26Brain Simulation
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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. 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
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31ARCHIMEDES Laser
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.
32. Thanks to 3D printing, NASA can basically “email” tools to astronauts.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. Each person has a “walking signature” that can be detected by their smartphone’s accelerometer data. The signature persists even if you change phones.
36Lockpicking with Smartphones
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.
37. “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.
38. Cosmic rays can trigger bitflips (Soft Errors) in computers and other tech devices causing them to glitch in disastrous ways.
39. Smart Dust is a miniature sensing chip with an autonomous power supply, computing, and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust.
40. Artificial Intelligence can predict aftershocks better than trained seismologists. The machine learning process - termed “neural-network forecast” outperformed the traditional “stress-failure” method by allowing computers to consider additional variables, including stresses in metals.
