Friday Futures: deflecting asteroids, jet pack flight is real

asteroid
Image credit | PaulPaladin

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: deflecting asteroids; whipping stuff into space; a cure for all cancers; jet pack flight hits stratosphere; magic with drones and getting dirt from Mars.

MIT figures out how to deflect killer asteroids

On April 13, 2029, an icy chunk of space rock, wider than the Eiffel Tower is tall, will streak by Earth at 30 kilometers per second, grazing the planet’s sphere of geostationary satellites. Read more…

Amazon drones crack the whip to get stuff into orbit

Never let it be said that Amazon Prime Air VP Gur Kimchi thinks small: His latest patent lays out a plan for a launch system that could theoretically send payloads into space on the end of a miles-long whip, guided by a phalanx of drones attached to the lash. Read more…

Did a Welsh University just discover a cure for cancer – all of them?


New antibiotics that kill bacteria in a new way

The newly-found corbomycin and the lesser-known complestatin have a never-before-seen way to kill bacteria, which is achieved by blocking the function of the bacterial cell wall. The discovery comes from a family of antibiotics called glycopeptides that are produced by soil bacteria. Read more…

NASA mission to bring dirt back from Mars

There are two kinds of places in the universe, as far as we know. The part here, on Earth, with all the life. And the rest of the universe: endless, sterile nonlife out to the ends of infinite creation. Read more…

Watch jet pack guy fly like Superman

NASA discovers vital link in planetary formation puzzle

Data from NASA’s New Horizons mission are providing new insights into how planets and planetesimals — the building blocks of the planets — were formed. Read more…

Unlimited renewable energy – just beneath our feet

There’s treasure buried deep beneath the viridescent foothills of Tuscany’s Apennine Mountains, where the stark metal trusses of the Venelle-2 drilling tower mark its location like an X on a map. This geothermal well reaches nearly two miles beneath the surface. Read more…

And here is some technical magic – with drones

(Compiled by Alex Leslie and edited by Tony Poulos)

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