This Week's News: Force Fields, Asteroid Missions, FB Drones

A new policy in France has taken root (pun intended), as Parliament is now prohibiting commercial buildings from remaining active if they don't contain solar panels or green plants on their rooftops. The new approach to city design and appearance is said to be a tremendous step towards a complete overhaul of contemporary, energy-wasting cities and towns. The plants, people believe, could serve as a home for animal life, save energy used to heat or cool buildings, and would add a sort of vibrancy to city life that hasn't existed before. A "concrete jungle" by the words of some activists. Can you imagine how beautiful a sight it would be to walk through downtown and notice all the birds with their nests just above your heads?

Of course, solar panels are the better option as they could dramatically reduce electricity bills. All in all, I see this course of action as a very positive one, as it could one day enter residential districts and  redefine how we enjoy our lifestyles within city walls.

Don't get too excited yet, because it's not what you may think but Elon Musk has recently unveiled that in the coming months Tesla will add a self-driving feature to its existing fleet of cars, the Model S. The sensors are already there, and now the CEO has announced they will serve their function. "We can basically go between San Francisco and Seattle without the driver doing anything", Musk said, but that only applies to drivers who are constantly on highways, which is an impossible scenario. Besides, it's illegal in most US roads as of now. Rather, driver input is still required to move past neighborhoods and other zones the company has deemed unsafe for an autonomous vehicle to cross over. That means private property is the only place left to switch the car to autopilot, but soon this technology could fulfill Musk's vision of a truly autonomous system capable of interstate travel. One day...


NASA And Its Many, Many Expeditions

Okay, this next one is just pure awesome. NASA has a bold idea in mind: to send a vehicle to a nearby asteroid, remove a large chunk, and ferry it into the moons orbit, after which the manned Orion spacecraft will study it intently. Yes, our Moon is about to have its own, and this plan is critical for many reasons. For one thing, the Asteroid Redirect Mission will educate us about the complexities of space, and prepare us for an even bigger adventure to the Red Planet some decades from now. In addition astronauts can test the new spacesuits, study samples of rock, and come up with better disaster avoidance strategies. Sadly, though, we will have to wait six years for the first stage of the voyage to be completed as the spacecraft sends the chunk to our moon. For a detailed video explanation, look no further than here.

Similar to the asteroid chunk mission proposed by NASA, the space corporation has also made public their intent to send a human to space and test his endurance. Notably, the man for the job has a twin who will reside on Earth so the effects of living in space can be observed. Scott Kelly, the lab rat, has had previous experience with living on the ISS, but this one-year mission is on a whole other scale of difficulty. Vision problems and muscular atrophy are just a few of the many issues that result from an extended stay in space, which is why NASA scientists want to conduct 400 tests to measure Scott's health and compare it to his brothers'. This will be for purposes of determining whether astronauts on longer missions are capable of pulling it off.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's...Drones

Next topic: drones. These days in America, they're pretty hard to fly for commercial purposes with all these regulations floating about. Previous attempts by the Federal Aviation Administration to minimize the process of making it accessible still called for a 2-month waiting period, which is very inefficient. Simply, new policies take out this months long wait, allowing operators with section 333 exemptions to immediately fly their babies no higher than 200 feet, within sight, and during the day. Obviously things could be better, which is why Amazon voiced its frustration at the limitations imposed by the FAA. Amazon's Prime Air, a service that could deliver small packages to customers quickly and efficiently, is a future prospect that VP of public policy Paul Misener believes won't occur until the FAA realizes their strict regulations are damaging the potential for a new era of rapid and safe customer-delivery interaction.

You might not think it at first, but Facebook is investing its time in huge ass drones that can deliver Internet access around the world. Covered in solar panels, the drones can sustain altitude at a height of 60,000 ft for months on end. Their first test took place in Britain, a hotspot for drone activity. The reason it's not in the US, I think, is because of the FAA regulations I just covered. The recent test flights are similar to Project Loon in that they're part of a larger goal called the Internet.org initiative to connect everyone in rural areas, which is no easy feat. Zuckerberg is keenly aware that it's crucial to expand FB's user base with drones that will one day soar 17 miles above the ground. Although this goal is a bit self-centered, I see it possessing many unintended benefits, such as a globally interconnected society that can finally solve problems as a collective group.


Force Fields, Moon Oceans And More

Remember in episode I of Star Wars, where force fields were used to deflect incoming bullets by the droid army? This concept has been confined to science fiction for a very long time, but a new patent granted to Boeing could change that. A so-called "shockwave attenuation system", when it's developed by the military manufacturer, could sense a nearby explosion, detect incoming shockwaves from the blast, and transmit those signals to an arc generator that produces a plasma field just in time to minimize impact. This plasma field can essentially protect a building or other object from the damaging effects of an explosion, but its one downside is that this effect can't run for long because the energy shield would heat the atmosphere surrounding the target to an unbearable level. What's coolest, though, is that in future war settings an entire vehicle or tank could enter a battle with only small injuries to the exterior because of an invisible plasma-generator. Thumbs up for sheer futuristicness.

Want more info on the nitty gritty details? Head over here.

Before I spoil the excitement for the next story, check out the vid:

Alright, you may be wondering, what is this awesome piece of tech and where can I buy one? Well, that piece of tech is Magic Leap, and although you can't buy one yet I can tell it got you thinking. Magic Leap has partnered with Weta Workshop to produce this incredible demo of a future device that can overlay images onto the real world, and as you see, it has a number of potential uses ranging from work to play. We still don't know whether this is an actual demonstration of the gadget or just a reminder that it'll be groundbreaking, but the point is that this 90-second clip generated a huge amount of buzz in mere hours, indicating the headset has a chance of surviving in this soon to be AR-ridden world.

There's an ocean underneath the surface of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, and it's ginormous. What's perhaps more fascinating is the way a team of scientists from University of Cologne were able to discover is existence. Joachim Saur, who led the group knew that the Hubble Space Telescope could be used to learn something about the moon's magnetic field because of its aurorae, which are already detectable. Then, because of a special relationship with the presence of a liquid ocean in the interior and these same magnetic fields, the team can even determine how deep the ocean is (60 miles thick) and also how much water it contains. Guesses about the ocean being there have circulated in scientific discussion for decades, but now there is definitely some concrete proof.

Our last story for this week is about CRISPR, a biomedical machine recently capable of editing the human genome in a cost-effective and timely manner. But with every saving grace there is an evil side to top it off. Scientists, although they recognize this technology could one day be used to uncover the field of biology even further and maybe stop diseases, are rightfully afraid that too little is known about it for anyone to start altering our genes. Two problems immediately come to mind: parents going to unethical lengths to design their baby to their liking, and new genetic diseases accidentally arising that could be passed on for generations. If either of those problems manifests, it's going to be damn hard reversing them. Therefore, many scientists are calling for a temporary 'moratorium' or hold on this sort of treatment until much more has been uncovered.