Category: science

Someone finally noticed that jet black isn’t a naturally occurring color, and that soldiers would be better camouflaged if their guns had the same earth tones as their uniforms.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/07/british-army-to-cerakote-entire-infantry-weapon-fleet/

The U.S. Army’s XM-25 rifle grenade launcher is finally kaput after years of failure and cost overruns. Consider this: getting the per-unit ammo cost down to ONLY $1,000 was hailed as a major accomplishment.
https://www.stripes.com/news/army-s-xm25-program-officially-goes-kaput-1.541971#.W22yKxFpNuU.twitter

China has launched a new spy satellite whose resolution is only slightly below that of U.S. satellites.
https://www.janes.com/article/82366/china-closing-the-satellite-imagery-capability-gap

China’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier and first Type 055 destroyer just started sea trials. After this, they will be commissioned into the Chinese navy and put into regular use. Both vessels represent major improvements to China’s naval capabilities are put them ahead of Russia.
https://www.janes.com/article/82621/china-s-second-aircraft-carrier-first-type-055-destroyer-embark-on-sea-trials

New photos of China’s J-20 stealth fighter show it is an impressive machine not to be underestimated. Russia’s stealth fighter program, by contrast, has been basically cancelled.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new-capability-insights

Epic surprise: Russia can’t afford to buy more than 100 of its new T-14 tanks and instead will do cheaper upgrades to its hodgepodge of Cold War-era clunkers.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead

America could theoretically return its WWII battleships to active duty, but it would be cheaper to buy new destroyers, and the battleships would be vulnerable to anti-ship missiles that dive down into their lightly armored top decks.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-armor-in-an-Iowa-class-battleship-protect-against-Harpoon-and-anti-ship-missiles

This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech.
https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable.
https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/

A head-worn device that uses mild electric current to stimulate the wearer’s brain might improve multitasking abilities by 10% (the lab study could have been better).
https://www.janes.com/article/82580/afrl-finds-brain-stimulation-technology-boosts-multi-tasking-performance

Someone built a demonic machine that can find Waldo. Is nothing sacred? Has technology gone too far?
https://youtu.be/-i7HMPpxB-Y

A machine built by OpenAI trounced a team of five leading Dota 2 human players early this month, but then narrowly lost to a different human team later at the world championship. I predict the machine will win at the 2019 championship.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/06/openais-bot-handily-beat-a-team-of-professional-dota-players/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/openai_bots_eliminated_dota_2/

An AI can automatically edit video footage to seamlessly alter human mouth movements, meaning we’ll be able to pair it with other technologies (such as machine translation and machine voice imitation) to perfectly dub videos and movies from one language to another.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-ai-dodgy-lip-sync-dubbing.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice/

Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements.
https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris

The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow.
https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/

Computers can now predict earthquake aftershocks better than human seismologists.
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06091-z

As late as 1961, NASA wanted the Apollo missions to use a single space vehicle that would serve as the command module and lunar lander. It would have been heavier and more expensive than the two-piece vehicle they chose instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_orbit_rendezvous&oldid=851267134

A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/

If you’re internally debating whether to change jobs, end a relationship, or relocate, then you should probably do it. People are inherently resistant to making lifestyle changes out of laziness and fear, and will concoct all manner of justifications to continue business as usual until they hit the breaking point.
https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/

One step forward for therapeutic cloning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45046674

Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers

Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html

Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread.
https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw

The FDA has approved the first RNAi drug. If you want a laugh, research Ray Kurzweil’s past predictions about this class of medicine.
https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2018/08/fda-approves-first-drug-to-use-rna-interference-based-on-discoveries-made-at-umass-medical-school/

Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/

Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun.
https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ

Walmart is making a virtual reality store that will let you browse its wares without having to mingle with the unwashed masses.
https://qz.com/1362577/walmart-wants-to-take-on-amazon-with-virtual-reality-shopping/

How would we detect aliens whose lives were lived in microseconds or geologic timescales? Are rocks alive?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/maximum-alienness/

“Even at their tremendous distances, worlds like Triton, Eris, and Pluto will receive more than four times the energy at their surface that Earth receives today [once the Sun becomes a red giant].”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/23/which-worlds-will-survive-when-the-sun-dies/

The U.S. Army will buy up to 473 new “Bradley fighting vehicles,” but they’re so different from older variants that they probably shouldn’t be called “Bradleys” anymore.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/06/27/army-makes-massive-bradley-buy-up-to-473-vehicles-to-prep-for-major-power-war.html
Upgrade details: https://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/rebuilding-the-m2-bradley/

A Pentagon OIG report says that old Soviet Mi-17 Hip helicopters are better-suited to service in Afghanistan the newer American UH-60s. In a saner world, this would put the brakes on our plans to sell UH-60s to them, but the DoD operates in a world of its own.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21558/pentagon-admits-afghanistans-new-black-hawks-cant-match-its-older-russian-choppers

At the White Sands Missile Range, there’s a facility where antiaircraft weapons are tested on helicopters, which are strung up on a long cable stretched between two mountaintops.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21834/theres-a-place-where-helicopters-fly-on-high-wires-and-get-pummeled-by-missiles

Weirdly, the Ukrainian military is buying RPG-7 rocket launchers that are made in America, even though Ukraine has its own factory for making them.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/05/21/national-guard-of-ukraine-purchases-american-made-rpgs/

The Sun never sets on the U.S. military empire.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321

It turns out the widely mocked 1950s “Duck and Cover” slogan and accompanying cartoons were actually sage advice. Nuclear war is survivable.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/would-you-know-what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack-218675

[North Korea said] “[The] imperialist yankees can sometimes be helpful.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident

According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere?
https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis

I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space.
https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like

Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702

Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132

The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter

Since it was announced that a DNA genealogy website had been used to catch the Golden State Killer in April, four other cold case murders have been solved using the same technique.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611548/a-dna-detective-has-used-genealogy-to-point-police-to-three-more-suspected/

Pigs that are genetically engineered for disease resistance have been created and might be destined for widescale use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44388038

If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html

Between 2000 and 2015, pneumonia and meningitis vaccine drives in poor countries saved the lives of almost 1.5 million children under age 5.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-million-children-hib-pneumococcal-vaccines.html

The FDA just approved a cannabis-based drug to treat people with seizures.
https://apnews.com/16829deb1ce0489aa7e0bd1afa02eb73/Medical-milestone:-US-OKs-marijuana-based-drug-for-seizures

A new study suggests that 70,000 American women with breast cancer make needless use of chemotherapy. For them, chemo doesn’t improve survival rates more than using other treatments with milder side effects.
https://apnews.com/9f30770a3a3d42538cd3f14672cd6529/Many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo,-big-study-finds

Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3

In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones.
https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/

The Straight Dope, one of the best sources of mythbusting and digestible anecdotes about the oddities of history and science, may be shutting down for good.
https://www.straightdope.com/a-note-from-cecil-adams-about-the-straight-dope/

Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/

“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.”
This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/

If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495

‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘
That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence.
https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/

After a long hiatus, Richard Branson’s “Spaceship Two” returned to the air and made a successful test flight. If all goes well, he could be sending passengers into space in a few years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/

Here’s an in-depth analysis of what it would take to make a solar sail spacecraft that could reach 20% of light speed and go to Alpha Centauri. The engineering challenges are formidable, but not insurmountable.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/the-material-science-of-building-a-light-sail-to-take-us-to-alpha-centauri/

Instead of there being a multiverse, what if there’s only one universe, but different realms within it have distinct ground states?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/dont-be-afraid-of-the-multiverse/559169/

Crews scanning the ocean floor for Malaysia Air Flight 370 stumbled upon two shipwrecks from the late 1800s.
https://www.apnews.com/77038501654b4eb7925d567d37cb7ab8/Historians-name-2-Indian-Ocean-19th-century-shipwrecks

An ocean buoy detected a 78 foot high wave south of New Zealand, making it the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As the number and density of automated sensors like buoys, weather stations, and drones grow, so will data and film footage of extraordinarily rare occurrences and life forms. In 20 years, you’ll be able to ask your computer to “Show me everything weird that happened today” and spend the next several hours watching video clips from around the world, including places devoid of humans.
https://newatlas.com/record-wave-southern-ocean/54602/

BAE hopes to build a solar-powered, autonomous plane that could stay aloft for 12 months. It could do aerial surveillance and some functions currently performed by satellites.
https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2018/05/03/bae-systems-partners-with-drone-specialist-for-solar-powered-uav/

“Ocado” is a British grocery store chain that has no brick-and-mortar retail stores and only does home deliveries. Their food warehouses, where groceries are stored and packaged, are heavily automated and use hundreds of robots.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43968495

A fascinating piece that highlights some of the less-obvious ways autonomous vehicles will change the world.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/self-driving-technology-is-going-to-change-a-lot-more-than-cars/

It will also probably be easy to program autonomous vehicles to drive in ways that use as little fuel as possible. Many human truck drivers have a hard time keeping up these habits because they require near-constant focus and patience. Moreover, since machines don’t need to sleep, autonomous trucks could structure their routes in such a way that they were mostly on the roads during non-peak hours, like the middle of the night, meaning fewer traffic jams for everybody and less wasted gas.
http://www.fleetowner.com/fuel_economy/fuel-economy-0701

One of the NYT’s auto experts thinks gas-powered cars will be obsoleted by fast-recharging electric cars within five years, and sales of both will sharply shift to reflect this. Without giving a deadline for autonomous cars, he drops a lot of hints it will take substantially longer than five years to become mature and ubiquitous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/personaltech/electric-self-driving-flying-cars.html

‘”I’ve been at [Consumer Reports] for 19 years and tested more than 1,000 cars, and I’ve never seen a car that could improve its track performance with an over-the-air update,” Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, said in a blog post.’
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/30/technology/consumer-reports-model-3-recommended/index.html

A famous and still thought-provoking analysis of the cost-effectiveness of 500 different safety/health interventions. Yes, you can put a price on human life.
https://www.slideshare.net/myatom/tengs-et-al-cost-effectiveness-of-500-life-saving-interventions-2776562

Will America’s new “Right to Try” policy that allows terminally ill people to take drugs still in Phase II clinical trials help much? Probably not, and not just because only 10% of drugs prove themselves effective during Phase II.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/25/federal-right-to-try

The FDA shut down two “stem cell therapy” clinics after their treatments for people with vision problems made several of them go blind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/09/fda-seeks-injunction-to-stop-two-stem-cell-companies-after-patients-blinded/

The reality about “personalized cancer treatments” is that only 15% of cancer patients are eligible, and only 1/3 of them could benefit from it.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/02/cancer-sequencing-hype-and-reality

‘The National Cancer Institute’s new goal is to “eliminate suffering and death due to cancer” by 2015.’
–NCI Director Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, 2003
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)68718-7/fulltext

A meta-analysis of women who got the HPV vaccine proves beyond doubt that it works and has no side effects.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/08/health/hpv-vaccines-cervical-cancer-review/index.html

A meta-analysis of fMRI studies that “proved” male and female brains operate differently suggests they might have been flawed, and researchers might have failed to publish null findings.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23976-1

People who go to art school are likelier to get schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/artistic-creativity-and-risk-for-schizophrenia-bipolar-disorder-and-unipolar-depression-a-swedish-populationbased-casecontrol-study-and-sibpair-analysis/B3FFC439154C19A01F779365AF16B3C7

Electroconvulsive therapy has been unfairly maligned, and is actually the most effective treatment for some people with severe mental illness.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180502-the-surprising-benefits-of-electroshock-therapy-or-ect

MDMA, commonly called “Ecstasy,” has proven a remarkably effective treatment for PTSD in preliminary clinical trials. If all goes well, it could be legal for medicinal use in 2021.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/02/a-forbidden-remedy-for-veterans-nightmar

America’s early school start times are awful for students and their parents. As early as 1913, the practice’s ill effects on sleep, learning and quality of life were noted. Why do we do it anymore?
https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/

Machines hit a new milestone in automating chemical synthesis work.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/14/give-it-to-the-machines

Amateur chemist claims to have made a distilling process that can “age” whiskey the equivalent of 20 years in six days. Whether or not his claim is genuine, I think someone will make it work someday.
https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/05/09/bryan-davis-lost-spirits-distillery-booz

Did Betamax actually have better picture quality than VHS? This side-by-side footage analysis suggests not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

“[Intelligence] is a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number [like an IQ score]. To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the ‘Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest ‘AQ’ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics.”
https://youtu.be/p9eLpRbRk4c

Some alternatives to America’s state borders. I’ve long been a fan of breaking up states with big populations and merging states with small populations to help “even things out.”
https://www.quora.com/Do-U-S-state-borders-make-sense-for-modern-times

There’s substantial evidence that American judges allow their personal political and cultural views to influence their court rulings. Though judges claim to be coldly analytical and objective, it does actually matter whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.
https://www.apnews.com/cc39185fe15346d7a7c7c021bc3d4d90/Is-Trump-right-about-judges’-leanings?-Maybe,-review-shows

Here’s a supposedly genuine military report about the 2004 encounter between a U.S. Navy F/A-18 and a UFO off the coast of San Diego. The sighting was first described in a December 2017 New York Times article. The report deduces that the UFO could change altitude at ballistic missile speeds, was nearly invisible to radar, and might have had a cloaking ability on the visible light spectrum.
https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf

Between new plane purchases and upgrades of existing planes, the U.S. Navy plans to have at least 650 “Block 3” Super Hornet F/A-18E’s and F’s by 2025. They’re better than the current “Block 2” Super Hornets in every way.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21045/here-is-boeings-master-plan-for-the-f-a-18e-f-super-hornets-future

And in classic fashion, the Navy is dumping its worn-out, excess F/A-18C and D Hornets (note the lack of “Super”) on the Marine Corps. The Navy has 270 of these older fighter planes and will give the Marines 136 of them, mostly to be cannibalized for spare parts. The Navy’s final 134 Hornets will probably be transferred in the future as it gets more Super Hornets and F-35C’s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19040/navy-to-slash-legacy-f-a-18-hornet-fleet-to-prop-up-beleaguered-usmc-squadrons

The hardships of a Marine Corps F/A-18 mechanic struggling to fix planes that are older than he is. At some point, everything wears out, and the time and money spent on maintenance gets so bad that it’s actually cheaper to buy a newer replacement.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

Brazil has an 81-year-old river patrol ship still in active service. It originally had a steam engine and now has a helipad.
http://warisboring.com/one-of-the-worlds-oldest-military-ships-is-sailing-down-a-river-in-brazil/

Israel has developed an affordable upgrade kit that converts Soviet-era multiple launch rocket systems into guided weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21023/israeli-made-bolt-on-kit-turns-122mm-grad-artillery-rockets-into-precision-weapons

Israel also used small quadcopter drones to snag incendiary kites released by militant Gazans who were trying to randomly start wildfires across the border in Israel.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20853/israel-uses-drone-racers-to-down-incendiary-kites-and-drones-to-dispense-tear-gas-over-gaza

Some Korean War-era U.S. M41 light tanks are still in service in Third World armies.
http://warisboring.com/m-41-tanks-are-museum-pieces-and-still-in-service/

Indonesia has bought several brand-new U.S. AH-64E attack helicopters and will fly them alongside their old Soviet Mi-35 helicopters.
http://www.janes.com/article/80207/update-indonesia-formally-accepts-first-apache-helos

Greece is upgrading its F-16s and plans to keep them in use until 2048. The prototype F-16 first flew in 1974.
http://www.janes.com/article/79703/update-greece-moves-ahead-with-f-16-modernisation

Boeing got a patent for a detachable, automatic cannon that could be installed in the bomb bays of semi-stealth B-1 bombers, turning them into gunships. The U.S. military first experimented with this kind of weapons system in 1971. Prototype cannons were installed in the bomb bays of bombers made in the 1950s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20782/boeings-been-granted-a-patent-for-turning-the-b-1b-into-a-gunship-bristling-with-cannons

The U.S. Air Force is heavily upgrading the cockpits of their F-15s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21081/the-usaf-has-quietly-added-large-multi-function-cockpit-displays-to-its-f-15c-fleet

China has just launched its second aircraft carrier, which could be thought of as an upgraded copy of their first carrier, which was built by the USSR and launched 33 years ago. Does this milestone mean China’s shipbuilding prowess has surpassed Russia’s?
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2145890/chinas-first-domestically-built-aircraft-carrier-begins

Did you know you can build a somewhat OK bullet proof vest out of a thick textbook and a 1′ x 1′ ceramic floor tile?
https://youtu.be/ECug_76_NLg

The Basque Separatists have disbanded, thanks to an improved Basque economy (assisted by investment from Madrid) and a graying of the population. How many other ethnic secession movements could be defused with the same combination?
https://www.apnews.com/448d0d7510b0447abba9597c9c319f63/ETA%27s-bloody-history:-853-killings-in-60-years-of-violence

In 1872, English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. It’s the earliest example of the the “robot uprising” trope I’ve seen.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm

A few bummer remarks about the state of artificial intelligence. FIRST: ‘The current ways of trying to represent the nervous system…[are little better than] what we had 50 years ago.’  –Marvin Minsky, 2013
https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI

SECOND: ‘Over the next 30 years, we’re not going to see Commander Data…there is an A.I. bubble right now and people are making a fundamental error on estimating how good A.I. is going to be [and] how quickly.’ –Rodney Brooks, 2017
https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc

THIRD: ‘I suspect that [building the first true A.I.] means getting rid of back-propagation…I don’t think [back-propagation is] how the brain works.’ –Geoffrey Hinton (helped invent back-propagation in 1986), 2017
https://www.axios.com/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-says-we-need-to-start-over-1513305524-f619efbd-9db0-4947-a9b2-7a4c310a28fe.html

FOURTH: ‘We’re very far from having machines that can learn the most basic things about the world in the way humans and animals can do. Like, yes, in particular areas machines have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence we’re not even close to a rat.’ –Yann LeCun, 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/26/16552056/a-intelligence-terminator-facebook-yann-lecun-interview

Computer scientist Judea Pearl is slightly more optimistic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

A fascinating short video showing how a computer-generated Paul Walker was inserted into Furious 7 after the actor died during filming. Within 20 years, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell apart human actors and CGI versions of them.
https://jalopnik.com/how-extensive-special-effects-helped-finish-furious-7-a-1825917978

Unreal Engine 4 – (2018) – Ridiculous Realistic Looking Characters!
https://youtu.be/Vh9msqaoJZw

Google’s “Duplex Assistant” can perfectly imitate humans during brief phone calls. I think machines will pass the Turing Test within 11 years, and shortly thereafter, we won’t be able to tell the difference between human speakers and CGI versions of them: we’ll be able to make machines that can speak using a real human being’s voice, to intelligently carry on conversations with other humans, and to even answer questions and put forth topics of conversation as the imitated human would.
https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0

Non-invasive, wearable sensors that monitor muscle and nerve activity can be used to accurately represent a person’s physical movements in a virtual reality avatar. The demo video is incredible.
https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew

The world’s oldest spider is dead at 43. It was a trapdoor spider, and it survived that long by staying in one hole in the ground its whole life, conserving its energy and avoiding risks (good life advice?).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/27/farewell-no-16-scientists-left-miserable-worlds-oldest-spider/

Airborne lead particles that drifted to Greenland from Europe and got trapped in successive layers of ice tell the tale of Rome’s rise and fall. The quantity of lead smelting positively correlates with periods of prosperity.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/14/roman-empire-rise-and-fall-revealed-greenland-ice/608819002/

The longest possible straight-line journeys over sea and land are uncovered, at long last! I wonder if the estimate would change if the Arctic Ice Cap were counted as dry land (explorers have walked across the whole thing before).
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/ocean-path-will-take-you-longest-straight-line-journey-earth

Russia launched the world’s first floating nuclear reactor. It will be towed to the Arctic sea to provide power to a remote town.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/30/607088530/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-power-plant-its-headed-to-the-arctic

Burying nuclear waste in shafts drilled into the seafloor might be the best permanent disposal option.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/

Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now…
https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s

Some estimates about how powerful alien telescopes would be if they used “gravitational microlensing.”
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.06351.pdf

The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

‘Project Cyclops was a 1971 NASA project that investigated how SETI should be conducted.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cyclops

A machine that can detect dark matter has been invented. This paper appeared in one of the world’s premier scientific journals.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/09/admx-detection-technology/

Lakes in northern Canada could be similar to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701375

Venus’ atmosphere might harbor microbial life.
http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-ponders-possible-life-adrift-in-venus-clouds

‘Leo Aerospace plans to revive a decades-old method of putting satellites into space. They’re using hot air balloons to lift the rocket and its micro-satellite payload 18 km (11 miles) above Earth. At that altitude, there’s 95% less atmosphere. This means much less drag on the rocket, which translates into smaller rockets with less fuel.’
https://www.universetoday.com/138966/launching-rockets-from-balloons-is-about-to-be-a-thing-but-we-need-a-better-name-than-rockoons/

China’s first space station crashed. They have a second, slightly larger and newer one in orbit and want to someday launch a third.
https://apnews.com/6fb6a34f6e844f85beca6afbf79ea7b8

Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar

Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395

Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos

Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751

About 80% of male pattern baldness is purely genetic. Everything else (smoking, stress level, diet, exercise, type of shampoo you use) barely moves the needle.
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006594

IQ is about 50% genetic. The weight of scientific evidence about this has grown to be overwhelming, and we’re now moving on to identifying the genes responsible for human intelligence.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/selective-schools-meritocracy-and-genes/

Depression is about 40% genetic, with the rest of the risk explained by non-genetic biological factors and negative life experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/26/gene-map-for-depression-sparks-hopes-of-new-generation-of-treatments

The Bajau people, who have been living on boats and diving into the sea to catch food for 1,000 years, have genetic adaptations for that lifestyle.
https://economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21740737-meet-bajau-group-people-amphibious-life-have-evolved-traits

Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html

The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830

Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women.
https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351

A lesson in “you get what you pay for”: Russia’s T-90 tank is slightly inferior to America’s M1 tank, but that’s because the T-90 is smaller, cheaper, and has a smaller crew.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-t-90-dangerous-weapon-could-it-beat-americas-best-25379?page=show

Marine Corps F/A-18s are old and falling apart, but through ingenuity and hard work, their ground crews keep them flying. The article should help you understand why readiness levels are so bad in cash-strapped militaries that operate even older planes, like the Indian Air Force and its MiG-21s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

An offer not for the faint of heart: India plans to donate obsolete military equipment to its allies in Asia and Africa.
http://www.janes.com/article/79564/india-to-offer-dated-refurbished-materiel-to-friendly-countries

And at the other end of its military technology spectrum, India has finally backed out of its partnership with Russia to develop a stealth fighter. Among other problems, they the fighters weren’t stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20347/its-no-surprise-india-finally-ditched-its-stealth-fighter-program-with-russia

The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles.
http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet

DARPA is working on a new weapons system comprised of a conventional cargo plane that launches swarms of small flying drones, which complete their missions against the enemy and then fly back to their “mothership” and dock with it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20058/this-is-our-first-glimpse-of-a-darpa-gremlins-drone-being-launched-or-recovered-from-a-c-130

Plasma weapons are infeasible, but laser cannons and particle cannons that fire streams of neutrons (we can already kill with neutron bombs) are theoretically possible.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html

100 years after WWI, the Triple Entente is still fighting the Ottoman Empire, and chemical weapons are still being used. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/13/politics/trump-us-syria/index.html

The recent American airstrikes on Syria used some basic but effective distraction tactics to keep the enemy guessing where it would come from.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-navy-fooled-russia-and-syria-with-a-warship-ruse-before-the-strike-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T

U.S. Special Forces have built a base in northern Syria to defend Kurdish rebels against the Turks. There’s no way this news footage could have been aired without the permission of U.S. forces, so this is a deliberate leak intended to send a message to somebody.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19929/u-s-special-operators-in-syria-have-set-up-futuristic-computer-assisted-mortar-turrets

The esteemed “Graham-Talent Commission” predicted in 2008 that terrorists would use nuclear or biological weapons before the end of 2013.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510559.pdf

‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/

“What may happen in the next hundred years” (John Elfreth Watkins’ amusing predictions from the year 1900). Most of them were right, or “essentially right.”
http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf

A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/

Government just can’t do drug policy right: California’s legal marijuana industry is so heavily taxed that the black market still thrives in the state.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2018/04/02/californias-new-recreational-marijuana-m

Cookies that made day care staff feel high on drugs didn’t contain drugs.
https://www.apnews.com/75959b080785434792561eedeb0377af

We might never cure every type of cancer, but we could get so good at detecting and treating it that cancer would become just another chronic, manageable condition like diabetes.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/04/18/curing-cancer-not-realistic-goal-doctors-focus-on-managing-instead-curing-disease.html

A combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy (pembrolizumab) raises survival rates for people with some types of lung cancer by almost 50%.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/health/lung-cancer-immunotherapy.html

A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514

The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html

‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits

MIT severed ties with Nectome over the latter’s announcement that it wanted to experiment with destructive human brain scans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43642786

A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/

Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf

A step towards Google’s mission: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
https://qz.com/1252664/talk-to-books-at-ted-2018-ray-kurzweil-unveils-googles-astounding-new-search-tool-will-answer-any-question-by-reading-thousands-of-books/

“Simulation capture” is a creepy theory about how an AGI would push you around. Whenever we finally invent an AGI, it will probably say “I’ve got a million more like this…”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c5GHf2kMGhA4Tsj4g/the-ai-in-a-box-boxes-you

“You can’t get from narrow AI to AGI.” Likewise, even if we can’t invent AGI, we can surely make multitudes of very good, task-specific narrow AIs that could collectively put the human race out of work.
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2018/04/no-you-cant-get-from-narrow-ai-to-agi/

There’s a reason why established car companies still have humans on their assembly lines.
https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-1825264384

Machines that milk cows radically improve the lives of dairy farmers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/07/599259931/when-robots-milk-cows-farm-families-taste-freedom

Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice.
https://www.economist.com/node/21541717

Researchers have built a DNA-based nanomachine that has a rotary motor and can move in a specific direction.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/nanomachine-made-from-dna-nanorings.html

‘Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.’
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

‘Grand Theft Auto 5 has made money than any other form of media in history, with over 90 million units sold and $6 billion in revenue.’ If games get good enough and jobs get scarce enough, is a Ready Player One future really so unrealistic?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/04/09/gta-5-has-made-more-money-than-any-film-book-or-game-says-analyst

33% of Britons don’t like their jobs, and 37% think their jobs are meaningless. What if this keeps getting worse as time passes?
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/

Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike.
https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k

‘That’s what happened last week to a 31-year-old man who was held by police for questioning over an “economic dispute” as he waited with more than 60,000 fans of Hong Kong’s Jacky Cheung for a night of pumping Cantopop.’
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/facial-recognition-used-catch-fugitive-094342186.html

Multiple cell phone wiretapping stations are around the White House and Capitol Building.
https://www.apnews.com/d716aac4ad744b4cae3c6b13dce12d7e

One positive use of mass surveillance will be the tracking of wildlife populations, including endangered species. Someday, we’ll have highly accurate counts of entire animal populations.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/science/drones-infrared-cameras-animals.html

The rental car market will REALLY be upended once average people own self-driving cars and some peer-to-peer app lets them rent out rides at random times throughout the day. For example, if you were sitting around at home doing nothing on Sunday, you could push one button and make your self-driving car available as a taxi for any local people who wanted it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/03/30/airbnb-for-cars-is-here-and-the-rental-car-giants-are-not-happy/

With the recent news about Tesla autopilot cars killing two people, has anyone considered how many lives they might have SAVED?
https://insideevs.com/watch-autopilot-save-tesla-model-x-from-collision/

Didi, China’s version of Uber, is going to buy fleets of cars suited for different types of cab rides. ‘Didi considers ordinary cars to be “overspecced” for normal trips, featuring more passenger space, engine power, and other features than are required.’
https://qz.com/1261415/chinas-didi-partners-with-carmakers-to-design-vehicles-for-ride-sharing/