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SpaceX has shown a test firing of the new Raptor 3 engine. The new engine has removed so many parts that United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno thought it was incomplete. SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell joins broadband.io and Ready.net CEO Jase Wilson for a fireside chat at Mountain Connect 2024. Works pretty good ... Read more

In a groundbreaking development, scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have created the world’s most powerful loop heat pipe (LHP), capable of transporting an astounding 10 kilowatts of heat without using any electricity. This innovation promises to revolutionize energy efficiency across multiple industries, from electric vehicles to data centers. Understanding Loop Heat Pipes Before delving ... Read more

Ukraine has taken a few hundred square kilometers of territory in Russia in the Kursk region. This is an escalation of the Ukraine Russia war. IF Ukraine can hold the territory then it would be possible for an exchange of territory to occur in a possible peace settlement. It does increase the probability that Russia ... Read more

The startup Hermeus is rapidly developing a hypersonic plane. They have begun testing their proprietary precooler technology with the Pratt & Whitney F100 engine. This video highlights some of our favorite camera angles from testing. What’s a precooler and why are they testing it? The Hermeus precooler increases the maximum speed of the turbine engine ... Read more

High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) wires must be be better than copper wire on price-performance metrics before copper can be widely replaced. A HTS wire segment shows the energy density properties that are five to ten times better than commercial HTS wire. It will need to be scaled up to the hundreds of tons of production ... Read more

George Church spoke at Aubrey de Grey’s conference to discuss using gene editing to provide radical life extension. George is hopeful that gene editing can be used to realize longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is where we add one year of life extension to people life in less than one year. If Longevity escape ... Read more

On July 17, 2024, two research teams reported that have re-detected the phosphine, and have tentatively found ammonia as well. Phospine and ammonia are produced by living microorganisms. It’s not proof that living microbes are floating around in Venus’ atmosphere. The findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for ... Read more

Hundreds of billions will be spent to scale AI data centers to Millions of Exaflops by 2029. The systems will be 3000 times more powerful than the largest AI training centers today. There will be huge challenges making massive data centers that will use many gigawatts of power. Here we review which Nvidia chips will ... Read more

NASA scientists have now discovered a single place on Mars with signs it once hosted all three of life’s main ingredients: liquid water, energy, and organic molecules. On July 21, NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted a strange rock partially buried in a dry riverbed. White streaks hinted water once flowed through the stone, and Perseverance detected ... Read more

NASA is worried that multiple small reaction control system thrusters could fail while the Starliner is near the space station and cause a disaster. There are combinations of Starliner thrusters failures would make it become uncontrollable and cause a collision with the space station. The thrusters are needed later in the flight back to Earth ... Read more

Nanonuclear is vertically integrated microreactor and advanced nuclear technology company that raised $20 million on July 18, 2024 in a stock offering and had raised $8 million in earlier funding. Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture interviewed the CEO James Walker. Mr. Walker is a Nuclear Physicist and was the project lead and manager for constructing the ... Read more

Ars Technica reports that there has been a lot of recent activity at NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX. This activity suggests that two ISS astronauts (Wilmore and Williams) could come home aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft rather than Starliner. Nextbigfuture believes that it is a needless risk to have the astronauts return on Boeing Starliner. Multiple ... Read more

NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for $843 million to make a giant version of the Dragon Spacecraft to de-orbit the Space Station. It will use 47 Draco engines instead of the 16 on the Crew dragon. It will four times the thrust and six times the propellant. If there was ever a mission to move ... Read more

SpaceX has unveiled the Raptor 3 engine, marking significant advancements in thrust, specific impulse, and mass efficiency compared to previous versions. The Raptor 3 boasts a thrust of 280 tf, a specific impulse of 350s, and an engine mass of 1525 kg. The SpaceX Raptor 3 engine has potential to exceed 300 tons of thrust ... Read more

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says that the AI large language models are still exponentially scaling. It takes 6-24 months to reach each successive scaling node but the scaling is still working. AI Inference is becoming larger than AI training. The data for AI training is different than the reference data used by AI to generate ... Read more

What kind of future energy does humanity really need to develop? We need a lot more energy than you think. We need to build faster and it needs to be cheap. There is vastly more electrical energy that is needed. The world has added about 700 TWh per year in electricity in 2022 and in ... Read more

Lex Fridman interviews Elon Musk and the Neuralink team on the Future of Humanity for over 8 hours. Lex interviews them in sequence. Elon Musk is CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and CTO of X. DJ Seo is COO & President of Neuralink. Matthew MacDougall is Head Neurosurgeon at Neuralink. Bliss Chapman is Brain ... Read more

Elon Musk and Tesla will have the capability to go all-in on robotaxi in 2025. Will they choose to use it? The Full self driving software is improving by two to five times every three months in terms of miles between interventions. They will get to feature complete by the end of this year. Tesla ... Read more

NASA and Boeing continue to analyze the Boeing Starliner at the International Space Station. The Boeing Starliner has been delayed about six weeks before a planned return flight of two astronauts. Michael Tzukran is a satellite photographer who captured a picture of the Boeing Starliner being inspected by the Canadarm. NASA said SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ... Read more

Elon Musk will meet Samsung CEO Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai CEO Chung Eui-sun in Paris in early August. It is reported they will dine in Paris this weekend. They will also discuss the development of next-generation technologies and explore ways to cooperate. The meeting was reportedly made at the suggestion of Chairman Lee Jae-yong. Elon ... Read more

A startup, Cutting Edge Superconductors, claims to have a variant of the South Korean LK99 room temperature superconductor that shows low resistance and some weak evidence of meissner effect and quantum locking. The sample is tiny. They are trying to get a few hundred thousand in SBIR and NASA grants and $600,000 in crowdfunding. The ... Read more

OpenAI has starting to roll out advanced Voice Mode to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users. Advanced Voice Mode offers more natural, real-time conversations, allows you to interrupt anytime, and senses and responds to your emotions. Advanced voice mode can translate between languages in realtime. It can also sing and do other voice generation ... Read more