Lifeboat Foundation

A footpath in the UK has been equipped with free Wi-Fi coverage, with manholes, on-street cabinets, and other ‘street furniture’ being used to broadcast the signal, which reaches maximum speeds of 166 Mbps and can be accessed from up to 80 metres (260 feet) away.

For the time being, this is a very small-scale scheme: the connected street has been set up in the market town of Chesham, home to some 21,000 people, about 50 km outside of London. As you might expect, it’s a promotional stunt on the part of Virgin Media, but the company says it’s committed to improving public Wi-Fi access across the country, and will be using feedback from the trial in Chesham to help inform its future plans.

“The unlimited Wi-Fi service is available to residents, businesses, and visitors passing through the centre of Chesham,” explains the Virgin Media team. “The service even covers parts of Lowndes Park — Chesham’s 36-acre park space.”

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A robot construction worker that can move around a building site autonomously and make architectural structures is being developed by Swiss designers and roboticists. Jim Drury saw it for himself.

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Remember that paralyzed guy from Southern California who managed to walk on his own accord thanks to a revolutionary technique that bridged the gap in his severed spinal column with a wireless Bluetooth link? A team of doctors at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University have reportedly accomplished the same feat with a patient’s arms.

The team described its initial findings at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago on Tuesday. The system works much like that of the earlier team at UC Irvine: a brain-control interface (BCI) reads the patient’s brain waves emanating from his motor cortex, converts them into actionable electrical signals and wirelessly transmits them to an actuator “sewn into” the patient’s arm. This actuator is comprised of 16 filament wires that generate electrical impulses, which cause various muscle groups to contract when stimulated. The patient thinks about moving his arm and it does so — well, sorta.

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Finally. A Back to the Future tribute that’s genuinely cool.

Engineers at Stanford University along with Renovo Motors built an electric, self-driving DeLorean, appropriately named MARTY. The researchers are using it as a test bed to develop autonomous cars that use racing-inspired techniques to avoid accidents.

See also: USA Today travels ‘Back to the Future’ with front page from the film.

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#5. Denmark pays students $900 a month to attend college.

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What will life be like in 30 years’ time? We asked six forecasters to do better than Back to the Future II’s predictions.

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We’re going back to the future! In Back to the Future Part 2 Doc and Marty travel to the future—October 21, 2015. Yup, we’re living their future! But while we might not have flying cars, hoverboards, or self-fitting shoes, a lot of their predictions about the future weren’t that far off. Here’s a list of 10 they got right.

But seriously, they got a lot wrong. Find out what in our other video, 10 Things Back to the Future 2 Got Wrong!

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Just a few years ago, we were wondering where all the movies about outer space had gone. And now, we don’t have to wonder any more, because we’ve been getting a crop of fantastic new movies about astronauts, spaceships, and the joy of exploration.

There have been at least a couple of previous golden ages of space movies—the period following 2001 comes to mind, and so does the boom in space-opera adventures after Star Wars. The post-2001 boom saw a handful of idea-rich, very human-focused movies about ideas, which used space and science fiction as a way to further conversations and arguments that were rooted in the eras they were made in. Space, following Star Wars, became a fantastical, otherworldly setting, full of the magic and monsters of pulp serials and fantasy, dressed in other-worldly garb.

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