Super Projects: Airships, Bugs that Eat Plastic, Robot Overlords

Published: May 3, 2017, 11:30 p.m.

b'Phil and Stephen explore more super projects, including buiulding airships and saving the planet with a caterpillar that eats plastic bags.\\n\\nGoogle\\u2019s Sergey Brin said to be working on a zeppelin-like airship\\n\\n"Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been known to enjoy ambitious flights of technological fancy, but this may be his flightiest: Bloomberg reports the enigmatic billionaire, who favors dark attire and once leapt out of an airplane wearing Google Glass to promote the launch of the wearable, is now working on a secret airship in a NASA hangar.\\n\\nBrin\\u2019s interest in zeppelins isn\\u2019t purely an anachronistic tick \\u2014 the Hybrid Air Vehicles HAV 304 Airlander 10 hybrid airship, depicted in the image above, holds the record as the world\\u2019s largest aircraft and has some promising benefits for potential military operations, including a very low operational heat signature and radar profile."\\n\\nScientists have discovered a worm that eats plastic bags and leaves behind antifreeze\\n\\n"The wax worm, a caterpillar typically used for fishing bait and known for damaging beehives by eating their wax comb, has now been observed munching on a different material: plastic bags.\\n\\n\\xa0\\n\\nJ\\xfcrgen Schmidhuber on the robot future?: \\u2018They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants\'\\n\\n"The German computer scientist says artificial intelligence will surpass humans\\u2019 in 2050, enabling robots to have fun, fall in love \\u2013 and colonise the galaxy."\\n\\nWT 298-607'