Category Archives: Futurism

Star Light

Scientists just observed a new galaxy for the first time, and at 13 billion lightyears away, its one of the most distant galaxies spotted to date.

The galaxy, MAMBO-9, isnt setting any long-distance records. Scientists have found galaxies at similar and even greater distances from us. But MAMBO-9 is nearly as old as the universe, CNN reports, so the new finding could help astronomers reveal more information about the earliest days of the cosmos.

MAMBO-9 is only about 970 million years younger than the universe itself, according to research published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal. Thats an unfathomable length of time for humans, but a mere blip in the cosmic calendar.

The new discovery presents a rare opportunity to watch a galaxy form. Light from MAMBO-9 that just reached Earth which portrays things that actually happened 13 billion years ago reveals a vast cloud of dust that will someday form into new stars and exoplanets.

We expect 100 times more stars than dust, lead researcher Caitlin Casey from the University of Texas at Austin told CNN. But MAMBO-9 has not produced that many stars yet, and we want to find out how dust can form so fast after the Big Bang.

READ MORE: Meet MAMBO-9, one of the most distant galaxies to ever be observed [CNN]

More on space: Something Very Strange Seems to be Synchronizing Distant Galaxies

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Scientists Spot One of the Most Distant Galaxies Ever: MAMBO-9 - Futurism

See Clearly Now

Every year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society releases a reportabout all the studies published within its pages that attempted to determine the cause of extreme weather events that year.

Ever since the first annual report was published in 2011, an increasing trend has emerged: more and more fires, disastrous storms, and other events have been identified as symptoms of worsening climate change around the world, according to E&E News. Its a troubling pattern that drives home unfortunate realities: climate change means more than rising temperatures, and we can expect more meteorological devastation in the future.

The latest report analyzed studies that were published over the course of 2018. Of those, an overwhelming majority causally linked the weather in question to climate change.

Only one paper didnt, according to E&E News, but that may have been due to a limited data set not because climate change wasnt to blame.

Some of the studies found that the extreme weather events that they were analyzing were only possible in a world with a changing climate. For instance, a 2017 heat wave near Australia couldnt have possibly happened unless climate change was real and driving the wave itself.

And as our worsening climate creates entirely new weather problems, we may be stuck an ever-rising amount of new storms.

READ MORE: Climate change is influencing more disasters study [E&E News]

More on the environment: Scientists Are 99.9999 Percent Sure Humans Caused Climate Change

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Study: Many Extreme Weather Events Were Caused by Climate Change - Futurism

Solar U.S.A.

Elon Musk is talking, again, about his idea to turn 10,000 square miles in the U.S. desert into a solar farm that can power the entire nation. In a Saturday Twitter reply to an article by Treehugger about Bill Gates questioning the efficiency of solar power, Musk fired back that all you need is a 100 by 100 mile patch in a deserted corner of Arizona, Texas or Utah (or anywhere) to more than power the entire USA.

He first talked about the idea in 2015, and reiterated them in 2017, as Inverse points out. The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile, Musk said at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island in 2017. One square-mile. Thats it.

Musk also linked to a University College London blog post, in which energy researcher Andrew Smith did some back-0f-the-envelope calculations, finding that a 10,000 square kilometer area far smaller than the 100 by 100 mile patch to be clear could generate about 500 Gigawatts at 21 percent efficiency, the average in Northwest Texas. Thats more than the U.S. annual average consumption of 425 GW.

But it would be an extremely expensive mega project as well. If you were to cover the patch with Teslas solar panel-covered Roof tiles, it would still cost about six trillion dollars, according to Popular Mechanics which is about the GDP of Japan.

READ MORE: Elon Musks Plan for One Giant Solar Farm Is a Little Insane, but Not Completely Insane [Popular Mechanics]

More on the idea: Elon Musk Tells National Governors Association How We Could Power the U.S. With Solar

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Elon Musk Is Talking About Powering All of America with Solar - Futurism

Before the end of the year, Turkey will become the first nation to get its hands on a brand new military drone equipped with a machine gun.

Its called the Songar, and it can carry 200 rounds of ammunition. A New Scientist story notes that the drone is accurate enough to hit a human target with every bullet fired from 200 meters (656 feet) away a devastating level of accuracy in the already troubling space of drone warfare.

Songar is the work of Turkish electronics firm Asisguard, and according to the companys website, a human can control the drone from a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Using a single controller, they can operate up to three Songars simultaneously during the day or at night, looking through the devices cameras and deciding when to fire their guns.

Asisguard equipped the drone with two systems designed to address the issue of recoil affecting accuracy. One uses a group of sensors that accountfor variablesranging from a targets distance to the current wind speed. The other uses robotic arms to manually move the gun as needed to counteract the recoil.

Songar isnt the first machine gun-equipped drone weve seen, and its easy to see why the devices appeal to militaries: with an armed drone, a soldier can attack the enemy while staying out of harms way.

But as more and more armed drones emerge, it seems like just a matter of time before militaries decide to remove human operators from the equation altogether. In fact, that may already be happening as United States Defense Secretary Mark Esper accused China in November of selling autonomous killer drones to nations in the Middle East.

So, while the drones that Asisguard plans to sell to Turkey later this month might require a human operator, theres a chance the next armed drones the nation adds to its arsenal will be autonomous and thatll be when things get really scary.

READ MORE: Turkey is getting military drones armed with machine guns [New Scientist]

More on drones: New Warfare Drones are Small as a Quadcopter

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Middle Eastern Nation First to Buy Drone Armed With Machine Gun - Futurism

Yeah, Got That Water

After surveying 19 exoplanets, a University of Cambridge-led research team found 14 had water vapor in their atmospheres more than theyd expected. The amount of water vapor, meanwhile? Less than theyd anticipated. Yet: These new insights could go a long way toward narrowing our hunt for extraterrestrial life.

Its important to know about even the most remote presence of water elsewhere [given] that water is a key ingredient to our notion of habitability on Earth, project leader Nikku Madhusudhan said in a press release,

For their survey results of which were published on Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters the researchers gathered spectroscopic data on the 19 exoplanets using numerous telescopes, including Hubble and Chiles Very Large Telescope.

Using that data, they were able to estimate amounts of various chemicals in the exoplanets atmospheres and hope to do the same for additional exoplanets in the future.

We look forward to increasing the size of our planet sample in future studies, Madhusudhan said. Inevitably, we expect to find outliers to the current trends as well as measurements of other chemicals.

READ MORE: Water common yet scarce in exoplanets [University of Cambridge]

More on exoplanets: Exoplanet Water Worlds Could Hold Unfathomably Deep Alien Oceans

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Survey Finds That Water Is Common Around Exoplanets - Futurism

Imagined by Artisitc Director Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton Men's 2054 is a luxury lifestyle ready-to-wear collection built for the great unknown.

Fashion has long flirted with futurism. What began as a cutting-edge movement among early-20th century painters and sculptors quickly swept over the design studios and runways of Milan and Paris. It played out as a celebration of everything new, urban and industrialfabrics, designs, colors and cuts that reflected movement and speed.

But what exactly is futurism now that we are living in the future? It is here, in Louis Vuitton Mens 2054 capsule collection: 14 pieces made of 100% water-repellent technical fabrications with transformable features and multifunctional values. In the collection, Artistic Director Virgil Abloh revisits the idea of compressomorphosisfirst introduced in his pre-fall 2019 collection. The term applies to garments accessorized with wrapper bags into which they can be entirely compressed for travel purposes. For instance, the back pocket of an oversized coat unrolls into a life-size tent raised with included tent poles, the coats back-zip adornment transforming into the tent door; a padded over-shirt with multiple zips for adaptation compresses into its own back pocket and morphs into a pillow native to trekking.

The name is a nod to 1854, the year the house was founded, and signals a fusion of the past, present and future. In other words, its clienteles uniform 200 years from its point of origin. The future is now.

Pieces in the Louis Vuitton Mens 2054 collection range from $6,535 for the 3-in-1 parka to $920 for the 3D effect T-shirt, all at Louis Vuitton Design District.

Photography by: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

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Virgil Abloh Merges Fashion and Futurism with the Louis Vuitton Men's 2054 Collection - Ocean Drive Magazine