FUTURESCOPE

a project about down-the-road technology, nascent futures, weak signals, foresight, future technology, zukunftsforschung, emerging technology, high-tech and amazing visions of the future. The Future is closer than you think!

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A 3-D Material that Folds, Bends and Shrinks on its Own

Harvard researchers have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self actuated. It can change size, volume and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task.

[read more]

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Team of µTug Microrobots Pulls a Car

Not only are ants impressively strong, they are also amazing team players. This research inspired by such teamwork examples how the ways that microrobots move effects their ability to work in teams. With careful consideration to robot gait, we demonstrate a team of 6 super strong microTug microrobots weighing 100 grams pulling the author's unmodified 3900lb (1800kg) car on polished concrete.

[paper] [MicroTugs on futurescope]

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Dogfight - Cosmo vs Spot

Nuff said. Here's more from Spot's training session on this day.

[Video by Steve Jurvetson] [more photos]

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Solar Cells everywhere: MIT developed the world thinnest and lightest complete solar cell

To demonstrate just how thin and lightweight the cells are, the researchers draped a working cell on top of a soap bubble, without popping the bubble. The laboratory proof-of-concept (still a long way to go before every surface is coated in solar cells) shows a new approach to making solar cells that could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon.

[read more] [picture by Joel Jean and Anna Osherov]

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Atlas is back

A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.

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"John, the road we'll be driving today is mountainous & steep. Do you wish to buy more engine power?"

Brave new world. Thank you Accenture.

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Neurostimulation: Halo Sport Neuropriming Headset

And so it begins. Halo has created cool-looking headphones with built-in neuropriming technology, that uses pulses of energy to improve the brain’s response to training, enabling the motor cortex to send stronger, more synchronous signals to muscles. More activated muscle fibers = faster gains in strength.

Apparently, the US Military accelerated pilot and sniper training by 50% with neurotechnology similar to Halo Sport. And if you read the news from yesterday on improving your pilot skills by zapping your brain with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots it sounds fair, plausible and within reach, because halo is also using the tDCS technology.

But the real deal is that brain stimulation devices prepare themselves to go mainstream. Brain-altering gadgets like thync, halo or other neuroelectric wearables are paving the way for new neurocentric brain-machine interfaces, mood-changing services that manually turn up or down happiness and memory augmentation in general. It's possible that we're observing nascent signals of a new postnormal revolution, driven by neurotechnologies and electroceuticals.

Sure, hacking the brain is great for health applications and rehabilitation methods. But at the same time I can imagine a lot of socio-technological abuse and misuse. Corporate oppressive mood changes, hacked brainmemories, DIY experiments and emerging neuro-addictions are just the tip of the iceberg. Fun times to be alive.

[halo] [picture by halo]

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Could Soldiers Wear an Anthrax-Proof "Second Skin"?

What if instead of putting all those pieces on over a uniform, soldiers could put on a protective layer of lightweight undergarments (essentially anti-anthrax underwear), throw on the uniform, and be protected and ready to go? The Army and researchers from MIT, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Air Force Civil Engineering Center (NSRDEC) are working on such a "second skin" concept.

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Improve your pilot skills by zapping your brain with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots

Researchers at HRL Laboratories have discovered that low-current electrical brain stimulation can modulate the learning of complex real-world skills.

The study, published in an open-access paper in the February 2016 issue of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that novice pilots who received brain stimulation via electrode-embedded head caps improved their piloting abilities, with a 33 percent increase in skill consistency, compared to those who received sham stimulation. “Pilot skill development requires a synthesis of multiple cognitive faculties, many of which are enhanced by tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) and include dexterity, mental arithmetic, cognitive flexibility, visuo-spatial reasoning, and working memory,” the authors note.

Phillips speculates that the potential to increase learning with brain stimulation may make this form of accelerated learning commonplace. “As we discover more about optimizing, personalizing, and adapting brain stimulation protocols, we’ll likely see these technologies become routine in training and classroom environments,” he says. “It’s possible that brain stimulation could be implemented for classes like drivers’ training, SAT prep, and language learning.”

Is there a word for the period, when reality catches up with scifi? Postnormal is a good start. Are there others?

[via kurweilai] [paper]

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Legacy Futures #4: Segway

Remember the tweet by Oniropolis about the picture from Walter Molino (1962)? Last year, the HZAW School of Engineering in Zuerich presented the BICAR (the happy medium between car and bicycle), an area-efficient, quiet and climate-friendly urban transport car for ridesharing.

[ZHAW]

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Implanting False Memories

Snip from the NOVA documentary "Memory Hackers", which aired on February 10, 2016 at PBS. Dr Julia Shaw wrote a book on the science of memory hacking: "The Memory Illusion" will be available starting June 2nd from Penguin Random House.

Btw: I warmly recommend to read The Machine written by James Smythe. It's a neogothic scifi chamber play about broken love, the implications of nascent neurotech, dementia and domestic abuse. One of my favorite scifi stories in recent years:

Haunting memories defined him. The machine took them away. She vowed to rebuild him. From the author of The Testimony comes a Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.

Beth lives alone on a desolate housing estate near the sea. She came here to rebuild her life following her husband’s return from the war. His memories haunted him but a machine promised salvation. It could record memories, preserving a life that existed before the nightmares.

Now the machines are gone. The government declared them too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth’s flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back, that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece.

[read more at The Telegraph]

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Drone-2000 (Floating Prophecies)

A dystopian performance for amplified drones.

The figure of the drone serves as the starting point for this film, enabling it to explore the intersections that exist between fictional depictions arising from science-fiction literature and the actual advent of flying machines with camera vision in contemporary world, folklore and mythology.

By juxtaposing quotes from works from the previous century (1880 ­- 2000) with a selection of popular, recent videos that have been posted on video sharing websites, this film explores the grey zone between self-fulfilling prophecy and composite narratives.

[Drone2000]

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Watson for President

The Watson 2016 Foundation is an independent organization formed for the advocacy of the artificial intelligence known as Watson to run for President of The United States of America. It is our belief that Watson’s unique capabilities to assess information and make informed and transparent decisions define it as an ideal candidate for the job responsibilities required by the president.

[vote] [picture by The Watson Foundation 2016]

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Lockheed, where legacy and former futures have a longer life than elsewhere

"When you got a big job, large equipment, people to support and no roads to get there, there is only one solution: A safe, simple and sustainable answer. Hybrid Airship - #noroadsnoproblems"

[read more]

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Future of Food - The World's First Cultured $1000 Meatball

If Victor Frankenstein would be alive today, he certainly would have made a career in the artficial meat sector.

Memphis Meats, a start-up that specializes in “growing meat outside a live animal,” says it is should have its “cultured-meat” products on the market in three to four years. And just to prove that they are serious, they have just presented their first lab-grown meatball—a $1,000 meatball—to the public. A $1,000 is a pretty high price to pay for a single meatball, but it pales in comparison to the cost of one pound of their cultured-meat—$18,000.

Be sure to read the interview with Memphis Meats CEO Dr. Uma Valeti.

[via munchies] [Memphis Meat]

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Weaved - Time-based Textile

Dana Zelig has created a fabric that can change its structure into three-dimensional arrangements using physical-programmed plastic patterns. From Creative Applications: "She decided to examine the possibility of applying plastic to fabrics, by means of pressing them together, allowing the heat to manipulate the plastic, and the manipulated plastic to effect the adjusted fabric."

Research of textile structures and programmable textile using plastic, allowing complex textile structure computations in computer time to be counted in minutes instead of hours or days. Here, I try to suggest an optimal tension and movement by bringing the textile and polystyrene together in a new manner.

[read more at creative applications] [Dana Zelig]

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First robot in history to ace No. 16 at Waste Management

Progress. 19 years after Tiger Woods.

In the opening round of the 2016 Waste Management Phoenix Open, LDRIC the golf robot gets a hole-in-one on the par-3 16th hole.