Wireless Power Network Could Maintain Drone Air Dominance for Years

Currently, drones run out of power after days, hour or minutes. If there was wireless power beaming then electrically powered drones could stay flying over a battlefield indefinitely. Years of flight could become possible. Swarms of drones would be have the power to stay over entire states or countries indefinitely. The multi-year electrical drones could …

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Lots of Small Drones in Warfare

There is now large-scale use small drones in warfare and there is now a rapid pace of improvement. The massive and effective military use of drones has been proven in the Ukraine war. The most effective countermeasure is electronic jamming. DARPA has large request for bids for swarms of autonomous drones. Autonomous Multi-domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms …

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Update on Microwave Beam-Heated Propulsion

Kevin Parkin described the history and status of microwave beam-heated propulsion at Space Access 2019. Technical summary is at Parkin Research. Kevin showed more pictures of the test systems. Kevin gave a previous update on beam propulsion in 2018 at Breakthrough Propulsion. Kevin wants to get heat reflectors and better coatings tested in a $1 …

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Large-scale technique to produce quantum dots at ten times lower cost

A method to produce significant amounts of semiconducting nanoparticles for light-emitting displays, sensors, solar panels and biomedical applications has gained momentum with a demonstration by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While zinc sulfide nanoparticles – a type of quantum dot that is a semiconductor – have many potential applications, high …

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Outdoor air pollution is killing over 3 million per year and world air pollution increased by 8% from 2008 to 2013

Air pollution is a killer, and it’s getting worse. All forms of air pollution is causing the premature death of ten million people per year Outdoor air pollution increased by 8% from 2008 to 2013 Outdoor air pollution is still increasing and current trends would see it double by 2050 Air pollution levels in many …

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Russia rebuilding and repairing its navy

11 ships will be handed over to the Russian Navy after repairs and one vessel will be the fourth Varshavyanka class submarine that should be handed over to the military by the end of the year. Russia’s shipbuilding industry is not in good shape, as the delays in refitting the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier as …

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Desktop 4.25 gigavolt particle accelerator

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma to get the particles up to speed. The setup is known as a laser-plasma accelerator, an emerging class of particle accelerators that physicists believe can shrink traditional, miles-long accelerators to machines that can fit on a table. The …

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Powercube details for outdoor 40% efficient solar to electricity conversion using commercial cells

A solar research team at the University of New South Wales has converted over 40 per cent of sunlight into electricity, with an innovative take on Australian-designed solar tower technology. This is a follow up to an article yesterday about record outdoor solar power conversion efficiency. The team achieved 40.1 per cent efficiency in outdoor …

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Boeing CEO wants Incremental Progress so that Future Moonshot Projects from Elon Musk, Google or others will kill Boeing instead of a self inflicted failed Dreamliner project

Boeing Co. Chief Executive Jim McNerney said the plane maker aims to emulate the product strategy of Apple Inc. by developing future passenger jets in incremental steps, rather than once-a-generation “moon shots” that carry too much risk. This is a reaction to the difficulties in building the advanced 787 Dreamliner, which suffered years of delays …

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Cheap high resolution thermal imaging could replace the flashlight and bring a boom in new night vision products

New, low-cost chips for sensing thermal energy could lead to a raft of new night-vision products, engineers say, ushering in everything from smarter cars to handheld devices for spelunking. A new technology used by Raytheon, “wafer-level packaging,” dramatically reduces the cost of making these thermal sensors. The advances could – for the first time – …

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