Category Archives: Futurist

Taco Bell has recently announced plans for a restaurant redesign that will prioritize digital elements for their on-the-go customers. And one such futuristic location, which utilizes contactless features, has just been unveiled in New York City.

The beloved fast-food chain is cutting the ribbon on its very first digital-only U.S. restaurant today, located in none other than the city's Times Square area, a prime location for brand peacocking and offbeat customer attractions. And naturally, this restaurant puts on full display the high-tech vision that Taco Bell has for its future.

RELATED: 7 New Fast-Food Chicken Sandwiches Everyone's Talking About.

The Times Square Cantina, located in the iconic Paramount Building, will only be fulfilling digital orders. Customers will have to place orders through their phone apps or at one of the ten self-order kiosks, and pick them up at the checkout counter or from one of the code-operated automated cubbies. This location will also sell Taco Bell merch, like keychains, pins, and pens, which can be ordered through the digitized kiosks.

The chain's cantina concept has been around for several years and is a way for Taco Bell to entice its urban customers. These locations provide a more upscale experience by serving specialty alcoholic beverages and providing a view of the open kitchen reminiscent of high-end restaurants. From time to time, you'll also find exclusive menu items on offer.

The new Times Square location follows the recent opening of the chain's first drive-thru cantina operated by a franchisee in Danville, Calif., which has seen great success with its outdoor socializing area. Both restaurants bring Taco Bell a step closer to reaching its ambitious goal of 10,000 global restaurants in the next decade.

For more on Taco Bell, check out 5 Major Changes You'll See on Taco Bell's Menu, and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter to get the latest restaurant news delivered straight to your inbox.

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Taco Bell Just Opened a Futuristic New Location In This Major City - Yahoo Lifestyle

Who's going to be an astronaut?New Deal

NASA has signed paperwork to explore the prospect of letting a company film what would be the first reality show set in space Space.com reports.

The show, titled Space Hero, claims to be the worlds first ever global casting show where contestants compete for a trip to the International Space Station, according to a statement, with flights being offered up by Axiom Space.

Despite the agreement, nothing is set in stone just yet. The document signed by NASA this week does not authorize a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, as a NASA spokesperson told Space.com. Instead, its meant to facilitate initial cooperation and information sharing between NAS and Space Hero.

The reality show is planning to invite anybody over 18 to enter the competition, with first flights to the space station tentatively scheduled for 2023. According to the shows statement, the mission could also include a 24/7 immersive and interactive livestream.

The news comes after billionaire Jared Isaacman announced a crew of four non-professionals last month who will be joining him on a trip around the Earth on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule some time this fall.

Equality is our mission, Space Hero co-founder Deborah Sass said in the statement. We encourage women and men from all over the world to apply to become the Space Hero. This competition is a safe environment for everyone. Dont let gender be a hurdle.

READ MORE: Space Hero reality show competition signs space act agreement with NASA [Space.com]

More on the ISS: Watch NASA Astronauts Take SpaceX Spacecraft for a Joyride

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NASA Considering Reality TV Show Filmed on Space Station - Futurism

Last week, Elon Musks neural implant company Neuralink released a video of a primate, whod been implanted with its technology, playing the game Pong with its thoughts.

The technologically flashybut otherwise disappointing demo neuroscientists first developed and demonstrated mind-control tech in primates decades ago represented Neuralinks growing prominence in the public sphere, and raised important questions about privacy, data ownership, and biomedical ethics.

While Im excited about the therapeutic applications of brain chips for those with movement and memory problems, I worry about the widespread use of brain chips in the future, cognitive psychologist Susan Schneider told Observer.

Schneider, whos the Director of Florida Atlantic Universitys Center for the Future Mind, has criticized Elon Musks ambitions for Neuralink for years. In 2019, she said that merging the human mind with AI, as Musk said he wants the neural implant to do, would be akin to suicide.

Without proper regulations, your innermost thoughts and biometric data could be sold to the highest bidder, Schneider added in her latest interview.

Neurological data gathered as part of a medical experiment or treatment is protected by regulations like HIPAA. But there are no legal barriers preventing a company like Neuralink from harvesting and selling cognitive data through a consumer neural implant, like a more invasive version of how Facebook monetizes your data.

And while a neural implant capable of doing that is still far in the future, the fact that technology could outpace the regulations meant to protect the public is alarming.

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Expert: Neuralink Could Sell Your Private Thoughts to the "Highest Bidder" - Futurism

Scientists have long observed a growing dent in the Earths magnetic field just above the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The South Atlantic Anomaly, as it has become known, can wreak havoc with satellites and spacecraft that happen to pass over it.

Now, scientists suspect it may have a connection to two mysterious blobs of dense material discovered in the Earths mantle that recent research suggests could be the partial remains of Theia, an ancient Mars-sized protoplanet believed to have smashed into the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, as Business Insider reports.

Last month, a team of scientists led by Qian Yuan, a graduate student from Arizona State University, presented the idea that the two underground blobs, each millions of times larger than Mount Everest, could have been shards left over from the collision.

Yuan and his colleagues found seismological evidence that the blobs, formally known as large low-shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs), were quite different from the rock in the rest of the Earths mantle.

The blobs may also have a connection to the South Atlantic Anomaly, as our planets magnetic field is generated by the swirling iron in Earths outer core, wherein hotter material rises into the partially solid mantle above and is replaced by sinking, denser material, a process known as convection.

Scientists believe the strange dip in the field is caused by something huge interrupting this process under the Atlantic Ocean.

As it turns out, the relatively hot and dense qualities of the two LLSVPs could technically be significant enough to affect these convection currents, Yuan proposed.

One of these blobs also happens to be near southern Africa, not too far from the South Atlantic Anomaly.

But its not a perfect fit, problematizing the theory.

Why doesnt the same weakness occur in the magnetic field above the Pacific, where the other province is? Technical University of Denmark geophysicist Christopher Finlay told BI.

Its a compelling theory, which could shed light on the mysteries surrounding the magnetic field surrounding our planet that protects us from the Suns harmful radiation.

But until Yuans claims can be evaluated, we will have to take it for what it is: a theory.

READ MORE: Remnants of an ancient planet buried inside the Earth may be the cause of a weak spot in the magnetic field [Business Insider]

More on the anomaly: Scientists: Earths Magnetic Field Could Shift 100x Faster Than Observed

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Anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field May Be Caused by Buried Fragment of Ancient Planet - Futurism

The Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 crossover weve always wanted.

Cyberpunk 2077 unfortunately never hit the same heights as CD Projekts other whopper of a game, The Witcher 3. But, if you ever happened to want to know what Yennefer would look if she was in the futuristic title, this cosplay will be sure to settle any curiosities you may have.

Flung into the cosplaying spotlight today we have the delectable Oksana_Frost showcasing her top-drawer Yennefer attire but with a twist. Instead of the sweet aroma of Lilac and gooseberries, Yennefer enters the Night City in a haze of cigarettes and car fumes.

Just in case youre new to The Witcher world, let me give you a quick briefing: Although Yennefer didnt appear in the firstWitchergame, she did appear in flashbacks inThe Witcher 2: Assassins of Kingsand then found herself as a main character inThe Witcher 3: Wild Huntplaying a sorceress and Geralt of Rivias true love.

Russian photographer oksana_frost takes the very essence of Yennefer in her stunning cosplay by changing the powerful enchantress into one of Cyberpunks cyborgs.

As you can see from the images, Yennefers arm is laced in wires and contraptions poking out from her skin as well as her face. Her eyes, too, have changed from their usual violet colour to a hypnotic red stare.

Known for her elegant attire, this Yennefer cosplay can be seen incorporating some of Cyberpunks boldness throughout her dress with strips of harsh gold giving this cosplay a real revolutionary statement.

Its brilliantly designed and cleverly constructed by oksana_frost as she mixes in two very different worlds into one striking cosplay. I love it. If youd like to see more of Oksanas photography and many of the other talents she lends her hand to, you can follow her over on Instagram.

While you are here, make sure to check out our own review for the Netflix seriesThe Witcherhere. If gaming is more your style,The Witcher 3: Wild Huntis available on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Have something to tell us about this article?

Rachael, who is Head of Culture, has been gaming for many years. Some of her favourite video games include The Witcher 3 and The Last of Us but also loves a good indie title. Gaming Culture is where her heart lies and spends many hours sieving through gaming fan art and cosplay displays. Other than gaming, Rachael is a book nerd and music lover.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Meets The Witchers Yennefer in Futuristic Cosplay - DualShockers

Several new Battlefield 6 details have been revealed by a storied leaker of EA's game, including a somewhat futuristic setting.

As you can see below, reputable Battlefield-related leaker Tom Henderson has published a newsletter outlining several new details about the unannounced Battlefield 6. In the newsletter, Henderson claims that Battlefield 6 has a slightly futuristic setting, being set around 10 years in the future from the present day.

Through this, Battlefield 6's developers will be able to implement technology that is only just being experimented with by today's military, according to Henderson. We should expect to see military robots, drones, and jets, as well as your usual helicopters and tanks.

Battlefield 6 will feature a "revolutionary" campaign, according to Henderson's newsletter. You'll operate a specialist team, and you can select which superpower to fight for: the USA, or Russia. Additionally, the campaign will feature co-op support throughout, so you'll be able to fight in your squad alongside your friends.

Apparently, Henderson has heard Battlefield 6's multiplayer referred to as "Battlefield 3/4 on steroids," and bigger and better than before. The leaker also claims that there's a battle royale mode on the way, but possibly after the main game launches, where you'll be able to play as one of four classes, each with different perks.

Finally, Henderson reveals that this year's Battlefield will simply be called "Battlefield." There's no added flair on this year's shooter from EA, and we can expect to see a reveal trailer in May without actual gameplay, which lines up with what a journalist at Venture Beat previously claimed.

Rumors of a Battlefield game launching in 2021 first circulated in January, when Henderson claimed that EA was designing the forthcoming game's maps with 128 players in mind. At the time, Henderson also claimed that the unannounced Battlefield game would be heavily inspired by Battlefield 3, welcome news if you're a fan of the series' past.

Last month, an EA official revealed that Criterion was being recruited to help develop the unannounced Battlefield game with EA DICE. Criterion's Need For Speed game is being put on the back burner temporarily, as both studios are going full tilt in an attempt to ship Battlefield later this year. Whatever the final game might end up looking like, there might be less than two months to go until we finally get a glimpse at the next Battlefield.

For a complete list of all the other games slated to launch at some point over the coming year, head over to our new games 2021 guide for more.

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Battlefield 6 leaker claims slightly futuristic setting with drones and robots - Gamesradar

Image by Lindsay Fox via Flickr

According to experts at analyst firm Jefferies, Bloomberg reports, smokers may soon be poised to disappear from many markets.

With regulators and tobacco ambitions increasingly aligned, in many countries, no smokers within a generation could become a reality, analyst Owen Bennett wrote in a recent statement. If smoke-free is to happen, this is only achieved with the support of [reduced-risk products, including e-cigarettes and vapes].

Citigroup Inc. is also of the impression that the number of smokers will drastically be reduced in the near future. In fact, the investment bank believes smoking will disappear by 2050 from much of the developed world, including the US, parts of Europe, and Australia, according to Bloomberg. The number of children smoking dropped by almost three quarters in just 20 years.

The news symbolizes a major shift. Big Tobacco now has to reposition to stay competitive, switching from traditional tobacco products to e-cigarettes and other vapor products.

Philip Morris, for instance, signaled last summer that cigarette sales may grind to a complete halt.

I am convinced it is possible to completely end cigarette sales in many countries within 10 to 15 years, CEO Andre Calantzopoulos wrote in a sustainability report at the time.

The company is now hard at work switching its consumers over to smoke-free products. Its target: 40 million adult smokers to switch by 2025.

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Smoking Will Disappear Within a Generation, Experts Say - Futurism

An environmental medicine professor is sounding the alarm on humanitys rapidly declining fertility rates and she says chemicals in plastics are largely to blame.

Shanna Swan, professor of environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinais Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, helped complete a major study in 2017 that discovered sperm count amongst men in Western countries has dropped by more than 50 percent over the past four decades, according to The Guardian. Last month, she released her book Count Down that dives into how and why humans are losing their ability to procreate.

People are recognizing we have a reproductive health crisis, but they say its because of delayed childbearing, choice or lifestyle it cant be chemical, Swan said to the Guardian. I want people to recognize it can. I am not saying other factors arent involved. But I am saying chemicals play a major causal role.

In the 2017 study published in Human Reproduction Update, researchers discovered that sperm concentration fell from 99 million per ml in 1973 to 47.1 million per ml in 2011. That represents a steep sperm count decline of 53.4% in men in western countries such as Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Europe.

According to Swan, one of the primary drivers are chemicals that interfere with or mimic the bodys sex hormones.

Phthalates, used to make plastic soft and flexible, are of paramount concern, Swan said. They are in everybody and we are probably primarily exposed through food as we use soft plastic in food manufacture, processing and packaging.

She continued, They lower testosterone and so have the strongest influences on the male side, for example diminishing sperm count, though they are bad for women, too, shown to decrease libido and increase risk of early puberty, premature ovarian failure, miscarriage and premature birth.

Swan says that the rate of fertility decline isnt just an odd quirk that can be easily solved with reproductive therapies like in-vitro fertilization. It actually poses an existential threat to humanity. In fact, she projects the world is on track to be completely infertile by 2045.

The current state of reproductive affairs cant continue much longer without threatening human survival, Swan writes in Count Down.

Though this situation seems dire (and it is), there is some hope. She says that we need the chemical industry to develop new non-hormonally active chemicals for domestic use. Also, those who plan to have children should be wary of the plastics they bring into their home such as Teflon, BPA, and phthalates.

Otherwise, Children of Men might look more like a documentary than a fictional movie one day

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Humans Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Procreate, Scientist Warns - Futurism

Theia's impact with the Earth created the Moon and perhaps left some shrapnel behind.Ancient Shrapnel

There are two gigantic blobs of densematerial lurking in the lower depths of the Earths mantle beneath West Africa and the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of miles wide, the blobs have been one of the planets best-kept secrets and baffled for scientists for decades.

Now, theres mounting evidence that the blobs might be remnant shards from an ancient protoplanet named Theia that crashed into the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, Science Magazine reports. Scientists previously suspected there was a link between the blobs, formally known as large low-shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs), and the Moon, but most thought the LLSVPs were planetary scars from Theias impact, not pieces of the alien world itself.

To be fair, this isnt the first time that scientists have speculated that the underground blobs were remnant shards of Theia, Science reports. But Qian Yuan, the Arizona State University graduate student who presented the idea at last weeks Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, seems to have made the most compelling case yet.

I think its completely viable until someone tells me its not, Arizona State seismologist Edward Garnero, who didnt work on the study, told Science.

The smoking gun in Yuans work, as it were, is seismological evidence that the LLSVPs are chemically different from the rest of the mantle rock that surrounds them. That suggests that the blobs have extraterrestrial origins and because theyre six times more massive than the Moon, something as large as a protoplanet would have had to shear them off.

Even though the research remains somewhat speculative, seismologists emboldened by studies like Yuans are increasingly convinced that other pieces of otherworldly shrapnel could also be hiding beneath the Earths surface, according to Science. Uncovering them, they suspect, could help reveal that Earths ancient past was far more violent than what we know so far.

READ MORE: Remains of impact that created the Moon may lie deep within Earth [Science Magazine]

More on the Earths layers: Scientists: Theres Something Lurking in the Center of the Earths Core

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There Appears to Be a Huge Chunk of an Ancient Planet Buried Inside Earth - Futurism

"Our goal is to know the function of every gene so we can develop a complete model of how a cell works."FrankenBacteria

The first-ever bacteria with a genetic code engineered entirely from scratch in a lab is now growing, splitting, and multiplying just like any unicellular organism found in nature.

National Institute of Standards and Technology scientists (NIST) first developed the bacteria JCVI back in 2010, according to a press release on the project. Since then, its been a matter of improving and iterating the lab-developed organism by adding and removing genes to see what works. Now, they seem to have finally ironed out the kinks of a previous version that didnt work quite right.

That last version, JCVI-syn3.0, could multiply on its own but the resulting offspring had striking morphological variation, as the scientists describe it in the new paper they published Monday in the journal Cell. Basically, the descendant bacteria werent even remotely uniform in terms of size and shape, so the researchers went back to work on the synthetic organisms genome.

We want to understand the fundamental design rules of life, NIST cellular engineer Elizabeth Strychalski said in the press release. If this cell can help us to discover and understand those rules, then were off to the races.

The original goal was to engineer a bacterium with the smallest-possible genetic code. But, in this case, the team had to introduce 19 new genes into JVCIs DNA to get cellular reproduction working correctly.

The problem is that the NIST scientists dont fully understand what all the genes they introduced into the bacterias DNA actually do. So even though the bacteria is reproducing as it should, they still need to take a step back and figure out how they actually cracked the code.

Our goal is to know the function of every gene so we can develop a complete model of how a cell works, MIT researcher and study coauthor James Pelletier said in the release.

READ MORE: Scientists Create Simple Synthetic Cell That Grows and Divides Normally [National Institute of Standards and Technology]

More on synthetic biology: This Newly Made Synthetic Life Is the Simplest Living Organism Ever

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Scientists Engineer Synthetic Bacteria That Multiplies Like the Real Thing - Futurism