DailyDirt: Living In The Future... Now

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Aug 7th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Technology has made some impressive advances over the last few decades. We don't have strong AI just yet -- nor flying cars -- but there are some pretty cool gadgets all around us. Kids are walking around with supercomputers (by 1960s standards). Some forms of cancer actually have reliable treatments. (Unfortunately, there are over 100 types of cancer, and many of them are still incurable.) Let's appreciate some of the awesome stuff that didn't exist just a few years ago. Here are a few more nifty things that kids will take for granted soon.

Flying cars might not be driving around anywhere anytime soon, but a hoverbike could be zooming around remote locations (if you're brave enough to try to pilot it). A rider sits on this hoverbike as a passenger on this quadcopter-like mode of transportation... and it looks like a very noisy way to get from point A to B. [url]
A superconducting power cable is going to be laid underground in Chicago, and it will be able to carry an order of magnitude more power than conventional copper cables. This new cable is designed to prevent power outages by re-routing electricity in the event a power substation fails, reducing the likelihood of a cascade failure of substations that could knock out power to a significant portion of the city. [url]
Forget smartwatches. Don't you want to wear an atomic clock on your wrist? A wristwatch using cesium-133 is accurate on the order of one second in a thousand years, and each watch will cost about $12,000 in a limited edition run. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: atomic clock, hoverbike, superconducting cable, transportation, wristwatch

7 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Mason Wheeler (profile), 7 Aug 2014 @ 5:22pm

Some forms of cancer actually have reliable treatments. (Unfortunately, there are over 100 types of cancer, and many of them are still incurable.)

Be very careful conflating "treatment" with "cure". A whole lot of R&D these days is going in to the development of cancer treatments, specifically for stuff that will turn deadly cancers into "manageable chronic conditions." A cure is the last thing most pharmaceutical companies want to produce, not when they can instead come up with a product that the person becomes dependent on taking (and continuing to purchase) for the rest of their life.

By the strictest, original sense of the word, they are actively trying to turn patients into drug addicts--people for whom loss of access to the drug would result in severe or even life-threatening medical problems--rather than curing them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- John Fenderson (profile), 8 Aug 2014 @ 9:15am
  
  Re:
  But some forms of cancer can be cured. My mother was cured of Hodgkin's (one of the most treatable forms of cancer). No, they don't call it "cured" (the term is "in remission") but it's certainly not a chronic condition that must be maintained through any special health or drug regimen. She's been cancer-free for 40 years now.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Mason Wheeler (profile), 8 Aug 2014 @ 10:33am
    
    Re: Re:
    And that, as you pointed out, was 40 years ago. Today, the priorities are very different.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2014 @ 5:34pm

It's about time people started trying to improve on the 19th century tech we currently use to move electricity around.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2014 @ 5:49pm
  
  Re:
  It's about time to get rid wheels too. 'Cus I said so.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2014 @ 6:16pm

Source of Power for Superconductors
Chicago with a superconductor? Moving power from where? Oh, yeah! From coal and gas fired turbines. Global warming on steroids! Order of magnitude more carbon-burning power sources needed to fill order of magnitude-better conductor capacity. Especially in the flatlands. In the Pacific NW? We got the POWER!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2014 @ 7:06pm

Actually, the 2011 breakdown for Illinois is:

Coal: 45.56%
Nuclear: 48.69%
Natural Gas: 2.35%
Renewables: 3.40%

I'm sure the renewables percentage is on the increase, given that wind farms are sprouting all over the state.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]