The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which has named five projects for $500,000 Phase 2 awards.. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is leading one of the Phase II projects, one called ‘Orbiting Rainbows,’. It involves clouds of dust-like matter being shaped into the primary element for ultra-large space lens. Inspired by the light scattering and …
Elon Musk, CEO and CTO (Chief Technical Offocer) of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, interviewed on 60 Minutes. The video covers Elon Musk’s biography from childhood to today. The Elon Musk TED Talk from 2013 If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks Brian WangBrian Wang is a …
The South China Morning Post mentioned the stalled Broad Group 202 story Sky City project. Chairman Zhang Yue said the firm did not use bank credit to fund its development, but he did not rule out getting bank loans to finance the “Sky-city” project. It has a construction budget of nine billion yuan (HK$11.3 billion), …
Gregory Benford describes [at Centauri Dreams] an evening he had with Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees. It is very interesting and discusses the great scientists attitude to science fiction and the value of it to them. It also discussed how Dirac made his greatest discovery. Paul Dirac won a Nobel in 1933 for …
In the United States, the suicide rate, which had slowly risen since 2000, jumped during and after the 2007-09 recession. A new book [The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills] estimates that 4,750 ‘excess’ suicides — that is, deaths above what pre-existing trends would predict — occurred from 2007 to 2010. Rates of such suicides were …
—Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company focused on extending the healthy, high performance human life span, announced they have hired Franz Och, Ph.D., an expert in machine learning and machine translation as the company’s Chief Data Scientist. Och comes to HLI from Google where he was Distinguished Research …
The World Bank has a 120 page study of the Regional Economic Impact Analysis of High Speed Rail in China. There is also a 29 page step by step guide. Recent research carried out by a World Bank team shows that at the current stage of development, transport projects such as high speed rail can …
Thailand’s military government approved a massive budget to upgrade the country’s railways including high-speed rail that would eventually link with China as part of an eight-year plan to improve infrastructure. The junta approved 741.46 billion baht ($23.3 billion) to build two high-speed train routes that will connect Thailand’s industrialized eastern seaboard with its northern and …
Interview with Dr. Brian Ahern. Dr. Ahern is a physicist with an undergraduate degree from MIT whose later work focused on exploring BCS-theory and superconductivity. In 2012, he issued an in-depth report on nano-scale cold fusion for the Electric Power Research Institute. Earlier this year the open-source Martin Fleischman Memorial Project added Brian to their …
Most major social movements have seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels. The fight over the eight-hour workday, which ended in Washington, D.C., in 1938, began in places like Illinois and Massachusetts in the late 1800s. The movement for social security began in California in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Health Care …
On Friday, Turkey inaugurated its long-awaited high-speed rail link between Istanbul and Ankara, cutting the 533km (330 mile) journey between the two cities from a typical seven hours to three and a half. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was on board for the maiden voyage and hailed the 250km/h link, which cost $4.1bn, as …