Mars Flyby Plan will cost 1 to 2 Billion dollars and will send Middle Aged Couple that Already had Children

Dennis Tito provided details of the Mars Manned Flyby Plan The mission, a “return fly-by”, in which the spacecraft would fly around Mars rather than land, would last for 500 days. It is expected to cost between $1 billion and $2 billion, which Mr Tito is hoping to fund partly through television rights and by …

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China’s Bachelors Hustling to Make Money and Win a Wife Are Boosting GDP by 2% per Year

In China, men overwhelmingly outnumber women. The ratio of men of marriageable/dating age (15-30 years old) to every woman is 1.15 — an unusual imbalance that’s created a rat race of bachelors vying for the affections of a limited pool of young women. Many may want to marry, but never will. Men started outnumbering women …

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France has constructed earthquake cloaking for protecting hospitals, nuclear power plants and other structures

A group from the Institut Fresnel in Marseille and the ground improvement specialist company, Menard, both in France, say they’ve built and tested a seismic invisibility cloak in an alluvial basin in southern France. That’s the first time such a device has been constructed. Future versions of this system could be used to protect hospital, …

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Advanced LTE deployments in 2013 and 2014

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) did not originally consider LTE, WiMAX, and HSPA+ to be 4G systems Advanced LTE has download speeds of 300 mbps to 1 Gbps and is a true 4G system. A brief summary of status of mobile carriers’ LTE-A penetration is provided below. SK Telecom SK Telecom has successfully tested their …

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Rail volumes and Manufacturing Index show China’s economy is expanding

1. Business Insider – A Great Graphic comes from Also Sprach Analyst. The first chart shows various modes of goods transportation and China’s GDP. The best fit is with freight traffic. The second chart focuses on the simply the rail cargo volume. The volume of China’s rail freight in October was 3.2% lower on a …

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Russia partners with Czech companies for SVBR-100 fast neutron modular reactor

Russia’s Rosatom nuclear agency signed a deal to build a fast-neutron nuclear reactor on Russian territory in co-operation with 13 Czech companies. It is called the SVBR-100 project. Research and design work on the SVBR-100 reactor will continue until the end of 2014, while operations proper are set to begin in 2017. Potentially, it could …

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MIT boosting nanospinner yields by ten times, lower costs and increasing energy efficiency

Nanofibers — strands of material only a couple hundred nanometers in diameter — have a huge range of possible applications: scaffolds for bioengineered organs, ultrafine air and water filters, and lightweight Kevlar body armor, to name just a few. But so far, the expense of producing them has consigned them to a few high-end, niche …

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Broad Group of China is maintaining a 90-day schedule to build a world’s tallest 220 story skyscraper

Construction Week Online – Broad Sustainable Building (BSB), a subsidiary of the Broad Group based in Changsha in Hunan province, China, insists that it will deliver its 220-storey Sky City within the targeted 90 days, rather than in 210 days as rumored by the media. The 90 day assembly schedule does not include time to …

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Nanoshell therapy to be tested in lung cancer clinical trial

Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) and Nanospectra Biosciences have planned the first clinical trial for lung cancers of a new therapy that uses gold nanoshells, which were invented at Rice University. Nanospectra’s AuroLase Therapy uses a combination of lasers and nanoparticles to destroy cancer tumors with heat. Because the nanoparticles — balls of silica …

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Human enhancement and the future of work

The Royal Society looks at Human enhancement and the future of work. The project explored potential enhancements arising from advances in science and engineering that are likely to impact on the future of work. Here is the 72 page workshop report What is meant by Human Enhancement (for this report) The term ‘human enhancement’ encompasses …

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Israel may have bombed a Munitions Factory in Sudan

The Atlantic – Yesterday, Sudanese culture and information minister Ahmed Bilal Osman alleged that the previous evening, four Israeli fighter jets flew over Khartoum from the east and partially destroyed the Yarmouk munitions factory, in the city’s south. Israel may have done it for a few reasons: 1. To slow and reduce the amount of …

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