China faces an important choice: whether to continue with its old model and raise the risk of a hard landing for the economy, or to shift gears. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, China’s choice: Capturing the $5 trillion productivity opportunity, finds that a new approach centered on productivity could generate 36 trillion renminbi ($5.6 …
Billionaire Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri within a generation—and he’s recruited Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking to help. Yuri Borisovich is a Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He founded investment firms Digital Sky Technologies (DST), now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global. Through DST …
Every bit of weight on an aircraft increases the fuel, emissions and money required to put it in the air. NASA and Boeing have been working together to design a longer, thinner and lighter wing – so different from typical commercial transport aircraft wings that it requires a brace, or truss, to provide the wing …
According to epigenetics — the study of inheritable changes in gene expression not directly coded in our DNA — our life experiences may be passed on to our children and our children’s children. Studies on survivors of traumatic events have suggested that exposure to stress may indeed have lasting effects on subsequent generations. But how …
Almost a month after Stephen Hawking and his colleagues posted a paper about black holes online, physicists still cannot agree on what it means. Some support the preprint’s claim — that it provides a promising way to tackle a conundrum known as the black hole information paradox, which Hawking identified more than 40 years ago. …
Globally, Star Wars is now the third highest grossing worldwide release of all-time with over $1.73 billion. Based on international numbers alone, it is now the seventh highest grossing release with $921.4 million, just behind Avengers: Age of Ultron. Star Wars the Force Awakens taking first place for the fourth weekend in a row with …
A new analysis of an ape that lived 12.5 million years ago suggests it is a type of gorilla. If that’s true, it means gorillas evolved much earlier than thought, and also pushes back the time when humans split from chimps by about 2 million years. David Begun of the University of Toronto in Canada …
University of Florida Researcher Angelini came up with the idea to use microscopic hydrogel particles as a medium for 3-D printing of soft matter. These particles are 99.8 percent water and 20 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. He found that he could manufacture soft materials into shapes more fragile than anything …
Dr. Vincent Tang, a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, describes DARPA’s progress toward automated, always-on radiological detection systems designed to detect nuclear materials quickly over vast distances. He spoke at DARPA’s “Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum” on Sept. 9, 2015. DARPA has developed a radiation detector that is small and cheap, integrates …
Director Tim Russ and writer Ethan H Calk are both from the world of ”Star Trek” – trekkies know Russ as wise Vulcan Tuvok from the ”Voyager” and ”TNG” series, and Calk was a writer on ”Deep Space Nine” – but this low budget curiosity isn’t exactly canon. The story of ”Star Trek: Renegades” : …
Jeff Funk, Associate Professor at National University of Singapore, makes some projections and analysis of Neuromorphic chips. The presentation describes the advantages and disadvantages of synaptic chips when compared to conventional chips and how rapid rates of progress in speed, density, and power efficiency are making synaptic chips economically feasible for supercomputing applications. The biggest …