Technology Tuesday: October 9th
Welcome to Technology Tuesday! Every week The Job Shop Blog will bring you our 5 top science and technology news stories from around the web.
This week: What electronic tattoos mean for humanity, resurrecting the mammoth to help with global warming, the world’s first practical quantum computer, NASA’s manned space exploration plans, and storing human knowledge in DNA on the moon.
HOW ELECTRONIC TATTOOS MAY CHANGE THE WORLD AND HUMANITY
It’s the stuff of cyberpunk science fiction — tattoos adorned with flashing lights and sophisticated circuitry. They’ll monitor our vitals, we’re told, and feed us personalized health advice in real time. They’ll wire our biology to the web, and put the internet of things at — on, in — our fingertips. They’ll enhance our five senses, and perhaps even give us new ones.
This type of human augmentation is depicted in Circuits, the first episode of Glimpse, a new original sci-fi series from Futurism Studios (a division of Futurism LLC) and DUST. Watch the first episode below.
RESURRECTING MAMMOTHS COULD HELP CURB GLOBAL WARMING
It’s 12,000 B.C. Modern humans are starting to migrate to the Americas for the first time. We won’t discover farming for another 2,000 years. We won’t build cities for another 9,000 years. As a species, our story is just beginning. In Siberia, another’s is coming to an end.
The mammoth steppe, one of the world’s most expansive ecosystems, is on the brink of collapse. For millennia, these arctic grasslands have played host to a variety of enormous plant-eating mammals, most notably the wooly mammoth. As a keystone species, the mammoths had long ensured environmental harmony. They kept the trees from multiplying, which allowed grass to grow in its place, sustaining all of the animals in the steppe.
THE WORLD’S FIRST PRACTICAL QUANTUM COMPUTER MIGHT BE JUST 5 YEARS AWAY
You’ve read the headlines: quantum computers are going to cure disease by discovering new pharmaceuticals! They’re going to pore through all the world’s data and find solutions to problems like poverty and inequality!
Alternatively, they might not do any of that. We’re really not sure what a quantum computer will even look like, but boy are we excited.
It often feels like quantum computers are in their own quantum state — they’re revolutionizing the world, but are still a distant pipe dream.
NASA HAS AMBITIOUS GOALS FOR CREWED SPACE EXPLORATION
NASA’s got a whole new plan.
On Wednesday, the space agency announced its detailed National Space Exploration Plan to achieve the President’s lofty goals set out in his December 2017 Space Policy Directive-1.
Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon landing, long-term human deployment on and around the Moon, reassertion of America’s leadership in space, strengthening private space companies, and figure out how to get American astronauts to the surface of Mars.
A NONPROFIT PLANS TO STORE HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IN DNA ON THE MOON
Imagine, for a second, that human life has been snuffed out like the flame of a candle. Wouldn’t it be nice if we’d archived the sum of our knowledge for whoever might come along next?
That’s the idea behind the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit exploring ways to store vast amounts of information. in formats that will last for “thousands to millions” of years. And after all, spreading caches of information around the solar system is the ultimate backup.
Its latest project: encoding important books and crowdsourced images into synthetic DNA molecules, and storing them on the Moon.