Can a drug-detection dog beat Apple’s U1 chip? Attach a $29 Apple AirTag to your stuff and you can use your iPhone to locate it when it goes missing. WSJ’s Joanna Stern put the new gadget up against a drug-detection dog and other lost-item trackers, like the Tile Pro, in a series of indoor and outdoor challenges. Photo illustration: Laura Porat for The Wall Street Journal
Category Archives: Technology
Digital Currencies: Could They Be The End Of Banks?
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have been billed as a major disruptor to finance. But digital currencies issued by governments might be even more radical—they may even threaten the future of traditional banking.
Analysis: Why Demand For Armed-Drones Is Surging
Armed drones are growing in military importance as conflicts around the world have proven the utility of these effective tools of war. Companies in China, Turkey, and Russia, among others, have developed advanced remotely piloted aircraft that can use guided weapons on and off the battlefield.
The widespread use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States to target and kill insurgents jump started a new chapter in the history of conflict. These high flying and remotely piloted aircraft could engage targets with impunity while the operators were safely working in a ground control station. Keeping the crews out of danger also made the drones politically cheap to use over dangerous skies.
Now more and more countries are gaining this military capability for their own purposes. “At the moment, we’ve seen over 100 states worldwide using military drones and that number is growing significantly” said Wim Zwijnenburg, Project leader, Humanitarian Disarmament at PAX. “We have over 20 states that are using armed drones in conflicts or outside of armed conflicts.”
Although larger and more complex drones, like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper are not cheap to develop or operate, smaller drones are becoming more ubiquitous in conflict zones. Limiting the proliferation of these smaller drones, and the ability to weaponize them, is a regulatory nightmare for government agencies around the world.
“Drones are just model airplanes with great sensors on them. And all of these are dual use and have been used in the civilian realm” said Ulrike Franke, a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “And in fact, drones have risen enormously in the civilian realm over the last five to 10 years. And so controlling their export is really difficult.”
Analysis: The Future Of Geothermal Energy
Miles below the Earth’s surface, there’s enough thermal energy to power all of humanity for the foreseeable future. It’s called geothermal energy, and it’s poised to play an increasingly large role as a source of always available, renewable power. Now, there are a number of startups in the geothermal space, working to figure out how to access this heat in difficult to reach geographies, at a price point that makes sense. And it’s even gotten the attention of oil and gas industry giants, who are interested in greening their portfolios while sticking to their core competencies – extracting energy resources from deep within the Earth.
Analysis: How China Came To Dominate Rare Earth Minerals (WSJ Video)
Neodymium is critical to making the wheels of a Tesla spin or creating sound in Apple’s Airpods, and China dominates the mining and processing of this rare-earth mineral. So the U.S. and its allies are building their own supply chain. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge/WSJ
Science: Rise Of ‘Exascale Supercomputers’ (Video)
The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.
The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power. So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers. But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.
Medicine: ‘How Vaccines Actually Work’ (Video)
Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease, and they have been saving human lives for hundreds of years. Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease.
Naval Warfare: ‘Seawolf Class Submarines’ (Video)
The Seawolf class is a class of nuclear-powered fast attack submarines (SSN) in service with the United States Navy. The class was the intended successor to the Los Angeles class, and design work began in 1983. A fleet of 29 submarines was to be built over a ten-year period, but that was reduced to 12 submarines.
Future Driving: Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging
Cornell is pioneering an innovative approach for the wireless charging of electric vehicles, forklifts and other mobile machines, while they remain in motion.
Inside Views: ‘USS Gerald R. Ford’ Aircraft Carrier
As the world’s largest aircraft carrier in the world’s dominant navy, the USS Gerald R. Ford is gargantuan. The aircraft carrier took eight years to build, several more years to test, and is large enough to tower over the biggest building in plenty of large towns. Named for the 38th President of the United States, the Gerald Ford is the lead ship of the US navy. It clocks in at over 1,000ft or nearly three American football fields in length, and nearly 250 feet high. Contained in that massive space, the aircraft carrier also has a whopping 25 decks. The massive ship, which can house over 4,500 people and carry over 75 aircraft, is powered by two nuclear reactors, and fully-loaded, weighs in at over 100,000 tonnes. That makes her the largest warship ever constructed. The total building cost is estimated at over 17 billion dollars, including 5 billion spent on research alone. After several delays it came in at 22% over the intended budget.
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