Japan has spent $331 million on the X-2 Stealth fighter prototype but it would cost roughly $60 billion to develop and field a modern stealth combat aircraft. Japan is not likely to develop the X-2 into a fully operational stealth aircraft—the cost is just not worth it for a limited production run. Instead, the country …
A prototype of the first Japan-made stealth fighter was unveiled to the media Thursday at a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. factory in central Japan. The fighter will first undergo ground tests before making its maiden flight in mid-February or later. The country’s first domestically made stealth fighter — 14.2 meters long, 9.1 meters wide and …
The Oil-price collapse was caused by the astonishing, unexpected growth in U.S. shale output, responsible for three-fourths of new global oil supply since 2008. And as lower prices roil operators and investors, the shale skeptics’ case may seem vindicated. But their history is false: the shale revolution, “Shale 1.0,” was sparked not by high prices—it …
WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan, will convene an International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on Zika virus and observed increase in neurological disorders and neonatal malformations Outbreak in the Americas In May 2015, Brazil reported its first case of Zika virus disease. Since then, the disease has spread within Brazil and to 22 other countries and territories …
Nextbigfuture interviewed Jaeyoung Park who leads the EMC2 commercial fusion effort. EMC2 is developing the work of late Dr. Robert Bussard for magneto-electrostatic fusion, also known as “Polywell fusion”. Dr. Park confirmed the recent publication of an EMC2 patent filing. Dr Park also discussed the reasons behind EMC2’s silence, which had been driven by the …
Russian officials have decided they should talk to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries about output cuts to bolster oil prices, the head of Russia’s pipeline monopoly said on Wednesday, remarks that helped spur a sharp rise in world prices. Oil futures surged more than 5 percent after the comments by Nikolai Tokarev, head of …
The first classic game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952 as a PhD candidate’s project. Then fell checkers in 1994. Chess was tackled by Deep Blue in 1997. The success isn’t limited to board games, either – IBM’s Watson won first place on Jeopardy in 2011, and …
Electric car manufacturers have to design futuristic vehicles to entice buyers in order to ride out the challenge of plunging oil prices, Tesla co-founder Elon Musk said today. The luxury all-electric US car maker, founded in 2003, rose to prominence as oil prices soared and made alternative energy vehicles more tempting. Now the fledgling industry …
A guest article by Joseph Friedlander Nigel B. Cook’s Glasstone.Blogspot Blog Nigel B. Cook’s Glasstone.Blogspot Blog has beautiful coverage of many nuclear topics here. http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/ Cook is a master researcher who digs up incredible piles of research on all topics nuclear and the following is a partial repost of a 1957 article about men surrounded …
Russia and China are increasingly pursuing the ability to attack America’s space-based assets, but is there anything the Pentagon can do to thwart Beijing and Moscow’s ambitions? Space-based capabilities like GPS, communications and reconnaissance satellites are the sinews that hold the U.S. military together, allowing American forces to operate across the globe. Russia’s leaders also …
The Antipode is the second hypersonic jet by Canadian inventor and engineer, Charles Bombardier. The Antipode design is a 10-seat private jet that uses rocket boosters to take off, detaches the rockets at altitude of 12km, fires its hypersonic engines to hit speeds of Mach 24 (20,000 km/h), and gets you from New York to …