Friday Futures: remote control planes and radioactive food

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Image credit: Piotr Zajc / Shutterstock.com

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of  The Future from around the web. This week: remote control fighter planes; Marianas Trench nuked; neural networks in a dish; storm surge video; and missing universal matter found!

Pilots can control three fighter planes from their office

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the US and drop bombs in the Middle East. Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required. Read more…

Video: here’s what would happen if a nuke blew in the Marianas Trench. Watch now…

Funding approved to grow neural networks in petri dishes

Will the computers of the future be built in factories as they are today, or will they be grown in labs like cell cultures? That’s the question posed by an interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer engineers who won a $500,000 grant this week from the National Science Foundation. Read more…

Robotic skin can turn pretty much anything into a robot

When you think of robotics, you likely think of something rigid, heavy, and built for a specific purpose. New ‘Robotic Skins’ technology flips that notion on its head, allowing users to animate the inanimate and turn everyday objects into robots. Read more…

Video: the truth about eating radioactive food. Watch now…

Astronomers just found the universe’s missing matter – not the dark stuff

Astronomers finally found the last of the missing universe. It’s been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the “ordinary” matter in the cosmos—stars and planets and gas, anything made out of atomic parts. Read more…

Here’s how they did that storm surge presentation

At a certain point, you think you have a good grasp of what to expect from weather graphics. A color-coded map, a five-day forecast with a sassy cloud. Which might be why the Weather Channel’s 3-D, room-encompassing depiction of the Hurricane Florence storm surge took so many by surprise. Read more…

Video: here is the largest, rideable robot. It is huge. And scary. Watch now…

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

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