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Mar 26, 2018

India is now the world’s third-largest electricity producer

Posted by in categories: finance, government

India now generates around 1,160.1 billion units of electricity in financial year 2017, up 4.72% from the previous year. The country is behind only China which produced 6,015 terrawatt hours (TWh. 1 TW = 1,000,000 megawatts) and the US (4,327 TWh), and is ahead of Russia, Japan, Germany, and Canada.

Total electricity production stood at 1,003.52 billion units in India between April 2017 and January 2018. “Multiple drivers (like industrial expansion and rising per capita income) are leading to growth in power demand; this is set to continue in the coming years,” said a report by the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), an arm of the Indian government’s ministry of commerce.

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Mar 26, 2018

China’s out-of-control space station will crash back to Earth this weekend

Posted by in category: space

The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany, claims that debris from Tiangong-1 will splash down between March 30 and April 2, although it said these dates were ‘highly variable’

By.

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Mar 26, 2018

What the World’s Governments Are Saying About Cryptocurrencies

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, finance, law, policy

Getting your head around cryptocurrencies was hard enough before governments got involved. But now that policy makers around the world are drawing up fresh regulations on everything from exchanges to initial coin offerings, keeping track of what’s legal has become just as daunting as figuring out which newfangled token might turn into the next Bitcoin.

The rules can vary wildly by country, given a lack of global coordination among authorities. And while that may change after finance chiefs discuss digital assets at the Group of 20 meeting in Buenos Aires this week, for the time being there’s a wide range of opinions on how best to regulate the space. Below is a rundown of what major countries are doing now.

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Mar 26, 2018

Scientists trace ransomware payments across the globe

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

In ransomware attacks, your personal files are held hostage until you pay. Here are hackers’ most frequent targets and how they get their money.

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Mar 26, 2018

Clean power is shaking up the global geopolitics of energy

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability, transportation

This special report will look at the energy transition from the perspective of America, the EU and China as well as petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. It will pinpoint winners and losers. It will argue that America is at risk of squandering an early lead, obtained by using natural gas and renewables to slash emissions, promoting clean technology and helping pioneer the Paris agreement. China is catching up fast. Saudi Arabia and Russia are in most obvious peril.


TO ENTER TAFT, two hours north of Los Angeles, you drive along the “Petroleum Highway”, past miles of billboards advertising Jesus. God’s country is also oil country. Spread over the sagebrush hills surrounding the town are thousands of steel pumpjacks (pictured), contraptions that suck oil out of the ground. They look like a herd of dinosaurs. Some Californians would describe the oil industry in the same way.

The oil produced at Taft is not produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as much of it is in Texas and North Dakota. It is so heavy it needs to be steamed out of the ground, in a process known locally as “huff and puff”. Yet Kern County, with Taft on its western edge, produces 144m barrels of oil a year, the second highest output of any county in America. Fred Holmes, a third-generation oilman and patron of the West Kern Oil Museum, says he is proud of the heritage, however much it irks local drivers of electric Tesla cars that the Golden State has such a carbon-heavy underbelly. “Oil is renewable energy. It just takes longer to renew,” he quips. He has built a giant wooden derrick at the museum to celebrate it.

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Mar 26, 2018

DARPA Is Researching Time Crystals, And Their Reasons Are ‘Classified’

Posted by in categories: military, neuroscience, quantum physics

The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.

But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.

In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.

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Mar 25, 2018

Are digital drugs the future of medication?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, futurism

A drug with the potential to revolutionise medication has been approved in the US.

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Mar 25, 2018

Cracks In Earth’s Magnetic Field Let In These Fantastic Aurora Views

Posted by in category: futurism

Folks in the planet’s higher latitudes have been treated to some https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/07/16/the-aurora-…right-now/” target=”_self”>fantastic nighttime aurora borealis light shows in the past few days thanks to cracks that open up in Earth’s magnetosphere around the time of the fall and spring (or autumnal and vernal, to be a bit more formal about it) equinoxes.

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Mar 25, 2018

Next Generation Launcher considered under U.S. Air Force’s EELV program

Posted by in categories: business, transportation

The U.S. Air Force is considering Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. What does this new launch vehicle look like? How tall will it be? What will it capable of? To find the answers to these questions, SpaceFlight Insider spoke with one of the officials responsible for the new booster’s development.

SpaceFlight Insider spoke to Orbital ATK’s Mark Pieczynski, the Dulles, Virginia-based company’s vice-president of Business Development for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group.

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Mar 25, 2018

Work halted for 10 days when loose bolt is found in San Onofre radioactive waste canister

Posted by in category: nuclear energy

Works crews transferring spent fuel at the San Onofre nuclear plant from cooling pools into dry storage discovered a loose bolt inside one of the canisters, prompting Southern California Edison to temporarily halt the relocation effort. The job resumed earlier this week.

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