Category Archives: Futurism

Wait... what!? Droopy Wiper

We appear to have gotten a peek at one of the biggest mysteries plaguing car culture today: the single massive windshield wiper blade on Tesla's Cybertruck,the end of which is seemingly made from a floppy, rubber-like material.

In other words, it may not be composed of multiple standard-issue wiper blades after all, as suspected by The Verge for months now.

The wiper of Tesla's brutalist pickup EV has been the subject of much speculation for over a year now. Ever since the internet first spotted early prototypes with a gargantuan wiper bolted to the left side of its equally massive windshield, it has ruthlessly mocked the design for being not only quirky but questionably effective as well.

The specs alone are baffling. It's just under four feet long, and as Carwow's Mat Watson found out firsthand in a recent video, the end is wiggly. Just under a minute into the video, Watson picks up the wiper, revealing that the tip of the wiper blade lifelessly droops down.

It's an interesting design choice, especially considering the wiper has been given a big job.

"It's the biggest piece of automotive piece of glass on the market," Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy told Top Gear in a video last week. "It's actually pretty big even for architectural glass."

As a result, Tesla had to come up with the "biggest truck wiper," according to Moravy, to keep any precipitation or dirt from the glass for visibility.

Official pictures shared by the EV maker confirm that the wiper is only able to reach a small portion of the glass, meaning that the passenger side will likely remain dirty while on the road.

More on the Cybertruck: Tesla Has Quietly Built a New Vehicle That Riffs on the Cybertruck

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The Cybertruck's Giant Windshield Wiper Is Floppy - Futurism

Exodus is the first game from Archetype Entertainment, a studio established by Wizards of the Coast in 2019 and staffed by former developers from BioWare, 343 Industries, Naughty Dog and other AAA establishments. Exodus is a big and bold sci-fi RPG that deals with time dilation, the idea that time passes more slowly than we're used to during high-velocity travel, causing interstellar explorers to outlive their friends and family back home.

In Exodus, humanity has been forced to abandon Earth and establish a new civilization in a hostile galaxy. Players are the Traveler, a person tasked with exploring far-off solar systems for advanced alien technology. What the Traveler counts in days, the rest of humanity experiences in decades. With this conceit, players' choices will cause butterfly effects to ripple across humanity's new planet, particularly in the lives of their own loved ones, and the Traveler will watch these play out over generations.

Player choice is a big part of Exodus, affecting individual combat moments and helping to shape the overall story arc. The game includes alien weaponry and classic gunplay, a deep progression system, and a swathe of companion characters (yes, romance is on the table). Also, Matthew McConaughey is in Exodus in some way, and he presented the game at The Game Awards, unveiling its first trailer.

Archetype, a division of Wizards of the Coast, is packed with stellar sci-fi video game talent. It includes studio head James Ohlen (Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age: Origins), executive producer Chad Robertson (Star Wars: The Old Republic), director Chris King (Halo 4), and narrative director Drew Karpyshyn (Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2). The focus on time dilation and personal loss in Exodus underscores the team's desire to build an emotional, narrative-driven game, with action as an engaging but supplementary feature and they have the rsums to pull that off.

Exodus is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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Exodus is a new sci-fi RPG from former BioWare, 343 and Naughty Dog developers - Engadget

Six stories high. 360 million degrees Fahrenheit. Blowing Fusion

Japan has officially inaugurated the world's biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor.

The reactor, dubbed JT-60SA, represents the latest testbed for a potentially transformative source of renewable energy harvested from atoms fusing together under immense pressure and incredibly high temperatures without risking a nuclear meltdown.

But despite almost a century of fusion research, we've only been able to make small, incremental steps towards achieving the "holy grail" of producing a meaningful amount of net positive energy. Whether this grand new facility will make any strides toward a practical solution is anyone's guess.

Japan's latest reactor is six stories high and can heat plasma to a blistering 360 million degrees Fahrenheit inside its donut-shaped "tokamak" chamber. It's meant to lay the groundwork for the even larger International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is currently being constructed in France.

As Agence France-Presse reports, ITER is already well over budget and technical problems are delaying its development significantly.

Despite these setbacks, scientists are eager to give the JT-60SA reactor, a Japan-European Union collaboration, a whirl.

"It's the result of a collaboration between more than 500 scientists and engineers and more than 70 companies throughout Europe and Japan," said Sam Davis, deputy project leader for the JT-60SA, during the inauguration last week.

Despite plenty of disappointing results and setbacks over the years, it's an exciting time for fusion energy. The inaugurationcomes after researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claimed to have produced a net energy gain usingthe "world's largest and highest energy laser system," a fusion reactor that works very differently from both ITER and JT-60SA.

In August, the team claimed it had achieved the feat for a second time. However, the jury is still out on whether these experiments actually represent a major breakthrough, as the results have yet to be thoroughly vetted by outside experts.

Whether JT-60SA, or its much larger sibling, will finally be able to demonstrate that fusing atoms can represent a sea change in our efforts to power the world with renewable energy remains to be seen as well.

More on fusion: Microsoft Signs Deal to Get Fusion Power by 2028

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Japan Finishes World's Largest Fusion Reactor - Futurism

It's way more than you think. Power Hungry

It's an open secret that generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT eat up an astronomical amount of power.

Even generating images from a text prompts with a tool like Midjourney or OpenAI's DALL-E is immensely power-intensive.

As first spotted by The Register, a team of researchers from AI developer Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University recently shared a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper on how much power AI tools need to perform a variety of tasks.

Their results are and highlight the very real carbon footprint of turning to AI instead of a human artist for imagery needs.

Strikingly, they found that the "least efficient generation model" they studied Stable Diffusion's open source XL, which was released in July used almost as much power per image as that required to fully charge a smartphone.

Coming up with 1,000 images using this model generates the carbon emission equivalent of "4.1 miles driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle," according to the paper.

However, due to the "large variation between image generation models," that number can also be smaller.Overall, across all models the researchers tested, generating 1,000 images took an average of 2.907 kWh, roughly the equivalent of charging a phone's battery to 24 percent per image.

Generating text, however, is a seemingly far less power-hungry process and only used as much as the equivalent of three smartphone charges for 1,000 queries, the researchers found.

But extrapolating the data to a global scale reveals an even uglier truth. Companies like OpenAI and Google are already facing rapidly growing energy bills as they attempt to keep their generative AI tools online.

Recent estimations suggest AI servers on a global scale use the equivalent of what an entire country like Argentina uses in a year.

Just cooling these servers alone has an astonishing environmental footprint. According to Google's 2023 Environmental Report, the company used an astronomical 5.6 billion gallons of water last year, a 20 percent increase over its 2021 usage.

In short, the AI industry's carbon footprint will continue to be a big problem, especially as the world creeps ever closer to a climate catastrophe.

The latest research serves as a reminder that even on an image-by-image basis, the energy costs of using these generative AI tools can be considerable.

It's unclear, though, how these results compare to more commonly used AI image generators like Midjourney or OpenAI's DALL-E, which weren't part of the study

More on generative AI: AI's Electricity Use Is Spiking So Fast It'll Soon Use as Much Power as an Entire Country

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You'll Be Astonished How Much Power It Takes to Generate a Single AI Image - Futurism

"We can exonerate him. We found the tomato." Grand Theft Tomato

A scandal on board the International Space Station has finally been put to bed.

For months now, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio has been accused by his fellow crew members in jest, they say, mostly at least of eating a tiny tomato that was laboriously grown on board the space station.

But as it turns out, Rubio was innocent.

"Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [already], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato," NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said during a live stream celebrating the station's 25th anniversary.

"But we can exonerate him," she added in the footage, spotted by Space.com. "We found the tomato."

Rubio flew to the space station on board a Soyuz spacecraft in September 2022 and made his return just over a year later due to delays caused by the same capsule starting to uncontrollably leak coolant. The unusual incident forced Russia's space program to send a replacement spacecraft, which ended up taking several months.

While he was on board the station, Rubio tended to an experiment dubbed Veg-05, which involved growing tiny Red Robin dwarf tomatoes.

In late March, astronauts were each given a share of the harvest tucked inside Ziploc bags. Rubio says his share, however, floated away before he could eat the fruits of his labor.

"I spent so many hours looking for that thing," Rubio said during a September livestream. "I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."

In October, two weeks after returning to the ground, Rubio told reporters that he spent "18 to 20 hours of my own time looking for" the errant tomato, as quoted by Space.com.

"The reality of the problem, you know the humidity up there is like 17 percent," he added. "It's probably desiccated to the point where you couldn't tell what it was, and somebody just threw away the bag."

Given Moghbeli's latest comments, he likely was spot on in his predictions.

More on the ISS: Space Station Turns 25, Just in Time to Die

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Space Station Astronauts Find Desiccated Tomato After Blaming Colleague for Its Theft - Futurism

An Emirati oil executive has landed in hot water after claiming that there's "no science" behind phasing out fossil fuels to keep global temperatures from creeping above 1.5 degrees Celsius, an internationally agreed-upon climate benchmark.

His comment, made during a panel led by former UN special envoy for climate change Mary Robinson, particularly struck a nerve as Sultan Al Jaber is currently leading the ongoing COP28 conference, an international climate summit in Dubai.

The conflict of interest is palpable. Al Jaber is CEO of Adnoc, the largest drilling company in the Middle East that's gearing up to expand its drilling ventures considerably.

According to the Global Oil and Gas Exit List, a public database that keeps track of the activities of oil and gas ventures, the Al Jaber-led state oil company has far and away the biggest plans to expand oil and gas production in the world.

"There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5," Al Jaber said during the panel discussion, adding that he refused to be part of an "alarmist" discussion.

Unsurprisingly, the preposterous claim from the oil executive sparked a considerable amount of outrage.

"I read that your company is investing in a lot more fossil fuel in the future," Robinson shot back.

"Youre reading your own media, which is biased and wrong," Al Jaber retorted. "I am telling you I am the man in charge."

Yikes. Did we mention the panel discussion was about a global campaign to empower women in leading climate action?

To state the obvious, the research is very explicit on the need to stop burning fossil fuels.

"The science is clear," UN secretary general Antnio Guterres told delegates at the summit. "The 1.5C limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce, not abate. Phase out, with a clear timeframe."

And his critics didn't beat around the bush in denouncing his comment.

"From the moment this absurd masquerade began, it was only a matter of time before his preposterous disguise no longer concealed the reality of the most brazen conflict of interest in the history of climate negotiations," former vice president Al Gore told the New York Times in an email.

"Obviously, the world needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible," he added, noting that Al Jaber "has been preparing one of the most aggressive expansions of fossil fuel production, timed to begin as soon as he bangs the final gavel to conclude COP28."

In comments to The Guardian, Climate Analytics chief executive Bill Hare called Al Jaber's comments "an extraordinary, revealing, worrying and belligerent exchange."

"Sending us back to caves is the oldest of fossil fuel industry tropes," he added. "It's verging on climate denial."

Following the outrage, Al Jaber didn't back down on his claim, complaining that his "one statement" was "taken out of context."

"I have said over and over that the phase-down and the phaseout of fossil fuels is inevitable," he told an impromptu press conference this week, as quoted by the NYT.

In short, COP28 is quickly turning into nothing more than a distraction. Worse yet, leaked documents revealed that the United Arab Emirates is planning to use climate meetings like it to promote oil and gas companies.

More on climate change: 15,000 Scientists Warn Society Could Collapse By 2100 Due to Climate Change

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Head of Climate Conference Who Happens to Be an Oil Exec Says Actually Fossil Fuels Are Fine - Futurism