In a sign of desperation, Russia has started offering citizenship to foreigners who agree to fight in Ukraine.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-offers-citizenship-foreigners-who-fight-russia-2024-01-04/
The fancy German tanks Ukraine got this summer have all broken down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraines-leopard-tanks-russia-war-not-repaired-sebastian-schafer-germany-2024-1
NATO countries continue transferring their stocks of Soviet weapons to Ukraine. It’s now Greece’s turn.
https://english.nv.ua/nation/greece-to-transfer-old-air-defense-systems-anti-aircraft-guns-to-support-ukraine-defense-50387832.html
Ukraine shot down a Russian A-50 spy plane–their equivalent of the U.S. AWACS–and damaged a second spy plane so badly it had to make an emergency landing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-says-took-down-spy-plane-intel-suggests-russia-worried-2024-1
Ukrainian drones are now dropping land mines on Russian targets.
https://youtu.be/dcsf5yuEHDY?si=V1S72LBAN_kOYmtX
Small Ukrainian kamikaze drones armed with shaped charges are wreaking havoc on Russian tanks since the drones can be flown into weak spots in the armor. Mobile, anti-drone weapons will need to sharply improve or tanks will become obsolete.
https://youtu.be/8PVwe8CDsI8?si=iumRResUY9_rKaMZ
This video of a Ukrainian kamikaze drone hunting down a Russian Army van reminds me of something from a Terminator movie.
https://youtu.be/voshtfn9PRM?si=hCP_xUENpyxl9Io8
The “aerostat” flying drones from Terminator Salvation.
https://youtu.be/_iJBc_O-Qow?si=5_oPPhWzdJLux5F8
Conflicts across the Middle East have worsened.
- In the last 100 days, 1% of Gaza’s population has been killed (more than half of those were women and children) and 85% of the population has been forced to flee their homes at some point.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/14/1224673502/gaza-numbers-100-days-israel-hamas - Israel has destroyed or damaged most of the buildings in Gaza since October 7.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68006607 - In spite of the massive damage Israel has inflicted, 70-80% of Hamas members are still alive.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-toll-thus-far-falls-short-of-israels-war-aims-u-s-says-d1c43164 - The International Court of Justice ruled that there is not enough evidence to prove or disprove Israel is committing genocide against Gazans, so a longer trial will be needed at a future date when more evidence is available.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/01/26/the-icj-delivers-a-stinging-rebuke-to-israel-over-the-war-in-gaza - The Shi’ite “Houthi” government of Yemen has started firing rockets at commercial ships transiting through the Red Sea. The Houthis get their money and weapons from Iran.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-biden-retaliation-attacks-0804b93372cd5e874a0dd03513fe36a2 - An Iranian-armed militant group in Iraq used a suicide drone to attack a large U.S. military base in Jordan, killing three U.S. troops and injuring dozens more. President Biden says he intends to retaliate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68131434 - Pakistan and Iran had a border skirmish, with both sides attacking what they claimed were rebels inside the other’s territory.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/29/irans-top-diplomat-visits-pakistan-to-ease-tensions-after-joint-strikes
Iran now has ballistic missiles that can hit Israel.
https://www.twz.com/iran-executed-its-farthest-ballistic-missile-strike-ever-with-new-weapon
‘Four of the five Taliban members released from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration in 2014 in exchange for admitted US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl are part of the Islamic fundamentalist group’s new hardline government in Afghanistan’
https://nypost.com/2021/09/07/four-taliban-members-swapped-for-bowe-bergdahl-now-in-afghan-government/
Contrary to what Thomas Friedman claims, there have been several instances where two countries with McDonald’s in them have fought each other.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-countries-war/
The Dodecanese campaign was a weird WWII engagement considering its constellation of forces and location.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecanese_campaign
You don’t need to score a direct hit on a tank with an artillery shell to cripple it: an air burst shell that detonates within 100 feet of a tank can pepper it with enough shrapnel to destroy its visioning devices, radios, cannon, and its caterpillar tracks.
https://youtu.be/GFrVhhPBiUw?si=RSYuqcNhr8EIZTix
In the 1980s, the Soviet Army experimented with “balanced recoil” rifles to replace their older, AK-style rifles. While the idea sounded good in concept, in practice, the rifles were worse overall.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/06/14/akb-akb-1-soviet-trial-balanced-action-rifles/
The F-16 is 50 years old!
https://www.twz.com/flying-the-block-70-f-16-ultimate-viper-according-to-its-test-pilot
Nobel prizewinning economist Christopher Pissarides predicts narrow AI will destroy countless STEM-dependent jobs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nobel-prize-winner-cautions-rush-103617209.html
Economist Tyler Cowen predicts narrow AI will destroy countless “wordcel” jobs.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/01/what-are-the-actual-dangers-of-advanced-ai.html
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts wrote an essay about the uses and limitations of narrow AI in the legal field.
https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2023/12/31/chief-justice-roberts-issues-2023-year-end-report
DeepMind has released AlphaGeometry, a narrow AI that can solve geometry problems as well as the smartest humans.
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry/
AlphaFold has discovered thousands of new molecules that probably have mind-altering effects in humans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00130-8
The NPCs in the new video game The Matrix Awakens are surprisingly smart. While they’re almost certainly not conscious, they should make us consider the ethics of creating AI characters for future games.
https://youtu.be/xxynE5MjzS0?si=4eF26DP1v5ST26FR
Mark Zuckerberg has made it Meta’s goal to build an AGI.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/24042354/mark-zuckerberg-meta-agi-reorg-interview
Sheryl Sandberg is quitting Meta.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68014577
The Mobile ALOHA house robot is still experimental and has many limitations but shows how much robotics has improved.
https://youtu.be/HaaZ8ss-HP4?si=nPlGyBqNG_Em6uCm
Elon Musk says a Neuralink brain chip has been implanted in a human for the first time.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/29/elon-musk-neuralink-first-human-brain-chip-implant
Deepfaked nude photos of Taylor Swift widely circulated on X, causing an uproar.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68110476
In 2020, a company called “Volocopter” promised it would create a “flying electric taxi service” in Singapore by the end of 2023. It didn’t happen, though at least the company isn’t bankrupt yet. (I’m deeply skeptical of flying cars, but think small, autonomous passenger aircraft are more plausible.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-09/first-electric-air-taxis-set-to-fly-in-singapore-by-2023
Roboticist Rodney Brooks grades some of his technology predictions.
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2024-january-01/
Bill Gates would have been a trillionaire by now had he not sold so many of his Microsoft shares. I’ve predicted that we’ll have to wait until the 2050s for the first person to achieve a $1 trillion net worth, but I’m thinking it will happen sooner.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire-today-163852659.html
Microsoft’s market cap is now $3 trillion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68144741
In the country of Georgia, two twin girls were stolen from their unconscious mother at a hospital right after they were born and sold on the black market to two couples. Years later, the girls stumbled upon each other through social media and unraveled the truth about their own pasts. Social media, mass DNA testing and other technologies will make people more aware of doppelgangers and lost relatives in the future.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13009701/Incredible-moment-Georgian-twins-reunited-birth-mother-22-years-stolen-hospital-sold-black-market-separate-families-Identical-girls-teens-one-saw-TV-talent-show.html
The long-promised “Lunar Codex” is not far behind its predicted schedule. Unfortunately, the first time capsule was on a Moon lander that just malfunctioned and crashed back to Earth.
“The Lunar Codex is a project to preserve contemporary creative arts for future generations, a message-in-a-bottle to the future,” explained Dr. Samuel Peralta, creator of the enterprise. “It consists of three time-capsules – the Peregrine Collection, the Nova Collection, and the Polaris Collection – to be launched via three separate missions to the Moon over 2021-2023.”
https://www.savannahnow.com/story/entertainment/2021/08/03/savannah-ga-artists-june-stratton-karen-bradley-join-lunar-codex-dr-samuel-peralta-moon-space-nasa/5413324001/
Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, is actually a good candidate for future human habitation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Titan
Color-corrected images show Uranus and Neptune look dull and nearly identical to each other. The two planets are also so far from the Sun that they’d look dim to the naked eye if you got near either of them in a space ship.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/04/world/neptune-uranus-new-color-images-scn/index.html
After three years of operation, the first helicopter on Mars has broken down.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends
Instead of sending one, big spaceship to other stars, why not send many, tiny spaceships that work together as a swarm once they get there?
‘Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century. We presuppose availability by mid-century of a laser beamer powerful enough (~100-GW) to boost a few grams to relativistic speed, lasersails robust enough to survive launch, and terrestrial light buckets (~1-sq.km) big enough to catch our optical signals. Then our proposed representative mission, around the third quarter of this century, is to fly by our nearest neighbor, the potentially habitable world Proxima b, with a large autonomous swarm of 1000s of tiny probes.’
https://www.nasa.gov/general/swarming-proxima-centauri/
The Pentagon’s Inspector General says the DoD’s internal process for collecting and analyzing UFO reports remains badly inadequate.
https://www.twz.com/watchdog-says-pentagons-uap-response-may-pose-threat-to-national-security
The decoding of the coffee plant’s genome is the first step to creating new varieties of coffee that taste better or different from today’s brews (which are pretty similar) and that can grow in more types of climates. Thanks to such genetic engineering, maybe the U.S. will someday grow all the coffee it needs. In the farther future, we’ll “cut out the middleman” by directly converting simple organic molecules into coffee grounds in giant food labs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68062130
The first rhesus monkey clone has reached adulthood without any signs of health problems. This means we now have the technology to clone humans, but for every one, healthy clone, there would be dozens of mutant fetuses that died in utero and deformed clones that were born and died in childhood. It won’t be ethical to clone people until the success rates get a lot better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00136-2
In a medical experiment, a pig liver that was genetically engineered to not be rejected by a human immune system functioned for 72 hours after it was surgically attached to a braindead man.
https://apnews.com/article/pig-liver-kidneys-transplants-penn-ba9b2d181d26425cc4927ad6c55f79f7
‘The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a second use for the first CRISPR-based medicine, Casgevy, which was approved in December to treat sickle cell disease. The groundbreaking treatment can now also be used to treat transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia in people 12 and older. Like sickle cell, beta thalassemia is an inherited blood disorder.’
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/16/health/crispr-casgevy-beta-thalassemia/index.html
A prestigious cancer hospital has been forced to retract several medical studies due to faked data.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/dana-farber-cancer-institute-boston-harvard-data-manipulation-claims/
We could learn biological lessons about disease resistance and life extension by studying bats.
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341951/
The average IQ for a person with Down Syndrome is 60, meaning a Down Syndrome Genius would only be as smart as an average person. However, there are people with “mosaic” Down Syndrome, in which the disorder affects their physical appearance in the standard way, but not their brains. Such people have normal intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/mar-galceran-makes-history-spain-first-parliamentarian-downs-syndrome