What's a new scientific concept or technological innovation that really makes you feel like we're living in the future?
What's a new scientific concept or technological innovation that really makes you feel like we're living in the future?
mRNA vaccines. You can literally code a vaccine now. That's just mind blowing to me.
Especially impressive when you consider the etymology of the word "vaccine" and realize that a century ago vaccines were created by incubating them in a cow
The technology behind it isn't new, but The Thought Emporium is a Youtuber who:
1: DIY-d a genetically modified virus to cure his own lactose intolerance (successfully)
2: Is currently working on a biological computer that runs on animal neurons.
3: Has livestreams where the viewers submit ideas (like making tomatoes spicy) and he designs DNA to accomplish it.
Also he helped shut down a scam health product that contained radioactive material which isn't particularly futuristic (actually it reminds me of the "radiation is good for you" craze in the early 20th century) but I wanted to mention it anyways.
Being trans always was such a cyberpunk concept to me. When I was a kid was like "people can change their gender? Cool"
We can say that... it was a sign lol.
When I was a kid there was only one openly trans person I would ever see. A man at the library who wore women's clothes (to put it in the terms we would have used then). They didn't try to be feminine beyond the clothing. Very occasionally some makeup. Legs were not shaved etc.
I was at the library on a weekly basis and saw this person all the time but it was just this one person. My mother told me not to stare or make fun of them and that they weren't hurting anyone and could dress how the pleased.
Now, some forty or more years later I frequently encounter non-binary people, trans people, etc. I follow the same method my mother taught me. They are just people living how they want.
It is interesting to be that William Gibson had trans characters in Johnny Mnemonic, for example, written in 1981. That's around when I would see that person at the library.
I listened to Mr. Krabs sing Billie Jean.
Meme technology is about to get SciFi.
I had to listen myself, for those curious.
There's a huge rabbit hole of this stuff if you dig deeper.
On one hand I like were using it for memes and shit posting
On the other, we're about to fake some incriminating evidence and just keep making dead musician albums forever because someone owns the rights to the voice.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/KRevRFvJv_M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Every time I hear about World Coin scanning people's retina's for $50, driver monitoring tech inside new cars, or Amazon asking people to pay for things with palm prints I feel a bit like I'm living in the Minority Report. Does that count?
cyberpunk without any cool aesthetics.
What, you don't appreciate the beauty of an anti-homeless bench? /s
The future isn't necessarily positive I guess
Driverless cars, VR and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we're living in the movie Total Recall.
Usually total recall reminds people of something else
Get your ass to Mars!
and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we’re living in the movie Total Recall.
Wow, I hadn't heard about that. I've wondered for a while if astronauts could use VR to "escape" a cramped spacecraft.
Everything going on in biology, but the existence of of Nana and Lulu especially. The first genetically altered humans are starting school pretty soon.
Data compression. Something about "making less data out of ... The same data" is really mind blowing, & the math is sick
It is not that complicated, to make a simple example with strings: AAAABBBABABAB takes up 13 spaces, but write (compress) it like 4A3B3AB take up 6 spaces compressing it more than 50%.
Now double it like AAAABBBABABABAAAABBBABABAB with 26 spaces and write it as 2(4A3B3AB) with 9 spaces it takes only 30% of the space.
Compression algorithms just look for those repetitive spaces.
Takes those letters and imagine them being colored pixels of a picture to compress a picture
Once you get into audio, images and video it revolves a lot around converting temporal and/or positional data into the frequency domain rather than simple token replacement.
Smartphones. The sheer fact that we're able to fit these cameras, computer chips, and everything else into these thin glass slabs is still mind-blowing to me.
Even just the screen is absurd.
Turns out we can express most of proteins, some of the time, and then isolate them. This includes enzymes, when isolated these can do things like they naturally do but now in flask, but also they do things that aren't remotely natural but are useful for us. These things are pretty fragile usually so then some of these can be modified so that they are resistant to higher temperatures, detergents etc. This is not only the nerdy shit like advanced chemical synthesis - lots of dishwasher tablets and and washing powders contain enzymes that cut proteins into pieces (like subtilisin), so in some cosmic sense dishwasher digests your leftover food off plates
Enzymes are still proteins, and have all problems of proteins. Turns out, you can just take the most important part out of enzyme, make it, or something functionally similar out of completely synthetic parts, and it still works. Sure, it's not as active or selective, most of the time, but it's resistant to things that would absolutely shred proteins. This is called organocatalysis and it was subject of 2021 Nobel Prize
Sometimes you want to take an enzyme and make it not work. We also have a tool for that: first you have to get structure of that enzyme, or some receptor protein, and by looking how a small set of random molecules lodges in it you can make a very selective, very potent ligand, sculpting it atom by atom with no knowledge other than protein structure. If you have time and resources, this can be made to work for almost any protein (that can be crystallised)
3D printing.
I've had a 3d printer for years and I still can't really get over how nuts it is. Like it feels like one of those things you'd read about in science magazines as this amazing super scientific thing the scientists out in MIT have in their labs like a supercomputer or some expensive toy people who build stuff on YouTube have in their garage next to the lathe and big fancy CNC table, but no, it's just, here. On my desk. Being used to casually print stuff that I've designed myself on the computer like it's nothing.
My great grandad was a carpenter and I wish I could've shown him it. I wonder what he'd think, seeing something that was once only in the realm of handcrafted diagrammes and days of building now a few hours of modelling and printing away.
expired
Decoding animal communication and interspecies communicstion with AI.
https://lemmy.world/c/digitalbioacoustics
!digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world
(Which way should I be sharing community links on here?)
Should really be using the "! link", not URLs. While both work on mobile apps, on the web version the URL redirects to the community's instance.
Alright, thank you. Good to know!
Both work with "Sync for Lemmy". Don't know about other apps/sites.
Thankyou! I can also confirm that both work for me in voyager as well.
I walk into my house and start dictating to a speaker sphere what lights to turn on, what to set the thermostat to, and to turn on the tv. And she answers. Just like in sci fi movies.
It's all fun and games until she creates herself a Life-Model Decoy and traps you inside the house in order to "protect" you.
Oh yeah, I forgot that that used to be a sci-fi thing, but it definitely was when I was a kid.
The LANDSAT program. Not exactly new since it's been going for about 50 years, but it's still fascinating and maybe more relevant than ever with concerns about climate change.
We can get different types of data about a landscape from the different parts of the light spectrum. For example, telling coniferous and deciduous trees apart based on how they reflect light. Imagine echolocation on steroids, using light.
Thanks for sharing this I always wondered where they got those pictures.
AI generated images/voices and deepfakes. I really am worried about it becoming difficult to figure out what is real on the internet in the next 10 years.
fair, but photoshop has existed for a while now. this just makes it slightly easier.
Modern cell phones. It's crazy that I basically never need a computer now. My phone is so diversely useful. I spend more money on phones than computers now. It's also the best camera I've ever had! Phones are just so cool lol.
I know where you are coming from, but I can't see how a phone would be a replacement of a computer, not with Android nor iOS, maybe we need a better mobile OS 😂
My Mac is on repair currently and one of my most uses for it was to manage my docker containers hosted in my NAS, while I can do some of that in my Android phone it is a pain in the ass to work with it, especially if it can retain many tabs opener as any modern browser lol.
The Samsung Dex thingy kinda gets close to this new future though.
I feel like the average person doesn't need a computer most of the time. Anyone who's a "power user", for lack of a better term, probably does. I run a VM with a desktop OS on my Proxmox setup that I remote into from my phone for things that I require a full OS for but don't want to break out my laptop. I often find myself remoting into it from my laptop anyway just for continuity.
We also need physical keyboards on phones. I want my Droid 3 back.
JWST
We have phones as powerful as computers in our hands when 20 years ago that was impossible. The exponential growth of computers and smartphones is mind-blowing. And the amount of technology that has bloomed from all of that
The Internet, but I'm old.
The DNS it's so mind blowing to think about how we are able to map so many domains to so many ip adresses so smart and stable
And that the service replies practically instantly every time no matter which domain you choose.
Edit: wtf is with these downvotes? DNS is without a doubt the fastest part of accessing the internet. In website load time, it's an almost unnoticable fraction of the total load time.
Funny you should say that. DNS is 40 years old. Definitely not futuristic tech. But yeah, it works surprisingly well.
Yeah, still it feels futuristic
Lithium polymer batteries that make advanced computing portable. We wouldn't be able to create multi function cell phones without the battery power and longevity of those batteries. Star trek tricorders are going to be the next big tech coming to the generation after Gen z.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but wake me up when we've got replicators and holodecks. They're as enticing now as they were decades ago.
If you lived in a society that had ready access to replicators and holodecks, you'd probably be asking for teleportation and eternal youth.
What's amazing yesterday is boring today. That's kinda part of the human condition.
Being able to fly anywhere in the world with almost zero planning, and then being able to communicate back to anyone at home with almost zero delay, would have been unheard of just two generations ago, but now that it's normal, it's a shrug and look for the next thing.
Vegan Feta cheese
CoViD mask usage
PV panel price reduction
IPCC cooperation and language
Gamified drone wars producing music videos
PrEP
Voyager 2
Blows my mind every fucking time I read about it.
Props to the USA/NASA and their engineers for achieving something so long lasting with technology from ~50 years ago.
Someone else here mentioned the Steam Deck as a powerful handheld on the go, I want to do a similar approach.
Playing PS1 games with a Miyoo Mini, I swear my child's dream was to play PS1 games in a handheld sized similar to my Game Boy Advance from that time, now we can do it in even smaller devices! (And this one isn't even the tiniest lol).
Micro SD cards, 1TB that tiny, for $50
Quantum computing is a very very revolutionary innovation. Biological computers are also going to be very revolutionary.
The trampoline
Pretty good podcast from sysk on this - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/how-trampolines-work-42604886/
Railguns on navy ships.
