Humans have only domesticated about 150 plants, even though a far greater number of plants are edible. Moreover, just wheat, rice and corn make up 2/3 of the world’s calories. Some scientists are trying to domesticate new plants, like “kernza”, to improve food security and stimulate the human palate with new tastes. I think the future of food will be more diverse, healthier, and tastier than the present.
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/potato-bean/
Chinese scientists found a way to turn CO2 into starch in a lab eight times faster than corn plants can do it. However, it’s unclear whether their method is as energy efficient as photosynthesis. In the far future, most of our food will be synthesized in factories and labs.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3150453/chinese-scientists-have-found-new-way-make-starch-lab-could-it
Though the cost of making lab-grown meat has significantly decreased, it’s questionable whether the trend will continue at the rates various proponents claim. Note that, in my own predictions, I don’t foresee synthetic meat displacing natural meat until the end of this century.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
Here’s an interesting and haunting colorized video of a long-extinct Tasmanian tiger.
https://newatlas.com/science/thylacine-colorized-4k-video-extinct/
Ultraviolet lights will become more common for killing airborne pathogens.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/air-filtration-and-uv-disinfection-greatly-reduce-viruses-in-hospital-wards.html
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201214164328.htm
A computer algorithm connected to a basic webcam can, by sight, identify whether objects can be recycled, with 95% accuracy. There’s no reason why we couldn’t someday program one machine to recognize every kind of manmade object.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2288627-ai-accurately-identifies-whether-objects-can-be-recycled-from-a-glance/
Tesla has improved its self-driving car technology, though end users disagree over how big the difference is.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/tesla-fsd-10-testers-agree-a-large-improvement-has-been-delivered.html
The bicycle and the cotton gin could have been invented decades earlier than they were. Are there any gaps in today’s corpus of human technology that we’ll only become aware of decades from now?
https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle
Advances in drilling technology could make geothermal energy much cheaper and more widespread.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
Parts of the ocean floor are covered in rocks made of valuable metals. It’s just laying out in the open. Long-stalled plans to use remote-controlled robots to mine them might be coming to fruition.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/03/1031434711/your-next-car-may-be-built-with-ocean-rocks-scientists-cant-agree-if-thats-good
Ocean acidification, driven by global warming, is less damaging to coral reef ecosystems than thought.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1903-y
Cephalopods (squid, octopi, cuttlefish) have more evolved eyes than advanced vertebrates, including humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye
There’s a new computer program that can predict protein structures even better than AlphaFold.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/another-way-do-protein-structure-prediction
“Thomson Reuters'” 2016 predictions for which new and upcoming drugs would be big sellers are turning out to be only somewhat accurate.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/2016-crystal-ball-needed-polishing
The Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 has raised unrealistic hopes about the near-term prospects of other mRNA vaccines for other diseases.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-s-history–and-its-future
‘Americans living with HIV could have the same life expectancy as those without’
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/562283-americans-living-with-hiv-have-the-same-life-expectancy
People who survived the Chernobyl nuclear disaster were actually no likelier than average to later have children with genetic mutations.
https://www.science.org/content/article/no-excess-mutations-children-chernobyl-survivors-new-study-finds
China has banned genetically engineered humans, human clones, and human-animal genetic hybrids.
https://biohackinfo.com/news-china-gene-editing-criminal-law-article-336-march-2021/
‘[Globally] more than 700 million living humans are the offspring of second cousins or closer relatives. In some regions, the rate of such unions reaches 20–60%.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25289-w
A feud between a divorced husband and wife over the division of their marital assets boiled over when the woman raided the man’s human cryonics business and stole several dozen frozen corpses and human brains. The pair founded the company, located near Moscow, together during their marriage.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9978003/Cryogenically-frozen-bodies-brains-rich-people-SNATCHED-Russian-lab.html
The F-5 fighter first flew in 1959. Its descendants are still in service and being upgraded, in spite of being decades old. As impressive and as efficient as the F-5 is, though, the plane’s small size and lack of any stealth fundamentally limit how good it can be.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42507/first-navy-f-5-aggressor-begins-upgrade-that-will-make-the-entire-fleet-far-more-potent
In 1994, a still-secret American stealth plane might have had an accident at a British airbase in “Boscombe Down.”
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37371/the-boscombe-down-incident-remains-one-of-military-aviations-most-intriguing-mysteries
Pentagon scientists throw cold water on the notion that quantum radar could render stealth planes obsolete.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40933/quantum-radar-offers-no-benefits-to-the-military-say-pentagon-science-advisors
During the most recent fighting against Gaza, Israel made the first military use of “drone swarms.” The swarms were made of dozens or even hundreds of quadcopters, which used cameras to watch different parts of Gaza for terrorist rocket and mortar launches. Most of the drones were not directly controlled by human operators, and were programmed to autonomously operate.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-apparent-world-first-idf-deployed-drone-swarms-in-gaza-fighting/
During its recent war with Armenia, Azerbaijan’s air force converted dozens of obsolete biplanes into remote-controlled drones, and then flew these over Armenian military positions. The Armenians took the bait by shooting the old planes down, depleting their antiaircraft missiles and revealing the positions of their missile launchers in the process.
https://www.overtdefense.com/2020/10/05/azerbaijan-reportedly-convert-ancient-an-2-biplanes-into-drones/
Lockheed’s AH-56 “Cheyenne” was an extremely advanced attack helicopter prototype the U.S. Army considered adopting in the early 1970s. The gunner’s seat could rotate 360 degrees along with a 30mm cannon hanging under the craft, letting him keep the weapon pointed at a target regardless of the helicopter’s overall orientation.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40014/the-cheyenne-attack-helicopter-had-a-crazy-rotating-gunners-seat-right-out-of-star-wars
Economic reality has slapped the U.S. military in the face again: It has reduced its order for Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs), each of which is more expensive than a Bentley, to buy more Humvees even though JLTVs were originally planned to fully replace the former.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41439/joint-light-tactical-vehicle-funds-redirected-by-army-once-again-to-buy-new-humvees
A former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, says he is open to the existence of intelligent aliens and knows a credible person who encountered a UFO during a plane flight.
https://nypost.com/2021/04/06/former-cia-director-says-he-believes-ufos-could-exist-report/
The “Incessant Obsolescence Postulate” says that colony ships traveling to distant planets will be overtaken by faster colony ships launched later and incorporating better technology.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066
A manned mission to Mars would need to be kept under four years in length to prevent the astronauts from being exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. And here’s an interesting tidbit: ‘The modeling determined that having a spacecraft’s shell built out of a relatively thick material could help protect astronauts from radiation, but that if the shielding is too thick, it could actually increase the amount of secondary radiation to which they are exposed.’
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/safe-for-humans-fly-to-mars
Elon Musk wasn’t the first entrant into the billionaire private space race (Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos beat him), but his venture into it was probably the most impressive. A SpaceX capsule took four civilian astronauts into Earth orbit for three days, and at an even higher altitude than the International Space Station.
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-travel-florida-science–657f49b1d7c4c914cc81308118fb1573
‘From the standpoint of the defense and firearms industries, if such a material [as “metallic wood”] can be built to a sufficient thickness, matching the claimed characteristics and at a reasonable cost, it may allow developing a wide variety of revolutionary new products: body and vehicle armor, exoskeletons, small arms, projectiles, unmanned vehicles, fighter jets, submarines … you name it.’
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/04/11/metallic-wood-new-material-that-is-as-strong-as-titanium-but-5-times-lighter/
Unless a new, worse strain of COVID-19 emerges, infections and deaths will keep steadily declining for the foreseeable future, and there won’t be a winter surge.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/22/1039272244/is-the-worst-over-modelers-predict-a-steady-decline-in-covid-cases-through-march