A Century of US wars and military actions

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 …

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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announces $3 billion investment to cure disease

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has put $3 billion toward their goal of helping cure, prevent and manage all diseases in their children’s lifetime. The money comes from the $45 billion organization Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan started last year to advance human potential and equality. The project will bring together teams of scientists …

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DARPA plans to record 1 million neurons at the same time by 2020 compared to 500 neurons today

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started a new project this week to dramatically increase the number of human brain neurons that can be read simultaneously, according to the MIT Technology Review. In four years, DARPA wants a breakthrough from neuroscientists that will record from 1 million neurons simultaneously. The initiative stems from the disappointing …

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Elon Musk tracking all advanced battery developments and sees nothing in the near term that would disrupt the Gigafactory of batteries

Tesla Motors and Elon Musk track about 60 different advanced battery development efforts around the world. Some of the efforts to develop improved batteries and hold some long-term promise. they rate all of them from one to five, where five is Tesla should be doing business with them and one is complete BS.” Elon Musk …

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F35 helmet costs $400,000 and entire fighter jets for less than the price 50 F35 helmets

The pilots flying the F35 aircraft will be wearing the most advanced and most expensive helmet ever. The helmet will give pilots quicker access to the information they need to see and has special cameras to “see” through the bottom of the plane. But it will cost an estimated $400,000 per helmet — more than …

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War and Peacetime Profiteering Update – Gerald Ford Aircraft Carriers over budget, years behind schedule and technologically doomed on arrival

The Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier is now $6 billion over budget and will fall years behind schedule. The program is now $6 billion over budget, according to a review by McCain’s staff. And while the lead ship is expected to be delivered next year, the second ship in the fleet is five years behind …

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Supervoid 1.8 billion light years across match cold spot billion light years across in the Cosmic Background radiation

In 2004, astronomers examining a map of the radiation leftover from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) discovered the Cold Spot, a larger-than-expected unusually cold area of the sky. The physics surrounding the Big Bang theory predicts warmer and cooler spots of various sizes in the infant universe, but a spot this …

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Alternative Nuclear fusion projects Tri-alpha Energy, General Fusion and Helion Energy featured in Nature

Tri Alpha is testing a linear reactor that it claims will be smaller, simpler and cheaper — and will lead to commercial fusion power in little more than a decade, far ahead of the 30 to 50 years often quoted for tokamaks. The ITER tokamak is mired in delays and cost overruns. The facility, being …

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SETI will likely find intelligent life in the next 20 years if it exists predicts Seth Shostak

Answers about Intelligent Alien Life should come within 20 years, astronomers told members of a Congressional science committee. A three-way race is under way to learn if life exists elsewhere in the solar system or beyond, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with the California-based SETI Institute, said during a hearing before the House Science and Technology …

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About 75% of the planets discovered the Kepler Space Telescope are mini-Neptunes

More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. Astronomers don’t know how they form or if …

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