Zoltan Istvan is running as a Transhumanist party candidate. He has a science focus. Here is an email interview with Nextbigfuture What has the campaign been like for you ? What media attention ? My campaign has been a whirlwind since it started nearly 20 months ago. The amount of attention given to it has …
The fourth low production rate copy of the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter has been spotted The J-20 will fly at up to 1305 mph The appearance of LRIP aircraft suggests that the type is nearing introduction into service with the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. A number of J-20s have been seen on satellite imagery …
Spacex and Elon Musk plan to spend $300 million on their first Red Dragon mission to Mars in 2018. This will be ten times more than NASA will spend If this leads to Spacex performing a series of mainly successful unmanned and then a manned mission to Mars around 2024 or 2026 then that manned …
China has completed the world’s largest seaplane that is currently operating. The amphibious AG600 is about the size of a Boeing 737 and will be used to fight forest fires and perform marine rescue operations, state-run news agency Xinhua said. The spruce goose made by Howard Hughes was a larger seaplane. It weighed 180 tons …
The latest study of population height shows most countries with male and females getting taller. The US used to have the tallest people but the tallest men are now in the Netherlands at an average of 6 feet tall. Men born in 1996 surpass average heights of 181 cm in the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia …
Leidos, a national security, health, and infrastructure solutions company, announced today that on June 22, it completed initial performance trials of the technology demonstration vessel it is developing for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program. The at-sea tests took place off the coast of San Diego, …
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers have achieved unprecedented scalability in 3D-printed architectures of arbitrary geometry, opening the door to super-strong, ultra-lightweight and flexible metallic materials for aerospace, the military and the automotive industry. In a study published online July 18 in Nature Materials (link is external), LLNL engineers report building multiple layers of fractal-like …
LLNL researchers are exploring the use of metal 3D printing to create strong, lightweight structures for advanced laser systems – an effort they say could alter the way lasers are designed in the future. In a Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program, physicist Ibo Matthews and his team are experimenting with a new research-based …
EPFL scientist Selman Sakar teamed up with Hen-Wei Huang and Bradley Nelson at ETHZ to develop a simple and versatile method for building such bio-inspired robots and equipping them with advanced features. They also created a platform for testing several robot designs and studying different modes of locomotion. Their work, published in Nature Communications, produced …
The old rules don’t necessarily apply when building electronic components out of two-dimensional materials, according to scientists at Rice University. The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson analyzed hybrids that put 2-D materials like graphene and boron nitride side by side to see what happens at the border. They found that the electronic characteristics …
The USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC) based at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) has been upgraded — to 1,098 qubits from 512. The D-Wave 2X™ processor is enabling QCC researchers to continue their efforts to close the gap between academic research in quantum computation and real-world critical problems. “Our QCC researchers have been …