Thomas Shugart at War on the Rocks makes the case that China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea are not trivial. Thomas Shugart is a Senior Military Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a submarine warfare officer in the U.S. Navy. China has three major islands Fiery Cross, Subi, and …
Robots for the automation of industrial tasks are on the rise in North America, according to a recently-released industry report from the Association for Advancing Automation. More than $800 million in orders were placed in the first half of 2016, setting a new purchasing high for the industry of 14,583 robots. This represents a 2% …
China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters. Such an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface, according …
Covering an area the size of 30 football pitches, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) was officially completed this week, making it the largest radio telescope in the world. The telescope is larger than the Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter. It will also be 10 times more sensitive than the …
Switzerland’s Federal Polytechnic Institute have an aircraft design which is inspired by shipping containers and Thunderbird 2 but with multiple fuselages. The Clip-Air team though—they’re preparing to build a smaller 10-meter drone prototype soon. Clip-Air capsules would also be able to be transported by rail. They would be for lighter containers for passengers that would …
Reusable rockets could greatly lower rocket launch costs but two other significant emerging technologies are 3D printing and liquified natural gas rocket fuel. Liquefied natural gas, which is a commercially available form of methane, could have several advantages as a rocket fuel. Blue Origin has said its wide availability and low cost would enable an …
Solar and wind energy are still a tiny share of the overall energy production mix ARPA-E has the FOCUS (Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight) project to make solar energy a larger part of the US energy mix. SOURCE – ARPA-E Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger …
The process of detecting light—whether with our eyes, cameras or other devices—is at the heart of a wide range of civilian and military applications, including light or laser detection and ranging (LIDAR or LADAR), photography, astronomy, quantum information processing, medical imaging, microscopy and communications. But even the most advanced detectors of photons—the massless, ghostlike packets …
Project Pacer And the Unbuilt Pacer Economy Part 1: This is the second of two articles. This gives some history of the possible need for near term D-D fusion neutrons to maximize fission fuel supplies. This second part covers more modern redesigns of the concept, notably by Ralph Moir in the 1990s and the fact …
The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, helping consumers make their own reliable health diagnoses anywhere, anytime. XPRIZE announced the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE has been officially extended through early 2017, providing the seven finalist teams with additional time to make adjustments to their …
Peter Thiel makes the case in the NY Times for policy to get aligned to enable new nuclear designs to be used to reduce the emissions associated with climate change Speaking about climate change in 2013, President Obama said that our grandchildren will ask whether we did “all that we could when we had the …