Future City in Science Fiction Movies

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When watching science fiction movies, the jaw-dropping high-tech equipment in it all refreshed our worldview. Have you ever thought about these fictional high-tech in the movie, will one day really come into our lives? It really is possible!

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"Mission Impossible 4" once appeared such a scene: Tom Cruise drove to the headquarters, using a touch screen on the windshield. In fact, this is also a new direction for the development of screen interaction technology in the future. Now this technology has been initially realized. With the help of AR technology, the entire windshield is transformed into a huge computer display. It is connected to sensors such as infrared camera radar on the car to provide drivers with real-world reminders such as road conditions Effective information.

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In addition, artificial intelligence robots in "Interstellar", face recognition in "Iron Man", and fingerprint recognition in "Sixth Day" have been practiced. Human prophets are not others, but these brain-sci-fi writers. The "smart city" featuring digitalization, networking, and intelligence is already the "future urban form" in which major cities around the world are racing to develop.

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In the movie "Iron Man", Jarvis is an intelligent steward of Iron Man. He can think independently and help the host handle various tasks and calculate various information. The development of Iron Man's mech and the update of the Ark reactor are inseparable. It's assisting. Smart home is based on the house, using network communication technology, automatic control technology, audio and video technology, etc. to integrate facilities related to home life, build an efficient management system for residential facilities and family schedule affairs, improve home security, convenience, Comfortable and artistic.

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In the film "Public Enemy of Machinery", Will Smith's fully-automated car can not only accurately identify the surrounding traffic, but also identify the driver's condition. The film is exaggerated, but the concept of "intelligent transportation" has long become the mainstream of research in the field of transportation in various countries. Some people call this system "Vehicle-Road Coordination". As the name implies, it integrates all vehicles, road facilities, and even pedestrians into a network. Through information sharing, the rational use of road space resources improves vehicle safety and road capacity.

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In addition to the perfect human-computer interaction capabilities, the medical robots in "Super Heroes" have a data chip with more than 10,000 diseases and medical procedures in the heart, which can truly achieve the "medical treatment" for patients. If there is such a lovely person around you, perceive your body temperature change, detect your illness and injury, and give the most intimate comfort and care in the first time, is it a very happy thing?

Death Valley

 

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Death Valley, a place in the United States, is a very harsh and terrifying place. It has the second highest temperature observation record on the planet, with a maximum temperature of 57 degrees Celsius. Death Valley, as its name suggests, once plundered countless lives. It is said that in the winter of 1849, a gold rushing team crossed the valley. Because it could not withstand the harsh climate here, most people were killed, hence the name of Death Valley. Death Valley is one of the hottest places in the world, but at night it is very cold and sometimes it encounters storms.

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In addition to the harsh climate and living environment, the human hell in Death Valley also has many uncertain organisms. If you are bitten, there may be only a pile of bones left in no time. People dare to explore what these organisms are, even those with a strong desire to explore, have not thought about contacting these unknown organisms in the past.

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However, it is strange that the Valley of the Dead turned out to be a "great paradise" for beasts, because there are more than 300 species of birds, more than 2,000 wild asses, and more than 20 types of snakes; it is really hard to believe that at such high temperatures, How do these animals survive under such harsh conditions? Some people may think that there is no hole in the other side of Death Valley! There are many other names in the Valley of the Dead, such as the Dead Crater, Dry Bone Valley, and Funeral Hill. This place is located in the desert valley of California in the United States. It faces the Sierra Nevada in the east, 225 kilometers long, 6-26 kilometers wide, and has an area of ​​1408 Square kilometers, cliffs on both sides of the canyon, the terrain is very dangerous.

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About three million years ago, this place in the Death Valley, the United States, was caused by the gravity of the earth that crushed the crust into huge rock blocks. At that time, some rock blocks protruded into mountains, and some tilted into valleys. Until the Ice Age, mountains of lakes poured in. Low terrain, drowning the entire pelvic floor, and then after millions of years of flame-like hardships, this great salt lake left over from the ancient century finally dried up, and there is such a strange phenomenon in the valley of the dead.

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It is said that the huge rocks there will slowly move on their own, leaving a long trajectory on the dry lake bed, because this strange phenomenon has troubled scientists for decades. But the mystery was later revealed. The reason for the stone's movement was from the strong currents blowing in the lake in the winter. The current caused by the strong wind can reach two meters per second, which is enough to move the stone. In addition, there is another movement of the stone. The important factor is (microbiota). The microbiota is composed of cyanobacteria single-cell algae and other small organisms. They secrete smooth substances and fall off to form sedimentary sludge, which provides a smooth movement platform for boulders. This is also used by scientists. It took decades to find out why the stones moved by themselves.

How a 32-year-old turned a high school yearbook idea into a $3.2 billion business

Published Wed, Jan 8 20209:54 PM ESTUpdated Thu, Jan 9 20209:29 PM EST

Karen Gilchrist@_KARENGILCHRIST

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She founded a $1 billion start-up by 30. Now she’s taking on the tech...

SYDNEY — It’s one thing to start a company. It’s quite another to start one that competes with tech titans like Microsoft and Adobe.

But that’s exactly what Australian entrepreneur Melanie Perkins did when she built a design product to rival the tech giants.

“Our goal was to take the entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and then make it accessible to the whole world,” said Perkins.

Perkins is the 32-year-old co-founder and CEO of Canva, a free-to-use, online design platform.

The young founder started the company in Australia in 2013 in a bid to make design accessible to all — be it for logos, business cards or presentations. Within five years, she made headlines as one of tech’s youngest female CEOs, at just 30.

Two years on, the Sydney-headquartered company is now worth $3.2 billion, giving Perkins and her co-founder and now- fiance, Cliff Obrecht, an estimated personal fortune of $900 million. And to think, it all started with a high school yearbook business.

Canva for Enterprise

Canva

A teenage dream

Perkins was just 19 when she was first struck by the idea. It was 2006 and she and Obrecht were studying at university in Perth.

The teen would earn a little income on the side by teaching other students design programs. But students found the platforms offered by the likes of Microsoft and Adobe “crazy hard” and she felt there must be a better way.

“People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that seemed completely ridiculous,” Perkins told CNBC Make It. “I thought that in the future it was all going to be online and collaborative and much, much simpler than these really hard tools.”

So she and Obrecht set to work making that vision a reality.

Starting small

With few resources and little business experience behind them, the couple started small and created an online school yearbook design business, Fusion Books, to test out their idea.

They launched a website for students to “collaborate and design their profile pages and articles.” The pair would then print the yearbooks and deliver them to schools across Australia.

Melanie Perkins and her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht in Perkins’ mother’s living room in Perth, Australia in 2010.

Canva

“My mum’s living room became my office, and my boyfriend became my business partner, and we started enabling schools to create their yearbooks really, really simply,” explained Perkins.

The business was a success, and remains active today. But for Perkins, it was just the first step in what she called her “crazy, big dream” for a one-stop-shop design site — so she began chasing investors.

Pitching to Silicon Valley

A few years later in 2010, while at a conference in Perth, Perkins received her first big break.

A chance encounter with Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai saw him invite Perkins to San Francisco to pitch her idea. Just hours later, the legendary venture capitalist, clearly impressed, was connecting her with his contacts.

“I thought that he didn’t really like what I had to say. He was on his phone, and I thought that meant he wasn’t really engaged in what I had to say about the future of publishing,” Perkins recalled.

“But then I got home and realized that he was actually introducing me to a few people.”

Making waves

Building new relationships with Silicon Valley was far from plain sailing, Perkins soon discovered.

Tai, an avid kitesurfer, was keen for Perkins and Obrecht to get networking at MaiTai, his unique retreat for investors and kitesurfing enthusiasts. So she had to pick up the sport — fast!

“Every time he (Tai) would say how was my business going, he’d also be like ‘how’s your kitesurfing going?’” Perkins recalled.

“I had not done it before — and, to be honest, it’s not something that I would normally, naturally try,” she said.

“But yeah, decided to give it a go because when you don’t have any connections, you don’t have any network, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through.”

Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams.

Canva

Growing the team

The new skill served her well. Before long, the young couple was winning over major investors and building out Canva’s design platform with a fast-growing team of tech engineers.

But it was in 2012 that the business began in earnest. With the help of their tech advisor and the co-founder of Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen, Perkins and Obrecht found a tech co-founder in Cameron Adams and a tech developer in Dave Hearnden.

Months later, at the close of their first funding round, the company was oversubscribed. That initial $1.5 million investment was even matched by the Australian government in a bid to keep the company on Aussie shores.

The following year, the site went live, allowing subscribers to create a variety of online designs for free.

A design for the future

Today, Canva has helped create close to 2 billion designs in 190 countries and won celebrity backing from the likes of Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson.

In October 2019, an $85 million funding round led by Silicon Valley investor Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital gave the company a valuation of $3.2 billion.

Perkins said she plans to use the additional funding to expand the team of 700 across Sydney, Beijing and Manila, while also building out the company’s paid services, Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise.

Canva’s Sydney office in 2018

Canva

That strategy will bring Perkins the closest she’s come yet to competing directly with the professional design tools created by tech giants like Microsoft and Adobe.

But with 85% of Fortune 500 companies already using her platform, the young founder says she’s up for the challenge.

“I think I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself. And I think that sort of internal locus of control has been pretty strong,” said Perkins.

“So while the expectations around our company and what we’re expected to do is sort of increasing, that’s nothing on what I’ve got on myself!”

Why Can Polar Bears Resist Cold?

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The king of the Arctic, the polar bear, lives on the coast or islands near the Arctic and withstands the rigors of the cold year round. So why can polar bears live in cold environments? This is actually closely related to the structure and shape of the polar bear's body and its living habits.

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Let's start with the material composition of polar bears. The main food source for adult polar bears is seals rich in whale fat, allowing them to build a thick thermal insulation layer, so that 50% of their body weight is fat, and the fat is mainly distributed under the polar bear's skin, a high content of subcutaneous fat The layers provide conditions for polar bears to withstand the cold.

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Fat is a good substance that stores and supplies energy in the body. 1 gram of fat is completely broken down in the body to produce 38 kilojoules of energy, which is more than twice as much as 1 gram of protein or 1 gram of sugar. And fat is a bad thermal conductive material, which can effectively play a role in heat insulation. Very thick subcutaneous fat reduces the heat loss in the polar bear body and effectively resists the severe cold.

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Second, the secret of polar bears' protection from the cold is inseparable from their special fur. The polar bear's hair appears to be "white", but when observed by electron microscope, it is found that they are actually hollow structures. The hair does not contain any pigments and is transparent. This special capillary can pass ultraviolet light along the core, helping the polar bear to absorb almost all the light shining on it, increasing its temperature inside the body.

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In addition, polar bears are "still" about 67% of their life and begin to hibernate when the North Pole enters the coldest period, minimizing the loss of energy in its body to retain more energy substances to maintain body temperature.

Elephants No Ivory to Protect Themselves

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The image of an elephant has always been kind and cute. Elephants can only be touched in cages or elephant shows in zoos. In fact, docile elephants are very suitable for humans, but in Malaysia In the elephant habitat, elephants can't grow tusks. What is going on?

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In Malaysia, there are many wild elephants, but the ivory of the elephants has been cut down and sold by merciless poachers, but the elephants that have gone to the ivory will fall to the ground in pain for a long time. After years of being attacked by poachers, a phenomenon of the elephants made everyone very distressed.

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Because poachers have cut off the ivory of elephants for many years, a large number of elephants have now adapted to the time when they have no teeth, so the offspring born have no teeth. This phenomenon not only occurs in Malaysia, but also in the world. It is happening in gregarious places.

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This situation of ivory-free evolution in order to prevent the attack of ivory makes all the people who like elephants very distressed. Experts who specialize in elephants also said that they have never seen such things in more than 20 years of research. In the past, only a few male elephants did not have teeth, but now all elephants no longer have teeth.

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In some parts of Africa, even 90% of elephants do not have teeth. The destruction of forests and the illegal trade in ivory have forced this cute group of elephants to have no ivory. Thousands of elephants were threatened by poachers, so the local government set up an anti-poacher team to deal with hateful poachers. The elephant's encounter was really miserable.

What Will Happen In The 2020s

Expert Speak – 

It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us.

One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bill Gates, is that people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade.

This is an important decade for mankind. It is a decade in which we will need to find answers to questions that hang over us like last night’s celebrations.

I am an optimist and believe in society’s ability to find the will to face our challenges and the intelligence to find solutions to them.

So, I am starting out 2020 in an optimistic mood and here are some predictions for the decade that we are now in.

1/ The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one. It will require countries and institutions to re-allocate capital from other endeavors to fight against a warming planet. This is the decade we will begin to see this re-allocation of capital. We will see carbon taxed like the vice that it is in most countries around the world this decade, including in the US. We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate. We will see massive capital investments made in protecting critical regions and infrastructure. We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate. We will see installed solar power worldwide go from ~650GW currently to over 20,000GW by the end of this decade. All of these things and many more will cause the capital markets to focus on and fund the climate issue to the detriment of many other sectors.

2/ Automation will continue to take costs out of operating many of the services and systems that we rely on to live and be productive. The fight for who should have access to this massive consumer surplus will define the politics of the 2020s. We will see capitalism come under increasing scrutiny and experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.

3/ China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower leveraging its technical prowess and ability to adapt quickly to changing priorities (see #1). Conversely the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view.

4/ Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move. The US will be hamstrung by regulatory restraints and will be slow to move, allowing other countries and regions to lead the crypto sector. Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.

5/ A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc. The emergence of decentralized consumer applications will be slow to take hold and a killer decentralized consumer app will not emerge until the latter part of the decade.

6/ Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.

7/ The exploration and commercialization of space will be dominated by private companies as governments increasingly step back from these investments. The early years of this decade will produce a wave of hype and investment in the space business but returns will be slow to come and we will be in a trough of disillusionment on the space business as the decade comes to an end.

8/ Mass surveillance by governments and corporations will become normal and expected this decade and people will increasingly turn to new products and services to protect themselves from surveillance. The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy.

9/ We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade. Age and experience will be less valued by shareholders, voters, and other stakeholders and vision and courage will be valued more.

10/ Continued advancements in genetics will produce massive wins this decade as cancer and other terminal illnesses become well understood and treatable. Fertility and reproduction will be profoundly changed. Genetics will also create new diseases and moral/ethical issues that will confound and confuse society. Balancing the gains and losses that come from genetics will be our greatest challenge in this decade.

That’s ten predictions, enough for now and enough for me. I hope I made you think as much as I made myself think writing this. That’s the goal. It is impossible to be right about all of this. But it is important to be thinking about it.

I know that comments here at AVC are broken at the moment and so I look forward to the conversation on email and Twitter and elsewhere.