North Korea has launched “one unidentified missile” from its northern Jagang province, the South Korean Defense Ministry announced in a statement. The missile flew for about 45 minutes and appeared to have landed in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone. The missile may have landed within 230 miles of Japan’s coast, Japanese Prime Minister …
The US Navy completed testing on a software fix for its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) that will allow the heaviest planes to take off with less stress to the airframe, Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) announced this week. The EMALS team found during April 2014 testing that airplanes carrying full 480-gallon wing-mounted external fuel …
Breakthrough Starshot brings the Silicon Valley approach to space travel, capitalizing on exponential advances in key areas of technology since the beginning of the 21st century. The nanocraft concept, combining light beamer, lightsail and StarChip, is by far the most plausible system for launching a realistic mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation. The key …
Breakthrough Starshot plans to launch a fleet of tiny interstellar chipsize probes to Proxima Centauri in 30 or 40 years. Small chip probes have been launched into low Earth orbit on June 23. Sprites are ‘satellites on a chip,’. Research performed by Mason Peck and his team at Cornell University included Breakthrough Starshot’s Zac Manchester …
SpaceX, the rocket maker founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has raised up to $350 million in new financing and is now valued at around $21 billion, making it one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world. Five companies based in the United States that are valued at more than $20 billion — …
Nearly a fifth of the $94 trillion in global infrastructure investment needed by 2040 risks being unfunded if current spending trends continue according to the G20-backed Global Infrastructure Hub. To close the spending gap, annual infrastructure spending needs to rise to 3.5 percent from 3 percent of global gross domestic product. The GIH, set up …
Strong light-matter coupling in these semiconducting tubes may hold the key to electrically pumped lasers Light-matter quasi-particles can be generated electrically in semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Material scientists and physicists from Heidelberg University (Germany) and the University of St Andrews (Scotland) used light-emitting and extremely stable transistors to reach strong light-matter coupling and create exciton-polaritons. These …
University of Arizona engineers are installing three 20-foot-long tubes for a new high-speed wind tunnel in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Building. The Office of Navy Research (ONR) funded them with $2 million to study problems of instability and materials failure for aircraft and missiles flying at highly supersonic, or hypersonic, speeds of Mach 5 …
Cambridge researchers have shown that energy-efficient superconductors can power super energy efficient spintronics devices. What once seemed an impossible marriage of superconductivity and spin may be about to transform high performance computing. In 2016, IBM found that humans now create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. From the start of this decade to its end, …
Researchers have designed a novel computing system made solely from carbon that might one day replace the silicon transistors that power today’s electronic devices. It is a spintronic device that could eventually operate as much as 1000 times faster than current processors. “The concept brings together an assortment of existing nanoscale technologies and combines them …
The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon. Three previous reports of editing human embryos were all published by scientists in China. The US work is believed to have broken new ground both in the number of …