Morten Bay of University of Southern California Center for the Digital Future has written a non-satire academic paper claiming that Russian internet trolls increased the Star Wars fan divide over the Last Jedi. This was not written for the Onion. It is titled Weaponizing The Haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop …
The World became 50% urban in 2007. The global urban population increased from a mere 13% in 1900 to 29% in 1950. In 1960 the world was one-third urban. The world will have gone from 55% urban now to 68% in 2050 and over 70% in 2060. Megacities have populations over ten million. There are …
The White House released a National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science that outlines its plan for advancing the field. The Department of Energy and National Science Foundation also announced grant awards totaling $218 million and $31 million. The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research is awarding $81 million to develop computing hardware and software, …
Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. 2015 TG387 was discovered about 80 …
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, has detected two unusual signals. ANITA floats on a helium balloon 37000 meters high for a month at a time. It searches for the signals of high-energy particles from space, including lightweight, ghostly particles called neutrinos. Those neutrinos can interact within Antarctica’s ice, producing radio waves that are …
Moon Express is planning to send new robotic explorers to the Moon starting in 2020. Moon Express had participated in the Google Lunar Xprize. Moon Express has raised $12.5 million. Moon Express Chief Executive Bob Richards said that the funding will support redevelopment of Launch Complex (LC) 17 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in …
Below are the top 15 trading partner countries based upon exports from the USA in 2017. There have been new trade deals concluded (although the US-Canada-Mexico deal needs to be ratified and passed) Canada, Mexico, Europe, and South Korea. Canada and Mexico are 34% of US exports. Europe is 20%. South Korea is 3%. The …
Helion Energy has successfully raised $30 million raised in the past three years will be enough to get Helion through the debut of its 50-megwatt break-even nuclear fusion prototype. Helion’s commercial strategy is to build fusion reactors in Washington, with capacity of about 50 megawatts, and deploy them at industrial facilities. Helion Energy is building …
In 2017, Nextbigfuture said that the ITER tokamak fusion project would cost $45-60 billion more than the claimed $22 billion construction budget and US Department of Energy (DOE) agrees with a far higher cost estimate. On April 11, 2018, Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary for science, provided a $65 billion estimate to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee …
Marc Millis summarized the presentations at a Sept 10 to 14 workshop on propellantless propulsion in Estes Park Colorado. (H/T Centauri Dreams) Three different tests of the EmDrive were reported of varying degrees of rigor. All of the tests indicated that the claimed thrust is probably attributable to false positives. Woodward’s Mach Effect Thruster had …
Currently there are some 30 and 40 meter optical ground based telescopes under construction. The largest mirror for a space telescope is still the Hubble Space Telescope. The 6.5 meter James Webb telescope has been delayed. James Webb has 18 hexagon segments and weighs about 6500 kilograms. There are about four ways 1000 meter (kilometer) …