitation, with liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors and permanent magnets that “combine to allow Lexus to create the impossible.” It says it is working with …
In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017. Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province …
Michael Dittmar wrote a series of posts about nuclear energy that was published on The Oil Drum in 2009. In the first post of the series, he said that uranium “civilian uranium stocks are expected to be exhausted during the next few years” and “the current uranium supply situation is unsustainable”. Basically lack of uranium …
The Economist Intelligence Unit has long range economic forecasts to 2050 for the United States and other countries. ‘Long-term macroeconomic forecasts: key trends to 2050,’ is a new report from The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU). It examines some of the big economic issues that will shape global business around the world in the coming …
Using ever more energetic lasers, Lawrence Livermore researchers have produced a record high number of electron-positron pairs, opening exciting opportunities to study extreme astrophysical processes, such as black holes and gamma-ray bursts. The current lasers are at 500-1000 joules. The favorable scaling of electron-positron pairs with laser energy obtained in these experiments suggests that, at …
D-Wave Systems, the world’s first quantum computing company, announced that it has broken the 1000 qubit barrier, developing a processor about double the size of D-Wave’s previous generation and far exceeding the number of qubits ever developed by D-Wave or any other quantum effort. This is a major technological and scientific achievement that will allow …
Russia will deploy new Bastion anti-ship missile complexes in the Arctic in 2015, a senior military official announced earlier this month. The coastal defense missile system is reportedly designed to destroy various enemy ships, including landing squadrons, convoys, carrier strike groups and single vessels. In addition to the cruise missile deployments, which cannot be considered …
Russia’s Navy will carry out a profound modernization of about ten nuclear-powered submarines of projects 971 and 949. “Everything will be new there. All the units, mechanisms, radio electronics,” Viktor Chirkov said, adding the after the modernization Russia’s Navy would have practically new nuclear submarines in terms of onboard equipment and weapons. The submarines are …
A guest post by Joseph Friedlander The New Horizons Probe is rapidly approaching the Pluto/Charon system. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Details at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=181 Details at: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150622 Notice that this is a double world system, orbiting an exposed barycenter. The fainter one is Charon, the brighter more massive one Pluto. The two are tidally …
The USA National MagLab made a magnet that broke the world record for an all-superconducting magnet. Built with both traditional and novel superconducting materials, the magnet reached a field of 27 teslas on June 5 in a test that exceeded designers’ expectations. The magnet is a smaller version of an even more powerful magnet due …