During a test, a U.S. MQ-9 drone conducted the world’s first air-to-air shootdown of another drone.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/19/mq-9-gets-first-air-air-kill-training-exercise-air-force-official-says.html
First American F-35 does a combat strike.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-35-fighters-fly-first-ever-combat-164551915.html
First American F-35 crashes and burns.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23912/marine-corps-f-35b-has-crashed-near-mcas-beaufort-in-south-carolina
I’m surprised the UH-60 didn’t win.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23803/dark-horse-contender-boeing-snags-air-force-deal-to-replace-aging-uh-1n-hueys-with-mh-139
Another Russian superweapon (a nuclear-reactor-powered cruise missile) that was announced with trumpets has failed in secret, which is just par for the course. This one’s a bigger doozy than usual since it involves radioactive contamination.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/649646815/russias-nuclear-cruise-missile-is-struggling-to-take-off-imagery-suggests
South Korea’s “K2” tank is quite good, and since it is indigenously made (unlike Korea’s older, K1 tank), it is free from U.S. end user export rules.
https://www.janes.com/article/82977/dx-korea-2018-hyundai-rotem-readies-k2-mbt-for-middle-east-opportunities
America’s troubled Zumwalt-class “stealth destroyers” are not very stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23544/navys-revamped-stealth-destroyer-looks-less-stealthy-as-it-leaves-san-diego-for-trials
“[Thanks to our low birth rates,] Twenty years from now, unless [Japan] can replace a considerable number of people with robots, it’ll be hard to maintain the current level of war capability.”
https://japantoday.com/category/national/SDF-recruiters-struggle-as-applicant-pool-dries-up
The U.S. and Britain only became allies around 1900, when Germany’s rise forced Britain to nearly withdraw from the Americas to secure its rear flank and shuffle its limited military resources to Europe. The U.S. also correctly calculated that it could pressure Britain to the bargaining table if it built its own navy up enough to give it regional superiority to the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Similarly, if the Chinese achieve regional superiority over the Americans in the South China Sea, it could make U.S. forces peacefully (but begrudgingly) cede control.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797
For some reason, the Chinese press isn’t reporting on all of its country’s warship launchings. This might lead average Chinese people to underestimate the size of their own navy, but of course every respectable spy agency is seeing everything.
https://www.janes.com/article/83269/china-quietly-increasing-warship-numbers
China’s hospital ship docks in Venezuela to render humanitarian aid and remind the government that socialism doesn’t actually work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45616736
China’s second and only remaining space station will crash back to Earth in July 2019. It’s first station crashed earlier this year. China says it will get back in the game by launching a third in a few years.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/asia/china-tiangong-2-space-lab-intl/index.html
A Japanese space probe has sent back the first images ever from the surface of an asteroid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156
Rumors of China’s coal industry demise have been greatly exaggerated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706
Roads “paved” with solar panels have proven to be as bad as everyone expected. Interesting tidbit: ‘shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6195123/Roadways-lined-solar-panels-not-promising-hoped-studies-show.html
Mirrorless cameras are improving, and will make DSL-R cameras obsolete within a few years. I predict it won’t make sense for anyone to buy a DSL-R by 2030, though there may still be a market for them among uninformed consumers and people interested in their nostalgia value.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45627055
Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get
Fields medalist Alain Connes praises the defunct Soviet math academies, and of the general merits of allowing smart people to pursue pure knowledge instead of being pressured to use their talents to make money. If machines make human labor obsolete and everyone is put on welfare–er, a UBI–will people follow their passions and cultivate useful, inborn talents? Or at that point in the future, will human math geniuses just run into more frustration since machines would also be superior at pure math?
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-connes-interview.html
Autonomous cars would make traffic lights obsolete since the vehicles would wirelessly coordinate with each other to avoid collisions. Perpendicular streams of car traffic could flow through each other’s gaps at road intersections with the precision of Blue Angels stunt pilots. Eliminating stop lights would improve the flow and rhythm of traffic, reducing jams. I also predict that this ability to coordinate as a swarm will allow for dynamic lane reversals according to acute changes in traffic flow. For example, imagine there’s a city where everyone works, a suburb where everyone lives, and an eight-lane highway connecting the two. Every morning, the four lanes leading into the city are clogged with cars because all the people are trying to get in to their workplaces and the four lanes leading out of the city are empty, and every evening the reverse is true. If all the people have autonomous cars, only a four-lane, one-way highway would be needed since the cars would all switch directions without danger of head-on collisions twice a day to match the changing needs of the flow of people.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/infrastructure/how-vehicletovehicle-communication-could-replace-traffic-lights-and-shorten-commutes
The more interesting and much more plausible future technology the article touches on is automated inventories of all items in your home. Once you have enough cameras in your home, and perhaps a robot butler, they’d set about identifying every object in every room to create a list. (Monitoring of refrigerator contents and automated ordering of replacement foods to replace those verging on exhaustion or spoilage will be another aspect of this.) The frequency with which you used the objects would also be observed, and your machines would encourage you to get rid of things you never used, like your old set of skis. They’ll make it easy by putting ads on eBay and scheduling times for buyers to pick them up. You’ll just have to push the “OK” button. Physical goods will be allocated across the population more efficiently as a result, and prices for things will go down once billions of objects collecting dust in garages and attics enter the market.
Automated personal inventories will also show us how infrequently we use possessions we consider “essential,” like tools (e.g. – you only use your rake two days per year, each autumn), which will probably give rise to “libraries of things” instead of personal ownership. (This is simply an extension of the same logic supporting the idea that Uber-style ridesharing will replace personal car ownership.) When you think about it, it really is kind of crazy to spend money on something that sits idle in your house 99.99% of the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html
…And then this article about a “wardrobe rental service” highlights the limitations of the sharing vs. private ownership model. It would probably take more time and energy to move clothes around between people, and the apparent cost savings would be a false efficiency.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45630395
The medical promise of stem cell therapies mostly failed to pan out. Success might still be had if we pumped several billion more dollars into research.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/28/fighting-it-out-over-stem-cells
In spite of new records being set in nearly every sport, every year, scientist David Epstein thinks it’s not being caused by human genetic evolution, and in fact, much of the improvement is illusory.
https://youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0
The 16% of human genes that were known to scientists in 1991 accounted for half of all genetics studies in 2015. 27% of human genes have never been the focus of a science paper. Is this imbalance due to some kind of human bias, or have we rightly focused on studying the genes that are the most important?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/
The FDA has approved an AI that can diagnose diabetes-induced vision problems by looking at scans of human eyes.
https://qz.com/1371580/can-ai-deliver-on-its-promise-to-close-the-gap-between-rural-and-urban-health-care/
The total number of potential, stable molecules is probably between 1×10^20 and 1×10^30. Put in perspective, the Earth weighs 6×10^30 mg.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/06/virtual-compound-screening-the-state-of-the-art
Aerial drones with electric engines and solar panels could be recharged by with ground-based lasers.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a22677285/darpa-drones-recharged-laser-silent-falcon/
In a first, a surfboard-sized autonomous boat with a small solar panel and wind sail crossed the Atlantic by itself.
https://www.apnews.com/f6d0e2a099684468873ab48966590ada/Robot-boat-sails-into-history-by-finishing-Atlantic-crossing
Someday, robots will be able to see you around corners.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-around-corners-20180830/