Future Stories

Orbital Assembly and the Gateway Foundation are working on a reasonable set of plans and steps to build a space station that is 488 meters in diameter. They would start with a hub that is 78 meters wide. The National Space Society has the goal of 100-meter wide space station that weighs 8500 tons. It could house 500 people. In the NSS Space Settlement as Easier Way, there are Kalpana One space stations which at 450 meters in diameter and 224 meter in width would weigh 170,000 tons and could have about 8000 colonists. The 8000 person Kalpana stations are

Elon Musk SpaceX BFR and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin are targeting fully reusable rockets. The reusable rocket age should have started in the 1980s. However, cost-plus contracts and political bureaucracy split manufacturing of the space shuttle into 50 states. The plan was for space shuttle flights to happen once a week and for the cost to be $5 million instead of the $1+ billion that they did cost. There has been a 40-year delay to the fully reusable rocket age. Elon and Jeff are aware of the history of commercial air travel as bigger and more efficient planes developed from

Iran’s official unemployment rate is 12% and oil exports have declined by about half a million barrels a day and might decline even further as the effect of the renewed U.S. American sanctions increases. Iranian people have no confidence in their leaders and are frustrated with the economy, lack of economic reform and high unemployment. Most Iranian’s do not care about Syria and Yemen and many are greatly angry about wasting money on foreign wars. The Iranian unemployment has been around 10-15% for decades. Iran’s inflation rate has been 10-20% with occasional spikes to 50%. Currenty Iran misery index is

The Marvel Studios release schedule is intense. Three Blockbuster films a year? That’s a lot. But there’s a reason. Read more...

Grab discounts on a 4K Smart TV , Philips Hue bulbs , Breda watches , and more of Saturday’s best deals. Read more...

A new technical specification will enable SD cards to achieve a theoretical maximum storage capacity of 128 terabytes with a transfer speed of 985 megabytes per second.

Geralt and Jack aren’t incredibly alike, but this mashup really works. Read more...

The rocket that has been counting down in Fortnite finally launched at 1:30 EDT today, and what happened afterward was a little weirder than anyone was expecting. Read more...

I love Tom Cruise. Every Tom Cruise action movie is a joyful montage of Cruise running from setpiece to setpiece, doing a series of immensely inadvisable acrobatic feats that somehow, improbably, all work out in the end. Read more...

Star Wars needs to be saved. Fans loved Star Wars a New Hope and from the Empire Strike Back and the Clone Wars and Rebels animation series. Return of the Jedi was disappointing with Ewoks but it still had a reasonable closure for Luke, Vader and the Emperor. There were some good things to love about the Prequels. The lightsaber and spaceships battles in the Prequels were solid. There was the addition of Mace Windu and some other Master Jedi. The clone troopers were interesting. The Force Awakens was flawed but there was setup that could have been interesting. My

With Wakanda getting more involved in the affairs of the world after the events of Black Panther , one has to imagine major sports events are on the agenda, right after sharing advanced technology and helping the planet survive alien cataclysms. Which means it’s probably time they put together some soccer teams. Read more...

Comic books provide infinite opportunities for creative expression in the interplay between text and artwork, and 2018 has been a remarkable year for titles with unique, confident perspectives. From invigorating takes on decades-old properties to new works about interspecies romance, “alt-right” conspiracy theories,… Read more...

Cellulose is the most abundant and broadly distributed organic compound and industrial by-product on Earth. The bottom-up use of cellulose to fabricate 3D objects has had big problems that prevented printing wood for practical applications. Use in combination with plastics has lacked scalability and has had high production cost. Researchers in Singapore have demonstrated the general use of cellulose to manufacture large 3D objects. They are using fungal-like adhesive material(s) (FLAM). The cost of FLAM is in the range of commodity plastics and 10 times lower than the cost of common filaments for 3D printing, such as polylactic acid. SUDT

The post This Week in Tech: June 23 – June 29, 2018 appeared first on Futurism .

So, what’s the deal with the ‘D” in the Walt Disney logo, anyway? It’s got this odd squiggly flair to it that’s kind of hard to read. That’s just Walt’s signature, right? Well, actually, it’s a bit weirder than that. Read more...

Aedes mosquitos, responsible for the spread of diseases like Zika, dengue and yellow fever, do not disperse for more than 100 meters in their lifetime. They are also fragile, and high-altitude releases by airplanes can damage their wings and legs. Drones are being used to spread millions of sterile mosquitos a week. Sterile mosquitos were being released using time-consuming and labor-intensive ground methods. Drones can treat 20 hectares in five minutes. Each drone can carry 50,000 sterile mosquitos per flight. The drones being used cost about 10,000 Euro per drone. Overall the cost of releasing mosquitos is halved. WeRobotics drones

Dr. Abraar Karan has developed a nearly perfect 72-hour mosquito repellent where 98 percent of the mosquitoes did not land and of those two percent that landed, 100 percent did not bite. * Tests show the repellent stay on parts of the skin for 72 hours or even longer * It is not absorbed into the bloodstream. Pesticides like DEET are absorbed into the bloodstream. * it does not wash off. It wears away as part of the skin’s natural shedding process. This is going to save many, many lives. Mosquitos cause millions of deaths every year from Malaria and

China National Petroleum (CNPC), the largest state-owned producer of oil and natural gas in the China, reportedly plans to nearly double natural gas production from shale sources this year and wants a five-fold increase in such production by 2020. China has a lot of natural gas reserves but it has tougher geology than the USA for producing. China’s gas is in mountainous and tough terrain without as much water. Water would help with production. CNPC plans to produce 5.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) (197.8 Bcf) of natural gas from unconventional sources in southwestern Sichuan province in 2018, according to a

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the coolest toys we’ve seen on this here internet lately. This week: Comic-Con exclusive mania continues, Fantastic Beasts finds itself an extremely clever Lego set, and the best incarnation of the Justice League assembles on your toy shelf. Check it out! Read more...

Looks like someone ’s not getting any Gysahl Greens . Read more...

Sonic the Hedgehog, a live-action/CG hybrid based on the popular video game series, is racing its way to theaters everywhere, especially now that it has a villain. Read more...

Israel is investing more than $2 billion for new weapons for a possible attack against Iran. They are getting a new long-range missile and new refueling aircraft. A new IAI/IMI Rampage missile has about 150-kilometer range and is a fire and forget missile. There are reports by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida that Israeli F-35 fighter jets entered Iranian airspace over the past month. Iran denied this happened but replaced the General in charge of Iran’s air defense days later. Protests and a weak economy in Iran The Iran rial appears to be 50% weaker over the last weeks and is

The Pentagon has been directed to establish a Space Force as a new military branch. Just as the marines are an hybrid offshoot of the Navy and Army, the Space Force would be splitting the Space components that Air Force, Army and other branches. The Space Force idea has endorsements by the Joint Chiefs’ office and various military branches. The Space Force will probably be in the 2019 defense authorization act. Nextbigfuture believes this will be further opportunity for more military leaders to move up in rank and for more bribes and expensive and excessive procurement contracts. Currently all the

Scientists have discovered a new species of sheet-weaving spider, and it only dwells in one cave in southern Indiana. As its name suggests, this spider spins flat, tightly-woven, horizontal webs. There are thousands of species of sheet-weavers, and you’ve probably walked through one of their webs by accident some… Read more...

Tokamak Energy of the UK has built the ST40 prototype fusion reactor and they aim to reach 100 million degrees celsius by the end of 2018. They have already reached 15 million degrees. Tokomak Energy UK is using high-temperature superconductors to make far stronger magnets in order to make compact commercial nuclear fusion. After the ST40 will be the following three devices that will if successful will have commercial fusion energy. ST40X a higher performance demo ST-F1 a controlled fusion power demonstration Then the ST-E1. This will have full electric power generation. Here is the time lapsed build of the

The first place I fell in love with the late, beloved science fiction author Harlan Ellison was in comics. Specifically, it was in Daredevil #208, a comic I obsessively read over and over again when I was a kid. After re-reading it last night, I can definitely state that it holds up extremely well. Read more...

Even though the culture has bought into the idea that a person’s teenage years are some of the most tumultuous of their lives, sometimes one of the weirdest parts of transitioning into adulthood is realizing that you were actually way more together (relatively speaking) when you were younger. Read more...

In the first season of Luke Cage , the nigh-indestructible man was, essentially, an island. He was a stranger living on Harlem’s fringes, butting up against enemies with strong ties to the historic neighborhood. Season two tells us more about the families that spawned Luke, Mariah, and new villain Bushmaster, and does… Read more...

Last month, archaeologists in Italy found the skeletal remains of a Pompeii resident who apparently had his head crushed by a giant rock while fleeing the eruption some 2,000 years ago. The victim’s skull has now been recovered, and its surprisingly pristine condition suggests an alternative cause of death. Read more...

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MOUSEKIND. Friday morning, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It’s destination? The International Space Station (ISS) . Though unmanned, the rocket is carrying some very important passengers: 20 laboratory mice. The mice are part of a study by Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology (CSCB) . The plan: ten will spend a record 90 days in orbit, while the other 10 will return to Earth after 30 days. The researchers will see how space affects the mice’s  circadian rhythms (biological processes that occur in 24-hour cycles), microbiome (the bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on the body), and other physiological processes. TWINSIES. This new study builds upon the another also the CSCB researchers worked on: NASA’s Twins Study . For that project, astronaut Scott Kelly spent one year aboard the ISS while his identical twin brother Mark (also an astronaut) stayed on Earth...

When Ant-Man and the Wasp hits theaters next week, it’ll be the 20th Marvel Cinematic Universe film released in the past 10 years. That’s a lot, and—especially after the unprecedented success of the last two films, Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther— it’s easy to forget this was never a sure thing. Read more...

Somehow it’s still hard to fathom that Back to the Future Part II was set three years ago. For children of the ’80s and ’90s, the Robert Zemeckis sequel was the most popular and recognized vision of a future we might see when 2015 finally arrived. And while some of the technology imagined for the film never got made,… Read more...

AMAZON HAS ENTERED THE ARENA. On Thursday, Amazon announced it had bought PillPack, an online pharmacy for about $1 billion, a source briefed on the deal told The New York Times . The news caused waves in the $560 billion prescription drug industry; shares of publicly-owned drug companies like Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS dropped by 9.4 percent, 13 percent, and 9.2 percent, respectively. SMARTER PRESCRIPTIONS. PillPack is pretty unique in the pharmacy industry. First, unlike its competitors, it has no brick-and-mortar stores — the company only delivers medications in the mail. Instead of packaging user medications by the prescription (with a month’s worth of one drug in one bottle and another drug in another bottle, for example), PillPack packages medications by the dose. Say a person has to take three different pills each morning and two each night. A monthly PillPack delivery would include 60 or so tiny packets. Half would contain all three morning medications, and the othe...

Ah, nostalgia. Pick up your very own  NES Classic for $60 at Walmart while supplies last. Read more...

Next week, Ant-Man and The Wasp descends on theaters. Apparently it’s pretty good ! I’d be excited, but alas, I live in the UK—and for a godawful reason, Disney has decided to delay its release here until August 3 . That reason is, unfortunately, a bunch of sports people punting balls around in Russia. And it sucks . Read more...

PROTECTING CALIFORNIANS.  Soon, Californians have a lot more control over their online data. On Thursday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 , an online privacy law that restricts large tech companies’ use of California consumers’ data. When the law goes into effect in 2020, it will require tech companies with annual gross revenues more than $25 million to disclose which categories of data they collect on California consumers. They’ll also have to disclose any third-parties they let access that information. Californians will be able to opt-out of having their data sold, and companies will not be able to penalize them— by limiting their use of the service, for example — for choosing to do so. Users under 16 will need to opt-in to having their data sold. The law also grants California’s attorney general the power to fine companies that don’t do enough to protect consumers’ personal information from cyber a...

Steven Universe fans love theorizing about the show almost as much as they love the show itself. So when the last batch of episodes blew the lid clean off one of the show’s longest mysteries, the identity of Pink Diamond, there was a field day as people pored over the series to recontextualize hidden clues. Now even … Read more...

Introducing CIMON, a floating, basketball-sized robot that will serve as a companion and assistant to crew members aboard the International Space Station. Infused with artificial intelligence, the floating bot is reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey , but far less evil. We hope. Read more...

Two giant eBay sales , the sleeve your laptop deserves , an electric lawn mower , and more kick off today’s best deals. Read more...

This week, The Expanse wrapped up its third season with a thrilling two-part finale , making fans even more excited that the show survived its brief cancelation scare . Season four will surely bring awesome new stories, but season three—the scifi standout’s strongest to date—will be hard to beat, and here’s why. Read more...

The Nasa Space flight forum has a report on the Mach Effect Thruster test. February 2018, James Woodward loaned a good Mach Effect Thruster (accompanied by a specially designed isolation transformer) to Martin Tajmar at TU Dresden, Germany. But for an unknown reason Tajmar and his team didn’t use the mandatory stepup/isolation transformer: Therefore they operated the device at the wrong frequency, one that could never trigger any thrust signature. Even worse: as the Dresden team saw nothing conclusive, they increased the voltage for too long and the temperature in the PZT stacks, so they also managed to toast the

That feeling when you’re one of Marvel’s Defenders, but your teammates would rather hang out with your co-star instead. As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter , Hasbro has unveiled its exclusive Marvel Legends Series Defenders Rail Authority 5-Pack for San Diego Comic-Con... and no one should be surprised that no one… Read more...

Over the past few months, the wildest rumors in video game industry circles haven’t involved the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Two. The most interesting chatter has centered on a tech company that’s been quietly making moves to tackle video games in a big way: Google, the conglomerate that operates our email, our internet… Read more...

Westworld ’s sophomore season may have occasionally been a bit too bonkers for its own good , but it’s hard to overstate just how beautiful HBO’s robo-revolution drama can look sometimes... even in its goriest moments, thanks to the impressive work of practical FX studio Fractured FX. Read more...

It’s hard to lament Comic-Con’s lack of focus on actual comic books when the convention also brings us some of the best and exclusive collectible toys of the year. In addition to new figures of Star Wars ’ latest heroes , Hasbro will be tapping Transformers fans’ wallets with a new Bumblebee set featuring a retro gold… Read more...

The post This Week in Science: June 23 – June 29, 2018 appeared first on Futurism .

Kevin Feige says a sequel to Doctor Strange is in the works. HBO’s Watchmen show adds a few more mysterious members to its cast. Jordan Peele’s new scifi anthology series is heading to Youtube. Plus, behind the scenes on Wonder Woman 1984 , Chloe Grace Moretz on the Suspiria remake, and more. Spoilers get! Read more...

SAYING GOODBYE. At 5:42 am EDT Friday, SpaceX effortlessly launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Unsurprisingly, everything went according to plan. The rocket is currently helping its payload — the Dragon capsule — enter low Earth orbit at the time of writing. By Monday, it should rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS), dropping off 5,900 pounds’ worth of supplies and gear in what’s now become a somewhat-routine mission for SpaceX. Still, while the objective itself isn’t necessarily anything out of the ordinary, today’s launch was special for SpaceX: it marked the last time the company would launch a Falcon 9 Block 4. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FALCON 9. The Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, completing 55 successful missions since its initial launch in 2010. In December 2015, the launch of the Falcon 9 v1.2, also known as the Falcon 9 Full Thrust, kicked off the era of the reusable rocket. SpaceX started lau...

It’s starting to feel like 2018 is the year of Spider-Man. Actually, scratch that, it’s become the year of the Spider- Verse . We’ve got a Spidey movie on the way that not only looks rad as hell but is diving straight into the idea of a multiverse of Spider-heroes . Sony is apparently bringing Silk to the big screen . And… Read more...

WORK FOR YOURSELF (BUT REALLY FOR AMAZON).  Amazon is looking for a partner. Well, more accurately, lots of little partners. On Thursday, Amazon launched its Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program , which will encourage entrepreneurs to start small Amazon delivery companies. Each entrepreneur will oversee 40 to 100 employees who will use 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans to deliver packages year-round, using Amazon’s own logistics systems to facilitate the process. Start-up costs for a DSP business are as low as $10,000, and military veterans can apply to have their start-up costs reimbursed. Amazon claims DSP companies can produce annual profits as high as $300,000. MO’ PACKAGES. MO’ PROBLEMS.  Right now, UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service deliver most of Amazon’s packages. But Amazon will need a lot more delivered, and soon. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that established delivery companies simply can’t keep up with Amazon’s projected growth...

The space between stars may look pretty empty—and for most mundane intents and purposes, it is—but it’s actually full of electromagnetic radiation and vast clouds of matter, together collectively known as the interstellar medium. Some of it is aliphatic carbons that leak from stars, and a new study from University of… Read more...

This autumn, the Thirteenth Doctor begins her adventures in time and space—not just on television, but in comics as well . But just before the real fun begins, a new comic series will see the latest Doctor look back on her life... or, rather lives , in an intriguing twist on an anthology series. Read more...

AI TO THE RESCUE.  When a storm is approaching, responders need as much detail as possible. Predictions of the timing, intensity, and range of the storm could make the differences between citizen lives saved and lives lost. Luckily, AI is here to make those predictions much more accurate. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting the various ways cities across North America use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and respond to natural disasters . According to the article, these systems make it easier for emergency response personnel to help the people most in need post-disaster. POWER TO THE PEOPLE. The WSJ  article highlights several systems that can do this. There’s IBM’s AI-powered Outage Prediction tool, which analyzes a combination of historical weather data and real-time weather measurements to predict power outages. That tool is 70 percent accurate at predicting outages up to 72 hours in advance, and its accuracy increases as the ...

Matt Groening’s upcoming Netflix series Disenchantment tells the story of, well, a disenchanted princess who realizes that her life’s true calling has less to do with ruling a kingdom and more with binge-drinking and swashbuckling with elves and demons. Read more...

The latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale broke a lot of ground with its portrayal of a scene that was not only crucial for the series, but also a fantastic representation of a truly human experience. We spoke to the episode’s director about how she and star Elisabeth Moss brought that moment to life, and why it… Read more...

ON SECOND THOUGHT…  In January, Facebook announced a new policy banning companies from advertising initial coin offerings (ICOs), binary options  (investments where the return is either a fixed amount or nothing at all), and cryptocurrencies on the platform. On Tuesday, Facebook reversed that policy; it will now allow “pre-approved advertisers” to promote cryptocurrency products and services on the platform. Companies must fill out an application and provide requested background information to earn Facebook’s approval to buy cryptocurrency ads. Ads promoting ICOs and binary options are still banned. STOPPING SCAMS.  Facebook’s initial decision to stop selling cryptocurrency ads was an attempt to rein in the many companies it claimed were misleading or deceiving users. And, truly, the crypto world has no shortage of scammers —  according to CoinDesk,  an official from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) told audience members during a crypto workshop on M...

As more and more people have begun reading comics digitally, DC’s fans have been wondering when (if ever) the publisher was going to get in on the all-you-can-read subscription service game much in the same way that Marvel has. As it turns out, that time is now. Read more...

Disney’s The Incredibles series might be about a happy-go-lucky superhero family balancing superhero work, school crushes, and diaper changes, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stay that way. Comics artist Warrick Wong has created an art series dedicated to his vision of the Parr family’s future, and it’s pretty… Read more...

The Expanse bid farewell to Syfy (ahead of its season-four shift to Amazon ) with a two-part finale that contained everything that’s made the show so fantastic over three seasons: killer space action, tense human conflict, and some perfectly-calibrated doses of hope, wonder, and mystery. Read more...

We’ve been quivering with anticipation ever since Lego officially confirmed it would be adding Voltron—the universe’s premiere lion-based defender—to its range of fan-petitioned Lego Ideas products. But now, we finally have our first look at the final set and it’s even better than we had imagined. Read more...

Sony confirms Tom Holland’s exclusive leak about Spider-Man: Far From Home . Drew Goddard talks Cloverfield and balancing the drama of X-Force with the comedy of Deadpool . Original Blue Ranger David Yost wants to stage a Power Rangers reunion. Plus, what’s to come on Humans and The 100 . Spoilers, away! Read more...

The U.S. trade deficit dropped in May which is causing Wall Street firms to increase GDP growth estimates for the second quarter. Macroeconomic Advisers raised its forecast to 5.3%. They have one of the most detailed forecasts. Others are also increasing their estimates to 4.5% to 5%. * Consumer spending is strong with a strong job market and tax cuts. * Business investment has been strong with the tax cuts * the US trade deficit has been smaller than expected. Economists doubt the strong growth can last. Most predict GDP will slow in 2019 and 2020. The US dollar is

UBER, UBER EVERYWHERE (EXCEPT LONDON). In September, London’s transportation authority, Transport for London (TfL), announced it would not renew Uber’s  five-year private hire operator license, effectively banning the company from operating in the city. Uber appealed the decision, and on Tuesday, a London court granted the company a 15-month probationary license, according to a BBC report . After that period is over, the company’s license will presumably be up for renewal again. CH-CH-CHANGES.  TfL denied Uber’s London license renewal request because the company was not a “fit and proper” operator, according to a  September press release . The authority noted that the way Uber handles driver background checks and reports criminal behavior could negatively affect public safety. During the hearing, Uber claimed to have made several safety-minded changes in the nine months since the denial. Now, it will report crimes to law enforcement before loggin...

The Gateway podcast follows Gizmodo’s investigation into the influence internet spiritual guru Teal Swan has over her thousands of followers across the world. Read more...

Wonder Woman 1984 won’t be out for over a year and we already have our first image of the film’s villain . Meanwhile, the Shazam movie, which is out a full seven months before the Wonder Woman sequel, has yet to reveal a single official image except a logo. Hmm . Read more...

THE EXCEPTIONAL ENCELADUS. On Wednesday, scientists from the Southwest Research Institute published a paper in  Nature  outlining their discovery of complex organic molecules on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 53 moons. These large, carbon-rich molecules emanate from the ocean beneath the moon’s icy surface, escaping as plumes through warm cracks. This emergence of complex organic molecules from a liquid ocean makes Enceladus the only body besides Earth to boast all the basic requirements for life as we know it, said co-author Christopher Glein in a news release . HELP FROM THE DEPARTED.  For their paper, the scientists relied on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft , which plunged into Saturn’s surface in September 2017. During a flyby in 2015, the craft detected hydrogen within the materials emanating from the cracks in Encledaus’s surface. Hydrogen sometimes serves as an energy source for microbes living near hydrothermal vents in the Earth’s oceans, so the researchers s...