China’s President Xi outlined at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum how much the world stands to gain from a rising China. He said 500 million Chinese tourists will go abroad over the next five years. This is a conservative estimate. In 2013, 98 million Chinese traveled abroad. That’s an increase of 18% compared to the …
The head of the Air Force Research Laboratory on Sept. 16 said the first test of a hypersonic aircraft could come within five years, and the technology could be applied to cruise missiles by the 2020s. Maj. Gen. Tom Masiello, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, said hypersonics is one of the most promising …
[Imperial College London] A structural ceramic that can withstand temperatures three times hotter than lava shows promise in hypersonic air travel, say researchers. Researchers in the UK and around the world are currently working on prototype technologies that could enable new types of aircraft to travel at hypersonic speeds – five times faster than the …
The performance of a quantum annealer on hard random Ising optimization problems can be substantially improved using quantum annealing correction (QAC). Our error correction strategy is tailored to the D-Wave Two device. They find that QAC provides a statistically significant enhancement in the performance of the device over a classical repetition code, improving as a …
Gregory Benford describes [at Centauri Dreams] an evening he had with Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees. It is very interesting and discusses the great scientists attitude to science fiction and the value of it to them. It also discussed how Dirac made his greatest discovery. Paul Dirac won a Nobel in 1933 for …
Here is a calculation that hydronponically grown lettuce is cheaper with a cost of about 4 cents per head. Lettuce can sell for about 0.99 to 1.75. Philips and GE are supplying special LED lights to lower the energy costs of indoor lettuce farming. They also grow the lettuce in racks so that every two …
Surviving in bad housing, without electricity and with unsafe cooking is Rich World Reality TV and is an entertaining challenge for a few weeks or months. However, it sucks badly for the everyday life of the worlds poorest billions. The unsafe cooking with indoor smoke and air pollution causes more cancer and disease. The lack …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 209 is up at Yes Vermont Yankee Atomic Insights – Existing nuclear plants are valuable and worth saving Many currently operating nuclear plants are in danger of being permanently shut down due to temporary conditions including low, but volatile natural gas prices, improperly designed markets that fail to recognize the …
Spike Aerospace was founded by a small group of passionate engineers interested in international travel, and opportunities to make that faster and more efficient. They have spent the last 2 years designing a supersonic personal jet — the Spike S-512. This amazing team, with years of experience at Gulfstream, Eclipse and Airbus have designed a …
The Pentagon this week edged closer to mounting missile-destroying lasers on unmanned and manned aircraft, awarding $26 million to defense contractors to develop the technology. Northrop Gumman and Lockheed will develop technology for pod-mounted laser weapons to protect manned aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from electro-optical and infrared (EO/IR)-guided surface-to-air missiles. Under the name …
Ray Kurzweil—futurist, inventor, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and now, director of engineering at Google— wants to live forever. He spoke to a magazine in Canada about it. Ray sees biology as software Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking …