The White House is rumored to be working on an executive order that would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication. Ars Technica reports: The White House hasn't actually announced the new policy yet, but the rumors were enough to get the attention of scientific publishers. Last week more than 100 publishing organizations signed a letter calling on the Trump administration to scrap the proposal. The letter warned that an open access mandate would "jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles." Without the ability to charge the public for articles, scientific journals would have to pass those costs on to researchers or taxpayers, the letter warns.

There is undoubtedly some truth to that -- many open access journals charge fees to authors. These fees range widely -- from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. If the federal government mandated open access for all federally funded research, researchers would presumably see some increases in the fees they pay to publish their articles in top-tier journals. But supporters of the open access model question how much value traditional scientific publishers actually add. The peer-review process is typically carried out by working scientists on a volunteer basis. Meanwhile, you'd expect the Internet to reduce the costs of distributing scientific journals. Instead, the cost of subscribing to scientific journals has been rising much faster than inflation in recent years.

A single wild tree on a New Zealand island could soon get some neighbors -- and that's a good thing. From a report: After seven decades of cuttings, failures, plant enzymes, a little coaxing, and a Maori blessing, one of the world's rarest trees -- which lives on a tiny island 40 miles off the northern edge of New Zealand -- might lose its title. And that's a good thing. A team of scientists and Ngati Kuri, the regional Maori tribe, recently returned from the island, where they scoped out potential conservation plans. Ngati Kuri members even planted 80 kaikomako saplings on the mainland this year. Yet those positive developments happened only by answering two important questions. How do you rescue a tree with no mate, and who shares that task? The story of the kaikomako resembles its home: rocky, with a generous dose of luck. Botanists identified one wild specimen in 1945 on the largest of the Three Kings Islands, Manawatawhi in Maori, which is a little bigger than Manhattan's Central Park. The tree isn't simply remote. It's completely alone. Blame the goats.

Four were released on the island in 1889 as a food source for possible shipwreck victims, and the population increased one hundredfold until the invasive animals were eradicated in 1946. Goats ate several island plant species out of existence, but the kaikomako survived by way of the classic real estate maxim. Location. In this case, it lived out of reach in a steep boulder field 700 feet above the ceaseless swells. Some scientists recognized the kaikomako as invaluable, a piece of New Zealand's biological heritage one calamitous storm away from vanishing. Others questioned whether it really was alone; perhaps it was a far-flung individual of an ordinary tree type that didn't require extra concern. You can read rest of the story on National Geographic website.

Rumbling quakes on the red planet have been traced back to Cerberus Fossae, suggesting this geologically young region is still alive and cracking. From a report: Millions of miles away, a robot geologist stands alone on the dusty surface of Mars, listening for faint seismic echoes in the ground below. Its finger on the red planet's pulse is sensitive enough to pick up the whoosh of wind, the drone of dust devils, the creak of tectonic cracks, and many other rumbles ricocheting though the planet's insides. While most of these signals have been indistinct murmurs, two have stood out loud and clear, allowing scientists to trace them back to their source: the first active fault zone yet found on the red planet. Known as marsquakes, the events clocked in between magnitude 3 and 4, according to data from NASA's InSight lander presented at a recent American Geophysical Union conference. While the two quakes are small by Earth standards, they're among the largest yet detected on Mars. Scientists were able to trace both quakes to an area known as Cerberus Fossae, a series of deep gashes that lingers some 994 miles to the east of InSight's landing zone.

The results from this work are pending publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and scientists associated with the InSight team declined to comment until after the study's release. But the announcement of this active fault zone millions of miles away already has earthbound scientists abuzz. "All the expectations we have and all the models we have to try to explain how active Mars might be can now be benchmarked against this measurement," says Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University who is not part of the InSight team. "Mars has just become a bit more alive to us with these data."

Michael Irving, writing for New Atlas: Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet. This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can "communicate" over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no matter how much space separates the two of them. In essence, information is being teleported between them.

Hypothetically, there's no limit to the distance over which quantum teleportation can operate -- and that raises some strange implications that puzzled even Einstein himself. Our current understanding of physics says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and yet, with quantum teleportation, information appears to break that speed limit. Einstein dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." Harnessing this phenomenon could clearly be beneficial, and the new study helps bring that closer to reality. The team generated pairs of entangled photons on the chips, and then made a quantum measurement of one. This observation changes the state of the photon, and those changes are then instantly applied to the partner photon in the other chip.

Researchers aim to recreate intense emotional experience astronauts reported on seeing Earth from space for the first time. From a report: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to grab politicians by the scruff of the neck and drag them into space to witness the view. Such drastic measures may not be necessary, however. Scientists are about to welcome the first participants on an unprecedented clinical trial that aims to reproduce the intense emotional experience, known as the "Overview effect," from the comfort of a health spa. If the trial goes well, what led Mitchell to develop "an instant global consciousness" and a profound connection to Earth and its people could be recreated with nothing more than a flotation tank, a half tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof virtual reality (VR) headset. "There's a lot of division and polarisation and disconnection between people," said Steven Pratscher, a psychologist and principal investigator on the trial at the University of Missouri. "We'd like to see if we can recreate the Overview effect on Earth to have an impact on those issues." Pratscher will recruit about 100 volunteers who are willing to don the VR headset and clamber into a dark, salt-laden flotation tank at the city's Clarity Float spa. The silence and buoyancy will mimic the sensation of floating in space, while the VR headset plays high-definition, 360 degree immersive video recorded by the Silicon Valley startup, SpaceVR.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to introduce [a $21 million plug-in station] in Red Hook several years ago in an effort to eliminate 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide, 25 tons of nitrous oxide and tons of hazardous particulate matter spewed out each year by cruise ships idling off Brooklyn's coast. [A recent survey found that asthma rates in Red Hook were almost twice as high as the citywide average. Also, Vanadium, a toxic metal in marine fuel that can cause lung damage, was found near cruise terminals in Brooklyn and Manhattan.] When not using shore power, a single cruise ship docked for one day can emit as much diesel exhaust as 34,400 idling tractor-trailers, according to an independent analysis verified by the Environmental Protection Agency. When a ship is plugged in, the agency said, its exhaust is nearly eliminated. But the system has hardly been used after going into operation in 2016. And New York City is expected to announce design plans next year that would expand and modernize terminals in Brooklyn and Manhattan to accommodate the world's largest cruise ships, and more of them. Yet there is no plan to further expand the shore power system.

Neighborhood residents, led by Mr. Armstrong, are sounding the alarm. They want the pollution controls that were promised by the Bloomberg administration. They fault the city and state for failing to force the matter, and the cruise line companies for failing to use the system. Carnival Cruise, which owns the three big ships that dock regularly in Brooklyn, including the Queen Mary 2, agrees that the issue is important. [...] Figuring out why Brooklyn's shore-power system hasn't eliminated cruise ship pollution has become a guessing game involving various government agencies, activists and the cruise lines themselves. One thing is certain: Cruise ships in New York don't have to plug in if they don't want to. The reason why many ships don't plug in is because they aren't required to. "California, unlike New York, has made plugging in mandatory," the report says. "Under a strict 2007 diesel-emissions law, the state requires that 70 percent of visiting ships -- including container and refrigerated cargo vessels -- connect to shore power."

"In Brooklyn, while other cruise ships are welcome to use the plug-in system, the Queen Mary is the only one that can easily access shore power because the electrical sockets on other ships do not line up with the shore-power crane, according to a development corporation spokesman."

Thousands of skywatchers gathered across parts of the Middle East and Asia on Thursday to glimpse the sun forming a ring of fire around the moon in a rare annular solar eclipse. From a report: An annular eclipse occurs when the moon covers the sun's center but leaves its outer edges visible to form a ring. Thursday's was visible in Saudi Arabia as well as Singapore, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The US government has for the first time authorized funding to research geoengineering, the idea that we could counteract climate change by reflecting more of the sun's heat away from the planet. An anonymous reader writes: The $1.4 trillion spending bills that Congress passed last week included a little-noticed provision setting aside at least $4 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to conduct stratospheric monitoring and research efforts. The primary aims of the program would include improving our basic understanding of stratospheric chemistry, and assessing the potential effects and risks of geoengineering. But it's controversial: There are concerns that using such tools could have dangerous environmental side effects, and that even suggesting them as solutions could ease pressure to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change.

Researchers from MIT have revealed the very first images of a human generated through a novel laser ultrasound imaging technique. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the new technique does not require any skin contact with the body, dramatically amplifying the range of uses for doctors in clinical environments. New Atlas reports: A new non-contact ultrasound method involving lasers has now been effectively demonstrated by a team of researchers from MIT. The challenge in developing the new method has been figuring out a way to use a laser to produce sound waves. Traditional ultrasound uses sound waves to penetrate a human body and bounce back off different tissues. Light, of course, cannot penetrate a human body as deeply as sound. The new method has found a laser, pulsing at a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers, can generate sound waves when it hits human skin. A second laser, tracking the same wavelength, can subsequently detect the reflected sound waves and generate a picture similar to that of a conventional ultrasound.

In the new study, the researchers demonstrate the successful development of this novel laser ultrasound technique, from initial tests on a gelatin mold resembling human skin, to excised animal tissue. The study ultimately demonstrates the method's efficacy in human volunteers, presenting the first non-contact laser ultrasound images of a human forearm. At this point the method does not deliver images at resolutions equal to conventional ultrasound techniques, however, the researchers suggest this is just the first developmental milestone to be crossed. The system can potentially be refined and improved to deliver finer tissue detail. The study has been published in the Nature journal Light: Science and Applications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country's annual carbon dioxide emissions in another setback to the fight against climate change. Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tons of carbon dioxide since Aug. 1, which is more than half of Australia's total greenhouse gas footprint last year, according to Niels Andela, an assistant research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and collaborator with the Global Fire Emissions Database. That compares with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service's estimate of 270 million tons in just over four months. "We have been closely monitoring the intensity of the fires and the smoke they emit and when comparing the results with the average from a 17-year period, they are very unusual in number and intensity, especially in New South Wales, for being so early in the fire season," said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus, the European Union's atmosphere observation program.

A new method for preserving genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials is reported. From a report: The future of digital memory may be inside a small plastic bunny that contains 3-D printing instructions for replicating itself stored in artificial DNA, said scientists Monday, who announced a method for mixing genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials. The scientists sealed the DNA data inside thousands of microscopic glass beads that protected the information as the plastic for the toy was heated and processed. By sequencing a snippet of the toy's DNA-infused plastic, they could extract the instructions and make flawless copies of the figure, they said. They reported the experiment in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

While cumbersome compared with conventional computer hard drives or tapes, the new DNA data-storage technique one day could be used to store digital information in items molded into virtually any shape, the scientists said. It could, for example, be used to make devices that contain their own blueprints or to embed electronic health records in medical implants and prescription drugs, they said. "We wanted to show that you can use this technology to hide information in common objects," said computational genomics researcher Yaniv Erlich, a co-author of the study who is chief science officer at a consumer genetics genealogy company called MyHeritage. The company wasn't involved in the project.

Answering this question requires that we rethink our views of exercise. From a report: People often consider walking and running to be activities that the body is able to perform on autopilot. But research carried out over the past decade by us and others would indicate that this folk wisdom is wrong. Instead exercise seems to be as much a cognitive activity as a physical one. In fact, this link between physical activity and brain health may trace back millions of years to the origin of hallmark traits of humankind. If we can better understand why and how exercise engages the brain, perhaps we can leverage the relevant physiological pathways to design novel exercise routines that will boost people's cognition as they age -- work that we have begun to undertake. To explore why exercise benefits the brain, we need to first consider which aspects of brain structure and cognition seem most responsive to it.

When researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., led by Fred Gage and Henriette Van Praag, showed in the 1990s that running increased the birth of new hippocampal neurons in mice, they noted that this process appeared to be tied to the production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is produced throughout the body and in the brain, and it promotes both the growth and the survival of nascent neurons. The Salk group and others went on to demonstrate that exercise-induced neurogenesis is associated with improved performance on memory-related tasks in rodents. The results of these studies were striking because atrophy of the hippocampus is widely linked to memory difficulties during healthy human aging and occurs to a greater extent in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The findings in rodents provided an initial glimpse of how exercise could counter this decline.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with a new concept for capturing CO2 from truck exhausts which could reduce emissions by up to 90 percent. Engadget reports: In a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Energy Research, the researchers propose capturing carbon dioxide from a truck's exhaust pipe and turning it liquid, which is stored in a tank on the vehicle's roof. This liquid carbon dioxide can then be delivered to a service station where it can be reused in various ways, including being turned into conventional fuel.

The carbon dioxide capture works by first cooling the gases which are emitted from the exhaust pipe. Special absorbent materials developed at EPFL could separate the carbon dioxide from other gases like nitrogen and oxygen. When it is full, the absorbent material is then heated to extract the carbon dioxide, and heat from the vehicle's engine is used to compress the carbon dioxide and turn it into liquid. That liquid can then be stored in a box attached to the vehicle's roof until it can be deposited at a service station when the truck refuels. The system is more appropriate for large vehicles like trucks or buses than for cars as it is rather bulky, requiring a 2-meter-long capsule and weighing 7 percent of the total payload of a truck. However, the researchers calculate that 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions could be recycled in this way.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide detector. He's not doing it to measure the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. He's interested in the amount of CO2 in each room. The indoor concentration of carbon dioxide concerns him -- and not only for the usual reason. Karnauskas is worried that indoor CO2 levels are getting so high that they are starting to impair human cognition. In other words: Carbon dioxide, the same odorless and invisible gas that causes global warming, may be making us dumber.

He proposed the idea last week at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the largest annual gathering of earth and space scientists in the world. He also previewed it in an online paper written with Shelly Miller, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and Anna Schapiro, a neuroscience professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper, while not yet peer-reviewed, was uploaded to a website where academics can discuss early-stage or provocative research. The science is, at first glance, surprisingly fundamental. Researchers have long believed that carbon dioxide harms the brain at very high concentrations. [...] Two centuries of rampant fossil-fuel use have already spiked the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to about 410 parts per million today. For Earth as a whole, that pollution traps heat in the atmosphere and causes climate change. But more locally, it also sets a baseline for indoor levels of carbon dioxide: You cannot ventilate a room's carbon-dioxide levels below the global average. In fact, many rooms have a much higher CO2 level than the atmosphere, since ventilation systems don't work perfectly. On top of that, some rooms -- in places such as offices, hospitals, and schools -- are filled with many breathing people, that is, many people who are themselves exhaling carbon dioxide. "As the amount of atmospheric CO2 keeps rising, indoor CO2 will climb as well," the report adds. "They project that, in a worst-case emissions scenario, it may be impossible to ventilate a crowded room below about 1,300 parts per million. That could induce some real cognitive damage."

The report goes on to cite a 2016 study by researchers at Harvard and Syracuse University, which found that human cognitive function declined by about 15 percent when indoor CO2 reached 945 parts per million, and crashed by 50 percent when indoor CO2 reached 1,400 parts per million.

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission intended to achieve all this will require three launches from Earth over the course of a decade, and five separate machines. From a report: The organisations involved -- America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and the European Space Agency, ESA -- are each responsible for specific craft in the chain of what David Parker, ESA's head of human and robotic exploration, calls "the most ambitious robotic pass-the-parcel you can think of." On December 11th, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, space scientists and astrobiologists outlined the details of the MSR. The project will begin with the launch, next July, of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. This will carry to the planet a successor to Curiosity, a rover that has been crawling productively over the Martian surface since 2012. The Mars 2020 rover, yet to be named, will land in a 45km-wide crater called Jezero, in February 2021. Its main purpose is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. Around 3.5bn years ago, Jezero contained a lake. Mars 2020 will drill for samples from the clay and carbonate minerals now exposed on the surface of what used to be a river delta flowing into this lake.

When the rover finds something that its masters want to bring back to Earth, it will hermetically seal a few tens of grams of the material in question into a 6cm-long titanium test tube, and then drop the tube on the ground. It can deal in this way with around 30 samples as it travels to different parts of the crater. Once it has dropped a tube it will broadcast that tube's location to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite already on station that is armed with a high-magnification camera. This camera will take photographs of the tube and its surroundings, so that the tube can be found at a later date. The tubes are intended to be able to survive for more than 50 years on the surface of Mars, at temperatures less than 20C. The next phase of the project will begin in 2028, when a "fetch rover" designed and built by ESA will be sent to Mars to find and collect the tubes.

Ethiopia launched its first observatory satellite into space on Friday (Dec. 20), according to local reports. From a report: The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, climate, mining and environmental observations, allowing the Horn of Africa to collect data and improve its ability to plan for changing weather patterns for example. The satellite will operate from space around 700 kilometers above the surface of earth. The launch, which was originally scheduled for September, took place at 03.21hours GMT from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Xinzhou, Shanxi Province, China. The satellite was carried on board a Long March 4B rocket.

The rocket launched was aired live on Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation. The Chinese satellite was designed and built at a cost of $8 million, with China paying around $6 million of the capsule's price, according to the head of the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute (ESSTI) at Addis Ababa University. Though it was launched from China its command and control center is based at the Entoto Observatory and Space Science Research Center (EORC) in Ethiopia, which is part of the Ethiopian Space, Science and Technology Institute (ESSTI).

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For over a century, the "solar sail" has been a concept in theoretical spaceflight, in science fiction, and in the last few years, actual spaceflight. Recently, the Breakthrough Starshot project has been prompting and funding a lot of work to optimise and explore the operational possibilities of flying spacecraft to nearby stars, and this has produced another (relatively) novel idea for efficient spacecraft propulsion — an electric sail.

It is well known that stars produce both radiation (light) and material outflows ("solar wind"). It is less well known that the momentum transferred by the solar wind can be considerably higher that that transferred by light. Recent calculations by the paper's authors, Loeb and Lingam, with not-unreasonable premises, show that for many classes of star (including the most common star types) the solar wind is considerably stronger than the radiation pressure. They propose that a mesh of wires, positively charged, can drive a spacecraft more efficiently than reflecting radiation. Moreover, by using the radiation to generate electrical power, the wire grid can be kept charged and incident electrons discharged in a beam to keep the spacecraft electrically neutral. Thirdly, maintaining a charge on the grid in interstellar space can act to brake the spacecraft, or even steer it, depending on the "space weather" it encounters.

Clearly, applying these mechanisms to optimising "Breakthrough" spacecraft could considerably widen the range of trajectories and mission profiles possible.

"Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton's McMaster University has created the smallest gingerbread house ever built," writes long-time Slashdot reader Mr.Fork, "even smaller than the one made in France last year by nanorobotics researchers at the Femto-ST Institute in BesanÃon."

"Decking the halls is a whole lot harder when you're decorating something 10 times smaller than a human hair," reports the CBC: Casagrande's creation is a home for the holidays -- a gingerbread house complete with a wreath over the door, a cheery brick chimney, Christmas tree details carved into the walls and a patriotic Canadian flag doormat.

"Compared to the size of a typical gingerbread house that you might buy in a grocery store kit, mine is 20,000 times smaller," he explained... Zoom out slightly from the silicon structure and you'll see it's actually perched atop a smiling snowman that's giving a mischievous wink. Pull back even farther and a seemingly massive cylinder appears -- believe it or not, that's a human hair... "The point of that was sort of to make some jaws drop when you realize even the snowman, which is much bigger than the house, is extremely tiny compared to the hair you see next...."

Casagrande used a focused ion beam microscope to etch out the microscopic details with a beam of charged gallium ions, which he compared to a sandblaster... " I wanted to spark some curiosity of science because that leads to better science literacy."

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: The nation's oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its founder as the leader of a "national, grass roots movement." But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization's funding, according to the most recent available tax records.

That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines.

In recent years, the center has been at the forefront of a movement that has led some parents to forgo or delay immunizing their children against vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles. Health officials say falling vaccination rates contributed to the infectious virus sickening more than 1,200 people in the United States this year, the largest number in more than 25 years. Measles outbreaks are surging worldwide, including in Samoa -- where nearly 80 people have died since mid-October, the great majority of them young children and infants... The group claimed credit this year for helping to defeat legislation in a dozen states that would have made it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children...

Mercola, whose claims about other products have drawn warnings from regulators, has also given at least $4 million to several groups that echo the anti-vaccine message. His net worth, derived largely from his network of private companies, has grown to "in excess of $100 million," he said in a 2017 affidavit.
In 2010 Mercola's site and the anti-vaccination group "launched a website that tracks vaccine-related legislation in every state. The site provides activists with detailed information, including how to sign up for public comment to support or oppose legislation in their state, where to park to attend a public hearing and what color T-shirt to wear to rallies..."

"In 2016, in response to a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, Mercola refunded nearly $2.6 million to more than 1,300 people who bought tanning beds that he claimed could reduce the risk of skin cancer."

"Retired Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast says fantastic technology exists that could transport a human anywhere on earth within an hour," reports The Drive, in an article shared by schwit1: As has been common as of late, Lt. Gen Kwast cites rapidly growing Chinese military and technological advances as the reason why the United States must invest heavily in new space-based technologies. "We can say today we are dominant in space but the trend lines are what you have to look at and they will pass us in the next few years if we do not do something. They will win this race and then they will put roadblocks up to space," Kwast argues, "because once you get the high ground, that strategic high ground, it's curtains for anybody trying to get to that high ground behind them." Kwast claims China is already building a "Navy in space" complete with the space-based equivalents of "battleships and destroyers" which are "able to maneuver and kill and communicate with dominance, and we [the United States] are not." Kwast's speech centers on the thesis that the United States needs a Space Force in order to counter Chinese advances and win the competition over the economy of the future and, as an extension, who sets the values of the future...

Around the 12:00 mark in the speech, Kwast makes the somewhat bizarre claim that the U.S. currently possesses revolutionary technologies that could render current aerospace capabilities obsolete... "[T]echnology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour...."

Kwast's comment is only one of several curious comments made by military leadership lately and they do seem to claim that we could be on the precipice of a great leap in transportation technology. We also don't know exactly where he is coming from on all this as it is not necessarily the direct wheelhouse of someone who was running the Air Force's training portfolio, although it does have overlaps...

Is all this setting the stage for a new space race that will benefit mankind by furthering scientific and technological development, or is it ushering in the conditions for the first great space war?