Alex Tolley has written up an analysis of an improved plasma magnet sail concept called Wind Rider. Centauri Dreams covered the work. Nextbigfuture notes that the design looks very simple and achievable. If it works then by 2030s we would be able to mass produce probes by the thousands to explore the solar system and …
Tesla sold more cars of any kind than all other carmakers other than Toyota and Honda in California in the third quarter of 2021. California passed 10% for EV sales in the third quarter. Passing 10% for EVs for total car sales seems to be a major milestone. Norway went from 10% EV sales to …
Elon Musk is being interviewed by the Space Studies Board. Talks first about the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. He expects the first orbital flight will be January 2022. This will be the largest rocket ever made. The first launch may not be fully successful but they have made factories to make many of the rockets. …
IBM announced a new 127-quantum bit (qubit) ‘Eagle’ processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021. The ‘Eagle’ processor is a breakthrough in tapping into the massive computing potential of devices based on quantum physics. It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer. IBM also …
QuEra Computing Inc. emerged from stealth mode has revealed a completed 256 qubit device. QuEra Computing Inc. emerged from stealth mode today with $17 million in funding from Rakuten, Day One Ventures, Frontiers Capital and leading tech investors Serguei Beloussov, and Paul Maritz among others. The company recently received a DARPA award, and has already …
A recent NASA audit reveals Boeing and Grumman cut of Space Launch System contracts. It also reveals that NASA Artemis will end up costing $93 billion through 2025. $29 billion will have gone to SLS. Lockheed gets $17 billion for Orion. SOURCES – NASA Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist …
Both nuclear reactors of the High-Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor-Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) at the Shidaowan plant in China’s Shandong province have reached criticality for the first time. The HTR-PM has two 250 MW thermal reactors that drive a single 210 MWe turbine. Commercial 600 MWe pebble bed reactors (6×250 MWt, total 655 MWe) will follow. the …
French President Emmanuel Macron said France will build six new nuclear reactors. This will keep France’s energy costs at a “reasonable” level and reduce dependence on imports. France will save energy and invest in domestic carbon-free energy production. Nuclear power was at the heart of Macron’s France 2030 plan for re-industrialization which was announced last …
Stealth startup, Spinlaunch, has come out of stealth and revealed that they have launched a suborbital test. They spin a projectile to high speed and then fire out the projectile. It is kind of like a futuristic version of a trebuchet. They have a subscale mach one demonstrator. They could also use this method to …
The adiabatic theorem – a fundamental achievement of quantum mechanics – was first formulated by Max Born and Vladimir Fock at the dawn of quantum mechanics. The theorem ensures that the evolving quantum state always remains close the so-called instantaneous eigenstate if external parameters change slowly enough. In a sense, adiabatic evolution is something like …
A paper in Nature reports that a Braingate Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enabled a man paralyzed from the neck down to have his thoughts translated to text with 94% accuracy. An intracortical BCI tdecodes attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translates it to text in real-time, using a recurrent neural …
