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Elon Musk discusses his new project digging tunnels under LA, the latest from Tesla and SpaceX and his motivation for building a future on Mars in conversation with TED’s Head Curator, Chris Anderson.

FOR years Elon Musk, a South African-born tech entrepreneur, has been telling anyone who will listen that the future of travel is the hyperloop. (Although he thinks it might also be driverless cars. Or perhaps affordable space travel.) Dubai may be about to test the limits of Mr Musk’s imagination.

The hyperloop is a train that moves along a tube that is kept at a thousandth of the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level. Because air resistance is one of the biggest obstacles to high-speed travel, all but eliminating it means that hair-raising velocity becomes possible. The proposed technology could shunt passengers along tunnels at perhaps 745mph, which is faster than a jet plane.

Physicists have been testing the properties of new 2D quantum materials that could usurp graphene as the ‘wonder materials’ of the future.

These materials, which can conduct electricity at nearly the speed of light, could replace silicon in the next generation of hyper-speed computers. One could even form the basis of a new “exotic superconductor” that could actually break time-reversal symmetry — or reverse the flow of time.

“Finally, we can take exotic, high-end theories in physics and make something useful,” says one of the researchers, Jing Xia, from the University of California, Irvine.

Continue reading “These New Quantum Materials Can Conduct Electricity at Nearly the Speed of Light” »

DARPA announced the Targeted Neuroplasticity Training, or TNT, program last March, and work now has begun on the effort to discover the safest and most effective ways to activate a natural process called “synaptic plasticity.”

Plasticity is the brain’s ability to strengthen or weaken its neural connections to adapt to changes in the environment. For TNT Program Manager Dr. Doug Weber, such plasticity is about learning.

“We’re talking about neural plasticity, or how the neurons, which are the working units in the brain, how their function changes over time as we train on new skills,” he said during a recent interview with DoD News.

Continue reading “DARPA Funds Brain-Stimulation Research to Speed Learning” »

A researcher crunches the numbers on time travel using his own TARDIS. Also, a weird new material could be the real-world version of a flux capacitor.

In recent years, multiple space agencies have shared their plans to return astronauts to the Moon, not to mention establishing an outpost there. Beyond NASA’s plan to revitalize lunar exploration, the European Space Agency (ESA), Rocosmos, and the Chinese and Indian federal space agencies have also announced plans for crewed missions to the Moon that could result in permanent settlements.

As with all things in this new age of space exploration, collaboration appears to be the key to making things happen. This certainly seems to be the case when it comes to the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the ESA’s respective plans for lunar exploration. As spokespeople from both agencies announced this week, the CNSA and the ESA hope to work together to create a “Moon Village” by the 2020s.

Continue reading “China and Europe May Build A ‘Moon Village’ in the 2020s” »

The US Marines could one day use amphibious tanks and robots with machine guns to storm beaches.

Researchers are quietly testing around 50 weaponised robots at the Navy’s Camp Pendleton base in California.

Continue reading “US Marines could use robots with machine guns to lead beach invasions” »

While China does this, the people in the USA who use cancer to pay for their third homes and quarterly trips to Tahiti write papers saying CRISPR is a WMD and needs to be made illegal LOL.

Here’s hoping China is able to pull it off.

On Friday, a team of Chinese scientists used the cutting-edge gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on humans for the second time in history, injecting a cancer patient with modified human genes in hopes of vanquishing the disease.

Continue reading “China Is Racing Ahead of the US in the Quest to Cure Cancer With CRISPR” »