BBC Knowledge AUGUST 2017

34

Innovations

science

COMPUTING

MATERIALS

PHOTOS: ALAMY, MIT, SHUTTERSTOCK, NASA

In its ongoing quest to build better spacecraft,

NASA has looked to the distant past for inspiration

and invented a form of 21st-century ‘chain mail’.

The new material was invented at NASA’s Jet

Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by a team led by Raul Polit

Casillas. Its outward-facing side resembles the surface

of a mirror ball and reflects light and heat, whereas

the inward-facing looks more like actual chain mail

and absorbs heat. It’s hoped the material could have

applications as protective (and insulating) cladding for

spacecraft, in astronauts’ suits, or even for creating

temporary landing strips. What’s more, it’s 3D-printed,

which means it could be produced on-demand in any

putative future base stations on Mars or the Moon.

SPACE

ARMOUR

Two giants of the tech world, Facebook and Elon Musk’s latest

venture Neuralink, have both announced that they are working

on brain-to-computer interfaces.

At Facebook’s recent F8 developers’ conference, Regina

Dugan from Facebook’s R&D division Building 8 showed

a video of a woman using such an interface to type eight

words per minute, and spoke of the company’s ambitions

to develop a similar system capable of typing hundreds of

words per minute within a few years. Dugan has experience

in this area: the technology in the Stanford University video

was similar to systems developed at DARPA, the US military

research agency, while Dugan was director there.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later enthused about

the technology in a Facebook post, saying: “We’re working on

a system that will let you type straight from your brain about

five times faster than you can type on your phone today.

Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that

can be manufactured at scale.” Meanwhile at Neuralink, work

is in progress on a system to help restore communication to

brain injury and stroke victims. Musk says they expect to have

a product on the market “in about four years.”

ZUCKERBERG

AND MUSK

WANT TO READ

YOUR MIND

NASA’s new chain mail:

just the job for going

jousting on Jupiter