The Futurist is your daily tech, cosmic, and science (both weird or otherwise) newsletter with articles and content curated just for you. How many strings did the original guitars have? Hint: Fewer than you probably would imagine. (Scroll to the bottom for the answer!) | | “Geothermal development company Fervo Energy has announced impressive strides being made at its Cape Station facility in southern Utah. The results could lead to a quicker and more widespread uptake of this super-clean energy production process. In a publication announced at the Stanford Geothermal Workshop this week, Fervo said it has been able to drill a horizontal well in just 21 days. That's a 70% reduction in drilling time over its first horizontal well, which was drilled in Nevada in 2022 as part of a Google-backed effort known as Project Red. The company says this reduction in time has led to an additional reduction of costs, with the latest well coming in at US$4.8 million, down from $9.4 million.” | Whether you’re a city slicker who’s trying to ditch public transportation or a suburbanite who’s sick of gas prices, getting a bike isn’t just trendy; it’s practical. And these days, the ~cool kids~ are leaning towards e-bikes because they’re faster and require less effort. BirdBike’s selection is impressive, boasting A-frame and V-frame options, both with powerful motors, advanced Carbon Drive trains, and integrated dash displays. The best part? They’re on sale now at their lowest price ever before: just $700 with free shipping included. Get ready to ride into spring on some new wheels — and get your e-bike while it’s price-dropped now through 2/21. [Ad] | “In downtown Mesa, Arizona, the 27-acre patch of land known as Site 17 has sat empty for decades, a redevelopment mystery that has yet to be unraveled. … Past plans have included turning the city-owned dirt lot, once home to 63 single-family homes, into a health-care facility and resort/water park. But in October, the city took a big step towards solving this real estate riddle, by selecting a proposal to build a housing project from the startup Culdesac, famous for its car-free neighborhood taking shape in nearby Tempe. … Culdesac became an urbanist darling in the US for its project in Tempe, a built-from-scratch zero-driving development that is transforming a vacant lot near a light rail stop into the kind of dense and walkable neighborhood that advocates say could be a model for other places trying to shun American-style car-centricity.” | “For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’s not even particularly complicated. It represents a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody. It’s a mini constitution for the internet, written in code. … And for most of the next 30 years, that worked pretty well. … But the internet doesn’t fit on a hard drive anymore, and the robots are vastly more powerful.” | Learn AI in 5 minutes a day. We'll teach you how to save time and earn more with AI. Join 400,000+ free daily readers for trending tools, productivity boosting prompts, the latest news, and more so you can learn how to hack your budgets, finances, your job, and other tasks that take up way too much time. Let AI automate all the stuff you need to automate and have more time to relax and live life! [Ad] | “Many companies rely on Slack for cross-organization communication and their employees use the platform to share messages, documents, team plans, spreadsheets, and more. To optimize user experience on the app, Slack is finally making its generative AI features available on the platform. On Wednesday, Salesforce, which owns Slack, announced the rollout of Slack AI, a generative AI experience that includes AI-powered search, channel recaps, and thread summaries. ‘These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth,’ said Denise Dresser, Slack CEO.” | Interested in having one of your social posts featured in The Futurist? | | The answer: Most commonly believed to be three | According to the Musicians Institute website: “The exact origin of the guitar is still a mystery. The word ‘guitar’ probably comes from the ancient Greek word κιθάρα (kithara). Mythology attributes Hermes with creating the first kithara from a tortoise shell, but many likenesses of Apollo show him with this instrument. This instrument had a wooden soundboard and box-shaped body, or resonator. Two hollow arms, connected by a crossbar, extended from the resonator. The instrument originally had three strings running from the crossbar to its lower end, passing over a bridge on the soundboard; later versions had as many as 12 strings.” | | | | |
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