To prove that its latest tactical ballistic missile works, Russia released clips of it blowing up targets in combat. One clip is of a missile striking a Syrian hospital in 2016–an attack which Russia has denied being responsible for.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39487/did-russia-try-to-refute-criticisms-of-its-missiles-by-showing-one-blowing-up-a-syrian-hospital
Russian warships are more heavily armed than their U.S. counterparts. This video breaks down the doctrinal, financial, and technological reasons for the difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMH8MPl-tk
Before the U.S. had “doomsday planes,” it had “doomsday ships.”
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39301/there-were-doomsday-ships-ready-to-ride-out-nuclear-armageddon-before-there-were-doomsday-planes
C-47 cargo planes that the Americans and British used in WWII are still flying in Colombia as gunships.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39236/theres-one-place-in-the-world-where-ac-47-spooky-gunships-still-fly
Only 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. By comparison, there are 33,000 U.S. troops in Germany and 54,000 in Japan. Is there any reason we shouldn’t say “The U.S. won the Iraq War”?
https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/us-cuts-troops-iraq-2500
For the first time in two decades, a year has passed without a U.S. servicemember dying in Afghanistan. Troop levels in that country are also down to only 2,500. Is the Afghan War over?
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/02/08/us-goes-one-year-without-combat-death-afghanistan-taliban-warns-against-reneging-peace-deal.html
The U.S. Army needed a T-80 tank for training purposes, so it bought one (actually, an upgraded variant called the T-84) from Ukraine. Twenty-five years ago, this was the best tank the Former USSR had.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/secret-out-did-ukrainian-t-84-arrive-arizona-testing-177905
There’s a long waitlist for foreign countries that want to buy surplus American Humvees.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/waitlist-buy-surplus-army-humvees-now-23-nations-long-177634
Our past assumptions about how lasers work might be wrong.
https://gizmodo.com/physicists-are-reinventing-the-laser-1846085004
While the “space of all possible songs” is effectively infinite, mathematical analyses show that humans gravitate towards creating and preferring a small cluster of song melodies and beats. This is probably due to cognitive and auditory limitations (i.e. – our brains come pre-wired to enjoy specific patterns of sounds, and we can’t hear many sound frequencies), and to certain songs becoming popular long ago by luck, and influencing the songs that came after.
https://youtu.be/DAcjV60RnRw
Human-produced noise pollution in the world’s oceans is overwhelming to sea life.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55939344
America’s only coal carbon capture power plant just closed. It was never economical.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-only-carbon-capture-plant-in-the-u-s-just-closed-1846177778
So far, global warming has had no net effect on Antarctica’s temperature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-00143-w
In January, the experts at The Weather Channel predicted the U.S. would have an abnormally warm winter, and that much of Texas would be particularly hot. In fact, Texas and several surrounding states were struck with record-breaking low temperatures in February and snow, knocking out utility service to millions and leading to dozens of deaths.
https://weather.com/news/weather/video/winter-temperature-outlook-released
https://ktxs.com/news/local/numerous-records-broken-during-this-historic-winter-storm
According to past sci-fi movies set in 2021, we were supposed to have computer brain implants, cyborg dolphins, an alien invasion and a couple world-ending disasters by now.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/14067163/films-set-2021-predictions-pandemics-aliens-accurate/
These 2010 predictions about the state of video game technology in 2020 mostly fell flat and make me feel kind of bad. What if my own predictions about when full-immersion VR games will become popular are also wrong?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2010/12/28/predicting-the-console-generation-of-2020/
There’s a betting market for predicting when the first A.I. will be invented. Right now, the median is 2036, and 75% of respondents expect it to happen by 2062 at the latest. I think the soonest it might happen is sometime in the 2040s, but that doesn’t mean I think that’s the likeliest decade it will debut.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/when-will-the-first-artificial-general-intelligence-system-be-devised-tested-and-publicly-known-of/
A genealogy website called “MyHeritage” unveiled an app that lets users bring still photos of the dead relatives to life. It’s a little creepy.
https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia
Similarly, this computer program transforms ancient busts into colorful, animated faces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOt7K1-m15k
42,000 years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field reversed, triggering sudden climate changes and mass extinctions, and making the Northern Lights visible all over the planet. Prehistoric humans lived through this.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/811
NASA released amazing footage of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg
Satellites from China and the UAE also entered Martian orbit.
https://apnews.com/article/uae-spacecraft-mars-historic-flight-d6d933c488c0a30987f86f91ce89fb8b
In 6 billion years, the Moon will break into pieces and fall to Earth.
https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/the-anticipated-future-of-the-moon/
Fuel efficiency data for hybrid-electric cars have been fudged. They’re not as good as advertised.
https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/presse/2020/presseinfo-16-plug-in-hybridfahrzeuge-verbrauch.html
Google terminated its “Loon” project, which sought to use high-altitude balloons to beam high-speed internet service to remote places.
https://medium.com/loon-for-all/loon-draft-c3fcebc11f3f
Scientists have created transparent wood.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/5/eabd7342
There was once a plan to grow trees with square trunks. There would be less waste at the lumber mill.
https://www.straightdope.com/21344108/whatever-happened-to-that-plan-to-grow-square-trees
‘There’s an enormous range in this ability in the animal kingdom. At the very lowest end, you’ve got the deep-sea marine isopods, wood lice, which are enormous and can see only four flashes every second. At the upper end of the scale, there are flies capable of seeing 250 flashes per second. Do they perceive time differently? I don’t know. But certainly their view of the world happening around them is incredibly different. (Humans are somewhere between these two on the scale.) What this means is you can have two animals sitting beside one another, one seeing all these little details, hyper-sensitive to all these minute little changes, the world flying around them, and meanwhile the other is basically living in a completely different temporal niche, living in a slow-placed, kind of lazy world, completely oblivious to all of it.’
https://gizmodo.com/how-do-animals-perceive-time-1846206287
An endangered ferret was cloned from cells taken from an animal that died 30 years ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/us/elizabeth-ann-ferret-cloned-scli-intl-scn/index.html
Marriage satisfaction, and the odds of getting divorced, are partly genetic. “[The] CD38 gene (CD38), at the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs3796863, is associated with cognitions and behaviors related to pair bonding…”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82307-z
We may have just found a highly effective weight loss drug with minimal side effects. Over 68 weeks, people taking it lost an average of 15% of their body weight.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/15/glp-1-and-obesity
An Israeli company made the world’s first lab-grown steak.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/aleph-farms-and-the-technion-reveal-worlds-first-cultivated-ribeye-steak-301224800.html
The sizes of South Koreans’ brains grew and the shapes of their skulls changed thanks to improved nutrition after the long period of privation under Japanese domination and the Korean War.
http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/ajpa.23464
Russia’s Sputnik-V vaccine for COVID-19 was viewed skeptically upon its debut, but recent studies prove it is as effective as the vaccines invented later in the U.S. and Britain.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putins-once-scorned-vaccine-now-favorite-in-pandemic-fight/ar-BB1drjfv
These charts show how effective the different COVID-19 vaccines are. These data also confirm that the South African strain of the virus is more resistant to them.
https://wordpress.cels.anl.gov/covid-vaccine-efficacy/
The U.S. recorded its 500,000th death from COVID-19. Fortunately, the death rate is dropping, and the 600,000 milestone isn’t expected to come until sometime in late May or early June.
https://apnews.com/article/us-deaths-nears-500k-coronavirus-acab3cc916330a3f068b7589350a18cd
An article from a year ago: “[There] appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus. It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before.”
https://nypost.com/2020/01/23/dont-buy-the-media-hype-over-the-new-china-virus/
J.P. Morgan’s analysts think the COVID-19 epidemic will be “effectively over” in the U.S. by April.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-pandemic-could-be-effectively-over-by-april-j-p-morgan-says-heres-why-51613163599
American life expectancy just dropped by a year thanks to the excess COVID-19 deaths. This hasn’t happened since WWII.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56110005
The COVID-19 lockdowns are now 10 months old. If millions of people being shut in with their significant others was going to lead to more sex and a baby boom, we would have seen the results by now. Instead, there has been a baby bust.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-01/u-s-baby-boom-forecast-turned-out-to-be-bust-despite-lockdown
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210122-the-baby-boom-that-never-was-france-sees-sharp-decline-in-lockdown-babies