NASA Orion spacecraft has taken over a decade and will see more cost overruns and

GAO found that the Orion program’s cost and schedule estimates are not reliable based on best practices for producing high-quality estimates. Cost and schedule estimates play an important role in addressing technical risks. In September 2015, NASA established a commitment baseline of $11.3 billion and an April 2023 launch readiness date for the program’s second …

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Gigafactories will be the key to sustainable economic and technological advantage for Elon Musk

Elon Musk argues that applying engineering effort to refining the production process is a better use of man-hours than trying to wring the last little bits of efficiency out of his cars. An engineer working on improving the factory line is five to 10 times more productive than that same effort put on the product …

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Russia making new destroyer class

Russia’s Severnoye Design Bureau has started working on the Project 23560 Leader-class destroyer that will combine the features of a destroyer, large antisubmarine warship and guided missile cruiser. The ship will most likely be nuclear powered. It will be capable of spending up to 90 days offshore without additional refueling or support. The Leader-class destroyers …

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Genetic startups and gene sequencing projects target the developing world populations

Though countries outside the U.S., Europe, and Japan make up 60 percent of the world’s population, they contribute less than 1 percent of sequenced genomic data globally. This is largely because poor countries historically focused their health resources on managing and eradicating communicable diseases and did not establish programs like the Human Genome Project in …

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Yi 4K camera is half the price and matches or beats the Go Pro Hero4 Black on a spec for spec basis

The Yi4K Action Camera is almost exactly a GoPro Hero4 Black. It has similar features. The Hero4 Black costs $500, and the Yi 4K costs $250. The Yi 4K beats the Go Pro Hero4 Black on a spec for spec basis It has twice the battery life and a built in touchscreen Brian WangBrian Wang …

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Orangutan mimics human speech

An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes. ‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”. “This opens up …

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Estonia e-residency allows anyone to setup and run a business in the EU

With 1.3 million citizens, Estonia is one of the smallest countries in Europe, but its ambition is to become one of the largest countries in the world. Not one of the largest geographically or even by number of citizens, however. Largest in e-residents, a category of digital affiliation that it hopes will attract people, especially …

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Supercomputers find a way of making ‘imitation graphene’ from salt

Researchers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (TISNCM), the National University of Science and Technology MISiS (Russia), and Rice University (USA) used computer simulations to find how thin a slab of salt has to be in order …

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Israel has a desalination fresh water surplus and desalination could be used to reduce middle east conflicts

Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination …

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China CH-4B drone copies the MQ-9 Reaper drone but with weaker engines

Video of China’s CH-4b drone shows it is a copy of the American MQ-9 Reaper drone. Like the Reaper, the CH-4B has a nose-mounted sensor turret incorporating both daytime and infra-red cameras. The cameras are capable of zooming on target and appear stabilized. The sensor turret also apparently has a laser rangefinder and designator. The …

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