The weirdest, most disruptive, and coolest science/tech stories of 2015

[51CTO.com Quick Translation] With new achievements in fields such as renewable energy, robotics and space exploration, this year's scientific and technological development has once again made amazing strides.

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Bizarre

It's the end of another year, and it's time to share with you the most interesting and sometimes weird science/tech stories that have come out this year. This year, we have witnessed drones throwing flames, cool photos of Pluto, and great progress in quantum computing, and these are just a few of the things we have to say. Without further ado, let's get started.

Drones that throw flames to roast turkeys

Apparently, we can use a flame-throwing drone like this to roast our own Thanksgiving dinner. Although the roasted turkey seemed a little burnt, and the man who operated the drone also attracted the attention of the police, he was not charged in the end. In addition, the man, Austin Haughwout, who was only 19 years old, was also interviewed by the police earlier this year for trying to realize the shooting function of the drone.

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Ultimate Robot

Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center have created a flying robotic vehicle that can wander and collect samples in the sparsely populated space. The vehicle—which is designed like a quadcopter to survive the thin atmosphere of Mars and the vacuum between the asteroid belt and moons—uses a lander as a chassis that can recharge its batteries and switch between orbits. The Extreme Access Flyer and its designers hope to develop a series of vehicles that can travel to shadowed areas within craters, take small soil samples, and test them for solid water readings from orbiting spacecraft. Given the need to operate constantly on a vast world, the device could perform hundreds of missions over the course of an exploration cycle. And its small size means that a single lander could carry multiple of these sample-collecting vehicles, so a failure in one wouldn't be catastrophic.

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Human brain controls vehicle

As seen above, researcher Zhang Zhao is wearing a brain signal reading device and using it to control his car through brain waves to drive steadily during a parade at Nankai University in Tianjin. Researchers from the ISI laboratory of Nankai University claim that the car can move forward, reverse, stop suddenly, and lock/unlock under the command of the human brain control vehicle system. The system can capture EEG (brain wave) signals from the user and send control commands to the vehicle, the researchers explained in an interview with Reuters.

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No driver? No ticket required?

A self-driving car built by Google was spotted in Mountain View, California, where Google is based, in November. According to reports, the Google self-driving car was driving at 24 miles per hour on a road with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour, causing a traffic jam. Please note - the picture above is not Google's self-driving car.

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Gremlins!

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is currently working on a program to launch and recover multiple small drones from one or more existing large aircraft such as the B-52, B-1 or C-130. The program, named Gremlins, aims to use large aircraft such as bombers or transport aircraft as launch and landing platforms for drone formations, and even certain fighters or small fixed-wing aircraft as platforms to release drones and pursue enemy targets that are already out of attack range. When these "Gremlins" complete their mission, C-130 transport aircraft will be able to recover them in the air and transport them back to the ground, and ground crews can re-debug them within 24 hours to prepare for another mission, the Defense Planning Agency explained.

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Wall-E in the real world

A replica of WALL-E, built by 17-year-old Bolivian student Esteban Quispe, appears in a garbage dump in Patacamaya, south of La Paz. Quispe assembled the WALL-E robot entirely from waste scattered across the Andean highlands. He hopes that this solar-powered robot will help mechanize agriculture in Patacamaya.

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Special wing design

The complex aircraft design, called the Preliminary Low Drag Aerodynamic Design, or Prandtl-D, was unveiled this year at NASA's Armstrong Air Force Research Center in Edwards, California. A boomerang-like design, the aircraft cuts fuel consumption by up to 11 percent through a new wing-fixed air-entry mechanism, NASA explained. Pictured here is Prandtl-D No. 2, which has a wingspan of 12.5 feet, as it wraps up a flight test and begins landing.

Not really a drone

Zhang Xiaowen sits in a Snowstorm, a personal flying device created by a team of engineering students at the National University of Singapore (NUS), as they discuss their work in the NUS gymnasium. The prototype, built by the team in collaboration with engineers from the School of Engineering Design Centre and academics from the university, has 24 engines, each with a 76cm diameter propeller, and can support a passenger weighing no more than 70kg for about five minutes. The flight control system it uses provides automatic flight control, which is essentially equivalent to the manual control capabilities of an unmanned aircraft and a pilot.

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Secret arrest?

Australian Federal Police raided the home of Craig Steven, creator of the virtual currency Bitcoin, on Sydney's North Shore. According to Reuters witnesses, Australian police raided the home of the man last Wednesday, who Wired magazine pointed out is likely the creator of the virtual currency Bitcoin. The purchase registration information for the corresponding property is signed by Wright, which Wired magazine pointed out is likely the real name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the suspect who first released the Bitcoin code under a pseudonym in 2009.

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Quantum computers

The D-Wave 2X quantum computer, shown above, was on display at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. As a quantum computing implementation within the NASA Advanced Supercomputer (NAS) design, this 1,097-qubit system is the world's largest quantum technology effort and was built by NASA, Google, and the University Space Science Research Association.

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Energy Tree

Two "wind trees", a renewable energy innovation. The above picture shows the sunset scene taken during the 2015 World Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Le Bourget near Paris, France.

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Jetpack

The Martin jetpack, launched by New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft, soars freely in the air while a pilot controls it remotely from the ground during a demonstration at a water park in Shenzhen, China. Kuang-Chi Science, a Hong Kong-listed Chinese company and a shareholder of Martin Aircraft, will be responsible for selling the aircraft in mainland China, with an estimated price of US$249,902.

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Solar installations everywhere

A man walks past a solar panel while talking on the phone at Dubai's Mohammed Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. Dubai is investing billions of dollars in clean energy generation, with the government saying Saturday it hopes to install solar panels on the roofs of all its buildings by 2030. Dubai, a fast-growing desert city with a population of 2.4 million, is located in the world's hottest region, which means it needs a lot of air conditioning and desalination for drinking water. The government will encourage property owners to install solar panels on their roofs and connect the electricity they generate to the local power grid, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum said in a statement. And as mentioned earlier, all buildings in Dubai are expected to have solar panels on their roofs by 2030.

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Big "pot lid"

The 500-meter (1,640-foot) diameter Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) is being built in Shanpingtang County, Guizhou Province, China. When it is completed in September 2016, it will be the largest telescope in the world.

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I can hear you

Workers are testing the wall-penetrating radar Retwis, made by the Czech manufacturer Pardubice. According to the company, Retwis is a portable radar product that can detect and display the specific location of living things behind walls or under ruins, and capture their movements and even extremely subtle activities in real time, such as breathing.

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Motorcycle Robot

Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. demonstrated a prototype of its motorcycle-riding robot "MOTOBOT Ver.1" at the 44th Tokyo Motor Show held in Tokyo this year. The self-developed "motorcycle robot" displayed by Japanese motorcycle manufacturer Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. can emit a blue forward-tracking light, and once the light hits pedestrians and takes a photo, it will brake itself. As shown above, the robot rides on an equally stylish sports motorcycle. The humanoid robot, called "MOTOBOT Ver.1", can analyze its current location and use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to navigate via satellite. In addition, it can ride at speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles) and has two sets of small training wheels to help it maintain balance when traveling at speeds below 5 kilometers per hour.

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The Year of Marty McFly

38-year-old Toby Fulp stood at the entrance of Burger King, holding an iPhone and dressed as a character in the movie "Back to the Future Part II". This day was a very memorable time point in the movie - October 21, 2015. In this movie released in 1989, the protagonist Marty McFly used a time machine to travel to this day.

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boom!

The barred spiral galaxy NGC 4639 appears in an undated image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 4639 is about 70 million light-years away and is part of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, a group of about 1,500 galaxies. NGC 4639 also hides a massive black hole that is consuming the surrounding gas, NASA explained.

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I can see my home here

A visitor experiences the Birdly flight simulator at the "Wonderful World of Animation" exhibition at the Museum of Design in Zurich. Birdly simulates a red kite flying over New York City and uses a platform to control the user's body to achieve a realistic flying experience. The flight simulator was developed by scientists at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Big Blue's move toward quantum computing

IBM recently received funding from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) to build a series of key components of a so-called universal quantum computer. As you may remember, IARPA is an agency under the National Intelligence Agency, and the funding received by Big Blue is mainly for its Logical Qubits (LogiQ) project, which aims to develop related technologies to realize logical qubits from a large number of imperfect physical qubits, ultimately overcoming the inherent limitations of current quantum systems.

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Radar upgraded to LiDAR

In a project called Modular Optical Aperture Building Blocks, or MOABBs, DARPA researchers hope to create extremely compact Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) systems—which use light to profile objects and radio waves to enable radar-like dynamic monitoring—that could help high-tech systems see like never before and enable a host of new applications.

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Tesla has achieved self-driving... to a certain extent

According to IDG News Service: This most cutting-edge consumer technology has already appeared in current commercial products. Tesla Model S sedans have achieved autonomous driving functions through this year's software upgrade, which can ensure that the car body maintains a certain distance from other vehicles and can even change lanes and parking positions on its own. In a series of software updates in October this year, millions of Tesla cars have completed the upgrade, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk even released a video that he called "crazy" - in which the driver's hands completely left the steering wheel. Although Tesla cars cannot achieve fully autonomous driving at present, they have broken the situation where autonomous driving technology is monopolized by Google, Apple and some automakers, and will fundamentally change the way people travel in the future.

Strange satellite

If Pluto and its moons weren't bizarre enough, scientists at the SETI Institute suggest looking at Hydra's ridiculously fast spin rate. In fact, most of Pluto's moons - including Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra - are spinning in an unusual state. So when NASA's New Horizon spacecraft arrived at the right location, its observations of the spin rates of Pluto's known moons surprised quite a few people. One of the moons, Nix, is named for its tilted spin axis. And the more distant moon Hydra spins like a gyroscope, rotating 89 times per sidereal period. "If Hydra were to spin any faster, material on its surface would be blown away by the huge centrifugal force," NASA noted.

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Can you see me?

Engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envision stealthy drones as ideal vehicles for specialized missions, including delivering humanitarian or military aid to civilians or military personnel in hard-to-reach locations. The program to develop such a drone is called the Inland, Controlled, Air-Release, Non-Recoverable System — or ICARUS for short. DARPA describes the ICARUS drone as being able to meet the following specific requirements: "The drone must be able to deliver the payload within four hours or 30 minutes after sunrise (assuming a nighttime launch), whichever comes first."

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Liquid water on red planets

NASA said in September that Mars has intermittent flows of liquid water -- a major discovery in decades of searching for life in space and a potential resource for future human space travel. The evidence for the water comes from Georgia Tech researchers working on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO. The 4,800-pound spacecraft has been photographing and measuring Mars since its launch in 2006. During its operations, researchers with the imaging spectrometer detected mysterious dark streaks on a Martian slope that are a telltale sign of hydrated minerals. The phenomenon has been observed at dozens of locations on Mars.

Drones travel with schools of fish

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is developing a drone that can travel on the surface of the water and also dive into the water like a school of fish. The Navy has named this amphibious drone FLIMMER and says it combines the characteristics of an aircraft and a submarine, that is, it first lands in the water and then gradually sinks. After that, it will be able to move freely underwater like a school of fish.

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The vacuum tube is back

Vacuum tube technology may sound like an old term, but scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are working on a new project to bring this widely used technology into the new era. The new program, called Vacuum Electronics Science and Technology, or INVEST, aims to build systems that support higher RF signal frequencies and use the resulting "high-sound" effect to open up unprecedented bands for application scenarios, including more flexible communications and data transmission in military and civilian environments.

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Network protection enters the power grid system

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is actively seeking to develop a defense capability for the national power grid system, and the specific system is called the Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Identification (RADICS) program, which can automatically detect and respond to various types of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the United States. DARPA is currently in a state of urgency and must quickly use network isolation and response capabilities to address the widespread and ongoing threat of cyber attacks on the power grid and its related systems.

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The return of supersonic vehicles

If Airbus and Aerion have their way, supersonic private jets could become a reality by 2023. The two companies unveiled their partnership in November and unveiled the result of their joint research: the AS2, a 170-foot-long needle-shaped three-engine jet that can break the sound barrier at more than 1,200 miles per hour, which is equivalent to about Mach 1.5. The jet is expected to be tested in 2021 - it will be able to accommodate 12 passengers - and go on sale in 2023 if all goes well.

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The Emoji family welcomes a new member

From IDG News Service: Sixteen years after the first mobile phone with a screen, Oxford English Press has officially named an emoji as its word of the year. 😂 The smiling tearful emoji was used very frequently in 2015 - accounting for nearly one-fifth of all emojis used in the UK and the US. But what few people know is that emojis were originally developed by NTT DoCoMo for its I-mode service in 1999, and a large part of their design was inspired by Japanese food, culture, social interaction and festivals.

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Smile!

This NASA photo of Pluto is a composite of four images taken by New Horizon's Long Term Reconnaissance Camera Instrument (LORRI), combined with color data from the Ralph instrument, to create the above color surface image released on July 24, 2015. The image was taken 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away, and the zoomed-in image shows details as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers).

The weirdest, wackiest, and coolest sci/tech stories of 2015

[Translated by 51CTO. Please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]