Navy admiral Pete Fanta wants to skip an at-sea prototype railgun in favor of installing an operational railgun aboard a new Zumwalt class destroyer which is planned to go into service in 2018. The Navy has been testing an electromagnetic railgun and could have an operational unit ready to go on one of the new …
Google has a team led by John Martinis to develop better quantum computers. They will be competing not only with whatever improvements D-Wave can make, but also with Microsoft and IBM, which have substantial quantum computing projects of their own. But IBM and Microsoft are focused on designs much further from becoming practically useful. Indeed, …
Out of a ‘haystack’ of 40,000 genes from three different organisms, scientists at ETH Zurich and a research consortium in Jena have found genes that are involved in physical ageing. If you influence only one of these genes, the healthy lifespan of laboratory animals is extended – and possibly that of humans, too. Driven by …
China plans to deploy its first two domestically built aircraft carriers to the southern island province of Hainan in anticipation of potential conflict over the disputed South China Sea, the nationalistic tabloid Global Times writes. A source from Beijing say China’s next carriers are likely to be deployed to the naval base at Sanya. Each …
On 23 September, at the Shenzhen International Biotech Leaders Summit in China, BGI revealed that it would start selling the pigs as pets. The animals weigh about 15 kilograms when mature, or about the same as a medium-sized dog. The institute quoted a price tag of 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) for the micropigs, but that was …
A group at the University of California, Los Angeles, has created microsupercapacitors using a simple DVD burner to forge the one-atom- thick sheets known as graphene on which these devices are formed, in arrays. Together with a battery, such supercapacitors could run a cellphone for days. And because an array is less than 10 micrometers …
A team from Singapore and Taiwan have shown that carbon fiber cloths coated in inexpensive catalysts can generate hydrogen, and perform not only in water but in seawater as well. IEEe Spectrum notes, the new material generated pure hydrogen roughly as efficiently as other state-of-the-art catalysts, the researchers say. Moreover, the new catalyst was more …
China Railway International USA CO., LTD. and XpressWest have agreed to form a joint venture that will accelerate the launch of the XpressWest rail project connecting Las Vegas, Nevada to Los Angeles, California (the “Southwest Rail Network”). The Project will develop, finance, build and operate the Southwest Rail Network, with stations in Las Vegas, Nevada, …
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have for the first time created and used a nanoscale vehicle made of DNA to deliver a CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool into cells in both cell culture and an animal model. The CRISPR-Cas system, which is found in bacteria and archaea, …
Observations from ESO’s La Silla and Paranal Observatories in Chile have for the first time demonstrated a link between a very long-lasting burst of gamma rays and an unusually bright supernova explosion. The results show that the supernova was not driven by radioactive decay, as expected, but was instead powered by the decaying super-strong magnetic …
A study of more than 300,000 nuclear-industry workers in France, the United States and the United Kingdom, all of whom wore dosimeter badges, has provided exactly these data. A consortium of researchers coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, examined causes of death in the workers (one-fifth of whom …