If the (rather intimidating) machines in the photo above remind you of bulldozers, “you’re close.” They are robotic deep-sea excavators. These particular ones can dig down to depths of 1,000 …
Practical spirit
While the American “pioneer” Musk symbolically launches his Tesla into the space junkyards, the Chinese manufacturers appear much more grounded: beyond electric/autonomous cars (for which the Chinese market is secured…), …
A red car with two rockets
Every season of capitalist transition, of model change, has its own corresponding opportunists. Musk is one of them. Under different conditions—say, twentieth-century capitalism—he would have ended up in jail or …
Catapults
The technology used at CERN, that of electromagnetic acceleration, is also being developed elsewhere — and not for subatomic particles, but for weapons. The latest phase of military research concerns …
Suitcases… and kisses to mom!
It is a sign of the times. The last time the philosophy of “migration to other planets” went mainstream was when the Americans globally showcased their moon landing. The “Apollo” …
The scientific epic
Anyone who thinks (or will come to think in the future) that the innovative recipe for genetic editing called Crispr/Cas-9 (see Cyborg 8: genetic cut-and-sew) is a pure product of …
The culture of honesty:
This is the declared goal of the Chinese state in a plan that formalizes what capitalist enterprises are already doing, only placing it under official state control by unifying it …
Orphans – and golden
Pharmaceutical companies chase “rare diseases”: they make crazy profits from the drugs for these cases. When a disease affects up to 5 people per 100,000, it is considered rare. In …
Risky jobs
We can make fun of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but its bosses are ahead. Way ahead. Their latest feat was legislation granting extraction rights for raw materials from extraterrestrial …
Unilateral actions
“Rare earths,” a list of metals with futuristic names such as yttrium, lanthanum, or neodymium (and 14 others), are used everywhere: from the construction of rockets and turbines to the …
Big ball!
Online shopping for products in a marketplace with over 10 million stores, free messages, calls and video calls, file sharing (even large multimedia files), social networking for both personal and …
The metaphysics of cyber-warfare
This is “the bad guy” Sauron, from “the lord of the rings”. ProjectSauron is what the well-known Russian malware fighting company Kaspersky Labs named a new discovery of theirs (almost …