Russia is learning from the mistakes it made early in the Ukraine invasion. Among other improvements, it has adopted better countermeasures against Ukrainian drones.
https://www.businessinsider.com/drones-russia-ukraine-war-electronic-warfare-2022-7
Here’s a video of Ukrainian troops operating a captured Russian T-80 tank. They praise its gas turbine engine and high technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFzXiAdfPvw
Contrary to widespread rumors, there’s no real evidence that Vladimir Putin has a chronic illness.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62246914
The CIA estimates 15,000 Russian troops have died in Ukraine so far.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-712678
In 1951, the CIA got its hands on a T-34/85 tank, the USSR’s best tank of WWII, and did a detailed technical analysis of it. Overall, they thought it was great, but with notable defects. It would be interesting to see what an Americanized T-34/85, with all the flaws the CIA found being fixed, would have been like.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81-01044R000100070001-4.pdf
Here’s a detailed analysis of the Soviet/Russian BMP armored vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9Acowtluk
A “Zephyr” solar-powered drone just flew from Arizona to Belize without landing. It took 17 days.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/zephyr-high-flying-drone-has-been-up-for-17-days-as-part-of-army-test
Someone attached a remove-controlled assault rifle to a robot dog’s back. Though it’s clearly too crude to be useful, it points towards something that will be common in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-It_O0bL0v8
The forgotten 2000 film Red Planet featured a killer robot named “AMEE.” Its superhuman speed and agility make it a potential mass murderer if armed only with a kitchen knife. In the far future, I think robots will have these kinds of capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y75hrsA7jyw
A database containing the personal information of 1 billion Chinese citizens was hacked and is now for sale online.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62097594
Computers can now generate lifelike images of foods and meals based on user text prompts.
https://nyx-ai.github.io/stylegan2-flax-tpu/
A guy who dropped out of high school, failed as a poet, took six years to get a bachelors degree (after failing several classes), and only discovered an interest in math during that sixth year, just won a Fields medal.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can ban women from getting abortions because their fetuses have Down Syndrome.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-phoenix-doug-ducey-a24fb1d27a3ffe6f386b8c8785be3937
The scientific evidence that parents who suffer life traumas can pass some traces of them on to their offspring via epigenetics is weaker than thought.
http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2018/05/grandmas-trauma-critical-appraisal-of.html
Using gene therapy, scientists can cure hemophilia B with one injection.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62240061
A fourth person has been cured of HIV thanks to a bone marrow transplant.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62312249
‘[We’re] now releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, which will expand the AlphaFold DB by over 200x – from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures – with the potential to dramatically increase our understanding of biology.’
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe
Brussel sprouts are noticeably more palatable now than they were as late as the 1990s thanks to selective breeding for flavor.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/from-culinary-dud-to-stud-how-dutch-plant-breeders-built-our-brussels-sprouts-bo
It might be possible to grow plants in the dark by feeding them nutrients produced by algae. The algae, in turn, are fed nutrients created through a process called “electrocatalysis,” which harnesses electricity generated by solar panels. In effect, the plant crops would still be nourished by sunlight, though the artificial process might be more efficient since solar panels are better at turning sunlight into energy than chloroplasts inside of plant leaves are.
https://www.wired.com/story/plants-growing-in-darkness/
A carnivorous plant that lives underground was discovered in Indonesia.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/01/world/carnivorous-plant-lives-underground-discovered-scn/index.html
Today’s skyscrapers could stay standing for thousands of years, so long as people are around to do piecemeal replacements of their structural parts as they wear out over time. Buildings can be designed from the outset to make this easier to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v3f_Q-ySa4
A famous sculpture called the “Elgin Marbles” has been digitally scanned using 3D cameras. A robot sculptor could use the data to make a near-perfect replica.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10651775/Digital-archaeologists-secretly-scan-Elgin-Marbles-inside-British-Museum.html
If you don’t like how Amazon treats it’s warehouse employees, don’t worry: the company is hard at work finding ways to replace them with robots, and in time it will succeed.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/21/23177756/amazon-warehouse-robots-proteus-autonomous-cart-delivery
Google fired Blake Lemoine, the computer scientist who publicly claimed the company had a sentient AI.
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/google-fires-blake-lemoine-engineer
Across several domains of software, exponentially large improvements to hardware are required to make linear gains in performance. This means if Moore’s Law stops, progress will really slow down.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14007
The James Webb Space Telescope has sent its first images of space back to Earth.
http://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
The bellicose head of Russia’s space agency has been fired.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-space-chief-dismissed-nasa-gets-deal-for-joint-crews/
Russia has given notice they will abandon their part of the International Space Station in 2024.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62308069
In a move reminiscent of something Weyland-Yutani would do, the U.S. government wants to send people into remote areas of the world to collect samples of deadly, rare diseases and send them to American labs.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/5/7/22973296/virus-hunting-discovery-deep-vzn-global-virome-project