Looking at the Taiwan phone call in terms of the Art of the Deal

Donald Trump’s protocol-breaking telephone call with Taiwan’s leader was an intentionally provocative move that establishes the incoming president as a break with the past, according to interviews with people involved in the planning. The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months …

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Carnival of Space 484

Carnival of Space 484 is up at Everyday Spacer Universe Today – New Theory of Gravity Does Away With Need for Dark Matter Unlike the traditional view of gravity as a fundamental force of nature, Verlinde sees it as an emergent property of space. Emergence is a process where nature builds something large using small, …

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Black Carbon Mitigation and climate

Several studies have demonstrated that carefully selected measures to prevent the release of microscopic BC particulate products arising from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass can reduce near-term warming and improve human health. BC is not the only substance emitted from incomplete combustion, and the climate impacts depend on the full range of …

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Cheap lidar, sensor and algorithm improvements will radically improve self driving cars over the next five years

A second fatal accident was revealed through a lawsuit filed against Tesla by the father of a man allegedly driving a Model S with the Autopilot engaged. The father of the 23-year-old Tesla driver who died in the crash filed the lawsuit in July in a Beijing court. The suit alleges that the accident, which …

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High quality graphene can be grown on ultrananocrystalline diamond in minutes at less than half the cost

Argonne Labs and UC Riverside have developed a method to grow graphene that contains relatively few impurities and costs less to make, in a shorter time and at lower temperatures compared to the processes widely used to make graphene today. The new technology taps ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD), a synthetic type of diamond that Argonne researchers …

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Unmanned flying drone will deliver up to 3000 pounds of on demand supplies at 300 mph to combat squads sending requests by cellphone

The DARPA Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) is being built by prime contractor Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works with Piasecki Aircraft under a $77 million DARPA contract. Lockheed is providing the software, Piasecki the hardware. The hardware is a 41-foot span, unmanned flying wing in a tiltrotor configuration. Two ducted proprotors about eight feet in …

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Quantum Enigma Encryption Machine

Researchers at the University of Rochester have moved beyond the theoretical in demonstrating that an unbreakable encrypted message can be sent with a key that’s far shorter than the message—the first time that has ever been done. Until now, unbreakable encrypted messages were transmitted via a system envisioned by American mathematician Claude Shannon, considered the …

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DARPA and Air Force Research making progress to mind controlled and autonomous drone swarms with prototype flight launches targeting 2020

A researcher at Arizona State University has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain. A controller wears a skull cap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer. The device records electrical brain activity. If the controller moves a hand or thinks of something, certain areas light up. “I can see …

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Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible. James Conca at Forbes describes the latest developments with uranium seawater extraction. James has some update from …

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Russian MC-21 and other planes competing to crack the Airbus and Boeing commercial jet duopoly

The Irkut MC-21 is a twin-engine short- to mid-range Russian jet airliner with a capacity of 150-212 passengers. The MC-21 is being developed and to be produced by Irkut and Yakovlev Design Bureau of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) group. It was formerly known in English as MS-21. The MC-21 is a replacement for the …

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