telescopes

Future of Asymetric warfare, Gini coefficient, and DARPA reinvention of traditional military powers

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There are several articles and researchers who believe that asymetric warfare will become dominant in the future. This is usually based on advanced tiny drones, cheap bioweapons, dirty nukes or massive nuclear proliferation and molecular nanotechnology. Eric Drexler has talked about unconstrained access to an unconstrained range of [nanotech]-level technologies would place unpredictable capabilities in …

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High Resolution Desktop 3D Printer for $3299

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At $3,299, the Form 1 could expand the market for 3-D printing technology. It can produce much higher-fidelity plastic objects than the consumer desktop printers available today. But it is still cheap enough to be affordable to a wide swath of professional designers, engineers, and dedicated tinkerers. The Form 1 can, for example, create detailed …

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You were already not smarter than a fifth grader and now you are not smarter than some bacteria

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MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts. The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic, thus making …

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Since Dwave 512 qubit Quantum computer is 10,000 times faster than a 420 GFlop workstation then it approximates a 4.2 petaflop supercomputer for some optimization problems

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Dwave’s 502 qubit adiabatic quantum computer was found to be 10,000 times faster than a regular quadcore workstation for some optimization problems and just a little faster for some other problems. There was an attempt to approximate the computing power of the Dwave quantum computer by using multiples of performance against the Linpack capabilities of …

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EPA publishes guidelines to help officials make decisions that balance radiation risks against evacuation and other actual risks

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The EPA has updated protective action guidelines in regards to radiation. The government’s legal safety standards haven’t changed. The new guidelines aren’t enforceable rules — they are suggestions to help local officials make tough decisions. In fact, the guidance repeatedly refers to meeting existing standards, not flouting them. The question, though, is how to handle …

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Chinese Satellites provides bandwidth for US drones and US dependence on Chinese Satellites could grow

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U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Chinese Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. Every new drone feed and every new soldier with a satellite radio creates more appetite for bandwidth — an appetite the military can’t hope to fill with military spacecraft alone. To try to …

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Israel air force on track to develop drones that can do everything piloted aircraft do by 2050-2060

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Israel’s air force is on track to developing drones that within four to five decades would carry out nearly every battlefield operation executed today by piloted aircraft, a high-ranking Israeli officer told The Associated Press Sunday. The officer, who works in the field of unmanned aerial vehicle intelligence, said Israel is speeding up research and …

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Bigelow Aerospace and NASA exploring inflatable moon base and other human exploration missions

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Cosmislog – Bigelow Aerospace and NASA say they’ve agreed to look at ways for private ventures to contribute to human exploration missions, perhaps including construction of a moon base. NASA signed a Space Act Agreement with Bigelow Aerospace to foster ideas about how the private sector can contribute to future human missions. NASA still is …

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Borg Rats with Brain to Brain interfaces in Rats and infrared sixth sense implants

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BBC News – Duke University fitted rats with an infrared detector wired up to microscopic electrodes that were implanted in the part of their brains that processes tactile information. The researchers say that, in theory at least, a human with a damaged visual cortex might be able to regain sight through a device implanted in …

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Self-assembled quantum dots in a nanowire system for quantum photonics

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Nature Materials – Quantum dots embedded within nanowires represent one of the most promising technologies for applications in quantum photonics. Whereas the top-down fabrication of such structures remains a technological challenge, their bottom-up fabrication through self-assembly is a potentially more powerful strategy. However, present approaches often yield quantum dots with large optical linewidths, making reproducibility …

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Tissue Engineering could lead to better ways to heal injuries and develop new drugs

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In a large-scale project recently funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, several MIT faculty members are working on a “human-on-a-chip” system that scientists could use to study up to 10 human tissue types at a time. The goal is to create a customizable system of interconnected tissues, grown in small wells on a …

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