Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- The US is becoming an artisan beverage powerhouse. First it was California wine at the Judgement of Paris. Now niche US distillers are beating premium Scottish Whisky in tasting competitions, and American microbrews are surging in popularity in Germany.
- People are attempting to create reputation-based verification engines for social media (though one can imagine accuracy assessments bifurcating based on politics or other worldviews).
- Caltech Professor Harry Atwater and colleagues are designing solar panels with the potential to more than double the less-than-20% efficiency of current panels by using a broader swath of the available light spectrum.
- Los Alamos National Laboratory has revealed it has been running a quantum Internet for more than two years, capable of sending “perfectly secure” messages.
- A Technology Review article asks whether “anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility.”