Toggle light / dark theme

Researchers have found that giving your brain an electrical stimulation while you sleep can lead to quicker learning and improved memory. Future You’s episode 6 explores what this will mean in 2050.

—————————————————–

Follow NPR elsewhere, too:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/npr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NPR
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/npr/
• Tumblr: http://npr.tumblr.com/
• Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/add/npr

ABOUT NPR
NPR connects to audiences on the air, on demand, online, and in person. More than 26 million radio listeners tune in to NPR stations each week and more than 36 million unique visitors access NPR.org each month making NPR one of the most trusted sources of news and insights on life and the arts. NPR is also the leading publisher of podcasts, with 36 original shows and an average of 4 million listeners per week. NPR shares compelling stories, audio and photos with millions of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat; NPR News and NPR One apps, online streaming, podcasts, iTunes radio and connected car dashboards help meet audiences where they are. NPR’s live events bring to the stage two-way conversations between NPR hosts and the audience in collaboration with the public radio Member Station community. This robust access to public service journalism makes NPR an indispensable resource in the media landscape.

And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe.


The US, UK and Australia are taking on Facebook in a bid to undermine the only method that protects our personal information.

• Edward Snowden is a US surveillance whistleblower.

Cells are the fundamental “building blocks” that make up living organisms. Yet, we don’t know exactly how cells were formed in the first place. We also don’t know what all the molecules that make up any natural cell do. Finally, we can’t yet put molecules together ourselves to make new synthetic cells.

Addressing the questions and challenges posed above requires significant collaboration and cooperation. The Build-a-Cell community welcomes all who wish to learn about and cooperate in the work of fully understanding and engineering a diversity of synthetic cells.

The future of biotechnology is in realizing fully understood, lineage agnostic organisms, beginning with single cells.

Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to potentially speed up the process of solving complex computations. Suppose you need to perform the task of searching for a specific number in a phone book. A classical computer will search each line of the phone book until it finds a match. A quantum computer could search the entire phone book at the same time by assessing each line simultaneously and return a result much faster.

Search and Rescue

This isn’t the first time a drone has proven invaluable in a search-and-rescue operation — we’ve seen others help save stranded swimmers, earthquake victims, and lost hikers.

While many of the drones used for those missions were designed for rescue purposes, in this instance, the drone’s owner, Steve Fines, typically used it to shoot photography — but when he heard Ethan was lost, he knew he had to do what he could to help find the boy.