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Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
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The race among leading contenders to build commercial spaceships to carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station and beyond
What's the Latest Development? Vanderbilt University professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho have developed a hypothesis on the composition of dark matter that, unlike other attempts at explanation, can be readily tested using existing underground detectors. Their focus is ...
What's the Latest Development? Planetary Resources, the private firm that seeks to make its money in asteroid mining, announced today (May 29) that it's going to build and launch a telescope that can be used by students, scientists, and others to examine objects in space. It would be one of ...
What's the Latest Development? At Wednesday's IceCube Particle Astrophysics symposium in Madison, WI, a team of researchers announced the detection of 26 high-energy neutrinos, all of which landed on the cubic kilometer of South Pole ice monitored by the IceCube neutrino observatory between May ...
What's the Latest Development? Launched today (May 8) by an international team of scientists, the SpaceWarps Web site invites the public to take a look at legacy images produced by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in hopes of identifying gravitational lenses, also known as space warps ...
What's the Latest Development? In a paper published in the latest issue of Science, MIT planetary scientist and astrophysicist Sara Seager suggests that the search for habitable worlds -- currently focusing around Earth-like exoplanets orbiting in an area commonly called "the Goldilocks zone ...
Over the last month, big news shook NewSpace and advanced the narrative of the industry. The stories’ main characters are not NewSpace companies with climactic reveals of technological breakthroughs. Instead, the protagonists are investors who support their investments and embrace new ones. With ...
Imagine a continuum of an industry’s present and potential customers, ordered by expected revenue per customer. Costs determine the extent the industry can meet the demand, and, in turn the revenue from this market continuum. Nascent industries like NewSpace possess high costs that may limit ...
NewSpace SmallCaps often face challenges: tight budgets, game-changing competition, lengthy development schedules and cash flow crunches. To reduce some of this pain, NewSpace companies have found significant advantages in tapping universities for talent, but more importantly, they have redefined ...
"I do in fact know that this sounds crazy," Elon Musk tweeted this week. “But if humanity wishes to become a multi-planet species, then we must figure out how to move millions of people to Mars." Like any big, bold idea, Musk's plan for colonizing Mars strikes you at first glance as indeed crazy ...
Like many investors, NSG Analysts know that the management team is the most important criterion or “screen” to use when evaluating a company in NewSpace, and the stakes are high for the LargeCap NewSpace management teams. More than any product, market opportunity, or level of capitalization, smart ...
Every week, Dr. Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. This week Dr. Kaku addresses the question of the possibility ...
Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon is a real spaceship. Han can take off at a moment’s notice and escape from pursuers into space. And when he reaches his destination he simply flies right down through the planet’s atmosphere and can land on almost any patch of ground. After a quick refueling he can do ...
50 years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous speech at Rice University challenging America to send a man to the moon within a decade. If Kennedy were alive today, he would probably be amazed at the audacity of a new project that is light years more ambitious: DARPA's 100-Year ...
A dollar doesn’t equal a dollar; a rover doesn’t equal a rover. What does that mean? Well, let’s just put it this way: While NASA has done an exceptional job of placing a rover on the fourth rock from the sun, I, for one, cannot be muzzled any longer. Most people celebrate the technological ...
The recent berthing of SpaceX’s (NSG 100: SET; #1) Dragon capsule at the International Space Station (ISS) changed history by becoming the first commercial spacecraft to successfully berth with the ISS. NSG analysts have extensively written in Thruster that the event will catalyze the growth of the ...