The Project 955A nuclear submarine Prince Vladimir and the Project 885M Yasen-M nuclear-powered underwater cruiser Kazan will be floated out in 2017, Russian Navy Deputy Commander-in-Chief Vice-Admiral Viktor Bursuk The Prince Vladimir was laid down in 2012 and will become the fourth submarine in the series of eight Borei-class underwater cruisers and the first submarine …
Centauri Dreams has a review of the EMDrive by Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation and other experts. They have spent the last two months reviewing the relevant papers. Millis enlisted the help of scientists with expertise in experimental issues, all of whom …
Intel has a team of quantum hardware engineers in Portland, Oregon, who collaborate with researchers in the Netherlands, at TU Delft’sQuTech quantum research institute, under a $50 million grant established last year. Earlier this month Intel’s group reported that they can now layer the ultra-pure silicon needed for a quantum computer onto the standard wafers …
Chinese scientists have become the first in the world to use a revolutionary new gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 on living humans. Scientists at Sichuan University in Chengdu have injected a person with aggressive lung cancer with cells modified using the gene-splicing technology in a bid to make the patient’s immune system more effective at …
In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASA’s Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object. This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown …
Harvard researchers have studied and observed solid hydrogen under pressure at low temperatures. With increasing pressure we observe changes in the sample, going from transparent, to black, to a reflective metal, the latter studied at a pressure of 495 GPa. They have measured the reflectance as a function of wavelength in the visible spectrum finding …
A Century of War and Gray Zone Challenges” has a September 2015 briefing slide produced by the Intelligence Directorate of U.S. Special Operations Command. The slide analyzes US military actions and wars and rates them as wins, losses or draws. SOCOM Intelligence Directorate’s assessment of the last century of American war — 12 and nine with a mind-boggling …
Applied scientists led by Caltech’s Kerry Vahala have discovered a new type of optical soliton wave that travels in the wake of other soliton waves, hitching a ride on and feeding off of the energy of the other wave. Solitons are localized waves that act like particles: as they travel across space, they hold their …
Scientists in South Korea have made ultra-thin photovoltaics flexible enough to wrap around the average pencil. The bendy solar cells could power wearable electronics like fitness trackers and smart glasses. Thin materials flex more easily than thick ones – think a piece of paper versus a cardboard shipping box. The reason for the difference: The …
Unit 4 of the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant started operating at 100% power for the first time today. The BN-800 fast neutron reactor is scheduled to enter commercial operation later this year. The BN-800 reactor was brought to minimum controlled power for the first time in June 2014, at which time commercial operation was planned …
Elon Musk said that the “obvious priority” after Model 3 production would be the compact SUV that was also mentioned in the Master Plan, the one that has been rumored in the past as the “Model Y.” “That’s also a car where we expect to see demand in the 500,000 to 1,000,000-per-year level,” he said. …