A real flying car landed at the Paris Air Show, Michelin unveiled a vision for 3D-printed tires you will never have to replace, and a team in North Carolina developed a smart patch that “harvests” body heat and turns it into electricity. What a powerful idea!
Space flight triggered amazing changes to a bunch of flatworms. Mosquitoes that carry life-threatening diseases may have met their match in a fungus engineered to sting like a scorpion. And a new drone can scoot around the world as well as any roach can. Nature has nothing on these creatures!
Physicians in Philadelphia have developed an artificial womb, researchers in England built an AI that can accurately predict the risk of heart disease, and MIT engineers designed a robotic 3D printer that can build a house. Once again, science is hitting home runs.
Norwegian engineers are planning to build the world’s first shipping tunnel to ease passage through treacherous seas, their Australian colleagues came up with an energy storage design inspired by fern leaves that is 30 times more capable than existing technologies, and scientists in China built a soft robot from silicone muscle that can swim with the fish. Dive right in. Engineering is awesome!
A man-made power island in the middle of the North Sea that could supply electricity for 80 million people, a robot that could read your mind and spot you noticing it made a mistake, and a DNA-based computer that grows as it computes? Go figure!
Engineers are turning trees into power plants, using sound waves to hear the footsteps of disease, and building an AI that can tell you when you are talking too much. Enough said.
Looking to the future can make your head spin, especially when we lack information on some of the disciplines that promise a more radical transformation: genetics, artificial intelligence and robotics are going to redesign our world, and this will take place in the short rather than long term. But what can we expect from the society of the future? Sometimes it’s difficult to think about tomorrow without being drawn into the influence of science fiction stories. Where’s the border? How far have we come with technology?
Scientists bioengineered salmonella that can kill the deadliest brain cancer, observed bacteria in a slime that “communicate with one another like neurons in the brain,” and tied the world’s tiniest knot. We’ll keep you in the loop.
It’s the start of 2017, and we can’t help but wonder what amazing scientific advances await. Judging by the year’s first haul, we may soon be able to push things around with tractor beams, print electronics on paper and toast to science with a glass of chardonnay nurtured by data. Cheers!
This week’s haul includes a rocket engine that breaks the laws of physics, a look at the serious side of putty, and astronauts who are about to go fishing for space junk with the help of a century-old fish net company. These are no fish tales!
