Voyager 2
Blows my mind every fucking time I read about it.
Props to the USA/NASA and their engineers for achieving something so long lasting with technology from ~50 years ago.
The DNS it’s so mind blowing to think about how we are able to map so many domains to so many ip adresses so smart and stable
Funny you should say that. DNS is 40 years old. Definitely not futuristic tech. But yeah, it works surprisingly well.
Yeah, still it feels futuristic
And that the service replies practically instantly every time no matter which domain you choose.
Edit: wtf is with these downvotes? DNS is without a doubt the fastest part of accessing the internet. In website load time, it’s an almost unnoticable fraction of the total load time.
Indoor plumbing is pretty cool. Used to be you had to shit in a bucket and then go pour it into a sewer drain - but because this was slightly inconvenient people got into the habit of dumping it out their windows.
Everything going on in biology, but the existence of of Nana and Lulu especially. The first genetically altered humans are starting school pretty soon.
Say what now?
Google says the twins plus one other 1 yr younger child child were edited embryos using crispr to prevent them from getting HIV from their father(s). Which was and is unethical. They are supposedly doing fine.
Damn that’s crazy. On the one hand, that’s really awesome that we can make it so that the kids don’t have HIV. On the other hand, I worry about people using it for really bad things… Thanks for telling me about it.
Yeah, the dude just kind of went rogue. One of them was fully edited, while the other has a blend of original and altered cells, because surprise surprise China’s maddest scientist did a bad job. If they’re still doing well that’s good, because it wasn’t certain there would be no side effects.
I’m glad they and any kids they have will be around whenever we start discussing doing it properly. And yes, Dr. He Jiankhui went to jail.
Being trans always was such a cyberpunk concept to me. When I was a kid was like “people can change their gender? Cool”
We can say that… it was a sign lol.
When I was a kid there was only one openly trans person I would ever see. A man at the library who wore women’s clothes (to put it in the terms we would have used then). They didn’t try to be feminine beyond the clothing. Very occasionally some makeup. Legs were not shaved etc.
I was at the library on a weekly basis and saw this person all the time but it was just this one person. My mother told me not to stare or make fun of them and that they weren’t hurting anyone and could dress how the pleased.
Now, some forty or more years later I frequently encounter non-binary people, trans people, etc. I follow the same method my mother taught me. They are just people living how they want.
It is interesting to be that William Gibson had trans characters in Johnny Mnemonic, for example, written in 1981. That’s around when I would see that person at the library.
Driverless cars, VR and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we’re living in the movie Total Recall.
Usually total recall reminds people of something else
and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we’re living in the movie Total Recall.
Wow, I hadn’t heard about that. I’ve wondered for a while if astronauts could use VR to “escape” a cramped spacecraft.
Get your ass to Mars!
The air fryer is pretty cool I guess.
Especially impressive when you consider the etymology of the word “vaccine” and realize that a century ago vaccines were created by incubating them in a cow
We have Mustard flavored Skittles now.
Truly we’re on the last frontier.
Oh yeah, I forgot that that used to be a sci-fi thing, but it definitely was when I was a kid.
It’s all fun and games until she creates herself a Life-Model Decoy and traps you inside the house in order to “protect” you.
Every time I hear about World Coin scanning people’s retina’s for $50, driver monitoring tech inside new cars, or Amazon asking people to pay for things with palm prints I feel a bit like I’m living in the Minority Report. Does that count?
The future isn’t necessarily positive I guess
cyberpunk without any cool aesthetics.
What, you don’t appreciate the beauty of an anti-homeless bench? /s
I like how every single new car model is an almost-identical Crossover.
Funny story, I live in a place where people turn up their noses at the slightly smaller crossovers for identity reasons, and there’s a noticeable trend towards driving scooters with an aftermarket envelope because “normal cars” are just too big.
Smartphones. The sheer fact that we’re able to fit these cameras, computer chips, and everything else into these thin glass slabs is still mind-blowing to me.
Vegan Feta cheese
CoViD mask usage
PV panel price reduction
IPCC cooperation and language
Gamified drone wars producing music videos
PrEP
Turns out we can express most of proteins, some of the time, and then isolate them. This includes enzymes, when isolated these can do things like they naturally do but now in flask, but also they do things that aren’t remotely natural but are useful for us. These things are pretty fragile usually so then some of these can be modified so that they are resistant to higher temperatures, detergents etc. This is not only the nerdy shit like advanced chemical synthesis - lots of dishwasher tablets and and washing powders contain enzymes that cut proteins into pieces (like subtilisin), so in some cosmic sense dishwasher digests your leftover food off plates
Enzymes are still proteins, and have all problems of proteins. Turns out, you can just take the most important part out of enzyme, make it, or something functionally similar out of completely synthetic parts, and it still works. Sure, it’s not as active or selective, most of the time, but it’s resistant to things that would absolutely shred proteins. This is called organocatalysis and it was subject of 2021 Nobel Prize
Sometimes you want to take an enzyme and make it not work. We also have a tool for that: first you have to get structure of that enzyme, or some receptor protein, and by looking how a small set of random molecules lodges in it you can make a very selective, very potent ligand, sculpting it atom by atom with no knowledge other than protein structure. If you have time and resources, this can be made to work for almost any protein (that can be crystallised)
The trampoline
Pretty good podcast from sysk on this - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/how-trampolines-work-42604886/
