Weekly Round-Up: Digital Brains in Furry Bodies

Are you enjoying this month’s feature conversation about Robots vs. Animals? We are, but we’d love to hear more from you.

Has anyone ever owned a robot dog like an Aibo, and if so, what was it like? Why are robotic animals so much scarier than real ones? And once we have robot pets, will real ones become obsolete?

If you have any thoughts on those (or other) topics, get in touch! Email us at hello@howwegettonext.com or, better still, just write something on Medium and tag us.

Meanwhile, here’s what we’ve been up to.

• The brain in the machine: Steve Grand is a reclusive programmer who shot to fame in the 1990s after developing the artificial life simulation Creatures. Now he’s on an ambitious quest to create real alien life forms that live inside your computer. Simon Parkin finds out how.
  [11-minute read]
• Aping ants: In the 1980s, we tried to design artificial, intelligent systems by treating the brain as a computer. That didn’t work, explains Richard Baguley, but it’s a movement in the 1990s which tried instead to recreate insects that’s responsible for the state of robotics today.
  [6-minute read]
• Far out: Darren Garrett and Duncan Geere collaborated on this short video, inspired by our recent post about colonizing the Solar System’s hottest real estate. Every other planet, it turns out, has its benefits — and a few major deficiencies — when it comes to supporting human life. [2-minute watch]
• Outside the bubble: Train passengers in India can now get McDonald’s delivered to their seats — how? Meanwhile, citizens of Central America are on guard against triple the number of snakebites this year — why? Read our round-up of news from around the world to find out.
  [3-minute read]

• The ghost in your radio: Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, and his story is as tragic as it is compelling. Despite developing much of the equipment we use in mobile phones today, he jumped to his death on a cold winter night. RCA’s David Sarnoff said only this to the press: “I did not kill Armstrong.” [7-minute read]

• Energy miracle: Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels, but working out exactly how is no easy task. In Slate, James Bennet interviews Gates to find out how he’s helping humanity dodge the worst effects of climate change. [6-minute read]
• Skyjam: The accepted wisdom around plane tickets is that they’re least expensive when bought as far in advance as possible and travel avoids holidays and weekends. That wisdom is wrong. Felix Salmon outlines the results of a recent study for Fusion that concludes there is no longer any rhyme or reason dictating when plane tickets are cheapest. “The battle of consumers against the airlines is over,” he writes. “And the airlines have won.” [2-minute read]
• On urban foot: The newly elected city council of Oslo declared that the center of the Norwegian capital will be totally car-free by 2019, in an attempt to reduce air pollution. To meet the goal, it’ll build 37 miles of new cycle lanes and boost investment in public transportation, says K.G. Orphanides in Wired. Still, local business owners are perplexed: How will their shops receive merchandise deliveries with no vehicle access? [1-minute read]
• The lost web: Anything put on the internet is public, forever, right? It’s the world’s greatest archive of information. Wrong, argues Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic, who instead outlines a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness. [16-minute read]
• Explosive potential: This week’s newsletter GIF is a blob of uranium sitting inside a “cloud chamber,” which tracks the radioactive particles it emits with bubbles.

• Bang, bang: Want a bit of DIY inspiration? This guy made a portable, 3D-printed railgun. So far, he’s tested it with carbon, aluminum, teflon, and copper-plated tungsten bullets, which it can fire at speeds of up to 560 m.p.h. “It isn’t likely lethal, but it would definitely hurt,” he wrote in a post on Reddit. [2-minute gallery]
• Talk to me: A small team of engineers is building a shoebox-sized FM transmitter, powered by a Raspberry Pi and aimed at helping people communicate in conflict zones. It’s called Pocket FM and will be tested in Syria, where its ability to spread broadcasts across a huge mesh network will make the source of transmissions tough to track down. Nieman Lab’s Shan Wang meets its German creators. [5-minute read]
• Eurasian moonbase: The Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, has partnered with the European Space Agency on a series of Moon missions with the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent lunar outpost. That’s not an easy task, as we recently explained, but it’ll begin with an unmanned lander mission to the Moon’s southern pole in five years’ time to scout for resources, writes Adam Epstein for Quartz.
  [2-minute read]
• Plane brilliant: Before the end of the year, a new jet engine that burns 16 percent less fuel, emits less pollution, has fewer parts, and creates 75 percent less noise on the ground will enter service. In Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter Coy charts the 30-year, $10-billion idea from the drawing board to reality. [5-minute read]
• … and finally: Futurist Gray Scott has issued a list of predictions for the coming decades. It includes age reversal and massive vertical farms in cities around the world by 2025, as well as artificial general intelligence, atmospheric water harvesting, and the majority of the world population becoming transhuman. Plausible? Perhaps, but technology has a nasty habit of moving both faster and slower than we expect.
  [6-minute read]