Northrop Grumman’s space and mission systems business will provide support for the Solid State High Power Laser Weapon System Demonstrator program under a potential three-year, $91.1 million U.S. Navy contract. The Defense Department said Thursday the cost-plus-fixed-fee contract has a base value of $53.1 million and base period of performance through Oct. 21, 2016. Northrop …
Scientists have taken a “very positive step” towards creating a universal vaccine against cancer that makes the body’s immune system attack tumours as if they were a virus, experts have said. Writing in Nature, an international team of researchers described how they had taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles …
People disabled by a stroke demonstrated substantial recovery long after the event when modified adult stem cells were injected into their brains. Injecting modified, human, adult stem cells directly into the brains of chronic stroke patients proved not only safe but effective in restoring motor function, according to the findings of a small clinical trial …
A team of researchers at MIT has developed a technique to integrate both analogue and digital computation in living cells, allowing them to form gene circuits capable of carrying out complex processing operations. Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter. These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in …
Techniques from information geometry have been used to show that there are an infinite number of quantum speed limits. They also develop a way to determine which of these speed limits are the strictest, or in other words, which speed limits offer the tightest lower bounds. As the researchers explain, the search for the ultimate …
This is an updating of my older articles based upon the updated estimates of air pollution related deaths. The deaths from coal, oil and natural gas and biofuels have a higher estimate. Basically the burning of fuel causes particulates and increases deaths by over 20 to 200 times compared to other energy production. However, deaths …
University of North Carolina physicist Mark Gubrud says the main limitation of the railgun is how much energy per shot you can deliver to the projectile and sabot without destroying the rails too fast. Patrick Tucker at Defense One details the challenges facing railguns using more than 5 megawatts of power per shot. This is …
The International Energy Association has a mid-term world oil forecast By 2021 non-OECD Asia will be importing 16.8 million barrels per day of crude oil and products, a rise of 2.8 million barrels per day compared to 2015. The People’s Republic of China (hereafter ‘China’), remains central to this growth, partly because of the underlying …
SpaceX will send an unmanned mission to Mars using the Dragon V2 rocket — starting in 2018 and launch a rocket to Mars every 26 months. The plan is for the first manned Mars mission in 2024. The plan for 2018 is for a sample return Mars rover to be delivered to the Martian surface …
China’s J-20 stealth fighter-bomber Aircraft and Y-20 tactical transport plane will be put into service “in the near future. The official Chinamil.com.cn website made this assertion while denying reports that the J-20 stealth fighter had entered PLA Southern Theater Command service and that comprehensive training between J-20 and J-10 fighter are already on. The J-20’s …
A prototype of the BrahMos hypersonic missile is expected to be manufactured in 2024 according to the Marketing Director of the Russian-Indian BrahMos Aerospace Company Praveen Pathak. Speed of the existing BrahMos supersonic missile will be increased 4 Mach by 2020. Development of a prototype hypersonic BrahMos will begin in 2022 Prototype will be flight …