In spite of what Hollywood would have you believe, submarines almost never fight each other.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/showdown-story-only-submarine-vs-submarine-battle-34652
Should we replace our aircraft carriers with cargo ships full of containerized missiles and drones?
https://taskandpurpose.com/maritime-airpower-aircraft-carrier/
The U.S. Navy will buy more of its venerable Arleigh-Burke destroyers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-getting-10-new-flight-iii-destroyers-and-it-could-be-game-changer-32427
The U.S. Army tested an experimental conversion kit that allowed a computer to fly a helicopter designed for a human pilot.
https://www.janes.com/article/84156/us-army-flies-automated-sara-helicopter
The USAF has selected the Boeing “T-X” to be its new training jet. It will replace the T-38, which first flew in 1959. Given the longevity of modern warplanes, the T-X should stay in service until at least the 2060s, by which time fighter and bomber planes might be automated, rendering human pilots obsolete. Thus, the T-X could be the last, or at best the second-to-last, trainer aircraft that the USAF ever makes. AIs won’t need to spend time in a simplified practice plane to learn how to fly. They will just be created in software labs and uploaded directly into frontline combat planes. Someday, the very notion of a “trainer aircraft” will be obsolete.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23889/boeing-wins-big-again-and-claims-the-usafs-huge-t-x-jet-trainer-deal
The T-38 pilot training jet could be converted into a fighter plane, but it would be crappy at its new job, and it would be a poor use of money considering what you’d get in return. Once the U.S. adopts the T-X, we’ll probably transfer our surplus T-38s to poorer allied countries or to aviation museums.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-aircraft-such-as-a-T-38-be-weaponised-in-a-war-time-situation
Even if a stealth plane is invisible to radar, it will be hotter than the air around it thanks to its jet engine and to air friction against its wings, so you will still be able to see the plane using a thermal camera (e.g. – “Predator” heat vision).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-stealth-russian-su-35-reportedly-took-picture-f-22-why-might-be-problem-34267
The U2 spy plane’s camera still uses analog film.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-photography-at-70000-feet-in-the-u-2-spy-plane/
The U.S. just withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because Russia had been cheating for years, and the U.S. needs medium-range missiles to deter China in the Pacific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia/
The U.S. might start mass producing copies of Russian guns for foreign military assistance. Ukraine and Bulgaria already have factories for making these guns, but apparently they can’t keep up with demand.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24283/russia-rages-at-pentagon-plans-to-build-u-s-made-derivatives-of-soviet-era-small-arms
The USSR planned to quickly nuke Austria if WW3 ever broke out even though Austria wasn’t in NATO and has enshrined neutrality in its constitution.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html
A police helicopter was used to break up a rowdy college party by flying low over them. The downdraft blew away their tents and lawn furniture. This is one, overlooked reason why flying cars were never built.
https://youtu.be/j4Au-yCQur0
Science is coming around to buttressing what has been common sense forever: Sunlight exposure raises your mood. This finding is particularly interesting since it establishes a biochemical pathway linking skin cells to brain cells.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/12/sunlight-and-the-brain
Another astounding discovery: cardiovascular exercise decreases your risk of death! Of note is that fact that there was no observed ceiling to the benefit.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428
Mushrooms and plants that contain hallucinogenic compounds evolved them as protection against insects. The fact that the chemicals also have effects on human brains is entirely coincidental.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/magic-mushroom-drug-evolved-to-mess-with-insect-brains/
Another medical study has found the drug Ecstasy can treat PTSD.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/29/another-ptsd-study-finds-dramatic-improv
Taller people might be at higher cancer risk because they have more cells in their bodies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/24/tall-people-at-greater-risk-of-cancer-because-they-have-more-cells
Gene editing in utero might soon be tried in humans that have congenital diseases caused by single-point mutations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/09/gene-editing-freely-you-have-received-freely-give
‘In technical papers my research group anticipated years ago that even very complex traits would be predictable once a [human genome] data threshold was crossed. The phenomenon is related to what physicists refer to as a phase transition in algorithm performance. The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html
Rapid progress is being made identifying the genes linked to many human traits, including intelligence.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/advances-in-genomic-prediction.html
‘[The] fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-genes-of-human-behaviour/
‘Universal Family Tree — Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. ‘ –Kevin Kelly, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html
Over 100,000 varieties of rice are being held at a global rice “gene bank” in the Philippines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45828150
The “dbSNP” is an open database of all recorded human alleles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/
Will cryonically preserved humans ever be revived? The consensus among the disinterested interviewees (e.g. – the people who aren’t running human cryonics companies and who haven’t written anti-cryonics books) is “No”, unless we get Star Trek-level technology. The freezing process damages the brain at the cellular level, and reversing it would require nanomachines.
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-frozen-people-ever-be-revived-1829905516
Increased use of keyboards and smartphone screens and the decline of handwriting are eroding fine motor control across the population, with particularly harmful impact on prospective surgeons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429
A new device called the “Everlast” notebook saves writings and drawings as data files. What kills it is the fact that you have to take photos of what you’ve written on the pages to save them digitally. The pages themselves should be able to detect what the user has written on them, and to upload it to their remote storage drive.
Prediction: Within 20 years, books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would then be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/642311833/everlast
In 1911, Thomas Edison erroneously predicted that most household furnishings and appliances would someday be made of steel.
https://www.inverse.com/article/19331-thomas-edison-alternate-futures-steel-home-design
Winston Churchill predicted that humans would someday eat lab-grown meats.
https://qz.com/1383643/seven-weird-food-predictions-from-the-past-including-churchills-lab-grown-chicken-wings/
Ben Goertzel 2008: ‘My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.’
https://opencog.wordpress.com/2008/07/
Ben Goertzel 2017: ‘I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and research director at OpenAI, predicts that the possibility of AGI be created in as little as five years “can no longer be discounted.” Skip to the 27:00 mark in his speech:
https://youtu.be/w3ues-NayAs
Stephen Hsu, physicist and all-around smart dude: ‘So a timescale > 30-50 years for AGI, even in highly optimistic scenarios, seems quite possible to me.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/intuition-and-two-brains-revisited.html
In 2013, some guy built a perfect Tetris-playing AI. It clears lines from the screen just as fast as new pieces fall from the sky. As far as anyone can tell, it could play forever.
https://codemyroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/tetris-ai-the-near-perfect-player/
The hype about self-driving cars is dying down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/shaken-by-hype-self-driving-leaders-adopt-new-strategy-shutting-up/
The Tesla Model 3 is, by some measures, the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa
A teardown of a Tesla Model 3 reveals it’s an extraordinary piece of technology, but its process of manufacture could be sharply simplified.
https://youtu.be/Lj1a8rdX6DU
ReThink Robotics, the company that made the “Baxter” general-purpose robot, went bankrupt due to low sales and sold itself to a German company.
https://www.therobotreport.com/hahn-group-acquires-rethink-robotics-ip/
We don’t know if there’s enough CO2 sequestered in Mars’ soil to create an atmosphere via terraforming machines. I think that, by the time we have the ability to send large numbers of people to Mars, intelligent machines will probably dominate Earth and cancel any senseless plans to send more than token numbers of resource-hogging meatbags like us there. Multi trillion dollar plans to terraform Mars will also be considered too wasteful to proceed.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/so-can-we-terraform-mars-or-not
A simple explanation of how the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are different.
http://ryanmarciniak.com/archives/390
‘The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be between 2.8×10^21 and 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.’
That sounds small until you think about this: A Ford-class aircraft carrier is 9.1 million (9.1×10^6) kilograms. A space warship ten times that size–which is in the same ballpark as a Star Destroyer–would thus be 9.1×10^7 kg. If we had space factories and converted just ONE PERCENT of the asteroid belt’s mass (I used the lower of the two estimates) into space warships, we could build 30.7 QUADRILLION ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt
In theory, a particle accelerator wider than our Solar System could unlock all the mysteries of physics and cosmology.
https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595
A Russian Soyuz space rocket exploded after takeoff, but miraculously, the two astronauts it was carrying safely ejected.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656473889/rocket-launch-failure-forces-astronaut-and-cosmonaut-to-make-ballistic-landing
NASA’s “Space Launch System” (SLS) heavy rocket is in even worse shape than thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/10/program-build-nasas-moon-rocket-could-double-price-billion-ig-says/
Yes, we still have the blueprints to build Saturn V rockets, but no, it wouldn’t make sense to make more of them for many reasons.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again
In the 1990s, the “DC-X” experimental rocket did test flights that proved rockets could vertically land and be 100% reusable. However, the technology wasn’t commercialized for over 20 years.
https://youtu.be/39cjZTCay24
The “To the Stars Academy,” which was co-founded by the former lead singer of Blink-182 and which publicized last year’s big UFO report, says it has very few assets and huge debts.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418050766/tv503167_1sa.htm
Scientists have created cheap, artificial wood that is better than real wood.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/
There have been recent technological breakthroughs in our ability to view the three-dimensional structures of small molecules.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world
Lowered plane travel costs and the growth of the global middle class have caused the number of tourists to explode. The trends will only continue, and I fear someday all the best places in the world will be overrun.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/overtourism-solutions/index.html
I predict that “Choose-your-own-endings” like this will become a common form of entertainment in the future. To appease different factions of fans, the same TV series will exist as “parallel universes” where the plots diverged at critical junctures. A mix of viewer focus groups and instant surveys will guide each divergence, and fanfiction crowdsourcing and AI will pick up the slack writing the multiple scripts. The logical endpoint of this is entertainment custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/netflix-is-said-to-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror