The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

Augmented Reality (AR): Will It Change Your Life? Tech World Says "Yes"

Augmented Reality sounds like a sissy description of drug use, but it's the latest and greatest concept in computer-enhanced living.  And has a lot of the same effects: seeing things that aren't there, an increased awareness of your place in the universe, even being able to "really, like, tell what somebody truly is" by looking at them - and it's this last that The Amazing Tribe (TAT, a Swedish technology firm) are working on.

The Next Tech Frontier: Hacking Your Head

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive - because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most.  Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell) an extremely serious problem.  Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like "me.exe") - if it gets damaged, unless you're a Buddhist there's no Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

The risk comes from the combination of the very best of technologized humanity with the worst: when medical experts and mindologists are building devices to let paralyzed patients communicate with the world, they shouldn't be worrying about some scumbag hacking the system for a joke.  If you don't think people would do that, welcome to the internet and don't give anyone any personal information.  As the technology advances out of medicine and into mass media (as it inevitably will) it'll only get worse. 

MIT's "MetaMaterials": Optical Clothing for a James-Bond World

With cameras in everything from phones to other, smaller phones, it may seem we've caught up with Q branch (the fictional research and development division of the British Secret Service) - which is why the boffins have built an imager without any camera at all.  That'll teach us to think we know anything!  A brand new nanofabric which can be used as cloth is now collecting images - meaning paparrazzi will soon be irrelevant, as we'll be able to get nude pictures direct from the clothing.

Countdown for Superconducting-Plasma Rockets -Star Trek Trumped!

Superconducting plasma rockets might sound like something Buck Rogers blasts the Infini-Cruiser into the Nth dimension with, but this isn't throwaway technobabble.  It's the result of years of work, and the prototype space engine is currently powering through testing.

The Ultimate Space Gadget: NASA's Ion Drive Live!

We're one step closer to Star Trek, with NASA successfully testing an experimental Ion Drive in Earth orbit.  In fact, since the Enterprise only had thrusters for low-speed maneuvers, this means we've got something even the guys with Warp Drive didn't think of. 

MIT Teams: "Can 4 Billion Cellphones Change the World for the Better?"

Teams of MIT Media Lab's Next Billion Network participants -our next generation of tech movers and shakers- are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous cellphone to help people in developing nations to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're going, and diagnose their health.

Augmented Reality On Your Phone? Yes! Soon it Will Be a World of Everyone, Everything, Everywhere

Your phone might put you in touch with the rest of the world, but you still need to know what part of the world you want to call - and what their number is, and whether they'll want to talk to you.  The latest generation of GPS-enabled phones is fixing that: drawing an invisible layer of data over everything and everywhere, enabling the tech-connected to use the world more effectively than ever before.

It's indestructible information: if a bar sucks, you can't graffiti the walls (at least not for long), but with new geo-tagging services you can leave an indelible message than anyone equipped with the same hardware can access.  And since that hardware is a phone, that's everyone.  The true power of tagging won't engage until after the usual new-tech shakedown, where one service beats or eats all the others and gets a solid service running, but then it'll be impossible for anywhere to work on the business principle of "the suckers won't be coming back anyway."

1st AI-Powered RoboScientist Created -A Galaxy Classic

The rise of the robots hasn't resulted in a murderous rampage quite yet, but it has reaped an enormous toll on low-level jobs.  Assembly lines, farms, factories - the machines have taken over millions of man-hours, but now the scientists have surpassed those systems and begun to make themselves obsolete.  Because Adam is online - and he's a scientist.

The rise of the robots hasn't resulted in a murderous rampage quite yet, but it has reaped an enormous toll on low-level jobs.  Assembly lines, farms, factories - the machines have taken over millions of man-hours, but now the scientists have surpassed those systems and begun to make themselves obsolete.  Because Adam is online - and he's a scientist.

Beyond H2O -Creating New Types of Water

Scientists are arguing about two new types of water, and we don't mean Dasani or Perrier - we're talking about entirely new phases like "liquid" and "solid."  Which proves that researchers get to fight about far better things than regular humans.

Military Shuts Out Scientists from Infra-Red Signatures on All Meteors Which Hit the Planet

The military has just decided to deny scientists data on incoming meteors in order to protect military secrets.  Anyone who can't see any problems with this arrangement, well done on never having seen a movie -ever.  Oh, and get Michael Bay on the phone - we've got his next plot ready.

The Air Force's Defense Support Program satellite network scans the globes for infra-red signatures (indicative of missile blasts and nuclear explosions) and incidentally picks up incredibly detailed information on all meteors which hit the planet.  Something the military didn't think was particularly interesting.  They did at least send the occasional update to the Earth-watching scientific community, scraps of data they didn't need, but a recent announcement makes it clear that there will be no more.

Augmented Reality (AR): Will It Change Your Life? Tech World Says "Yes"

Augmented Reality sounds like a sissy description of drug use, but it's the latest and greatest concept in computer-enhanced living.  And has a lot of the same effects: seeing things that aren't there, an increased awareness of your place in the universe, even being able to "really, like, tell what somebody truly is" by looking at them - and it's this last that The Amazing Tribe (TAT, a Swedish technology firm) are working on.

The Next Tech Frontier: Hacking Your Head

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive - because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most.  Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell) an extremely serious problem.  Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like "me.exe") - if it gets damaged, unless you're a Buddhist there's no Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

The risk comes from the combination of the very best of technologized humanity with the worst: when medical experts and mindologists are building devices to let paralyzed patients communicate with the world, they shouldn't be worrying about some scumbag hacking the system for a joke.  If you don't think people would do that, welcome to the internet and don't give anyone any personal information.  As the technology advances out of medicine and into mass media (as it inevitably will) it'll only get worse. 

MIT's "MetaMaterials": Optical Clothing for a James-Bond World

With cameras in everything from phones to other, smaller phones, it may seem we've caught up with Q branch (the fictional research and development division of the British Secret Service) - which is why the boffins have built an imager without any camera at all.  That'll teach us to think we know anything!  A brand new nanofabric which can be used as cloth is now collecting images - meaning paparrazzi will soon be irrelevant, as we'll be able to get nude pictures direct from the clothing.

Countdown for Superconducting-Plasma Rockets -Star Trek Trumped!

Superconducting plasma rockets might sound like something Buck Rogers blasts the Infini-Cruiser into the Nth dimension with, but this isn't throwaway technobabble.  It's the result of years of work, and the prototype space engine is currently powering through testing.

The Ultimate Space Gadget: NASA's Ion Drive Live!

We're one step closer to Star Trek, with NASA successfully testing an experimental Ion Drive in Earth orbit.  In fact, since the Enterprise only had thrusters for low-speed maneuvers, this means we've got something even the guys with Warp Drive didn't think of. 

MIT Teams: "Can 4 Billion Cellphones Change the World for the Better?"

Teams of MIT Media Lab's Next Billion Network participants -our next generation of tech movers and shakers- are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous cellphone to help people in developing nations to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're going, and diagnose their health.

Augmented Reality On Your Phone? Yes! Soon it Will Be a World of Everyone, Everything, Everywhere

Your phone might put you in touch with the rest of the world, but you still need to know what part of the world you want to call - and what their number is, and whether they'll want to talk to you.  The latest generation of GPS-enabled phones is fixing that: drawing an invisible layer of data over everything and everywhere, enabling the tech-connected to use the world more effectively than ever before.

It's indestructible information: if a bar sucks, you can't graffiti the walls (at least not for long), but with new geo-tagging services you can leave an indelible message than anyone equipped with the same hardware can access.  And since that hardware is a phone, that's everyone.  The true power of tagging won't engage until after the usual new-tech shakedown, where one service beats or eats all the others and gets a solid service running, but then it'll be impossible for anywhere to work on the business principle of "the suckers won't be coming back anyway."

1st AI-Powered RoboScientist Created -A Galaxy Classic

The rise of the robots hasn't resulted in a murderous rampage quite yet, but it has reaped an enormous toll on low-level jobs.  Assembly lines, farms, factories - the machines have taken over millions of man-hours, but now the scientists have surpassed those systems and begun to make themselves obsolete.  Because Adam is online - and he's a scientist.

The rise of the robots hasn't resulted in a murderous rampage quite yet, but it has reaped an enormous toll on low-level jobs.  Assembly lines, farms, factories - the machines have taken over millions of man-hours, but now the scientists have surpassed those systems and begun to make themselves obsolete.  Because Adam is online - and he's a scientist.

Beyond H2O -Creating New Types of Water

Scientists are arguing about two new types of water, and we don't mean Dasani or Perrier - we're talking about entirely new phases like "liquid" and "solid."  Which proves that researchers get to fight about far better things than regular humans.

Military Shuts Out Scientists from Infra-Red Signatures on All Meteors Which Hit the Planet

The military has just decided to deny scientists data on incoming meteors in order to protect military secrets.  Anyone who can't see any problems with this arrangement, well done on never having seen a movie -ever.  Oh, and get Michael Bay on the phone - we've got his next plot ready.

The Air Force's Defense Support Program satellite network scans the globes for infra-red signatures (indicative of missile blasts and nuclear explosions) and incidentally picks up incredibly detailed information on all meteors which hit the planet.  Something the military didn't think was particularly interesting.  They did at least send the occasional update to the Earth-watching scientific community, scraps of data they didn't need, but a recent announcement makes it clear that there will be no more.