What book, music or work of art would you store in an eternal archive that will outlast humanity?
Researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center have created a virtually eternal 5D data storage method.
This revolutionary technology carries a staggering “360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ).”
Why would some extremely patient alien civilization send a message to a planet 95 light years away?
The RATAN-600 radio telescope in the Karachay–Cherkess Republic of Russia picked up a strong signal that could originate from nearly 95 light years away from our planet.
A team of astronomers logged the signal from the 6.3 billion year old star named HD 164595. They want to focus on this star permanently, hoping that more communications could emerge.
How will the world change when we can manipulate all atoms like Lego blocks?
Futurist, filmmaker and National Geographic Brain Games host Jason Silva released a video about nanotechnology, exploring some of the eventual possibilities of a science that will give us “new construction kits for our reality.”
If you could measure how much time is left in your biological life, would you want to know?
As scientists learn more about DNA, we are much closer to being able to read the “biological clock” that modulates your life.
Someday, scientists will be able to predict your biological fate with alarming accuracy. People will have to decide if they want to know this number or not. Would you?
How would a computer algorithm plan a bank robbery?
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have created “Scheherazade-IF,” an artificial intelligence system that has a single purpose: to generate an interactive story.
Through algorithms and crowd-sourced information, the program can write a simple Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style story. So far, the program has generated stories about a movie date and a bank robbery, and the researchers found that human readers could follow these narratives created by artificial intelligence.
What if you could artificially simulate a mystical experience at home?
Brazilian researchers recently re-created the so-called “God Helmet” experiment carried out by Dr. M. A. Persinger.
You can read their results at the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research (PDF link).
What if you could explore the microscopic world around you with your phone?
Researchers around the world have developed inexpensive lenses that can change any smartphone into a powerful scanning microscope.
This technology could revolutionize medicine in places without proper medical resources, but it will also give amateur scientists powerful new ways to explore and manipulate the world around them.
What if we could create robots with the flight and flexibility of birds?
Scientists at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Weihai, China and UCLA have created a “dielectric elastomer rotary joint” that responds to electricity and recreates the motion of a flapping bird’s wing.
Instead of building flying machines with hard, inflexible wings, this technology could create more efficient, flexible and powerful wings.
How will drones change the way crime works?
Future Crimes author Marc Goodman and Science Friday created the “Crime Headlines from 2025” hashtag this week, generating a stream of hypothetical ways to break the law.
We have always obsessed about the future of drone technology, so we collected all the examples of drone crime and punishment in a single Storify post.
How will driverless cars change the way we move and interact on our city streets?
At the University of Michigan, the new Michigan Mobility Transformation Facility actually gives researchers a glimpse of our cities of the future.