Hypersonic vactrains are widespread Much of the world has now established a hypersonic, evacuated tube transport system connecting major population centres. * Its routes extend primarily throughout Russia, Northern Europe, Canada and the US. These trains are more advanced versions of the slower, simpler prototypes first introduced decades previously. * This form of transport works by combining the principles of maglev trains and pneumatic tubes. The trains, or vactrains as they are called, travel inside a closed tube, levitated and pushed forward by magnetic fields. After passing through an airlock, the train cars enter a complete vacuum inside the tube. With no air friction to slow it down, the vactrain can reach speeds far beyond that of any traditional rail system. The fastest routes can now reach speeds of around 4,000 mph (6,400 km/h) * – around five times the speed of sound – compared to a 300 mph maglev train a century earlier. * With speed of thi...
West Antarctica is among the fastest developing regions in the world As a result of global warming, temperatures at the poles have risen more than anywhere else in the world – meaning that parts of Western Antarctica are now comparable with the climates of Alaska, Iceland, and northern Scandinavia. In some areas, the melting of surface ice has resulted in conditions appropriate for large-scale human settlement. * The icy continent today would be unrecognizable to observers from the 20th century: its northern peninsula is now home to a multitude of towns and conurbations, with a total population numbering in the millions. Even farming and crop growing are now possible in some of the most northerly areas, using genetic modification techniques. Rapid immigration from countries all over the world has created a diverse mixture of people and cultures flocking to this new land of opportunity. In a way, the settlement of Antarctica is similar to that of America in the 18th and 19th...
Photosynthetic humans Following many decades of research, a number of human-plant chimeras are moving from the laboratory into clinical and commercial use. Among the treatments now available is a method for combining the photosynthetic capabilities of chloroplasts with human skin. This enables a person to gain energy from being exposed to sunlight. In 1990, scientists first coined the term "kleptoplasty" to describe a symbiotic phenomenon whereby plastids, notably chloroplasts from algae, are sequestered by host organisms. This had been observed in Elysia chlorotica , a species of green sea slug that absorbed chloroplasts from the algae it ate, making it effectively a solar-powered animal. In the early decades of the 21st century, researchers engineered cells that combined both animal and human material, producing chimeras (named after the creature from Greek mythology that possessed the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake). One notable experiment, f...
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