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In a press release, the U.S. Army announced that initial Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) prototypes arrived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The preproduction MPF vehicles will be put through their paces by paratroopers from the Army’s 82 Airborne.

“We are incredibly excited to see the MPF platform entering into this phase,” an Army Ground Combat Systems official stated, explaining that the “MPF represents an innovative and aggressive approach to system acquisition. The beginning of our SVA (soldier vehicle assessment) in January illustrates how hard the teams are working to keep the major events of this program on schedule,” despite the ongoing pandemic.

The Army awarded two initial prototyping contracts to both BAE Systems and General Dynamics back in 2018. The contracts, worth $376 million each, covered a total of 504 final production Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles, with initial deliveries scheduled for 2025.

When it comes to magnetic tape storage capacity, smaller is larger. That is, as the magnetic particles that store data become smaller, more data can be stockpiled in the same amount of space.

Two leading tech giants put that simple principle to work and announced Wednesday that they have developed a magnetic tape cartridge boasting the most dense capacity of any media in the world. Fujifilm and IBM say research into a new material, strontium , led to the creation of a tape cartridge capable of storing 580 terabytes of data. That’s enough to store roughly 580 million books, according to an IBM blog post published Wednesday.

Considering there are about only 130 million books in existence today, that’ll leave plenty of room for extras.

Kill a Watt

The reason why the price of energy storage is such an important automotive indicator is because the battery pack accounts for roughly a quarter of an EV’s total cost, making it the number one determinant of price.

It could be the electric car industry’s watershed moment: once dipping below the price of gasoline-powered engines, electric vehicles will look far more attractive to far more consumers.

The French military is starting exploratory work on the development of bionic supersoldiers, which officials describe as a necessary part of keeping pace with the rest of the world.

A military ethics committee gave its blessing to begin developing supersoldiers on Tuesday, according to The BBC, balancing the moral implications of augmenting and altering humanity with the desire to innovate and enhance the military’s capabilities. With the go-ahead, France joins countries like the U.S., Russia, and China that are reportedly attempting to give their soldiers high-tech upgrades.

Pre-Emptive Defense

All the same, Schroepfer seemed to acknowledge that getting people to actually use the tech might be a hard sell, according to the leaked meeting audio acquired by BuzzFeed News.

“We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to grow,” Schroepfer said. “It’s imperative that we get this right so that people around the world get all these amazing technologies… without experiencing the downsides.”

Super-fast quantum computers and communication devices could revolutionize countless aspects of our lives—but first, researchers need a fast, efficient source of the entangled pairs of photons such systems use to transmit and manipulate information. Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have done just that, not only creating a chip-based photon source 100 times more efficient that previously possible, but bringing massive quantum device integration within reach.

“It’s long been suspected that this was possible in theory, but we’re the first to show it in practice,” said Yuping Huang, Gallagher associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.

To create , researchers trap light in carefully sculpted nanoscale microcavities; as light circulates in the cavity, its photons resonate and split into entangled pairs. But there’s a catch: at present, such systems are extremely inefficient, requiring a torrent of incoming laser light comprising hundreds of millions of photons before a single entangled photon pair will grudgingly drip out at the other end.

“BAT said KBP had cloned a portion of the genetic sequence of coronavirus and developed a potential antigen, which is then inserted into tobacco plants for reproduction.”

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While large pharmaceutical companies are already producing vaccines, [the company British American Tobacco] believes its own can be produced in six weeks, compared with the several months it takes using conventional methods.

This, the company claims, is because of proprietary technology that allows elements of the vaccine to gather quickly on tobacco plants.