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Once we have passed a certain chronological threshold, we all begin to think that aerohighways lined with flying cars like the Delorean of Back to the Future 2 It would be one of many technologies that look good on the screen but simply cannot be transferred to the real world.

However, if not at least as shown in the film, yes in a certain way, it may be soon our skies will be full of flying cars.

billion

As of mid-2019, more than $1 billion were already being invested in a minimum of 25 flying car companies, such as Zee Aero, Opener and Kitty Hawk.

A dozen vehicles were already carrying out test flights, as explained Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler in his book The future goes faster than you think:

They come in all shapes and sizes, from motorcycles perched on oversized fans to human-sized quadcopter drones to miniature space capsule-like planes.

One of the most interesting projects is that of Uner air. If a helicopter has a cost per kilometer of $5.55, Uber Air wants to reduce it to $3.56. But the long-term goal is to reach a price of 27 cents per kilometer, that is, cheaper than driving a land car. His interest is focused on the so-called eVTOL, electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.

For an eVTOL to enter the flying car program, it must be capable of transporting a pilot and four passengers at a speed of 240 km/h for three hours of uninterrupted service. Uber already has five suppliers that have committed to delivering eVTOL vehicles that meet these requirements.

In Xataka

This car transforms into an airplane and vice versa: it has already successfully completed its inaugural test flight

The most commercially viable efficient aircraft is the Celera 500L. At the moment it is in the prototype phase, but it has already carried out more than 30 successful test flights. Maybe, if we're a little optimistic, Back to the Future 2 could be right around the corner.

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The news

At least 25 companies are already dedicating themselves to developing flying cars

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

The other day we reported as one of the most widely distributed newspapers in Spain suggested that Reiki helped combat COVID-19. Various media We have managed to remove such atrocities.

But one wonders, then, how such an important media outlet can publish things like that (not to mention some of its Cons, the horoscope section...). In the background, It is part of its natural process as a means of communication. A process that all media in history go through: basically, from best to worst.

Five phases

Any new means of communication ends up going through the following phases:

1. Negative forecasts by analysts or even by the inventor of the medium himself. With the advent of the telephone, it was said that it would end intimacy. That the radio made no sense. That cinema would not interest anyone. That there would not be enough demand for personal computers.
2. A progressive assimilation at the social level. People start using these media and discover that they are interesting.
3. A distribution of enormous cultural and material benefits in society. The media enlightens people, even some sectors of the social mass. For example, radio, in its origins, was based on programs that educated the people.
4. A progressive commercialization of the environment. Advertising, competition, and profit motive arrive, and content creators begin to be tempted and influenced by these factors.
5. A progressive devaluation of the environment in terms of cultural and material benefits in order to maximize commodification. The medium is no longer useful for what it was designed for, but rather to obtain more economic benefits (although without exaggerating too much so that the mark of compatibility that allows us to continue contracting advertising does not completely disappear).

In the end, @The vanguard has withdrawn his embarrassing article about the #reiki in view of #COVID19. Thanks to @damn_science and @SergioParra_ @xatakaciencia for warning. Now we hope that the diary of @Jordi__Juan post something serious about the topic
My tweet: https://t.co/0Z3EOrOF91 pic.twitter.com/K8N4vGakLz

— Luis Santamaría del Río (@vaiconDios) January 21, 2021

These phases took place, for example, with the first major media: Gutenberg's printing press, year 1450

It also happened with the Telegraph, which has been compared as a kind of victorian internet. This device was invented by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, American, in 1832.

The same thing happened with the newspaper: the first ones had few pages and were very expensive, so they were only aimed at educated and rich people. Someone devised a new form of business that consisted of lowering the price by partially covering the costs of writing, printing and distribution by inserting advertising, which forced the addition of more pages (so that the advertising could be better distributed).

As more people bought newspapers, advertising profits increased, so editors soon realized that inserting sensational or morbid news increased sales, that is, profits, which, in turn, forced to put up more pages of superfluous news.

Or publish sensational and shocking news, although false, like those that the media magnate began to introduce William Randolph Hearst.

In Xataka Science

The media takes advantage of our amygdala to stoke fears that no longer make sense.

And, of course, the same has also happened with the publishing industry.

And now it's starting to happen, too, with some digital media (some platforms become vulgarized and other less vulgarized ones appear that will also end up becoming vulgarized). Even the blogs, born as a tool for the empowerment of society, finally 99.9% of them barely reached a tiny audience, because the masses prefer hooky news, clickbaits, the bad stuff of Perez Hilton, the viral, the meme, the "and you won't believe what happened next."

They are only commercial (or political) forces, blind and random, that reach with their tentacles to any medium. It is something like an unstoppable natural process. The following science fiction story may help you better imagine the process:

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The news

The media goes through the same phases (from best to worst)

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

That if the Earth is flat, that if the vaccine is to inoculate us with a microchip, that if WiFi causes cancer, that the Earth is flat... all these anti-scientific beliefs are not essentially ignorance (we are all quite ignorant about it).

The most important thing is the call confirmation bias, which was coined by the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason after writing an experiment in this regard published in 1960.

Everyday religions

We believe the things that the people who are part of our "tribe" believe because we do not seek truth as much as social acceptance. Unlike many other animal species, for humans there is no greater punishment than being rejected or excluded from the group.

In Xataka Science

Smoking or non-smoking? This is how confirmation bias works

Furthermore, people treat facts as more relevant when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against your opinions, you don't necessarily deny the facts, but you assume that those facts are less relevant or worthy of being considered on a moral level.

This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that has been published on the topic, and which was presented at a symposium as part of the annual convention of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology in San Antonio.

In Xataka Science

We copy others much more than we think and that is why it is dangerous to live in bubbles

The results suggest that simply focusing on evidence and data is not enough to change someone's opinion on a particular issue. We are tough as hell. Other things persuade us.

This is what it also points out Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland), which describe how 'think like a lawyer', in the sense that people carefully select the pieces of information they should pay attention to 'in order to reach conclusions that they want to be true'. As it abounds in it Derren Brown in his book ÉOnce upon a time... an alternative history of happiness:

Likewise, we act under this influence whenever we focus on the annoying habits of someone we don't like, rather than on the pleasant ones. The confirmation tendency provides us daily with all the necessary evidence to stick to the script and so that our life continues along the same lines and seems true.

Of course, it also influences that we are ignoring science, and we do not understand the epistemological foundations on which scientific knowledge is based. In the following video I explain what liberal science is and why it is not based on consensus as we popularly understand it:

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People who reject scientific claims do so not so much out of ignorance as out of confirmation bias.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Today's weaving of threads has already reached diameters of a few microns (wool, cotton, synthetic polymers, etc.), but scientists at the University of Manchester have gone further by developing the world's finest weave, surpassing the finest Egyptian linen .

This has been possible thanks to the development of a form of weaving molecular threads into two-dimensional layers.

10,000 times a human hair

To understand how fine this thread is, let's think about the number of threads in a fabric per inch (about 2.5 centimeters). If Egyptian linen has about 1,500 threads, This new fabric reaches about 50 million.

Each layer of molecular tissue is only 4 nanometers thick; that is 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. For the moment, that is. the largest piece of fabric made is only 1 mm in length.

To develop this fabric, metal atoms and negatively charged ions were used to interlock small molecular building blocks made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur atoms. The woven building blocks were eventually joined together like pieces of a jigsaw to form individual sheets of molecular strands woven into a fabric just 4 millionths of a millimeter thick (4 nanometers).

In Xataka Science

The future of clothing: a fabric that cools when we are hot and warms when we are cold

As explained David Leigh, main author of this development that has been published in a study in Nature:

This is the first example of a layered molecularly woven fabric. Weaving molecular strands offers a new way to alter the properties of plastics and other materials. The number of strands and strand crossings was measured by bright X-rays on the building blocks. The strands bend the path of X-rays through the material by a specific amount, allowing researchers to measure how many strands there are per inch. The measurement shows that the material has a thread count of 40-60 million threads per inch. In comparison, the finest Egyptian linen has a thread count of around 1,500.

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The news

This is the finest fabric in the world and has been created by weaving threads of individual molecules into threads.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.