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If fake news and social media are getting you down, switch up your feed. Every day brings a raft of awesome innovation and fantastic discoveries.

From the historical accuracy of Assassin’s Creed to digital superpowers to donuts with black holes. Or black holes with donuts. We take a look at a tiny handful of the breakthroughs social media hasn’t told you about over the last few weeks.

Warning: Contains the words Quaversfreude and Twivalanche.

EPISODE EXCERPT:

I’m not saying that after MSP’s 4-episode series on Disruption that Matt Armitage feels that he needs to shake things up, but that would seem like a logical conclusion.
•Over the past few weeks we’ve gone to some fairly dark places on the show.
•I wanted to lift a little bit that darkness today.
•To try and reassure everybody that that it isn’t hopeless.
•And to try and highlight some of the great innovations and inventions and discoveries that have come out
•not over the last few months or years but literally over the last few weeks.
•I want to show people that however bad things might appear to be, it’s partly because we’re only focusing on one part of the picture.
•There is so much incredible stuff happening.
•One of the stories we talked about last week on geeks was NASA’s intention to put the first female astronaut on the moon within the next five years.
•It really is a great time to be a human. Animal, not so much.

Where are we starting? With Game of Thrones, like every episode over the past few weeks?
•Not with game of thrones but with games in general.
•And I guess the same theory applies for shows like GOT.
•Games may be helping us to grow our appreciation of history.
•A report in their new scientist talks about the accuracy that the makers of Assassins Creed Odyssey have gone to accurately recreate the world of Athens in around 400 BC.
•We know that with movies and TV shows based in ancient times, more attention is paid to plot devices than to the accuracy of geography or the actual surroundings.
•But with games you don’t have the same time impediments, especially with the sprawling worlds of many of today’s networked titles.
•And as we seen the physics engines and the replication of surroundings in all manner of games, as well as the attention to detail, is effectively creating these simulations of the world of that time.

Couldn’t you read a book?
•Of course you could. Or you can go to a museum and look at some of the exhibits.
•Or go and visit some of these places.
•Most of us have some artefacts of antiquity hanging around where we live. Possibly even in our own homes.
•There is a reason that the tech is called virtual reality.
•So if you’re going to play games, why not immerse yourself in all these fantastic landscapes that bring history to life.
•Learning isn’t just about absorbing facts in textbooks. It’s about to experience.
•And what better way to explore ancient Rome or Greece or Victorian London them to walk its streets with a sense of purpose or a mission.
•And as I said about other games, once you get bored exploring, you can start creating mayhem..

I think we’re sticking with superpowers for the next story…
•Yes, or an invention that pretty much gives us a superpower
•The power to see round corners. Just like superman and his laser x-ray whatever it is vision.
•In theory this isn’t something that actually knew with been able to use imaging algorithms with video images for quite a while to project an image of what things might look like around the corner.
•And they’ve always required some very stringent conditions, such as they’re not really being much going on around the corner, which kind of defeats the point.

This is the theory of an accidental camera?
•Yeah, you project patterns of light on the ground at the edge of the corner and those patterns are able to detect at least part of what’s happening around The edge that you can’t see.
•What changed here is that scientists at Boston University have developed a new algorithm the plugs in what is known as a plausible answer.
•Essentially the algorithm is trying to anticipate and predict what is around the corner from the variables that you can control.
•At the moment these images are one-dimensional but the Boston team is already working on imaging algorithms that will enable it to predict two and three-dimensional images.