SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket is now vertical on launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The fully-assembled 229-foot-tall rocket will be the most powerful in the world when it blasts off. It will have 4.7 million pounds of thrust at launch. Elon has said first Falcon Heavy’s engines will only be operated at …
The (noisy) 50-100 qubit quantum computer is coming soon. (NISQ = noisy intermediate-scale quantum computer). NISQ devices cannot be simulated by brute force using the most powerful currently existing supercomputers. NISQ will be an interesting tool for exploring physics. It might also have useful applications. But we’re not sure about that. NISQ will not change …
China carried out the first flight-tests of a new kind of ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) in November. The DF-17 is the first hypersonic glide vehicle-equipped missile intended for operational deployment ever tested. During the November 1 test flight, which took place from the Jiuquan Space Launcher Center in Inner Mongolia, the …
Virgin Hyperloop One, a Los Angeles company, announced it has raised $50 million from foreign venture capital investors and made Richard Branson the chairman of its board of directors. The new round of funding came from Dubai’s DP World and Russia’s Caspian Venture Capital. Axios, which first reported the story, called the money a lifeline …
China has a $1 billion to $1.5 billion virtual reality theme park that has a 174-foot tall statue of a Transformer made of 750 tons of steel. The theme park is set to open in February 2018. The copper statue portion of the Statue of Liberty is 150 feet tall and weighs 225 tons. The …
Like sandblasting at the nanometer scale, focused beams of ions ablate hard materials to form intricate three-dimensional patterns. The beams can create tiny features in the lateral dimensions—length and width, but to create the next generation of nanometer-scale devices, the energetic ions must precisely control the features in the vertical dimension—depth. Now, researchers at the …
A new NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) spectrometer measures single photons with great precision. The device could help bring about “quantum communications” networks, which would use individual particles of light to send bits of information. Because each bit of information can be embedded in the quantum properties of a single photon, the laws …
In September, the Department of Energy awarded Lawrence Berkeley Labs of $3 million per year to construct a quantum computer and the software needed to operate it. Siddiqi’s team have already produced an 8 qubit superconducting system, with the ultimate goal of reaching 64 qubits. This would be the first time anyone in the U.S. …
Material and engineering researchers at East China’s Zhejiang University unveiled a “super” aluminum-graphene battery that can be fully charged in 5 seconds and then last for two hours. They claim to have developed a novel aluminum-graphene battery that is more cold-resistant, can work in temperatures ranging from -40 C to 120 C and is less …
The SpaceX BFR (Big Falcon Rocket or Big Fucking Rocket) has a planned payload of 150,000 kg (330,000 lb) when flying reusable or 250,000 kg (550,000 lb) when flying expendable, making it a super heavy-lift launch vehicle. SpaceX plans to replace of all their current rockets by the early 2020s with the BFR. Tooling for …
7 of India’s biggest IT companies including Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant are laid off 56,000 engineers in 2017. 2017 layoffs were double the level in 2016. This is because they are not prepared to adapt to newer technologies. Less than 5% of Indian techies are equipped to handle high-skilled jobs. For several years now, Indian …