Friday Futures: Moon water and paper batteries

moon
Image credit: Vadim Sadovski / Shutterstock.com

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of  The Future from around the web. This week: water on the moon; Chinese head for the dark side; fast, small animals; hallucinations; humongous plane; paper batteries and air conditioning.

There’s water on the moon!

Researchers from NASA, the University of Hawaii, and Brown University confirmed the existence of water ice on the surface of the moon at its poles. That could provide future lunar colonists with the easily-accessible water supply they’d need to survive off-world. Read more…

Speaking of the moon, China sets its sights on the dark side of it

China’s space agency is shooting for the stars. Well, more accurately, the Moon. On Wednesday, the nation shared new details on its Chang’e-4 mission during a news conference in Beijing. Read more…

Video: The fastest animal on earth may be one of the smallest.

Scientists at Georgia Tech are busy studying this speedy tiny animal in hopes of producing solutions for future applications in small robots. Watch now…

Asteroid mining will be a thing you can learn in school

Our relationship with asteroids is set to change dramatically in the coming years. A university in Colorado plans to help us get ready for that — it recently launched the world’s first space resources program. Read more…

Video: Here’s how hallucinations happen (not how you might think)

A condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome can cause blind patients to hallucinate scenes in vivid color. fMRI studies show that these hallucinations activate the same brain areas as sight — areas that are not activated by imagination. Read more…

The biggest plane on the planet is monumentally big – like, ginormous big …

Strato­launch would be the largest airplane, by wingspan, ever created. The twin-fuselage, catamaran-style aircraft would be a flying launchpad, its purpose to heave a half-million-pound rocket ship to cruising altitude and then drop it, whereupon the rocket would ignite its engines for a fiery ascent into space. Read more…

Video: Here’s how air conditioning really works

These machines not only cool our environments, making them tolerable, they come with often additional impressive features. Watch now…

Video: They just invented a paper battery, powered by bacteria

Perhaps in the ultimate nod to low cost and sustainable energy derivatives, a team of researchers from the State University of New York, Binghamton have developed a paper battery which uses bacteria as a power source. Watch now…

(Compiled by Alex Leslie; Edited by John C. Tanner)

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