For the foreseeable future, CRISPR’s greatest impact will lie in its ability to help scientists rapidly rewrite the genomes of animal and plant species. In laboratories, agricultural companies have already begun to use CRISPR to edit soybeans, rice, and potatoes in an effort to make them more nutritious and more resistant to drought. Scientists might …
Assuming the US Congress ever became capable of passing legislation again, how much more energy-efficient could the United States actually get? By some accounts, the United States could stand to get twice as efficient in the coming decades, saving hundreds of billions of dollars and slashing its global-warming emissions in the process. Yet other economists …
The J-31 fighter jet had poor performance in air demonstrations at the 2014 Airshow China in Zhuhai. This has prompted officials from the state-run Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to emphasise the future development path for the aircraft. The builder AVIC is attempting to convey the perception that the actual “FC-31” production-standard aircraft will …
Meet “Super H mode,” a newly discovered state of tokamak plasma that could sharply boost the performance of future fusion reactors. This new state raises the pressure at the edge of the plasma beyond what previously had been thought possible, creating the potential to increase the power production of the superhot core of the plasma. …
As the Pentagon considers the future of military vertical lift, Bell Helicopter is talking with the US Navy and Air Force about designing a next-generation tiltrotor solution that could be ready by 2025. Bell is partnered with Lockheed Martin to build a rotorcraft flight demonstrator as part of the US Army’s Joint Multi-Role program, which …
NVIDIA Jetson is the world’s leading visual computing platform for GPU-accelerated parallel processing in the mobile embedded systems market. Its high-performance, low-energy computing for deep learning and computer vision makes Jetson the ideal solution for compute-intensive embedded projects like: Drones Autonomous Robotic Systems Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Mobile Medical Imaging Jetson TX1 is a …
An aviator flew by jetpack in a controlled and sustained flight around Statue of Liberty. The JB-9 is small enough to sit in the back seat of a car but powerful enough to fly thousands of feet high. The JB-9 jetpack, approved for the flight by the FAA and US Coast Guard was developed by …
The Scorpene-class diesel electric submarine Kalvari has begun sea trials. Six of these submarines are to be delivered to the Indian Navy by 2020. The Scorpène-class submarines are a class of diesel-electric attack submarines jointly developed by the French DCN and the Spanish company Navantia and now by DCNS. It features diesel propulsion and an …
When completed, Wendelstein 7-X will be the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type. Its objective is to investigate the suitability of this type for a power plant. It will also test an optimised magnetic field for confining the plasma, which will be produced by a system of 50 non-planar and superconducting magnet coils, …
The demise of flash memory at the hands of some new technological upstart has been predicted at least for the last decade. The latest pretender to the throne is the so-called memristor (also called resistive RAM, ReRAM, or RRAM). Of course, if you don’t like the term “memristor”, you can alternatively refer to it as …
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 …