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Archive for the ‘economics’ category: Page 88

Jun 4, 2020

Europe bets R&D spending will bring jobs to battered economy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, employment

The European Union wants a massive dose of research spending to lift it out of what could be the worst recession in its history. Last week, as part of a €1.85 trillion budget and pandemic recovery proposal, the European Commission, the EU executive arm, unveiled plans to pump €94.4 billion into research over 7 years, nearly €11 billion more than originally planned for the program, called Horizon Europe. But not everyone thinks the money is the best medicine.


Horizon Europe gets €13.5 billion to spend fast, spur growth.

Jun 2, 2020

How will the pandemic alter research funding?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, employment, finance

As the pandemic’s economic toll grows around the world, some experts fear it could harm science for decades by putting many thousands of researchers out of work and forcing nations to slash funding as they rebuild societies. Others say the pandemic could highlight the importance of science and spur long-term support, especially for basic research, much as the Second World War did.


Financial crises could spell trouble for science budgets but spending could surge in some countries: part 2 in a series on science after the pandemic.

Jun 2, 2020

To compete with China, an internal Pentagon study looks to pour money into robot submarines

Posted by in categories: economics, military, robotics/AI

The Navy is also developing a family of unmanned surface vessels that are intended to increase the offensive punch for less money, while increasing the number of targets the Chinese military would have to locate in a fight.

That’s a push that earned the endorsement of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday in comments late last year.

“I know that the future fleet has to include a mix of unmanned,” Gilday said. “We can’t continue to wrap $2 billion ships around 96 missile tubes in the numbers we need to fight in a distributed way, against a potential adversary that is producing capability and platforms at a very high rate of speed. We have to change the way we are thinking.”

May 30, 2020

Spain creates a universal minimum income targeted at 2.3 million people

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, government

As the pandemic continues to destroy the economy, the government guarantees no one will earn less than about $500 a month.

[Photo: Jack Gisel/Unsplash]

May 30, 2020

How Covid-19 has taken the shine off China’s sharing economy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics

Now abandoned bikes are strewn across the streets, the leather-covered massage chairs are empty amid worries over cleanliness and people are ordering more of their daily necessities online and avoiding malls altogether. After weeks of lockdowns and social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, many people are asking whether this fabled part of China’s shiny new tech-driven economy will ever recover its former glory.


Experts say that consumer behaviour has changed irrevocably as a result of Covid-19 – and that the sharing economy must adapt.

May 30, 2020

The story of cheaper batteries, from smartphones to Teslas

Posted by in categories: economics, mobile phones, sustainability, transportation

In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity—enough to power an electric car for three or four miles—cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. That’s a massive drop, and experts expect continued—though perhaps not as rapid—progress in the coming decade. Several forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to fall below $100 by the mid-2020s.

That’s the result of a virtuous circle where better, cheaper batteries expand the market, which in turn drives investments that produce further improvements in cost and performance. The trend is hugely significant because cheap batteries will be essential to shifting the world economy away from carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and gasoline.

Batteries and electric motors have emerged as the most promising technology for replacing cars powered by internal combustion engines. The high cost of batteries has historically made electric cars much more expensive than conventional cars. But once battery packs get cheap enough—again, experts estimate around $100 per kWh for non-luxury vehicles—electric cars should actually become cheaper than equivalent gas-powered cars. The cost advantage will be even bigger once you factor in the low cost of charging an electric car, so we can expect falling battery costs to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

May 29, 2020

DARPA Selects Teams to Increase Security of Semiconductor Supply Chain

Posted by in categories: computing, economics, internet, security

As Internet of Things (IoT) devices rapidly increase in popularity and deployment, economic attackers and nation-states alike are shifting their attention to the vulnerabilities of digital integrated circuit (IC) chips. Threats to IC chips are well known, and despite various measures designed to mitigate them, hardware developers have largely been slow to implement security solutions due to limited expertise, high cost and complexity, and lack of security-oriented design tools integrated with supporting semiconductor intellectual property (IP). Further, when unsecure circuits are used in critical systems, the lack of embedded countermeasures exposes them to exploitation. To address the growing threat this poses from an economic and national security perspective, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore chip economics versus security trade-offs based on the expected application and intent while maximizing designer productivity.

Today, DARPA is announcing the research teams selected to take on AISS’ technical challenges. Two teams of academic, commercial, and defense industry researchers and engineers will explore the development of a novel design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, and IP licensors – allowing, eventually, defenses to be incorporated efficiently into chip designs. The expected AISS technologies could enable hardware developers to not only integrate the appropriate level of state-of-the-art security based on the target application, but also balance security with economic considerations like power consumption, die area, and performance.

“The ultimate goal of the AISS program is to accelerate the timeline from architecture to security-hardened RTL from one year, to one week – and to do so at a substantially reduced cost,” said the DARPA program manager leading AISS, Mr. Serge Leef.

May 29, 2020

SpaceX and NASA are launching astronauts—and a new orbital economy?

Posted by in categories: economics, space travel

Still, commercial crew has managed to move faster and stay on budget compared to other NASA projects which explicitly eschew private capital and insist that NASA is the only suitable customer for their wares. The agency estimates it saved as much as $30 billion by building its new spacecraft this way.


What if THIS is the most important thing that happens in 2020?

May 27, 2020

United Nations New Economic Paradigm

Posted by in category: economics

The United Nations International Day of Happiness (UNIDOHappiness) recognizes happiness as a fundamental human right and goal, and is celebrated every March 20, forever.

May 26, 2020

Vietnam best Covid-19 fighter in the world: Politico

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, government, health

The prestigious news outlet mapped the performance of 30 leading economies by plotting their public health and economic outcomes and grouping them based on whether they have instituted light, moderate or severe restrictions on commerce and social interactions.

The matrix included countries and territories’ economic outcomes, including the benchmarks of GDP, unemployment and fiscal stimulus packages and health outcomes based on testing, infection and death statistics provided by health ministries and government authorities and graphed by Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University.

As seen in the ranking chart, Vietnam stands at the furthest end with “better public health outcome,” with Taiwan coming close, followed by New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland, Argentina and Australia.

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