US and Canadian nuclear regulators completed joint review of Terrestrial’s IMSR (molten salt) nuclear reactor. Terrestrial Energy looks to commercialise the Generation IV small modular reactor (SMR) technology and begin operating its first plant by 2028. Simon Irish, CEO of Terrestrial Energy, said: “This review by the Canadian and US regulators is a joint examination …
Terrestrial Energy USA and Energy Northwest have agreed a memorandum of understanding on the terms of the possible siting, construction and operation of an Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) at a site at the Idaho National Laboratory in southeastern Idaho. Terrestrial Energy USA is an affiliate of Terrestrial Energy Inc and is developing the IMSR …
As Russia and other adversaries stock up on drones, rockets, and missiles, the US Army is building up defenses to shoot them down. But that Short-Range Air Defense force has been devastated by a decade of cuts. The service’s plan to revive SHORAD involves deploying to Europe about 50 more of its current Avenger systems, …
A US F/A-18 Hornet has crashed earlier today in Japan. Rescue efforts to recover the pilot would be underway. This would be the 9th major incident involving a “Legacy Hornet” (including the Canadian CF-18 lost on Nov. 28, 2016) in the last 6 months. The rate of crashes involving legacy Hornets is alarming. Two U.S. …
Giant galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to form after smaller galaxies smash together. That suggests that hundreds of satellite galaxies would orbit our own, leftovers of the ones that formed our galaxy. But, so far, astronomers have found only about 50. The new galaxy, named Virgo I, is the latest satellite to be …
If you trace our evolutionary tree way back to its roots — long before the shedding of gills or the development of opposable thumbs — you will likely find a common ancestor with the amazing ability to regenerate lost body parts. Researchers have built a running list of the genes that enable regenerating animals to …
Nvidia is hoping to attract machine learning developers with the Jetson TX1, an ARM-based development board powered by the top-end Tegra X1 SoC. The company claims that in certain deep learning tasks that rely on dynamic input and computations—autonomous drones, facial recognition and behavioural analysis, and computer vision—the Jetson TX1 will beat out an Intel …
The FAA is years late in approving commercial use of drones and has violated numerous congressional deadlines. Mr. Bezos says regulatory inertia—not massive R and D—is blocking Amazon’s futuristic plan to have low-flying vehicles deliver within 30 minutes the 85% of its packages weighing less than five pounds. The FAA added insult to injury by …
A European research project is studying, in cooperation with Japan, all aspects of hypersonic passenger flight. Planes this fast will need new technologies of propulsion, new materials and completely new designs, developed by research and industrial partners from Europe and Japan. JAXA proposed its long-term vision, “JAXA2025,” to realize its own mission. The vision to …
Aluminum metal and silica glass react chemically as they are heated and drawn, producing a fiber with a core of pure, crystalline silicon — the raw material of computer chips and solar cells — and a coating of silica. It turned out that the chemical reaction in the fiber was a well-known one: At the …
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet. The spacecraft was approximately 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) Friday. Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California received …