Airborne lasers can be used offensively or defensively.
The Chinese military put out notice it wants airborne laser pods.
The pods could be used offensively or defensively, against aircraft or even missiles.
Airborne lasers, moving at light speed, could end dogfighting as we know it.
China’s military is soliciting would-be suppliers for a new airborne laser weapon. Notices on a government website invited defense contractors to provide information on an airborne laser attack pod. Depending on the level of power, the pod could be used to defend a friendly aircraft from incoming missile threats or destroy enemy aircraft and ground targets. Laser weapons are the next revolution in aerial warfare and could make dogfighting obsolete.
While Elon Musk and Waymo get all the attention — and regulations — autonomous vehicles for farming face fewer tech barriers and could be just as important
Between 2009 and 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles for its Waymo subsidiary, which have so far roamed more than 10 million miles of city streets — though none of those miles have yet involved a paying customer. Tesla, which builds the data collection it uses to improve its autonomous technology into every vehicle it sells, lost more than $1 billion as a company last year alone. In pursuit of viable self-driving cars, the companies have had to navigate a web of regulation that varies from state to state, apply for permits, and risk getting banned from roads if they fail to follow the rules. Neither of their self-driving technologies is ready to be set loose on public streets without a human safety driver behind the wheel or navigating previously approved routes.
But Zack James faced few barriers when he started his autonomous tractor company in 2017. His roughly 200-pound tractors are closer in size to a riding lawn mower (and about half the weight) than they are to traditional combines and sprayers, and the open metal frame vehicles work together in a swarm. After coming up with the concept while in law school at the University of Michigan, it took James about a month to fabricate the first prototype, which he soon tested on a family field in Crown Point, Indiana, standing by in case the tractor encountered an obstacle it couldn’t yet navigate.
Instead of sleek Teslas or robot Ubers, the first truly driverless vehicles are more likely to look like James’ tractors: rolling placidly over a cornfield at a max speed of 7 mph.
In 2100, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be among the world’s largest countries.
In 1950, four European countries were still among the world’s largest
In 2020, half of the 10 most populous countries in the world will be in Asia
By 2100, five African countries will be among the world’s most populous
In the 21st century so far, populous countries and strong population growth were most often associated with Asia – but this view of the world will have to change in the future, data by the United Nations and Pew Research Center shows.
I almost walked right by it. But then I realized the object the young man was holding up, apparently thrilling the small crowd gathered around his tiny CES 2020 booth, was a potato.
The vegetable in question looked like an ordinary, chunky Idaho spud, although protruding out of one side was some kind of antenna, a black plastic appendage bent upward. Close to the potato’s surface, the exterior of the antenna became a thin, blade-like electrode that pierced the skin, clearly doing… something.
The man was regaling the crowd with his incredible smart product, which he said was finally unlocking the awesome decision-making power of the potato. The antenna, which he called the NeuraSpud, tapped into the potato’s “artificial intelligence.” Once you connected your smartphone over Bluetooth to the device and launched the accompanying app, you could ask the potato anything — with your voice, no less — and it would spout an answer on the screen, the digital-vegetable equivalent of a Magic Eight Ball.
If the smart potato sounds like a big, stupid stunt, that’s because it is. The man behind the idea, Nicholas Baldeck from France, told me he brought his admittedly ridiculous “invention” to CES to make a point about the torrent of smart gadgets at the show, many of which don’t really solve problems at all.
“This product has way more chance of success than 60% of the startups here,” Baldeck says. “I am skeptical of this idea of ‘connected everything.’ Now it looks like innovation is about putting a chip into any object. I’m not sure the word ‘smart’ makes more sense before the word toothbrush than the word potato.”
The number of freelancers and remote workers in the American workforce continues to rise. So the shift towards coworking and other flexible workspace options will continue to play a prominent role in how and where we work. And as the industry evolves, it appears many small businesses are using coworking as a competitive advantage.
NOTE: For more information about coworking in the Denver/Boulder area, contact Colony Workspace at 303-666-4133!
Singapore, which ranked as the second-best place to hold a passport from in 2020, tied for first place last year.
The Henley Passport Index, an annual ranking of the most powerful passports in the world based on how many destinations the holder can enter without a visa, was just released.
Japan secured the top spot this year, with access to 191 countries and territories, a position it previously shared with Singapore.
Asia dominated the list, with Singapore landing in the No. 2 spot and South Korea tying with Germany for No. 3.
A US passport provides access to 183 destinations in 2020, giving it an eighth-place ranking. Passports from 16 other countries provide better access than the US. The country is also slipping in rank – last year it placed sixth.
A passport from Japan opens more doors than a passport from anywhere else in the world, according to the newly released Henley Passport Index.
The index is an annual power ranking of passports determined by the number of destinations a passport holder can enter without a visa.
A Japanese passport promises uncomplicated travel to 191 other countries and territories. In 2019, the passport promised access to 189 places and tied with Singapore’s passport as the world’s most desirable travel document.
Singapore maintained access to 189 destinations and placed second this year, followed closely by South Korea and Germany with access to 187 countries and territories.
Passports from countries like Canada, the UK, and the US all slipped in the rankings from 2019 to 2020 – but they are still desirable, with access to more than 180 destinations. For comparison, passports from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria offer access to fewer than 30 places.
With dazzling lighting, a curvilinear design, and a fortified shell, the Cube One is a prefab for the future.
Want a peek at the future of prefab design? Meet the Cube One—a 156-square-foot dwelling with built-in furnishings, voice-controlled tech, and a galvanized steel shell that can withstand extreme heat and natural disasters. Singapore-based Nestron will ship the Cube One anywhere in the world, and it’ll be ready for move-in the day it arrives.
Coworking spaces, by definition, group people together to work in one area, side by side. How closely depends on the accommodations and the management. Functioning in this environment can work differently for different people. A new survey reveals how workers feel about coworking spaces based on their individual personality types.
Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there.
In 2018 we celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the Institute for the Future (IFTF). No other futures organization has survived for this long; we’ve actually survived our own forecasts! In these five decades we learned a lot, and we still believe—even more strongly than before—that systematic thinking about the future is absolutely essential for helping people make better choices today, whether you are an individual or a member of an educational institution or government organization. We view short-termism as the greatest threat not only to organizations but to society as a whole.
Volkswagen has unveiled a new concept for a charging butler robot that can charge electric vehicles in a parking garage using mobile battery packs.
The German automaker says that “mobile robots will charge electric vehicles completely autonomously in the future.”
Mark Möller, Head of Development at Volkswagen Group Components, commented:
“The mobile charging robot will spark a revolution when it comes to charging in different parking facilities, such as multistorey car parks, parking spaces and underground car parks because we bring the charging infrastructure to the car and not the other way around. With this, we are making almost every car park electric, without any complex individual infrastructural measures. It’s a visionary prototype, which can be made into reality quite quickly, if the general conditions are right”,
By most measures that matter, clean energy had a stellar decade.
The cost of large wind and solar farms dropped by 70% and nearly 90%, respectively. Meanwhile, renewable-power plants around the world are producing four times more electricity than they did 10 years ago.
Similarly, electric vehicles were barely a blip at the outset of the 2010s. But automakers were on track to sell 1.8 million EVs this year, as range increased, prices fell, and companies introduced a variety of models.
But the swift growth in these small sectors still hasn’t added up to major changes in the massive global energy system, or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, cleaner technologies have mostly met rising energy demands, not cut deeply into existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, as the charts that follow make clear.
That’s a problem. Cutting emissions rapidly enough to combat the increasing threats of climate change will require complete overhauls of our power plants, factories, and vehicle fleets, all within a few decades.
Almost all major automakers are gearing up to enter the new era of self-driven cars. Taking this concept further is General Motors, which wants to do away with the steering wheel altogether in its latest self-driven model.
The automaker has put in a request to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow it to test self-driving cars sans a steering wheel or other human controls on American roads.
The NHTSA revealed that GM and Softbank-backed startup Nuro petitioned the agency in 2018 seeking exemption from U.S. road safety rules that were written a long time ago and are meant to control cars with human drivers.
