Global smartphone shipments grew 47 percent to hit 230 million devices in the second quarter of 2013, according to a new report from research firm Strategy Analytics. And Android captured record market share of 80 percent. Apple iOS reached 14 percent global smartphone share in the quarter. Microsoft has 4%. There will likely a bit …
Life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy: A review by Lenzen is fairly frequently quoted for its energy return analysis of nuclear energy. Lenzen had calculated nuclear energy return at 3-10 times the energy input. Lenzen assumes nuclear plants have an operating life of 25-45 years. Many nuclear plants are heading to …
A small blog listed Nextbigfuture among three optimistic future related blogs (Singularity Hub and KurzweilAI are the two others). He lists six blogs that are pessimistic about the future. One of the pessimistic blogs is collapse of industrial civilization which has a sample article that proposes that a collapse will be well underway by 2047 …
The Binshui New City management committee said that construction of the 838-metre Sky City – which developers plan to build in a record-breaking seven months – would not proceed until “relevant legal procedures” were met, Xinhua reported. The panel said nine domestic construction experts had studied the project, including its structure and quake resistance, but …
The Carnival of Space 312 is up at Links Through Space Chandra’s 14th Anniversary: Looking Back And Looking Ahead Nextbigfuture – Spacex has successfully completed mission duration tests firings of its upgraded Merlin 1D rockets in a octogonal configuration. This will increase the launch capacity to LEO of a Spacex Falcon 9.1.1 to 14.5 tons …
Indonesia’s economy Gross Domestic Product stands at IDR 8,200 trillion, of which household consumption contributes around IDR 5,000 trillion. The Exchange rate has been about 8500 to 10000 IDR to 1 USD. It did spike as high as 12000 to one in the financial crisis. Indonesia seems to be on track for consistent GDP growth …
Jonathan Markley provided a report on the Starship conference to Transterrestrial. Futurist Peter Schwartz Schwarz sees 4 possibilities for interstellar ships: 1. Generation ships 2. sleep ships 3. relativistic ships 4. download ships Forgotten types 5. Radically life extended crew 6. Breakthrough physics Freeman Dyson Freeman Dyson sees bio-tech as the way of the future …
A new metal-organic framework material that sorts hydrocarbon molecules by shape could lower the cost of gasoline and also make the fuel safer by reducing the need for certain additives that have been linked to cancer, according to a paper in the next issue of the journal Science. Refiners typically use a material that can …
IM Flash Technologies LLC, the joint venture between Intel and Micron Technologies, is considering how and when to take its NAND flash memory ICs into the third dimension but reckons its development of a 20-nm memory cell has bought it a generation or two of 2-D scaling. An industry-wide transition for the nonvolatile NAND flash …
Danny Lidar has said that he does not believe D-Wave Adiabatic quantum computer approach is scalable without error correction. He believes that the incorporation of error correction is a necessary condition in order to ever achieve a speedup with D-Wave’s machines. He does not believe D-Wave’s machines are any different from other types of quantum …
Dwave’s 512 qubit system can speedup the solution of Google’s machine learning algorithms by 50,000 times in 25% of the problem cases. This could make it the fastest system for solving Google’s problems. Google and Dwave have been working on sparse coding, deep learning and unattended machine learning with Dwave’s quantum computer helping to get …