The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) still uses thousands of fax machines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44805849
The first “color x-ray machine” has been built.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-first-ever-colour-x-ray-human.html
The latest Ebola outbreak in Africa is over and only killed 33 people, largely thanks to mass distributions of a vaccine developed in late 2016 by U.S. pharmaceuticals company Merck. By contrast, the 2013-16 African Ebola epidemic killed over 10,000.
https://www.apnews.com/302d5b99ae6b4a2b930dc6c9d8911ed3/Congo-confirms-end-of-latest-deadly-Ebola-outbreak
An American company has invented a new, pill-based cure for smallpox.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/second-opinion-smallpox-drug-tpoxx-1.4756087
Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby just turned 40, to momentary fanfare. Ironically, her conception came as a shock to the public, and IVF was temporarily banned in Britain in reactionary panic. Now, it’s accepted as normal. I predict the pattern will repeat when the first human clone and first genetically engineered human are made.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-44940929
Automated chemical discovery is improving. Full automation is ultimately possible.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/07/23/automated-reaction-discovery-gets-smarter
Half of all known organic molecules are based on a handful of carbon backbone chemical structures. Is this because those molecular structures are optimal, or because synthetic chemists like to make new molecules by modding known molecules because it’s easy instead of making new ones from scratch? What lurks in the uncharted realms of chemical space?
https://www.wired.com/2009/02/st-infoporn-4/
If you think cost inflation in the U.S. healthcare and education systems is bad, realize it’s even worse in the military.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/us-navy-cost-increases-are-worse-than-the-us-healthcare-system.html
The U.S. Navy might replace its Ticonderoga-class cruisers (567 feet long) and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (505 feet long) with a single type of ship.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22138/the-navy-may-use-one-hull-design-to-replace-its-cruisers-and-some-destroyers
During the 1970s, the U.S. Air Force experimented with nuclear ICBMs that could be carried in large cargo planes and launched by opening the rear cargo door and shoving them out. During freefall, the missiles’ engines would activate.
https://youtu.be/H8d21iOowjo
While President, Jimmy Carter floated the idea of building a colossal ICBM network in the southwestern U.S. A gigantic railroad network would use armored rail cars to randomly move ICBMs from one bunker to another in a sort of “shell game.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/07/26/complicated-race-track-scheme-favored-for-basing-new-mx-missile/482bb0ae-0c60-4806-b97d-c0b458aa357d/
Maybe the best way to counter small enemy drones on the battlefield is to send your own small drones after them.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22223/army-buys-small-suicide-drones-to-break-up-hostile-swarms-and-potentially-more
A reminder that everything eventually wears out: Lebanon’s AMX-13 tanks are so obsolete (production stopped 54 years ago) that they’re only good for making coral reefs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6002111/Fish-tanks-Lebanon-dumps-armoured-vehicles-Mediterranean-bid-boost-marine-life.html
Side-scanning sonar is sensitive enough to detect objects as small as submerged humans. What kinds of things will we find once the entire seafloor is mapped?
http://kleinmarinesystems.com/products/side-scan-sonar/system-3900/#prettyPhoto
Likewise, some radars can produce clear images of human skydivers and parachutes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3044147/Geronimo-Incredible-radar-image-shows-French-paratroopers-dropping-enemy-territory-night-time-anti-terror-operation-Libya-Niger-border.html
At last, the Syrian civil war appears to be nearing its end. The Assad regime has retaken control of most of the country’s land area and population, and raised its flag over Daraa–the city where the civil war started. The “White Helmets” group also fled the country.
https://www.apnews.com/119b758e3e224491a9ecf7e3bf26692b/Syrian-government-raises-its-flag-over-cradle-of-2011-revolt
https://www.apnews.com/603bec618f5444d59673ecf192183b93/Syria-blasts-evacuation-of-White-Helmets-as-‘criminal’
A photo collection of ISIS vehicle-borne-improvised-explosive-devices (VBIEDs). They’re normal civilian vehicles, but with large bombs inside, and they are driven into an enemy position and detonated. Note how homemade armor has been added to their fronts to protect them from disabling enemy fire, but not to their sides or backs. Similarly, tanks have the thickest armor in the front.
https://imgur.com/a/Ra8G2YM
Here’s a Swedish public service commercial that shows why hand grenades are bad (I guess they really know how to party), particularly if they explode two feet in front of your face. Note the lack of an orange fireball erupting out of the house’s windows, which is how the explosions are depicted in film and TV.
https://youtu.be/4vojUoFX15E
Another Indian Air Force plane–a MiG-21 fighter (production ended in 1985)–crashed.
http://www.janes.com/article/81862/iaf-pilot-killed-in-mig-21-crash
During the Vietnam War, some U.S. commandos were issued captured AK-47s and “sanitized,” American-made 7.62x39mm bullets for secret missions throughout Southeast Asia.
http://warisboring.com/u-s-commandos-had-a-love-affair-with-captured-ak-47s/
Russia is much weaker than the Soviet Union was, but Putin plays a weak hand masterfully. ‘Applying the right amount of pressure, as any veteran KGB agent would do, is an art. Moscow looks to bring just enough force to splinter its opponents, without so much aggression that it triggers a backlash.’
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/russia-strength-in-weakness/565787/
The U.S.-built “IceCube” detector in Antarctica picked up a neutrino emission from a black hole 3.7 billion light years away. It is landmark finding in the history of astronomy and will let humans peer deeper into space than they can with traditional telescopes that see light.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/12/in-a-cosmic-first-scientists-detect-ghostly-neutrinos-from-a-distant-galaxy/
‘Those stars over your head are a mosaic in time – the light is all hitting your retina at the same time, but (in the summer sky) you’re seeing how Altair looked in 2001, how Vega looked in 1983, how Antares looked in the year 1398, and how Deneb looked in about 600 BC. Let’s not even get into the deep-sky objects – if you stay up a bit later and can see the naked-eye fuzzball of the Andromeda galaxy, that light is from around the time that the australopithecines were learning how to spend more of their time walking on two legs.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/07/19/a-close-look-at-a-cancer-genome
Microfilm supposedly takes 500 years to degrade. I think the risk of a catastrophic loss of human records due to EMP weapons or solar flares is exaggerated, and the actual window of vulnerability will close in the future once humans or AIs become more diligent about protecting digital data and archiving data to ensure its longevity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/microfilm-lasts-half-a-millennium/565643/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Fixity
OpenAI, a company founded by top tech people to do “fundamental, long-term research toward the creation of safe AGI [artificial general intelligence],” has developed a narrow AI that can supposedly beat humans in the real-time strategy game “Dota 2.” On August 5, the machine will publicly battle a team of the five best human players.
https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark/
The OpenAI guys also made a robot hand that can clumsily manipulate a small cube. This might be the most dexterous robot hand ever made.
https://blog.openai.com/learning-dexterity/
For the first time, a complete fruit fly brain has been imaged at the level of individual neurons.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-brain-imaged-nanoscale-resolution.html
In 2013, Marvin Minsky said that the best route to AGI would be to first map a fruit fly brain at probably the same level of detail as was just done, and to develop a comprehensive algorithmic/schematic understanding of how it operates. Once we have “fruit fly level AGIs” we can apply the fundamental lessons learned to making the next most complex type of animal AGI, and so on, until we’re ready to make human-level AI.
https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI?t=27m23s
Also in 2013 (July 16 to be exact), Eric Schmidt said the Turing Test would be passed in five years.
https://youtu.be/3Ox4EMFMy48?t=33m35s
Tesla’s batteries aren’t more energy dense than those made by rival companies–instead, Tesla wins on price, which is mostly thanks to superior economies of scale.
https://qz.com/1325206/tesla-owners-battery-data-show-it-wont-win-through-chemistry-only-a-better-factory/
China continues to be a trailblazer in high-tech surveillance of its citizens, with its police now routinely monitoring sewer systems for chemical evidence of narcotics production.
https://qz.com/1331592/china-is-trying-to-fight-illegal-drug-use-by-looking-for-traces-of-meth-and-ketamine-in-wastewater/
Dumping powdered iron into the oceans could cheaply slow down global warming by sequestering atmospheric CO2 into the sea. Unfortunately, even small, carefully monitored experiments have been blocked by environmentalists, even though there’s no plausible way the experiments could cause significant damage. Consider that the Earth thrives in spite of volcanic eruptions that spew orders of magnitude more iron into the oceans at completely random intervals, in random locations.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/restore-the-oceans-and-get-up-to-50-times-the-fish-and-store-a-trillion-tons-of-co2.html
The total number of wildfires in the U.S. has slightly decreased since 1985, but the size of the average wildfire has quadrupled. While human-induced climate change could be a contributing factor, the trend might owe more to newer fire management practices, in which fires are allowed to grow bigger and burn themselves out to eliminate dead wood.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wildfires-in-the-u-s-are-getting-bigger/
Dr. Mark Jacobson, the author of a scientific paper claiming the U.S. could affordably switch to 100% green energy by 2050, has withdrawn his universally-criticized defamation lawsuit against a group of peers who wrote a scathing rebuttal.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-jacobson-lawsuit-20180223-story.html
Cities are more productive per capita because the higher population density increases the number and velocity of interactions between humans. However, it’s possible that the superlinear scaling effect stops once cities reach certain sizes.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/why-innovation-thrives-in-cities-0604
Could China convert this mega mall into an arcology?
https://youtu.be/tn9hoo6cZFc
Studies of identical twins show that sleeping on your belly, with one side of your face pressed into the pillow, can slowly bend your nose, making your face asymmetrical and putting you at risk for chronic headaches.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25357025
Computers can tell apart identical twins by detecting the faint differences in their facial expressions.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929266-200-lines-on-the-face-help-pick-out-the-twin-who-dunnit/
After another successful test flight, Richard Branson hopes to fly on the inaugural launch of his SpaceShipTwo space plane by the end of 2018.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632945197/virgin-galactic-space-plane-reaches-new-heights-in-test-flight