Someone finally noticed that jet black isn’t a naturally occurring color, and that soldiers would be better camouflaged if their guns had the same earth tones as their uniforms.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/07/british-army-to-cerakote-entire-infantry-weapon-fleet/
The U.S. Army’s XM-25 rifle grenade launcher is finally kaput after years of failure and cost overruns. Consider this: getting the per-unit ammo cost down to ONLY $1,000 was hailed as a major accomplishment.
https://www.stripes.com/news/army-s-xm25-program-officially-goes-kaput-1.541971#.W22yKxFpNuU.twitter
China has launched a new spy satellite whose resolution is only slightly below that of U.S. satellites.
https://www.janes.com/article/82366/china-closing-the-satellite-imagery-capability-gap
China’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier and first Type 055 destroyer just started sea trials. After this, they will be commissioned into the Chinese navy and put into regular use. Both vessels represent major improvements to China’s naval capabilities are put them ahead of Russia.
https://www.janes.com/article/82621/china-s-second-aircraft-carrier-first-type-055-destroyer-embark-on-sea-trials
New photos of China’s J-20 stealth fighter show it is an impressive machine not to be underestimated. Russia’s stealth fighter program, by contrast, has been basically cancelled.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new-capability-insights
Epic surprise: Russia can’t afford to buy more than 100 of its new T-14 tanks and instead will do cheaper upgrades to its hodgepodge of Cold War-era clunkers.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead
America could theoretically return its WWII battleships to active duty, but it would be cheaper to buy new destroyers, and the battleships would be vulnerable to anti-ship missiles that dive down into their lightly armored top decks.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-armor-in-an-Iowa-class-battleship-protect-against-Harpoon-and-anti-ship-missiles
This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech.
https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable.
https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/
A head-worn device that uses mild electric current to stimulate the wearer’s brain might improve multitasking abilities by 10% (the lab study could have been better).
https://www.janes.com/article/82580/afrl-finds-brain-stimulation-technology-boosts-multi-tasking-performance
Someone built a demonic machine that can find Waldo. Is nothing sacred? Has technology gone too far?
https://youtu.be/-i7HMPpxB-Y
A machine built by OpenAI trounced a team of five leading Dota 2 human players early this month, but then narrowly lost to a different human team later at the world championship. I predict the machine will win at the 2019 championship.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/06/openais-bot-handily-beat-a-team-of-professional-dota-players/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/openai_bots_eliminated_dota_2/
An AI can automatically edit video footage to seamlessly alter human mouth movements, meaning we’ll be able to pair it with other technologies (such as machine translation and machine voice imitation) to perfectly dub videos and movies from one language to another.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-ai-dodgy-lip-sync-dubbing.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice/
Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements.
https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris
The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow.
https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/
Computers can now predict earthquake aftershocks better than human seismologists.
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06091-z
As late as 1961, NASA wanted the Apollo missions to use a single space vehicle that would serve as the command module and lunar lander. It would have been heavier and more expensive than the two-piece vehicle they chose instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_orbit_rendezvous&oldid=851267134
A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/
If you’re internally debating whether to change jobs, end a relationship, or relocate, then you should probably do it. People are inherently resistant to making lifestyle changes out of laziness and fear, and will concoct all manner of justifications to continue business as usual until they hit the breaking point.
https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/
One step forward for therapeutic cloning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45046674
Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers
Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html
Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread.
https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw
The FDA has approved the first RNAi drug. If you want a laugh, research Ray Kurzweil’s past predictions about this class of medicine.
https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2018/08/fda-approves-first-drug-to-use-rna-interference-based-on-discoveries-made-at-umass-medical-school/
Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/
Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun.
https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ
Walmart is making a virtual reality store that will let you browse its wares without having to mingle with the unwashed masses.
https://qz.com/1362577/walmart-wants-to-take-on-amazon-with-virtual-reality-shopping/
How would we detect aliens whose lives were lived in microseconds or geologic timescales? Are rocks alive?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/maximum-alienness/
“Even at their tremendous distances, worlds like Triton, Eris, and Pluto will receive more than four times the energy at their surface that Earth receives today [once the Sun becomes a red giant].”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/23/which-worlds-will-survive-when-the-sun-dies/