1Bitflips
Cosmic rays can trigger bitflips (Soft Errors) in computers and other tech devices causing them to glitch in disastrous ways.
2. “Smart” toilets identify users through their fingerprints and distinctive features of their anoderm to analyze excreta using computer vision and deep learning. The data is then encrypted and stored in the cloud.
3. Researchers have figured out a way to break into locks by using a smartphone to record the sound of a key being inserted. They were able to narrow down the range from more than 330,000 keys to 3.
4. Each person has a “walking signature” that can be detected by their smartphone’s accelerometer data. The signature persists even if you change phones.
5. A solar flare acts as an electromagnetic pulse and if the earth was hit by a large enough flare it could fry every microchip and piece of technology in existence.
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6Ancient Voice
Scientists have managed to recreate the voice of a 3000-year-old mummified Egyptian priest. They produced a 3D-printed voice box based on a precise scan of his vocal tract, and then used the vocal tract with an artificial larynx sound, synthesizing a vowel-like sound reminiscent of a sheep’s bleat.
7. Thanks to 3D printing, NASA can basically “email” tools to astronauts.
8. One of Jupiter's moons, Europa is known to have a huge ocean underneath its icy surface. NASA is developing an ice-penetrating technology called ARCHIMEDES that uses laser light to penetrate Europa’s crust and allow explorers to access its underlying ocean.
9. After crashing, a driver in Germany was fined for using Tesla touchscreen wiper controls, under the same rules as using a phone while driving. The German court decided touchscreen car controls should be treated as a distracting electronic device
10. The “Nasal Ranger” is a device that is described as “binoculars for your nose” and not unlike the “Smell-O-Scope” in Futurama. American cities with odor control ordinances are buying the $2000 olfactometer for monitoring odors and also fine cannabis smokers or growers if their scents are too strong.
11Smart Watches
Smartwatches measure blood pressure by emitting light to the skin and reading how much light is reflected back. As the heart pumps blood, it causes a variation in blood volume on the skin and can be detected by a change in light absorption, a not-so-new technology called photoplethysmogram.
12. An AI-generated portrait titled “Edmond de Belamy” was sold at an auction for $432,500 in 2018. The AI used 15,000 portraits from the 14th to the 19th century, and the artwork is signed with a part of the algorithm code that produced it.
13. As of 2014, the most accurate simulation of the human brain ever was carried out, but a single second’s worth of brain activity took one of the world’s largest supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.
14. Modern Polaroid film is less technologically advanced than traditional Polaroid film, and that Polaroid photos are now worse than they used to be.
15. Breeder reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that produce more fissile materials than they consume. They are designed to extend the nuclear fuel supply for the generation of electricity. If you use breeder reactors, there is enough nuclear fuel on earth to power all of humanity (electricity + heat + transportation + industry) for ~4 billion years, thereby making it literally as renewable as the sun-derived renewables (wind/solar/hydro). In other words, the sun will run out of its finite but huge nuclear fusion fuel around the same time. The concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation have been one large impediment to creating breeders.
16Savenger Technology
A new kind of scavenger technology allows robots to ‘eat’ metal for energy. Right now when electronics need their own power sources, there are two basic options: batteries and harvesters (like solar panels). This kind of technology can harvest its energy from metals around it.
17. A fundamental limit exists on the amount of information that can be stored in a given space, which is about 10^69 bits per square meter. Regardless of technological advancement, any attempt to condense information further will cause the storage medium to collapse into a black hole.
18. In a 2017 criminal case, the US government put the secrecy of its hacking tools above all else. Prosecutors chose to drop all charges in a case of child exploitation on the dark web rather than reveal the technological means they used to locate the anonymous Tor user.
19. The computer chips that are put into spacecraft are not state of the art but are so old as to be obsolete. Their known reliability makes up for it.
20. Israeli researchers have been successful in creating a 3D-printed heart by converting fatty tissue from human patients to form “bio ink” which built the heart layer by layer. Around the size of a rabbit heart, it contains cells, blood vessels, chambers, and other structures a heart needs to function normally.
21Tay AI Bot
Tay was an artificial intelligence bot that was released by Microsoft via Twitter on March 23, 2016. It caused controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
22. A single gram of synthetic DNA contains 250 PERABYTES of storage capacity and can be copied endlessly for free. This is enough storage to theoretically store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks (this information is as of 2017).
23. AlphaGo, the AI that beat the world’s best (human) Go player in 2016, consumed one megawatt of power while playing the game, enough to power about 100 homes for a day.
24. The first documented IoT (Internet of things) cyber-attack which happened between Dec 2013 to Jan 2014 involved over 100,000 smart appliances such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions, and at least one refrigerator.
25. A 2019 study revealed some plants emit unique ultrasonic sounds when stressed. Measuring between 20-150 kHz, tomato and tobacco plant sounds were fed into a machine learning model and researchers were able to use their intensity and frequency to distinguish between dryness or physical harm.
