What's a new scientific concept or technological innovation that really makes you feel like we're living in the future?

mRNA vaccines. You can literally code a vaccine now. That's just mind blowing to me.

I'm holding a small device in my hand that gives me access to all of humanity's knowledge.

Granted, I'm using it to dick around on Lemmy, but..

Every time I think about doing something illegal or hear about people from only a few generations ago doing something fun but slightly illegal.

Then I think. There is no way you could do that now the police would use all the surveillance that is everywhere and if I got caught their wouldn't be a slap on the wrist and grow up. But it would be a serious issue for my future jobs and going to other countries.

Makes me think I'm in a futuristic movie. Just not one of the happy ending ones.

The technology behind it isn't new, but The Thought Emporium is a Youtuber who:

1: DIY-d a genetically modified virus to cure his own lactose intolerance (successfully)

2: Is currently working on a biological computer that runs on animal neurons.

3: Has livestreams where the viewers submit ideas (like making tomatoes spicy) and he designs DNA to accomplish it.

Also he helped shut down a scam health product that contained radioactive material which isn't particularly futuristic (actually it reminds me of the "radiation is good for you" craze in the early 20th century) but I wanted to mention it anyways.

I listened to Mr. Krabs sing Billie Jean.

Meme technology is about to get SciFi.

Being trans always was such a cyberpunk concept to me. When I was a kid was like "people can change their gender? Cool"

We can say that... it was a sign lol.

Every time I hear about World Coin scanning people's retina's for $50, driver monitoring tech inside new cars, or Amazon asking people to pay for things with palm prints I feel a bit like I'm living in the Minority Report. Does that count?

Driverless cars, VR and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we're living in the movie Total Recall.

Everything going on in biology, but the existence of of Nana and Lulu especially. The first genetically altered humans are starting school pretty soon.

Data compression. Something about "making less data out of ... The same data" is really mind blowing, & the math is sick

Turns out we can express most of proteins, some of the time, and then isolate them. This includes enzymes, when isolated these can do things like they naturally do but now in flask, but also they do things that aren't remotely natural but are useful for us. These things are pretty fragile usually so then some of these can be modified so that they are resistant to higher temperatures, detergents etc. This is not only the nerdy shit like advanced chemical synthesis - lots of dishwasher tablets and and washing powders contain enzymes that cut proteins into pieces (like subtilisin), so in some cosmic sense dishwasher digests your leftover food off plates

Enzymes are still proteins, and have all problems of proteins. Turns out, you can just take the most important part out of enzyme, make it, or something functionally similar out of completely synthetic parts, and it still works. Sure, it's not as active or selective, most of the time, but it's resistant to things that would absolutely shred proteins. This is called organocatalysis and it was subject of 2021 Nobel Prize

Sometimes you want to take an enzyme and make it not work. We also have a tool for that: first you have to get structure of that enzyme, or some receptor protein, and by looking how a small set of random molecules lodges in it you can make a very selective, very potent ligand, sculpting it atom by atom with no knowledge other than protein structure. If you have time and resources, this can be made to work for almost any protein (that can be crystallised)

Smartphones. The sheer fact that we're able to fit these cameras, computer chips, and everything else into these thin glass slabs is still mind-blowing to me.

The idea of me typing a prompt and AI generating a piece of art is incredible.

Decoding animal communication and interspecies communicstion with AI.

https://lemmy.world/c/digitalbioacoustics

!digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world

(Which way should I be sharing community links on here?)

Modern cell phones. It's crazy that I basically never need a computer now. My phone is so diversely useful. I spend more money on phones than computers now. It's also the best camera I've ever had! Phones are just so cool lol.

The LANDSAT program. Not exactly new since it's been going for about 50 years, but it's still fascinating and maybe more relevant than ever with concerns about climate change.

We can get different types of data about a landscape from the different parts of the light spectrum. For example, telling coniferous and deciduous trees apart based on how they reflect light. Imagine echolocation on steroids, using light.

https://youtu.be/DGE-N8_LQBo

3D printing.

AI generated images/voices and deepfakes. I really am worried about it becoming difficult to figure out what is real on the internet in the next 10 years.

JWST

I walk into my house and start dictating to a speaker sphere what lights to turn on, what to set the thermostat to, and to turn on the tv. And she answers. Just like in sci fi movies.

The Internet, but I'm old.

We have Mustard flavored Skittles now.

The DNS it's so mind blowing to think about how we are able to map so many domains to so many ip adresses so smart and stable

We have phones as powerful as computers in our hands when 20 years ago that was impossible. The exponential growth of computers and smartphones is mind-blowing. And the amount of technology that has bloomed from all of that

Lithium polymer batteries that make advanced computing portable. We wouldn't be able to create multi function cell phones without the battery power and longevity of those batteries. Star trek tricorders are going to be the next big tech coming to the generation after Gen z.

Voyager 2

Blows my mind every fucking time I read about it.

Props to the USA/NASA and their engineers for achieving something so long lasting with technology from ~50 years ago.

Vegan Feta cheese

CoViD mask usage

PV panel price reduction

IPCC cooperation and language

Gamified drone wars producing music videos

PrEP

Someone else here mentioned the Steam Deck as a powerful handheld on the go, I want to do a similar approach.

Playing PS1 games with a Miyoo Mini, I swear my child's dream was to play PS1 games in a handheld sized similar to my Game Boy Advance from that time, now we can do it in even smaller devices! (And this one isn't even the tiniest lol).

Micro SD cards, 1TB that tiny, for $50

Permanently Deleted

Quantum computing is a very very revolutionary innovation. Biological computers are also going to be very revolutionary.

The trampoline

Railguns on navy ships.

Indoor plumbing is pretty cool. Used to be you had to shit in a bucket and then go pour it into a sewer drain - but because this was slightly inconvenient people got into the habit of dumping it out their windows.

The air fryer is pretty cool I guess.