The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific and Indian Oceans praised the Navy’s $2.7 billion Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) and stressed the value of them in surveillance and in countering Chinese and Russian naval forces. Testifying Feb. 23 before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander, U.S. …
A new version of humanoid Boston Dynamics (Google – Alphabet company) Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the …
Brent oil fell 3 percent on Tuesday, erasing early gains after top producers Russia and Saudi Arabia dashed expectations of an outright supply cut by agreeing only to freeze output if other big exporters joined them. Benchmark Brent prices jumped briefly through $35 a barrel after Russia and Saudi Arabia agreed to keep output at …
A guest article by Joseph Friedlander This is a longer article giving an overview of what happens if Gershom Gale’s theory that people with fluid filled interiors can survive 1000 G and better is workable. If so, what new opportunities for manned space operations are opened? There are so many launch system ideas that have great …
Aidan Chatwin-Davies, Adam Jermyn, and Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have found an explicit way to retrieve information from one quantum particle lost in a black hole, using Hawking radiation and the weird concept of quantum teleportation. Quantum teleportation enables two partners, Alice and Bob, to transfer the delicate quantum …
Unit 4 of the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant in the Sverdlovsk district of Russia has been connected to the national grid. The BN-800 fast neutron reactor started providing power to the Urals region since Friday, Dec 11, 2015. To achieve this, the thermal capacity of the reactor was raised to 25% of its nominal capacity …
James Bessen wrote Learning by doing. Bessen returns to Marx’s 19th-century weavers to prove that as humans work with new technologies over the long term, they improve them and boost their own fortunes in the process. So, yes, when the power loom was invented, in 1785, it shifted weaving from farms to factories, instantly increasing …
A team at MIT has come up with an innovative desalination approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy. Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes …
The Military wants wearables that provide information for making better decisions in combat. DARPA is interested in environmental information such as maps, real-time intelligence, and location tracking of other troops, as well as the emerging area of “warfighter readiness.” Here, a wearable would tell users about their physiological state—whether a fighter is properly hydrated, over …
Russia is to supply China with 24 multirole Su-35 fighters in a deal stated as being worth USD2 billion (USD83 million per unit), Russian defence conglomerate Rostec has announced. “Lengthy negotiations have concluded in a contract to supply 24 Su-35 multi-purpose fighters to China,” Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov was quoted as saying by Russian daily …
Phil Plait is blogger and astronomer called the Bad Astronomer. He explains the special star which might have a Dyson Swarm. A Jupiter size planet has blocks 1% of a Stars light, but this has some dips of 15% and 22% and hundreds of other non periodic smaller dips. KIC 8462852 is a star somewhat …