The Whitehouse has issued a press release with details of the parameters of the nuclear framework deal. The US is trying to go for 12+ month to nuclear breakout instead of 2-3 months. Breakout meaning how long to get the first bomb from the point of following the agreement and when they stopped following and …
The F-35 fighter jet was supposed to do a bit of everything, as James Fallows explains in “The Tragedy of the American Military”. Instead, the aircraft can barely do anything: it has trouble flying at night, its engines have exploded during takeoff, and early models suffered structural cracks. There’s no end in sight, either. The …
The Carnival of Space 387 is up at Everyday spacer Paul Scott Anderson | The Meridiani Journal – Kepler finds ‘super-Earth’ exoplanet in first discovery of new mission The Kepler space telescope has found its first new exoplanet, a “super-Earth,” of its secondary mission phase. The discovery adds to a current tally of 996 confirmed …
The German Parliament approved a proposal to develop a new generation of tanks. The program will be included in the medium-term planning of the German Ministry of Defense. The decision comes amid tensions from the “Ukrainian crisis” where the number of Leopard 2A6 tanks 225/7 that the Bundeswehr (German military) aims to maintain operational would …
Thanks to Talk Polywell for the links to several more articles on Mach Propulsion Keith H. Wanser from the University of California has used Newton’s second law to explain propellantless acceleration, and he explicitly compares his findings to Woodward’s work on the Mach Effect. Journal of Space Exploration – Center of mass acceleration of an …
Shimizu corporation is a top 5 construction contracting company in Japan. They have built terminal 3 of Singapore’s airport and the The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line aka Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway. Aqualine is a bridge–tunnel combination across Tokyo Bay in Japan. It connects the city of Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture with the city of Kisarazu in Chiba …
In what may lead to the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of Type 1 diabetes in three decades, Xander University Professor Douglas Melton and colleagues have figured out the complex series of steps necessary to turn stem cells into beta cells. Beta cells are the sugar-sensing, insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas that are missing in …
Tesla Motors revealed the Tesla Model D. The rumors that Nextbigfuture reported six days ago were correct. the Model D is a dual electric motor car with all wheel drive and an autopilot for driver assistance. The All-wheel drive will be an available option on all Model S trim levels and the new top-end P85D …
IEEE Spectrum has more information about Google’s quantum computer hardware plans. The Martinis group had previously built quantum computing systems of up to nine qubits based on superconducting quantum circuits—the same type of general hardware design used by D-Wave’s machines. Under the new Google effort, Martinis hopes his team can roughly double the number of …
A set of experiments conducted on the Nike krypton fluoride (KrF) laser at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) nearly five years ago has, at long last, earned the coveted Guinness World Records title for achieving “Highest Projectile Velocity” of greater than 1,000 kilometers per second (km/s), a speed equivalent to two-and-a-quarter million miles per …
There has been a lot of new reports that the chatbot Eugene Goostman has “beaten the Turing test” — the classic test of machine intelligence proposed by AI pioneer Alan Turing, which says (loosely) that if an AI program can fool people into thinking it’s human, in a textual conversation context, then it should be …