As the U.S. withdraws it troops from Afghanistan after almost 20 years, the Taliban are rapidly taking over the country. Photos and videos show Taliban troops capturing large numbers of U.S.-made fighting vehicles, and Afghan government forces surrendering.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/06/disaster-at-hand-documenting-afghan.html
More on that:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/troops-flee-taliban-take-districts-northeast-afghanistan-n1273062
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57818221
Ethiopia’s army suffered a stunning defeat in the rebellious Tigray province. Thousands of their troops were captured and marched in front of cameras.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/world/africa/tigray-ethiopia-soldiers-captured.html
Here’s an interesting glimpse into a Syrian Army tank repair shop. Their mechanics made the best use of what they had during the civil war.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/08/a-look-inside-damascus-armour-repair.html
In 2020, the small U.S. aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard suffered a fire that caused so much damage the ship was sent to the scrapyard. The Navy now says that one of its sailors deliberately lit the fire.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/29/1022514854/sailor-charged-arson-uss-bonhomme-richard-navy-san-diego
British and Chinese aircraft carriers are both conducting missions in the South China Sea.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41752/british-and-chinese-aircraft-carriers-both-underway-in-the-tense-south-china-sea
China is making impressive progress building its third aircraft carrier, which will be significantly larger and more advanced than its other two.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/progress-report-chinas-type-003-carrier
A fast way to stop a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan might be for U.S. bombers to drop naval mines in the water.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/stop-chinese-invasion-b-52s-could-drop-mines-taiwan-strait-189127
The American submarine USS Thresher accidentally sank off the East Coast in 1963. For decades, the Navy claimed the sinking drowned the 129-man crew immediately. However, recently declassified reports suggest that some of them survived for as long as 30 hours. Being trapped in an air pocket inside a sunken vessel and slowly suffocating is one of the worst ways to die I know of.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41523/uss-threshers-crew-may-have-survived-many-hours-after-its-disappearance-according-to-new-docs
From 1984: ‘A senior Marine general [Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor] said today that a limited war with the Soviet Union in this generation is an “almost inevitable probability” and that the United States should be prepared to prevail in such a conflict…”Given what’s happening with Soviet power projection, we probably at some point in our lifetime will clash.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/06/22/limited-soviet-war-held-almost-inevitable/14709f97-3573-45e1-9fd6-432cfb06898e/
British children of 1966 sure were well-spoken, thoughtful, and mature compared to modern American children. This video should definitely give us pause about how we have regressed thanks to deficiencies in our culture and public education. At the same time, the parallels between their bad assumptions and ours today must be acknowledged. Their predictions of global catastrophe and/or being forced into totally different ways of life by the year 2000 were completely wrong. Likewise, the predictions that modern children would make about global warming doomsday, nuclear war, or robots taking over by, say, 2050, will also end up being wrong.
https://youtu.be/cwHib5wYEj8
A massive forest fire in southern Oregon was less damaging to areas where humans had recently allowed smaller, managed fires to burn. Refusing to accept that wild fires are part of nature’s cycle of birth, death, and renewal has led to terrible policy of suppressing most fires, inevitably leading to a huge buildup of dead and dry wood in forests, which in turn leads to mega-fires that can’t be controlled.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/20/1018522825/bootleg-wildfire-forest-management
‘Overall, our results imply that ridesharing has decreased US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and reduced total US traffic fatalities by 4.0%.’
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29071
The founder of the electric truck startup named “Nikola” has been indicted for fraud. The truck technology was a scam.
https://social.techcrunch.com/2021/07/29/nikola-founder-trevor-milton-indicted-on-three-counts-of-fraud/
Mark Zuckerberg believes that virtual reality and augmented reality headsets now used for gaming will, by 2030, be commonly used for work purposes, allowing for vastly better teleworking. He calls this world of virtual reality meetings, virtual workstations, and hybrid reality the “metaverse.” The concept is little different from what Ray Kurzweil foresaw over 20 years ago.
https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview
A new type of app lets players of first-person-shooter video games cheat, and is undetectable. The app watches the footage being displayed on the user’s computer screen, uses pattern recognition to identify enemy players in split seconds, and re-centers the player’s weapon crosshair over those enemies. As a result, the cheating player has perfect aim, and merely needs to push the “fire” button on his controller to always kill an enemy. Variations of this technology could be used to make the ultimate ad-blockers.
https://youtu.be/revk5r5vqxA
Fully convincing computer voice synthesis is coming soon. Famous people will be able to sell the rights to their distinctive voice prints, and small-scale human voice actors could lose their jobs.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-07-26/la-et-anthony-bourdain-deepfake-ai-voice-documentary-audio-cgi
AI company Deep Mind used an advanced program called “AlphaFold” to predict the structures of 350,000 proteins, including all of the roughly 20,000 proteins found in the human body. It will take a lot of time to verify all of their predictions, but so far, they have been very accurate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57929095
A chemist who has spent much of his career developing new drugs offers this analysis of how impactful AlphaFold will be to his field.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/23/more-protein-folding-progress-whats-it-mean
More genes that code for human obesity have been found.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6550/30
The first human conceived through “preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders” (PGT-P) has been born. This is one step down from genetic engineering.
https://www.ivfbabble.com/on-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-first-ivf-in-the-usa-the-first-baby-elizabeth-jordan-carr-looks-at-how-science-today-has-produced-a-new-world-first-baby-aurea/
A physically paralyzed and mute man can now communicate thanks to a brain implant that turns his thoughts into computer text. There’s an embedded video showing the man synthesizing sentences in real time. Brain implants that can decode a person’s thoughts will someday let people communicate telepathically, and to use their minds to directly control machines.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/14/1016028911/experimental-brain-implant-lets-man-with-paralysis-turn-his-thoughts-into-words
By genetically engineering plants to have an enzyme that de-methylates RNA molecules in humans, geneticists were able to increase crop yields by 50%.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/28/one-lost-methyl-group-huge-amounts-of-food-production
Once lab techniques are perfected, we will be able to cheaply produce any kind of meat, including meats mimicking exotic animals like ‘ostrich, snake, wombat, penguin, and any threatened species currently protected from slaughter.’ We could even synthesize human flesh for consumption.
https://futuristspeaker.com/future-of-agriculture/industrial-meat-growing-facilities-coming-to-a-city-near-you/
Billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos went into space in private spacecraft they had separately developed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57797297
https://apnews.com/article/jeff-bezos-space-e0afeaa813ff0bdf23c37fe16fd34265
While many cynics pointed out that Branson and Bezos only went into space for a few minutes apiece, they won’t be able to laugh at Elon Musk’s upcoming private space mission. Perhaps before the end of this year, Musk will send four people into space on one of his SpaceX rockets. They will orbit the Earth dozens of times over four days.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/03/1017255/space-tourism-finally-here-sort-of-spacex-inspiration4/
This is what a Space-X Falcon 9 rocket looks like after making eight trips into space.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/after-eight-flights-to-space-in-a-year-heres-what-a-falcon-9-looks-like/
During the height of the Space Race, CIA spies secretly examined and photographed a Soviet satellite that was being used as a museum exhibit. Remarkably, the Soviets decided not to make a hollowed-out mockup for this purpose–it was a real satellite containing all the actual components and some of their best technology.
https://www.popsci.com/cias-bold-kidnapping-soviet-spacecraft/
Using a technique called “star lifting,” we could slowly siphon off the Sun’s outer layers of hydrogen, which might shrink it enough to prevent it from turning into a red giant that is projected to expand and fry Earth in 5 billion years.
https://www.gregschool.org/gregschoollessons/2018/5/23/star-lifting-colonizing-the-stars-and-the-galaxies
‘[The WHO head] said there had been a “premature push” to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan — undermining WHO’s own March report, which concluded that a laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely.”‘
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1016436749/who-chief-wuhan-lab-covid-19-origin-premature-tedros
But it is also premature at this point to conclude COVID-19 definitely had human origins. Other evidence suggests it could have come from nature. The jury is still out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/19/1016005828/new-data-leads-to-rethinking-once-more-where-the-pandemic-actually-began
The Chinese virology lab from which COVID-19 may have leaked had received some money from the U.S. government to support its research. The U.S. may have inadvertently funded “gain of function” experiments in China that produced COVID-19.
https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699
Worries about side effects caused by the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine are overblown, and the net benefits of getting it (or any other FDA-approved vaccine) still massively outweigh the risks.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/13/more-on-vaccine-side-effects
The prediction from 13 months ago was right. In the second quarter of 2021, the number of Americans who had received at least one COVID shot hit 100 million. Shortly after, the number that had gotten at least two shots also hit 100 million.
“The first doses [of the COVID-19 vaccine] will need to go to the people who are at highest risk…particularly health care providers, people in long-term care facilities…But the goal would be certainly to start scaling this up as soon as you have a vaccine that’s safe and effective, so that by 2021, maybe even in the first or second quarter, we would have 100 million doses or so, so it wouldn’t have to be rationed so severely. But at first, there won’t be enough for everybody.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/04/868833292/nih-director-hopes-for-at-least-1-safe-and-effective-vaccine-by-years-end