JWST
The Internet, but I’m old.
Railguns on navy ships.
Indoor plumbing is pretty cool. Used to be you had to shit in a bucket and then go pour it into a sewer drain - but because this was slightly inconvenient people got into the habit of dumping it out their windows.
The air fryer is pretty cool I guess.
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.
Micro SD cards, 1TB that tiny, for $50
Vegan Feta cheese
CoViD mask usage
PV panel price reduction
IPCC cooperation and language
Gamified drone wars producing music videos
PrEP
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.
Decoding animal communication and interspecies communicstion with AI.
https://lemmy.world/c/digitalbioacoustics
(Which way should I be sharing community links on here?)
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.
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!
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)
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/
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
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.
Yes, I love carrying potentially explosive batteries in the pocket…
I hope you also love driving an actual explosion. Also known as a car.
I wish you people would actually do a comparison between ICE engine explosions vs. EV explosions.
Guess what? Firefighters can actually put out ICE vehicles, but they still haven’t figured out a solid way of putting out EV batteries.
Guess what? When ICE vehicles explode, more often than not they’re already running and there’s some electrical short or something. EV will just as soon explode in your garage while you’re sleeping.
Guess what? Studies show that since EV’s are way heavier, they wear through tires way faster? Did you know it takes approximately one barrel of crude oil to make an average car tire?
Guess what? Autonomous vehicles seem to have a habit of getting confused around emergency vehicles and causing wrecks, into the very vehicles meant to save people from accidents.
Guess what? Lithium ion batteries are typically rated for a max safe temperature of around 40⁰C, while the pavement the battery sits right over can be over 80⁰C
I’m too lazy to look up links, you’re smart, go Google these things or whatever. All these facts check out.
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Guess what? You’re wrong on all points. Studies show that you have 5G Corona and should report to Bill Gates immediately.
Also, I actually had a vehicle from 1987 that totally flooded the cylinders with gasoline due to a fault in the carburetor, and even then it didn’t explode when I started it.
Seriously though, what’s up with these EV’s that’ll just as soon randomly burn your garage and house down while you’re asleep and the car isn’t even running?
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Yes, that’s true… But on the other hand, it’s much harder to deal with EV fires because a reasonable amount of water won’t put it out like normal fires and it will burn for a long time, and spontaneously reignite after the fact as well. Firefighters often submerge the vehicle for weeks or else it would reignite…
Mind you, I still prefer EVs over ICE vehicles because the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but the EV fires are harder to deal with.
This is why we should do away with personal cars in cities all together and develop better transit systems that are efficient and safe.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwxZu3nVOZ0 how firefighters in South Korea are employing innovative methods to deal with EV fires.
Liquid gasoline is not what will explode. You need vapors. Gasoline still requires oxygen to burn, so if air is not mixing with the fuel, nothing’s gonna happen.
An internal combustion engine relies on having an environment of maximum flammability in order to function correctly. It’s when that environment is no longer contained by the engine that you run into catastrophic problems. Multiplied by how empty your fuel tank is.
This is quite true.
Still, gasoline doesn’t have a tendency to up and spontaneously combust all on its own, it takes some sort of external spark or flame to ignite.
Lithium batteries play a different game of Russian Roulette though. The car doesn’t even have to be running for one worn out cell to overheat and cause a catastrophic chain reaction blowing the entire battery pack.
Tricorders are 70ies tech. 2000s dumbphones are more advanced.
You’re thinking of their com badge, the tricorder was the thing they flipped open to analyse a rock or reverse the polarity of a time crystal. It could do basic medical work, interface with electronics, detect life forms, determine if plants are edible, all sorts
Oh. Yup, my bad.
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.
If you’ve got replicators, you already have half of a teleporter, and you already have the technology necessary to fabricate replacements for failing body parts, so you’re already at least partway to teleportation and eternal youth.
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.
