Future Tense

Mercenaries, private military contractors, commercial combatants – what you call them depends on your ethical viewpoint (and whether or not you’ve just hired some to supplement your own military forces).

Increasingly the things we throw away have value. In a consumerist world, with diminishing resources, rubbish is being recycled like never before. The recycling industry is now worth $US500 billion a year and it employs more people worldwide than any other industry except agriculture. Trash is no longer just an environmental problem, it’s an economic opportunity.

The technological progress of flight has been pretty amazing.

We might not give it much thought, but how we move is naturally predetermined. Left to our own devices we don’t usually walk in straight lines or make 90 degree turns, so why do so many architects and urban planners still favour grids and sharp angles?

These are boom times for the gambling industry – and not just online, as one might expect.

Author Paul Bogard worries that we’re losing our sense of darkness, that our taste for banishing the night is turning Earth into the planet that never sleeps. In Europe and North America the amount of light in the night sky continues to increase by around 6% a year.

Author Paul Bogard worries that we’re losing our sense of darkness, that our taste for banishing the night is turning Earth into the planet that never sleeps. In Europe and North America the amount of light in the night sky continues to increase by around 6% a year.

How is it that one can disable a lost iPhone, but not a piece of military hardware that’s inadvertently fallen into the hands of an insurgent? That’s a question Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has been pondering and his solution is to call for future weapons to be made with an inbuilt ‘kill switch’.

How is it that one can disable a lost iPhone, but not a piece of military hardware that’s inadvertently fallen into the hands of an insurgent? That’s a question Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has been pondering and his solution is to call for future weapons to be made with an inbuilt ‘kill switch’.

Construction has begun on a giant $US 20 billion nuclear reactor in southern France. When it’s completed in 2020 it will represent the latest experimental stage in a decades-long quest to mimic the energy generation of the Sun.