Even with access to less patient info, a computer program is better at detecting breast cancer in mammograms than human radiologists.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759
The U.S. cancer death rate fell 2.2% in 2017, mostly thanks to lower smoking rates, but also due to real improvements in cancer treatments.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/08/big-news-in-cancer-versus-big-talk
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/10/cancer-by-the-numbers
U.S. life expectancy slightly rose in 2018, mostly due to a drop in lethal drug overdoses.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/30/801016600/life-expectancy-rose-slightly-in-2018-as-drug-overdose-deaths-fell
There’s a new surgery that might delay menopause in women by years.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51269237
Lab studies prove that there are consistent, statistically significant differences between male and female personality traits. If you are given a written description of an anonymous person’s personality profile and no information about their sex, you could correctly guess their sex 85% of the time.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/
A new study finds that just one dose of magic mushrooms can ease anxiety and depression problems for up to four and a half years.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/health/magic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-patients-study-wellness/index.html
Russia has its own, closed universe of academic journal publishing, and it was just rocked by a massive fraud scandal.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/russian-journals-retract-more-800-papers-after-bombshell-investigation
The cost of sequencing a human genome sharply dropped between 2007 and 2012. However, since 2015, there has been no further decrease. The reason is unclear, but might owe to market forces rather than technological roadblocks.
http://enseqlopedia.com/2019/06/will-1000-genome-celebrate-5th-birthday/#comments
Thanks to genetic quirks, there are some people who can’t feel physical or emotional pain, or who only feel them weakly. Would we all be better off like that?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
Genes have been found that control how good fatty foods taste to people. I suspect that this lends further support to the theory that obesity is partly genetic, since it means some people crave fatty foods more than others.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.18.910448v1
If being smart is good, and being tall is attractive, and both traits are largely genetic, then why isn’t the whole human race very smart and tall thanks to people like that outbreeding everyone else over the course of human history?
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/12/29/variation-in-general-intelligence-and-our-evolutionary-history/
“So it appears that the [frog egg] cell contents, when totally mixed, are able to roughly reconstitute themselves into units that are about the size of cells, contain the appropriate subcellular fractions, and can go through some of the most important cellular processes.”
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/21/unscrambled-eggs
It only took 12 years and $40 million, but researchers have successfully mapped a whopping 1/3 of the fruit fly’s tiny brain circuitry!
https://www.wired.com/story/most-complete-brain-map-ever-is-here-a-flys-connectome/
Only a year after construction started, Tesla’s massive “Gigafactory 3” is finished and is mass-producing electric cars in China.
https://apnews.com/5d8c1e4f40ab2d26ca37d566ae3641e4
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.1% in 2019, mostly because several coal power plants closed.
https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2019/
The “Crescent Dunes” solar power plant, which uses mirrors to focus reflected sunlight on a container to boil molten salt, made sense at the time it was conceived, but now costs more to operate than photovoltaic solar power plants.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/a-1-billion-solar-plant-was-obsolete-before-it-ever-went-online
A team at Stanford built and flew a drone modeled after a pigeon. It had movable wings and actual pigeon feathers embedded in it. It will make sense to copy many of the anatomical and physiological features of animals when making some future drones and robots.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/796786350/pigeonbot-brings-robots-closer-to-bird-like-flight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjN7nXVBiwk
In the 2000s, there were some interesting proposals to upgrade the Space Shuttle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7wtXcaFws
To transport humans into space, Elon Musk had to prove to NASA that his SpaceX rockets could automatically eject their crew capsules if the rockets exploded during liftoff. The crew capsule is the very top part of the rocket. With the test passed, SpaceX might be launching humans into space by the end of this year.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-spacex/spacex-capsule-splashes-down-off-florida-after-rocket-failure-test-idUSKBN1ZI054
A huge amount of radiation hits Mars’ surface because the planet’s atmosphere is too thin to block it. Mars colonists would have higher cancer rates and would have to spend most of their time underground. (Intelligent machines, on the other hand, could easily live there.)
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on-mars1/
An Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a star 101 light years away.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7569
Wouldn’t emotionally intelligent AIs be useful to everybody and not just astronauts on long space missions?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615044/an-emotionally-intelligent-ai-could-support-astronauts-on-a-trip-to-mars/
The first tablet computer went on sale in 1993. It failed.
https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of-atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop
In “Decimal Time,” there are ten hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Robots are getting better at sorting merchandise in warehouses.
https://dnyuz.com/2020/01/29/a-warehouse-robot-learns-to-sort-out-the-tricky-stuff/
Several “robot restaurants” in San Francisco that opened with fanfare have recently shut down.
https://apnews.com/398c50db6df5dcd26f6fdc55d18e0c43
“Widespread AI and autonomous systems could lead to inadvertent escalation and crisis instability. Decisions made at machine rather than human speeds also have the potential to escalate crises at machine speeds. During protracted crises and conflicts, there could be strong incentives for each side to use autonomous capabilities early and extensively to gain military advantage. This raises the possibility of first-strike instability. AI and autonomous systems also have the potential to reduce strategic stability between adversaries and make the use of force more likely as they lower the risks to military personnel.”
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2797.html
From Samuel Huntington’s famous 1993 Clash of Civilizations essay: “[H]ow might war between the United States and China develop? Assume the year is 2010. American troops are out of Korea, which has been reunified, and the United States has a greatly reduced military presence in Japan.”
https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/political-science/media/clash.pdf
In 2006, Bill Clinton predicted that oil would someday run out, and the world would be like the Mad Max movies in 100 years.
http://archive.altweeklies.com/aan/transcript-of-clintons-speech-now-available/Article?oid=166649
Quantum computer scientist Hartmut Neven predicted that quantum supremacy would be achieved by the end of 2019. He was right.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/
‘You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.’
Recall a prediction of mine: ‘By [2030], photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
A list of old sci-fi books that were set in the 2020s:
https://onezero.medium.com/how-science-fiction-imagined-the-2020s-f8e98a5bc729
The movie Pacific Rim was set this year. Here’s a cool video explaining the (practically insurmountable) engineering challenges to building gigantic fighting robots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc8zDUC6hIc
China’s PISA test scores are high because it only lets students in the richest and most advanced parts of its country take the tests.
https://www.the74million.org/article/schneider-the-strange-case-of-china-and-its-top-pisa-rankings-how-cherry-picking-regions-to-take-part-skews-its-high-scores/
DARPA is testing out flying drones called “Gremlins” that are launched from and recovered by larger planes during flight. The drones are cheap and could perform many types of missions.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31882/watch-darpas-air-launched-and-air-recovered-gremlins-drone-take-its-first-flight
Panicky over a military standoff with the U.S., Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane in its airspace, killing 176 people. The Iranian government initially lied about its actions before coming clean. Many of its citizens protested in disgust.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/17/iran-shot-down-ukrainian-plane-how-did-ukraine-respond/
America’s “Doolittle Raid” against Tokyo is well-known, but the Soviet Union’s counterpart bombing raid on Berlin isn’t:
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/soviet-bombing-of-berlin.html
Not long after the first atom bomb was invented, someone got the idea to use them against ships. Ironically, the subsequent nuclear tests revealed that warships were better at resisting nuclear blast damage than they were at resisting the radioactivity. Many of the ships sank thanks to slow leaks caused by damage that would have been repairable had human crewmen been able to work without risk of lethal radioactivity levels. On some of the ships, the radioactivity was practically impossible to clean off.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Operation-Crossroads