During WWII, the ever-frugal and innovative Germans built tanks out of spare parts they captured from other armies. They found ways to wring utility out of obsolete equipment, both foreign- and domestically made. The “Marder” armored vehicles were outstanding examples of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyVyFGLX1TY
Henry Kissinger: “I don’t expect an all-out attack on Taiwan in, say, a 10-year period, which is as far as I can see.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/21/kissinger-china-taiwan-summit-biden-523139
‘Mooring retired Ticonderoga class cruisers around Guam could offer an efficient way to greatly expand the island’s missile defense umbrella.’
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41819/decommissioned-navy-cruisers-could-be-the-answer-to-guams-missile-defense-needs
A confrontation between U.S. Navy warships and Iranian gunboats in the Gulf of Oman came frighteningly close to disaster.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42987/video-shows-u-s-destroyers-very-intimate-standoff-with-iranian-vessels-over-seized-oil-tanker
This video shows the differences between how high explosive squash-head (HESH) and high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) weapons work. Note that HESH rounds work well when they flatten out against the surface of a tank before exploding, like a spherical glob of mud falling onto a hard floor and splattering into a pancake. Conversely, HEAT rounds work best when they explode at the instant they touch the surface of a tank, like a round, porcelain piggy bank being dropped and shattering just as it hits the ground.
https://youtu.be/Uhz3w8-PSl8
There are such things as bullets that explode on impact. They’re meant to penetrate heavy metal/ceramic body armor and light vehicle armor.
https://youtu.be/5Dqg5k_kdPw
The first patent for a percussion-cap musket was patented in England in 1807. Sportsmen there and in America soon discovered they were more reliable than their flintlock muskets, and adopted them in significant numbers. However, it wasn’t until 1834 that the British Army considered the new weapons for use. The tests showed that the percussion cap muskets were 26 times more reliable, and the British quickly adopted the new guns. Like Mikhail Kalashnikov 100 years later, the inventor of the revolutionary new weapon, Alexander Forsythe, received no compensation.
https://weaponsandwarfare.com/british-army-1820-45/
Bullets should always be made of softer metal than the gun barrels they are shot out of. If the bullets are harder, then they will ruin the barrel’s rifling, or even get jammed in the middle of the barrel after being fired, possibly causing the gun to explode.
https://www.quora.com/Would-a-solid-tungsten-carbide-bullet-ruin-the-weapons-rifling-because-of-the-hardness-of-tungsten
Someone tried to kill Iraq’s prime minister by flying an explosive-laden drone into his house and detonating it. Recall my prediction that, before 2030, “Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader.” This man wasn’t high-profile enough to satisfy my prediction.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-59195399
The U.S. military’s experimental “Gremlin” drones, which un-dock in midair from larger “mothership” planes, perform missions, and then fly back to the motherships and dock with them, are getting more refined.
https://youtu.be/H4T6Vr4a1hY
In the first attack of its kind, a quadcopter drone was used in an attempt to disable a power station in the U.S. It failed, and the police found the drone. The person or people responsible were careful to remove identifying information from the machine, and remain unknown. In the future, drones and narrow AI will untether each country’s military strength from the size of its human population.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43015/likely-drone-attack-on-u-s-power-grid-revealed-in-new-intelligence-report
AI scientist Stuart Russell foresees a day when a truck full of “a million” killer drones could drive into a city, release its load, and kill all the human inhabitants.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/29/yeah-were-spooked-ai-starting-to-have-big-real-world-impact-says-expert
The failed WWII “Bat Bomb” will turn out to have been an idea ahead of its time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
“Nitinol” is a remarkable alloy, and objects made from it “remember” their original shapes and revert to them, even after being bent or stretched into something else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI-qAxKJoSU
Before 1856, it was really rare to see purple-colored objects because purple dye was very expensive to make (snails had to be collected and boiled). But that year, a German chemist discovered a way to synthesize it from coal tar at very low cost. Almost overnight, every snail-boiling business went bankrupt, and by 1859, a fashion fad of wearing purple clothes swept the U.S. and Western Europe. It’s a perfect example of how technology brings things that were once the exclusive domain of the rich to everyone else.
The process will not stop. Consider that autonomous cars will make poor people like rich men with chauffeurs, in vitro synthesis of meat will make the finest caviars and steaks as cheap as SPAM, and virtual reality will give everyone access to whatever fantastic worlds they desire.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-ancient-rome-purple-dye-was-made-from-snails-1239931/
There is actually an upper limit to how loud sounds can be.
“For a sound of 194 decibels, the trough of the fluctuation would just touch zero, which is the vacuum pressure. It can’t go any lower than that, so a sustained sound greater than 194 decibels is not possible.”
https://www.quora.com/How-do-we-know-that-194-decibels-is-the-loudest-sound-possible
This website catalogs all the futuristic technologies mention in science fiction books, along with the years when they are supposed to be (or were supposed to have been) real.
http://technovelgy.com/
Sand behaves like a liquid when injected with compressed air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs
This elegantly simple video shows how an ammeter measures the amount of electric current flowing through a circuit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DanoG-nowk
Dow 36,000 is a reality…16 years after James Glassman and Kevin Hassett predicted it would be. Do they deserve credit for getting the prediction right?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
After a few hours of practice, machines can learn to play Atari video games much better than average humans.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210
“GauGAN2 uses a deep learning model that turns a simple written phrase, or sentence, into a photorealistic masterpiece.”
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/11/22/gaugan2-ai-art-demo/
Economist Tyler Cowen predicts that greater use of telework will expose most American jobs having to do with computer coding and IT to cheaper foreign competition (“teleshock”). Many formerly secure and well-paying jobs will vanish. Conversely, some types of culture-specific and location-dependent jobs will remain secure.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/the-teleshock.html
Automated cranes that load and unload cargo from ships greatly increase the efficiency of ports. Unfortunately, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that was just passed in the U.S. provides no money for such upgrades, presumably because unions afraid of losing jobs successfully lobbied the bill’s authors to exclude it.
https://reason.com/2021/11/09/americas-ports-need-more-robots-but-the-1-trillion-infrastructure-bill-wont-fund-port-automation/
Major volcanic eruptions and the concomitant reductions in agricultural output caused, or helped to cause, the collapses of several Chinese empires.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00284-7
Coal and crude oil can be turned into an edible, fat-rich substance similar to margarine. This study examines the feasibility of feeding the population with it during a global calamity that blocks out the sun for several years (ex – nuclear winter, megavolcano eruption, asteroid strike).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263876221004275
A Russian town on the Arctic Ocean is now getting heat from a barge with a nuclear reactor in it.
https://indianexpress.com/article/world/climate-change/a-nuclear-powered-shower-russia-tests-a-climate-innovation-7608185/
What would change if clean energy prices were super low? Among other things, we would start terraforming the deserts.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/what-would-a-world-with-very-cheap-energy-look-like.html
“SpinLaunch” is a giant centrifuge designed to hurl satellites into space. I wonder how much it would help to build such a machine on the summit of a tall mountain.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43079/space-launch-start-up-just-used-a-giant-centrifuge-to-hurl-a-projectile-into-the-upper-atmosphere
NASA had further plans for the Apollo Program and the Saturn V rockets, including the construction of a Moon base, and a manned Venus flyby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4CTI5GDz98
Thanks to a small computer chip implanted in his brain, a partially paralyzed man was able to use his thoughts to “[achieve] typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03506-2
People can make themselves taller by getting surgery where the legs are broken, the two halves are pulled apart a tiny amount, and then the body is allowed to heal by slowly filling in the gap with new bone. A woman with dwarfism underwent the procedures several times over four, agonizing years, to increase her height from 3′ 9″ to 4′ 11″. She even did it to her arms to keep them proportionate with her elongating body.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/16645445/underwent-years-agonising-surgery-stretch-my-bone/
The first drug to treat dwarfism has been FDA approved. It has to be injected every day, each daily dose costs $900, and it adds 1/2 inch of height per year of use.
https://medcitynews.com/2021/11/biomarin-pharma-sees-big-things-for-first-fda-approved-dwarfism-drug/
More accurate methods of screening human embryos for fatal genetic defects have raised IVF success rates.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/11/preimplantation-genetic-testing-for.html
Surprisingly, having low levels of cholesterol can also kill you.
“[There] is a U-shaped relationship between LDL-C level and all-cause mortality.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01738-w
Variations of AlphaFold are now simulating protein-protein interactions with high levels of accuracy.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/protein-complex-structure-predictions-already
In Britain, mass vaccination of girls and young women with the HPV vaccine has caused an 87% drop in cervical cancer cases since 2008.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59148620
This article is over a year old. Not bad: ‘This is the end of the coronavirus pandemic. And this is how it could happen in the United States: By November 2021, most Americans have received two doses of a vaccine that, while not gloriously effective, fights the disease in more cases than not. Meanwhile, Americans continue to wear masks and avoid large gatherings, and the Covid-19 numbers drop steadily after a series of surges earlier in the year. Eventually, as more and more Americans develop immunity through exposure and vaccination, and as treatments become more effective, Covid-19 recedes into the swarm of ordinary illnesses Americans get every winter.’
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/25/how-covid-19-pandemic-ends-421122
Large numbers of deer in the U.S. are testing positive for COVID-19, meaning they (perhaps along with other mammals) will serve as a reservoir for the virus, and will periodically infect humans for the foreseeable future. COVID-19 will become endemic.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/10/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-american-deer-could-alter-the-course-of-the-global-pandemic
A new drug that sharply lowers the odds of dying from COVID-19 has been unveiled.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59178291
Thanks to genetics, South Asians are likelier to die from COVID-19 than Europeans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59165157
Ivermectin does little or nothing against the COVID-19 virus. The medical studies that showed it reducing deaths were done in tropical countries where worm parasite infections are common. This means ivermectin saves the lives of some COVID-19 infectees by killing off their parasites, which are weakening their immune systems just enough to let COVID-19 to kill them. There is no controversy over ivermectin’s value as an antiparasite drug.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
The evidence that COVID-19 might be manmade is inconclusive, but can’t be dismissed.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/
A new variant of COVID-19, the “Omicron” strain (I love the menacing name!), has emerged in South Africa. Much remains unknown at this point, but there’s preliminary evidence that it is more transmissible than even the Delta strain, and may be resistant to the vaccines.
https://www.reuters.com/world/new-coronavirus-variant-omicron-keeps-spreading-australia-detects-cases-2021-11-28/