Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says that within just a few years, he expects far more powerful prototypes of more than 150 kilowatts. Within six to eight years, US forces could begin using laser systems of more than 300 kilowatts. A 150 kilowatt laser would have anti-missile …
A new study by Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb at Harvard says that fast radio bursts (FRBs) could come from extraterrestrial radio beams being used as beacons or to power alien light sails. The source of FRBs, which are milliseconds-long but incredibly bright pulses of radio waves, have intrigued and mystified astronomers for years – …
Researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in …
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency has launched a study of innovative ways to counter advanced missile threats such as ultra-high-speed maneuvering hypersonic missiles. The agency recently released a request for information that will seek to identify weapon concepts for defense against future advanced threats such as hypersonics, he said. The responses are due Friday and …
Researchers doubt the Harvard claim that solid metallic hydrogen has been created Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, both physicists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first posted a report of their results on the arXiv preprint server last October, which attracted immediate criticism. A peer-reviewed version of the report was published on 26 January in …
Secretary of Defense James Mattis last week directed his deputy to conduct a review of the F-35 fighter program with an eye to reducing the cost of the Pentagon’s biggest weapon program. The only situations where it might matter whether there are F35s or advanced superhornets would be a potential future conflict between China and …
The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy (Strategy) and the forthcoming National Near Earth Object Preparedness Action Plan (Action Plan) together seek to improve our Nation’s preparedness to address the hazard of near-Earth object (NEO) impacts by enhancing the integration of existing national and international assets and adding important capabilities that are currently lacking. The Strategy …
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) toda declared that broadband access Internet service is now considered a basic telecommunications service for all Canadians. The CRTC is also setting ambitious new speed targets and creating a new fund that will invest up to $750 million over and above existing government programs. Currently, about 18 percent …
The search for thermoelectrics with higher figures of merit (ZT) will never stop due to the demand of heat harvesting. Single layer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD), namely MX2 (where M is a transition metal and X is a chalcogen) that have electronic band gaps are among the new materials that have been the focus of …
The Carnival of Space 485 is up at Urban Astronomer Universe Today – ‘Global Warming Hiatus’ Not Good News For Planet Earth Universe Today – How Do We Colonize Jupiter’s Moons? Establishing colonies on the Galilean moons has many potential benefits for humanity. For one, the Jovian system is incredibly rich in terms of volatiles …
Researchers introduced new concepts and arithmetic functions that could play a significant role in the quantum factorization problem. The Factorization Ensemble is the main one; it allows us to bind the hamiltonian of a quantum factoring simulator. Although the researchers have not yet built a quantum simulator, they show that the prime factors of large …