Free Republic

During his sunset years, the great American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison invested a great deal of time and energy in a project that he felt sure would be not just profitable, but essential for U.S. national security. Along with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, in the 1920s and 30s he sponsored botanical research into finding an alternative source of rubber. His reasoning was simple: at the time, rubber came from Europe's colonies in Africa and Asia, and from countries in Latin America. It was therefore possible that, in a major war, the U.S. could be cut off from foreign...

s a kid, I’d sometimes try to imagine what life would be like without a particular sense or part of my body, like with questions from the Would You Rather? game. Would you rather be deaf or blind? Would you rather have no legs or no arms? I’d try to erase the sound of my mom’s piano playing, the sight of the ground growing smaller as I soared on the tree swing in my backyard, or the feeling of playing basketball so hard my lungs might explode, but I just couldn’t. How could life go on without these sensations that...

Dow Jones futures today rose modestly vs. fair value, along with S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures. President Donald Trump tweeted that it "will all work out" on U.S.-China trade. He also tweeted that he wants to help China's ZTE "get back into business, less than a month after the U.S. banned domestic companies from selling components to the telecom gear giant. That could be good news for U.S. optical stocks such as Oclaro, Finisar, Acacia Communications and Lumentum Holdings which also is an Apple iPhone supplier.

The experimental research combined two types of stem cells and created a viable embryo – which the team say would provide an unlimited stock for medical research. The created embryos would also be used for medical treatment testing and help shed light on one of the biggest infertility enigmas - why embryos fail to implant in the womb. However critics say it is a huge step towards human cloning. The researchers believe the wonder creation could see mice being cloned in three years time, and humans two decades later.

Is Bitcoin a greed-driven fad or will the blockchain technology that underlies it revolutionize the internet? Will artificial intelligence produce a world of ease and plenty or turn on us and kill us all? Is that jet pack you always wanted arriving any day now, or basically never?There are no shortage of people who make their livings by claiming to have answers to these questions. You should probably meet their claims with a healthy dose of skepticism.Futurists aren't all snake oil salesmen, of course, and it's sensible for both individuals and businesses to think ahead and develop contingency plans for possible future...

Russian mercenaries...attacked an outpost manned by American commandos and U.S.-backed fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), comprising Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters...Today, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is the U.S. military's best ally in the fight against ISIS in Syria, helping to take back 90 percent of territory formerly held by ISIS. It consists of well over 50,000 Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters.

Media are invited to attend a news conference at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland at 9:15 a.m. EDT Wednesday, May 2, to discuss a recent experiment to demonstrate a new nuclear reactor power system designed for space. News conference audio and presentation slides will stream live on NASA’s website. Kilopower could provide safe, efficient and plentiful energy for future robotic and human space exploration missions to the Moon, Mars and destinations beyond. The experiment was conducted November 2017 through March 2018 at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). News conference participants include: James Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASA’s...

The Flintstones, a cartoon about life in the Stone Age, has just surpassed The Jetsons, a cartoon about life in the distant future, when it comes to technological innovation. Researchers have successfully trained artificial intelligence to generate new clips of the prehistoric animated series based on nothing but random text descriptions of what’s happening in a scene. A team of researchers from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, trained an AI by feeding it over 25,000 three-second clips of the cartoon, which hasn’t seen any new episodes in over 50 years. Most AI experiments...

Amazon has filed a patent that could allow its Echo devices to one day listen in on conversations to help with user recommendations. A handy feature or more fodder for conspiracy theories? Should you whisper around your Amazon Echo, lest it whisper back to you? That’s the future suggested by a patent recently filed by the company, which examined the possibility of eavesdropping on conversations held around its voice-activated devices in order to better suggest products or services to users. The idea seems to be to turn Alexa, the company’s virtual assistant, from a dutiful aide under the user’s command...

Imagine your least-favorite world leader. (Take as much time as you need.) Now, imagine if that person wasn't a human, but a network of millions of computers around the world. This digi-dictator has instant access to every scrap of recorded information about every person who's ever lived. It can make millions of calculations in a fraction of a second, controls the world's economy and weapons systems with godlike autonomy and — scariest of all — can never, ever die. This unkillable digital dictator, according to Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is one of the darker scenarios awaiting humankind's future if...

The US tech sector does a great job of exchanging photos and recipes and family photos, but it doesn’t do much for overall productivity, which is stagnant as investment goes into apps rather than plant and equipment. This is how it always happens. Late Tuesday an obscure short-seller, Citron Research, announced that Twitter was the social media platform most vulnerable to privacy regulation – and its stock plunged 12% in the course of the day. All the other tech names followed, including the whole of the FANG+ Index (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, along with a half-dozen other big names,...

Finding a cheap and effective water purification process would have global implications. A research team from the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering has developed a new cost-effective and compact technology that combines gel-polymer hybrid materials to improve the purification process for drinking water. The new materials possess both hydrophilic—an attraction to water—qualities and semiconducting, or solar-absorbing properties. This enables the hydrogel to produce clean, safe drinking water from virtually any source, whether it's from the oceans or contaminated supplies. “We have essentially rewritten the entire approach to conventional solar water evaporation,” Guihua Yu, associate professor of...

A lot has been written about the Pentagon's plan to move its computing operations onto the cloud. The contract to do the work is said to be worth $1 billion in just the first year to the firm that wins the bid, and billions more after that. The contract is sole source - meaning one company would be responsible for designing and maintaining the contracted services for at least a decade and probably in virtual perpetuity - so it's no surprise rumors about the bid being rigged are flying around. There's a lot at stake for the winners and the...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday confirmed that it had opened an investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices following reports that data from 50 million users landed in the hands of a political consulting firm without their consent. Tom Pahl, the acting FTC bureau chief for consumer protection, said in a statement that the agency would be investigating whether the incident constituted a violation of a 2011 agreement that Facebook signed to settle charges over other privacy concerns. “Companies who have settled previous FTC actions must also comply with FTC order provisions imposing privacy and data security requirements,” Pahl said....

Raytheon Technology recently participated in a Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment (MFIX) at the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence, in which its advanced high-power microwave and laser dune buggy engaged and destroyed 45 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).Raytheon’s high-power microwave system engaged multiple UAV swarms, downing 33 drones, two and three at a time. “The speed and low cost per engagement of directed energy is revolutionary in protecting our troops against drones,” Dr. Thomas Bussing, Raytheon Advanced Missile Systems vice president, said. “We have spent decades perfecting the high-power microwave system, which may soon give our military a significant advantage against...

We were promised flying cars and virtual reality that was indistinguishable from the real things, what we got was a mess. The future wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but it was never going to be. At least not in our lifetimes.That technology has made our lives easier, and some would say better, isn’t really a matter for debate. But advances have begun to outpace common sense and, more importantly, our readiness for them.This week, two stories highlighted just how unprepared we are for the future that resides just around the corner.First, the “Facebook data breach” that wasn’t. You’ve...

When a driverless car kills someone, who’s to blame? That’s no longer a hypothetical question. A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a woman on a street in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday night, likely marking a grim milestone for the nascent technology: the first pedestrian killed by such a car on public roads. Police say the 49-year-old woman was walking a bike across the street, outside the crosswalk, at around 10 p.m. The Uber was traveling at 40 miles per hour in autonomous mode, with an operator in the driver’s seat, when she was hit. Police have not...

• Price performance difference between tech and utilities has spread lately to a level nearly as wide as when the dotcom bubble burst. • "The obsession with dot-com stocks in the late-1990s has been replaced today by a fascination with FANG stocks," said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. Price performance between the two sectors has spread lately to a gap not quite as wide as during the bubble, but close. Using a measure called the "Popular/Panned Ratio", Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group, sees danger signs growing for the bull market that began...

A simple illustration of the concept of driving something out of equilibrium to increase its stability is the well-known trick of making an inverted broom stand up on the palm of your hand or on one of your fingertips,’ said Ale Lukaszew, DARPA program manager. ‘If you hold your hand still, the broom is unstable and will fall over quickly. But if you drive the broom out of equilibrium by moving your hand around periodically, you can make the broom very stable, so it remains upright indefinitely.’ Particles in a quantum state are very sensitive to their environment. With the...

It's tough to make predictions especially about the future Science fiction has predicted many of today’s realities from cell phones to tablets. Many things that are today part of History like walking on the moon, organ transplants, and space stations were once flights of fancy. Futurists build current events on a foundation of History to provide a launching pad for visions of what is to come. One of the most widely recognized Futurists is Alvin Toffler whose seminal works include Future Shock and The Third Wave. He is also the one who told us, “Change is not merely necessary to...