Unlike typical consumer-aimed quadcopter drones, Latvian company Aerones specializes in big UAVs that can carry hefty loads. Last year, they showed off one of their big lifter’s prowess by towing YouTuber Kaspars Balamovskis on a snowboarding run.
Today, they released another stunt video spotlighting one of their heavy lifters hauling a man a thousand feet in the air — before he let go to skydive back down to earth. Check out the video!
Imagine taking your next trip of a couple hundred miles. New York City to Boston, for example. Or Houston to Dallas. Tampa to Miami. The obvious choice now might be to drive. But what if you could show up at an airport at one of those cities, bypass security checkpoints, board a small hybrid-electric plane with luggage in hand, and be on the ground at your destination in about an hour — all for $25 each way?
Space. The final frontier, and quite possibly your family’s next March Break vacation.
Experts say 2018 will be the year space tourism takes off. But while great leaps are being made at what seems like warp speed, it’s a venture that’s still fraught with issues that go far beyond its out-of-this-world price tag.
Recently, I’ve been impressed by a vision of the future as shared by serial entrepreneur and CEO Udo Gollub. He has noted that what happened to Kodak will happen to many industries in the next 10 years. But most don’t see it coming. Did you think, in 1998, that 3 years later you would never take pictures on film or paper again?
Digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first models had only 10,000 pixels of image resolution, but followed Moore’s law (like transistors, we’ve doubled the number of pixels per square inch every year). Similar to many exponentially growing technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, but grew progressively more superior and went mainstream in only a few short years.
Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age.
Glancing around school classrooms in 2016, it’s easy to miss just how far technology has transformed learning over the last decade. The desks, whiteboards and rows of chairs are the same, but so much else has changed that can’t be seen.
A third of Britain’s schools are asking students to bring their own tablets and laptops into the classroom now, coding has been on the national curriculum for three years, and more and more education is happening outside school through apps and digital services.
Elon Musk’s new Boring Company tunnels look pretty, well, not boring.
The company on Friday published an animated concept video on YouTube that shows how tunnels underneath a city could work. In the video, a car drives onto a metal platform that then lowers itself underground. The platform, with the car on top of it, speeds along at 124 mph, while other platforms carrying cars do the same. When the car reaches its destination, the platform lifts it back to the earth’s surface.
After a semi-painless injection between the thumb and index finger, a microchip is implanted in another employee. A cyborg is now created, and this human/machine mashup runs off to buy a smoothie using his or her new sub-dermal implant.
If that sounds futuristic, it’s because we’re conditioned to this as a sort of science fiction trope: human gets implanted, its overlords are now in control. For a Swedish company, however, the practice of implanting microchips into its employees has become routine, popular even.
When I was a kid I always wondered about how cool it would be if we could live in the world of the popular American animated sitcom The Jetsons. The show aired from 1962 to 1963, but the cartoon was set 100 years in the future. As it sometimes turns out with sci-fi stories, the future becomes reality. The Jetsons featured 3D printing, tablets, holograms, smart watches, flying cars and other strange inventions. While the flying cars may not have become a reality quite yet – they are testing drones as a method of delivery – I used to love the Jetsons’ food replicator that could churn out anything from asparagus to stroganoff. This now is a reality with companies like Foodini and CojoJet making it possible to create delicious 3D-printed entrées and desserts with the press of a button.
It can be impossible for humans to tell apart very similar colors. But, with a new pair of tetrachromatic glasses created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you can never again leave the house wearing two items of black clothing that don’t quite match.
These spectacles enhance the user’s existing color vision, affording them new power to discern more distinct shades. Once developed for practical applications, they could be used to spot camouflaged targets in the field or identify counterfeit money.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a 3D-printed robot “skin” capable of changing color according to the physical stimuli that it receives. The work was inspired by the so-called “goldbug,” a golden tortoise beetle, which changes color in the wild.
“I was googling online about two and a half years ago, looking for creatures that change their color, and found out about this beetle,” project leader, Subramanian Sundaram, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, told Digital Trends. “The golden tortoise beetle is incredibly interesting. One of the things it does is that, when it’s disturbed or scared, it drains out the fluid in its shell which is normally golden in color, but becomes a reddish-brown. I was interested by the idea that this beetle was able to respond to mechanical disturbances by changing the color and transparency of its outer shell. I thought we might be able to replicate that.”
Right now, you can head over to a local Volvo dealership and test drive a 2017 Volvo S90. With the push of a button, drivers can watch the car take over steering to stay within a lane, slow itself down in rush-hour traffic and accelerate — up to 80 mph — on the highway. It’s the first Volvo to include the second-generation Pilot Assist as a standard feature.
But, even equipped with radar and a 360-degree camera that can distinguish humans from deer, bicyclists and other cars, the $47,000 S90 sedan is not an autonomous vehicle. A driver must be in the seat and frequently touch the steering wheel. Otherwise, the car slows down.
Building a new 700mph transport system sounds pretty tricky, so one Hyperloop company has decided to kick things off by building the passenger pods first.
Hyperloop is a proposed plan to transport people or cargo between cities at near-supersonic speed in vacuum-sealed pods.
The technology is just a pipedream at the moment, with rival companies Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT)at the forefront of developments.
