Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: airplanes fuelled by mustard seed; wood stronger than steel; an all new frequency range for IoT; AI psychiatry; and Super Bowl 2066.
Biofuel: Qantas flies the Pacific on mustard seed, mainly
The world’s first dedicated biofuel flight between the United States and Australia – QF96 from Los Angeles to Melbourne – began last month. The 15-hour route across the Pacific will operate with approximately 24,000 kg of blended biofuel – made from a type of mustard seed – saving 18,000 kg in carbon emissions. Read more…
Move over steel, we can now make wood just as strong
Engineers at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) have found a way to make wood more than ten times times stronger and tougher than before, creating a natural substance that is stronger than many titanium alloys. Read more…
A completely new frequency range could open up new tech opportunities
Researchers from Brown University recently explored the use of a new terahertz (THz) frequency range that could one day be used for IoT devices. Their study is published in the journal APL Photonics. Read more…
AI can now figure out if you are psychotic
Language is also the tool by which psychiatrists evaluate a patient for particular psychoses or mental disorders, including schizophrenia. However, these evaluations tend to depend on the availability of highly trained professionals and adequate facilities. Until now…
How much will AI take over our lives? Experts have opinions.
There is much disagreement on the extent to which AI-powered automation will replace workers, the professions that will become automated, and where in the world will bear the brunt of the job losses. Futurism asked several experts to explain who they believe will be most likely to suffer as a result of automation. Read more…
New applications for telecoms – syncing telescopes as a service (STaaS)
For the process to work, though, the radio telescopes need to be perfectly in sync, and now, a new study has found a way to achieve that synchronicity more cheaply and simply than the standard method. Take a look…
Self-driving cars use way too much power
Today’s self-driving cars use terrific amounts of power to run their onboard sensors and do all the calculations needed to analyze the world and make driving decisions. And it’s becoming a problem. Read more…
Is this the future of the Super Bowl (through 2066)?
Now that Super Bowl 50 is finally over with, Wired looks ahead to Super Bowl 100, where the whole world gets to play, tickets will be stored in your eyeballs and beers will cost $75. Each. Read more…
Meanwhile, here are the coolest ads of Super Bowl 2018
What a game, right? Those Patriots. Those Eagles! TRICK PLAYS! That’s a Super Bowl for you. And the action continued during the commercial breaks, especially if you were interested in what various companies thought was worth paying upwards of $5 million to parade in front of 110 million people. Read more…
(Compiled by Alex Leslie; Edited by John C. Tanner, who could not care less about the Super Bowl)
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