Prof Steven Cowley, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, believes the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant in France could be producing viable electricity in the 2020s. The Joint European Torus (JET), a European pilot project at Culham in Oxfordshire, which is run by Prof Cowley. Prof Cowley’s laboratory in Oxfordshire has had …
IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is “very unlikely,” ice sheet collapse is “exceptionally unlikely,” and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is “very unlikely.” Chapter 12 of the upcoming Fifth IPCC report Nextbigfuture has indicated that more attention should be focused on particulate and soot air …
There are plenty of statements that Scott Aaronson was tossing around that insulted Dwave for having the temerity to prematurely talk about beating classical computers with an unbuilt quantum computer system. In 2007 Scott said – D-Wave’s current machine is said to have sixteen qubits. Even assuming it worked perfectly, with no decoherence or error, …
Yesterday I predicted that there would be a permanent base established on Mars by 2037. This is a prediction where I pad the date to allow for various real life problems to slow down the development. I believe the manned fly by of Mars will happen in 2018. Robert Zubrin is a highly opinionated and …
Ray Kurzweil has explained that his project is to get the Google computers to understand natural language, not just do search and answer questions based on links and words, but actually understand the semantic content. That’s feasible now. To successfully do this will involve employing technologies that are already at Google like the Knowledge Graph, …
Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues. The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early moon. …
A group from the Institut Fresnel in Marseille and the ground improvement specialist company, Menard, both in France, say they’ve built and tested a seismic invisibility cloak in an alluvial basin in southern France. That’s the first time such a device has been constructed. Future versions of this system could be used to protect hospital, …
Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) has begun the process of designing and building a replacement for its ageing Soyuz rocket and space capsule system, with the aim of putting it into operation by 2020. The Russian budget for a new rocket and capsule has been set at 2.1 trillion rubles (£43 billion), according to the …
North Dakota oil production at another record of 728,494 barrels of oil per day If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 …
1. After years of staunchly opposing uranium mining, Queensland state (austrialia’s northeast) has had a sudden change of heart. The state government says it plans to restart an industry that’s been dormant since 1982 so it can unlock deposits of the nuclear fuel worth 10 billion Australian dollars (US$10.3 billion). That’s good news for listed …
The International Energy Agency has an Iraq Energy Outlook, that projects Iraq oil production out to 2035. (142 pages) Iraq could double its production by the end of the decade, reaching 6.1 million barrels a day by 2020 from the 3 million barrels it currently turns out. The country, currently the third-largest oil exporter, could …