This Week in the Future, October 31-November 4, 2020
Another week, another suite of stories on everything from the protein in your blood to red hot electric sports cars. And of course another picture from Baarbarian to dazzle the eyes.
Curious Mouse Lab mice who were fed a broth of Lactobacillus exhibited lower stress, including increased willingness to explore elevated walkways and open areas.
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Wikimedia Commons
Anyone who has ever had a stomach bug knows it can really subdue your spirits as well as your appetite. But other parts of the gut microbiome can have the opposite effect, and make you feel great. Irish researchers have found a type of gut bacteria that seems to have directly interacted with the brains of mice, reducing stress and depression.
Hard Drive Platter Closeup Approximately 200,000 of these hard drives make up IBM's new array.
Researchers at IBM's Almaden, California research lab are building what will be the world's largest data array--a monstrous repository of 200,000 individual hard drives all interlaced. All together, it has a storage capacity of 120 petabytes, or 120 million gigabytes.
You can't imagine the shutter speed our photographer had to use to capture this shot (kidding)
IMAGE BY
DARPA
Back on August 11th DARPA launched, then lost, its Falcon hypersonic vehicle, also known as HTV-2. Today we found it. Not the actual glider, but a video of it streaking through the sky over the Pacific Ocean as captured by a crew member aboard a tracking ship. And as you can see in this video, it is indeed moving fast.
Apple's Minimalist Aesthetic We're not saying minimalism always works. Exhibit A: the button-less iPod Shuffle, which Apple quickly abandoned.
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Apple
In 1996, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple after a decade-long exile, the company's products took a dramatic turn. The next 15 years would be a whirlwind of monstrous success after monstrous success--iMac, iPod, iTunes Music Store, Intel-based MacBook, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad. Jobs's resignation as CEO yesterday has led to some excessive hand-wringing about Apple's future, near and far, but the Jobsian philosophy--in which the consumer is king, in which there is one right way to do things, in which it is always preferable to trim than to add--will hopefully have permeated Apple enough to weather his departure. It's already had an effect on the world at large.