Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now…
https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s
Some estimates about how powerful alien telescopes would be if they used “gravitational microlensing.”
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.06351.pdf
The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe
‘Project Cyclops was a 1971 NASA project that investigated how SETI should be conducted.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cyclops
A machine that can detect dark matter has been invented. This paper appeared in one of the world’s premier scientific journals.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/09/admx-detection-technology/
Lakes in northern Canada could be similar to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701375
Venus’ atmosphere might harbor microbial life.
http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-ponders-possible-life-adrift-in-venus-clouds
‘Leo Aerospace plans to revive a decades-old method of putting satellites into space. They’re using hot air balloons to lift the rocket and its micro-satellite payload 18 km (11 miles) above Earth. At that altitude, there’s 95% less atmosphere. This means much less drag on the rocket, which translates into smaller rockets with less fuel.’
https://www.universetoday.com/138966/launching-rockets-from-balloons-is-about-to-be-a-thing-but-we-need-a-better-name-than-rockoons/
China’s first space station crashed. They have a second, slightly larger and newer one in orbit and want to someday launch a third.
https://apnews.com/6fb6a34f6e844f85beca6afbf79ea7b8
Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar
Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395
Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos
Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751
About 80% of male pattern baldness is purely genetic. Everything else (smoking, stress level, diet, exercise, type of shampoo you use) barely moves the needle.
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006594
IQ is about 50% genetic. The weight of scientific evidence about this has grown to be overwhelming, and we’re now moving on to identifying the genes responsible for human intelligence.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/selective-schools-meritocracy-and-genes/
Depression is about 40% genetic, with the rest of the risk explained by non-genetic biological factors and negative life experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/26/gene-map-for-depression-sparks-hopes-of-new-generation-of-treatments
The Bajau people, who have been living on boats and diving into the sea to catch food for 1,000 years, have genetic adaptations for that lifestyle.
https://economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21740737-meet-bajau-group-people-amphibious-life-have-evolved-traits
Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html
The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830
Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women.
https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351
A lesson in “you get what you pay for”: Russia’s T-90 tank is slightly inferior to America’s M1 tank, but that’s because the T-90 is smaller, cheaper, and has a smaller crew.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-t-90-dangerous-weapon-could-it-beat-americas-best-25379?page=show
Marine Corps F/A-18s are old and falling apart, but through ingenuity and hard work, their ground crews keep them flying. The article should help you understand why readiness levels are so bad in cash-strapped militaries that operate even older planes, like the Indian Air Force and its MiG-21s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer
An offer not for the faint of heart: India plans to donate obsolete military equipment to its allies in Asia and Africa.
http://www.janes.com/article/79564/india-to-offer-dated-refurbished-materiel-to-friendly-countries
And at the other end of its military technology spectrum, India has finally backed out of its partnership with Russia to develop a stealth fighter. Among other problems, they the fighters weren’t stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20347/its-no-surprise-india-finally-ditched-its-stealth-fighter-program-with-russia
The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles.
http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet
DARPA is working on a new weapons system comprised of a conventional cargo plane that launches swarms of small flying drones, which complete their missions against the enemy and then fly back to their “mothership” and dock with it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20058/this-is-our-first-glimpse-of-a-darpa-gremlins-drone-being-launched-or-recovered-from-a-c-130
Plasma weapons are infeasible, but laser cannons and particle cannons that fire streams of neutrons (we can already kill with neutron bombs) are theoretically possible.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html
100 years after WWI, the Triple Entente is still fighting the Ottoman Empire, and chemical weapons are still being used. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/13/politics/trump-us-syria/index.html
The recent American airstrikes on Syria used some basic but effective distraction tactics to keep the enemy guessing where it would come from.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-navy-fooled-russia-and-syria-with-a-warship-ruse-before-the-strike-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T
U.S. Special Forces have built a base in northern Syria to defend Kurdish rebels against the Turks. There’s no way this news footage could have been aired without the permission of U.S. forces, so this is a deliberate leak intended to send a message to somebody.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19929/u-s-special-operators-in-syria-have-set-up-futuristic-computer-assisted-mortar-turrets
The esteemed “Graham-Talent Commission” predicted in 2008 that terrorists would use nuclear or biological weapons before the end of 2013.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510559.pdf
‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/
“What may happen in the next hundred years” (John Elfreth Watkins’ amusing predictions from the year 1900). Most of them were right, or “essentially right.”
http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf
A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/
Government just can’t do drug policy right: California’s legal marijuana industry is so heavily taxed that the black market still thrives in the state.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2018/04/02/californias-new-recreational-marijuana-m
Cookies that made day care staff feel high on drugs didn’t contain drugs.
https://www.apnews.com/75959b080785434792561eedeb0377af
We might never cure every type of cancer, but we could get so good at detecting and treating it that cancer would become just another chronic, manageable condition like diabetes.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/04/18/curing-cancer-not-realistic-goal-doctors-focus-on-managing-instead-curing-disease.html
A combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy (pembrolizumab) raises survival rates for people with some types of lung cancer by almost 50%.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/health/lung-cancer-immunotherapy.html
A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514
The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html
‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits
MIT severed ties with Nectome over the latter’s announcement that it wanted to experiment with destructive human brain scans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43642786
A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/
Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf
A step towards Google’s mission: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
https://qz.com/1252664/talk-to-books-at-ted-2018-ray-kurzweil-unveils-googles-astounding-new-search-tool-will-answer-any-question-by-reading-thousands-of-books/
“Simulation capture” is a creepy theory about how an AGI would push you around. Whenever we finally invent an AGI, it will probably say “I’ve got a million more like this…”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c5GHf2kMGhA4Tsj4g/the-ai-in-a-box-boxes-you
“You can’t get from narrow AI to AGI.” Likewise, even if we can’t invent AGI, we can surely make multitudes of very good, task-specific narrow AIs that could collectively put the human race out of work.
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2018/04/no-you-cant-get-from-narrow-ai-to-agi/
There’s a reason why established car companies still have humans on their assembly lines.
https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-1825264384
Machines that milk cows radically improve the lives of dairy farmers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/07/599259931/when-robots-milk-cows-farm-families-taste-freedom
Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice.
https://www.economist.com/node/21541717
Researchers have built a DNA-based nanomachine that has a rotary motor and can move in a specific direction.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/nanomachine-made-from-dna-nanorings.html
‘Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.’
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis
‘Grand Theft Auto 5 has made money than any other form of media in history, with over 90 million units sold and $6 billion in revenue.’ If games get good enough and jobs get scarce enough, is a Ready Player One future really so unrealistic?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/04/09/gta-5-has-made-more-money-than-any-film-book-or-game-says-analyst
33% of Britons don’t like their jobs, and 37% think their jobs are meaningless. What if this keeps getting worse as time passes?
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/
Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike.
https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k
‘That’s what happened last week to a 31-year-old man who was held by police for questioning over an “economic dispute” as he waited with more than 60,000 fans of Hong Kong’s Jacky Cheung for a night of pumping Cantopop.’
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/facial-recognition-used-catch-fugitive-094342186.html
Multiple cell phone wiretapping stations are around the White House and Capitol Building.
https://www.apnews.com/d716aac4ad744b4cae3c6b13dce12d7e
One positive use of mass surveillance will be the tracking of wildlife populations, including endangered species. Someday, we’ll have highly accurate counts of entire animal populations.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/science/drones-infrared-cameras-animals.html
The rental car market will REALLY be upended once average people own self-driving cars and some peer-to-peer app lets them rent out rides at random times throughout the day. For example, if you were sitting around at home doing nothing on Sunday, you could push one button and make your self-driving car available as a taxi for any local people who wanted it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/03/30/airbnb-for-cars-is-here-and-the-rental-car-giants-are-not-happy/
With the recent news about Tesla autopilot cars killing two people, has anyone considered how many lives they might have SAVED?
https://insideevs.com/watch-autopilot-save-tesla-model-x-from-collision/
Didi, China’s version of Uber, is going to buy fleets of cars suited for different types of cab rides. ‘Didi considers ordinary cars to be “overspecced” for normal trips, featuring more passenger space, engine power, and other features than are required.’
https://qz.com/1261415/chinas-didi-partners-with-carmakers-to-design-vehicles-for-ride-sharing/