China is set to land a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, a major step in the Asian superpower’s ambitious programme of space exploration. UPDATE – The lander has successfully landed on the moon. On Saturday afternoon (GMT), a landing module will undergo a powered descent, using thrusters to perform the first soft …
A Bloomberg Business Week analysis of skyscrapers analyzes the number of skyscrapers of different heights and tries to extrapolate when a mile high skyscraper will be built. They look at the buildings over 1,500 feet, all with completion dates between 2004 and 2020, a very short 16-year period. They estimate that one 5000 foot building …
The theory underlying Mach effects – fluctuations of the restmasses of accelerating objects in which internal energy changes take place – and their use for propulsion is briefly recapitulated. Experimental apparatus based on a very sensitive thrust balance is briefly described. The experimental protocol employed to search for expected Mach effects is laid out, and …
The U.S. military launched an experimental hypersonic aircraft on its swan song test flight Wednesday (May 1), accelerating the craft to more than five times the speed of sound in the longest-ever mission for a vehicle of its kind. The Air Force’s X-51A Waverider reached a top speed of Mach 5.1 during the test flight, …
NASA Kepler released last month 18,406 planet-like detection events from its last three year mission to search for exoplanets (Kepler Q1-Q12 TCE). Further analysis is required by the NASA Kepler Team and the scientific community to extract and identify true planets, including those potentially habitable. The Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo (PHL) performed a …
Wired has coverage of Broad Group of China and their CEO Zhang. Broad has built 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun. They are fabricated in sections at two factories in Hunan, roughly an hour’s drive from Broad Town. From there the modules—complete with preinstalled ducts and plumbing for electricity, water, and other infrastructure—are …
A Tour of Spacex Offices from October, 2011 Spacex Dragon Mission Highlights Spacex Merlin 1D Test Firing Super Draco Test Firing 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 …
Globalfoundries, which builds chips designed by other companies, was formed from former operations of Advanced Micro Devices AMD and Chartered Semiconductor and is bankrolled by investors in Abu Dhabi. It recently completed construction of a large factory near Albany, N.Y. Intel plans to introduce sample chips with its next production process–also based on FinFETs and …
NEI Nuclear notes applies the Mark Jacobson method of radiation death analysis to Japan Airlines. Stanford University released a study that projected 130 people, primarily in Japan, will die from cancer over the next 50 years as the result of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The group of companies that comprise …
Microsoft took a $6.2 billion charge for the purchase of performance of aQuantive, an online advertising service that it bought in 2007 for $6.3 billion. Since it bought aQuantive, Microsoft’s online division has reported losses totaling nearly $9 billion. Google spent $3.2 billion to acquire DoubleClick, an online ad service that used to compete against …
Here is a 6 page progress report on the Dense Plasma Focus fusion work at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) Every doubling of current means 30 times power. So some relatively simple modifications which are being developed should boost power levels by 300 times. Total elimination of arcing, which they are working on now, may drop …