This chart of how prices of various goods and services have changed over the last 20 years in the U.S. shows the impact of Moore’s Law, trade, private sector competition (or lack thereof), and government regulation.
https://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-or-century/
Here’s an interesting article on how changes in technology have altered our houses over time.
https://www.curbed.com/2019/1/16/18184194/mcmansion-hell-kate-wagner-modern-building-materials
At CES 2019, LG unveiled a 65″ TV that is only 3mm thick and can roll up like a carpet. It costs tens of thousands of dollars, but serves as a crucial proof of concept. Someday, average people will own wall-sized TVs that are paper-thin and 8K in resolution.
https://ces2019.lgusnewsroom.com/press-release/lg-debuts-tv-of-tomorrow-with-worlds-first-rollable-oled-tv/
The U.S. cancer death rate has been declining for 25 consecutive years. It mostly owes to people quitting smoking, and would be even lower if it weren’t for a rise in obesity-induced cancers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
Only 14% of Americans were smokers in 2017, the lowest ever. Smoking is more common among poor people, blacks, and Hispanics, partly explaining their lower lifespans.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-smoking-reduction-benefits-20190107-story.html
A new deep learning AI called “DeepGestalt” can scan images of human faces for the telltale signs of over 200 genetic disorders like Down Syndrome.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0279-0
There’s evidence that primitive human societies become less violent by killing off violent males and/or refusing to let them breed. Impulsive behavior–which can lead to violence–has a heritable, genetic component, and measurable changes to a human genepool can happen after just three generations of consistent natural selection.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/
Scientists genetically engineered mice so they only gave birth to females. If successfully applied to farm animals, the technique could lower the cost of meat and avert the extermination of billions of male animals per year. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/515064v2
Agricultural scientists used genetic engineering to make tobacco plants that grew much faster and larger thanks to more efficient photosynthesis. It might someday massively boost farm productivity, providing more food for the human population.
https://foundationfar.org/2019/01/03/scientists-engineer-shortcut-for-photosynthetic-glitch-boost-crop-growth-by-40-percent/
Bird lungs are more efficient at respiration than mammal lungs. With radically advanced genetic engineering, could we make humans that looked no different on the outside, but had bird lungs on the inside?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662944/
“Juice,” a popular dog that has appeared in many Chinese films, has been cloned by his owner to ensure the money keeps flowing after the original dog dies. https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/753111/china-celebrity-dog-juice-cloned-cloning-experiment-pets
Human fingerprints are partly heritable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-ones-fingerprints-sim/
The Russian BMP-3 armored vehicle can be fitted with a powerful, rapid-fire 57mm gun, which could destroy light and medium armored vehicles and also aircraft.
https://defence-blog.com/army/uralvagonzavod-shows-bmp-3-ifv-57mm-gun.html
Twenty years after joining NATO, Hungary is finally getting rid of its Soviet-era rifles and handguns and is buying new ones that use the same bullets as the West.
https://www.janes.com/article/85372/hungarian-defence-forces-receive-cz-bren-2-rifles
“Draken International” is a private military contractor that owns over 150 military jets, principally meant to be aggressor squadrons in air force training. http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25927/check-out-cockpit-in-draken-internationals-private-mirage-f-1m-aggressor-jet
The U.S. military was thinking about building the kinds of stealth helicopters used in the 2011 bin Laden raid as early as 1978.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25890/origins-of-stealth-black-hawks-date-back-over-33-years-before-the-bin-laden-raid
Yemeni rebels flew small UAV into a group of government soldiers and detonated it, killing six. It’s useful to think of these sorts of weapons as small guided missiles, which illuminates the fact that their use is just part of the decades-long trend for the technology to get smaller and cheaper. Small groups of people can now afford them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
The nearly-forgotten Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was the first instance when two, modern armies equipped with machine guns clashed, and old infantry tactics were shown to be terribly vulnerable to the weapons. Unfortunately, few generals heeded the war’s lessons, and the same mistakes were made ten years later in WWI. http://weaponsman.com/?p=23151
Passive sonar operators on U.S. subs sometimes hear noises underwater that don’t match with natural or manmade phenomena.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25784/what-u-s-submariners-actually-say-about-detection-of-so-called-unidentified-submerged-objects
After the U.S. started building a Space Shuttle, Soviet scientists and economists correctly determined that NASA’s claims the Shuttle would launch cargo into orbit cheaper than rockets were false, and in fact, it would cost more. This led the Soviets to conclude that the Shuttle in fact had a clandestine military purpose, and they found it could serve as a very high-speed nuclear bomber and that it could snatch Soviet spy satellites in orbit. The Soviets didn’t consider that Shuttle in fact had no military function, but that the U.S. government would waste billions of dollars chasing an unattainable goal (but we did).
https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-part-about-the-economically-dubious
China landed a rover on the dark side of the Moon and did an experiment where it sprouted seeds in a sealed container full of soil, demonstrating that crop plants can be grown on the Moon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46873526
The Large Hadron Collider has a 16.6 mile circumference. Europe and China now have competing plans to build particle colliders with 62 mile circumferences.
https://gizmodo.com/plans-revealed-for-enormous-particle-collider-in-china-1830444169/
A brain-computer interface (e.g. – a skullcap embedded with electrodes that monitor the wearer’s brain activity) was used to decipher spoken words a person was hearing based on their brain waves.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/350124v2