Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Exponential Minds’ The Future of Curing Cancer we see biotech experts bullish about curing cancer, new religions obsessed with A.I., cities below sea level in the future, new species in cities, and agricultural lasers.

Biotech Expert Claims That “In the Next Decade, Most Cancers Will Be Curable”

The New Religions Obsessed with A.I.

What has improved American lives most in the last 50 years? According to a Pew Research study reported this month, it’s not civil rights (10 percent) or politics (2 percent): it’s technology (42 percent).
And yet, according to other studies, most Americans are wary of technology, especially in areas of automation (72 percent), or robotic caregivers (59 percent), or riding in driverless vehicles (56 percent), and even in using brain chip implants to augment the capabilities of healthy people (69 percent).
Science fiction, however, is quickly becoming science fact—the future is the machine. This is leading many to argue that we need to anticipate the ethical questions now, rather than when it is too late. And increasingly, those taking up these challenges are religious and spiritual.
Read more at The Daily Beast

From Miami to Shanghai: 3C of warming will leave world cities below sea level

Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters if latest UN warnings that the world is on course for 3C of global warming come true, according to a Guardian data analysis.

Famous beaches, commercial districts and swaths of farmland will be threatened at this elevated level of climate change, which the UN warned this week is a very real prospect unless nations reduce their carbon emissions.
Data from the Climate Central group of scientists analysed by Guardian journalists shows that 3C of global warming would ultimately lock in irreversible sea-level rises of perhaps two metres. Cities from Shanghai to Alexandria, and Rio to Osaka are among the worst affected. Miami would be inundated – as would the entire bottom third of the US state of Florida.
Read more at The Guardian

Cities are driving evolution — and may spawn new species, scientists say

Our cities are reshaping the animals and plants that live in them, pushing some to evolve and even spawning new species more quickly and more often than you might think, scientists say.
Scientific evidence suggests:

• The beaks of birds like house finches and great tits are getting bigger so they can more easily eat from backyard bird feeders in Tucson, Arizona, and Oxford, England, respectively.
• Lizards called crested anoles are growing longer limbs and stickier toes for climbing buildings in Puerto Rican cities.
• Fish and pests are developing resistance to human pollutants and poisons.
• A mosquito that lives underground appears to be emerging as a new species from sewers and subway tunnels beneath cities around the world. It has different genes, feeding and breeding habits from its cousins, a species known as Culex pipiens, that live above ground.

Those are just some of the dozens of examples uncovered by University of Toronto biology professor Marc Johnson and Jason Munshi-South, a biology professor at Fordham University in New York. The pair pored through the scientific literature and looked for patterns among 192 studies that appear to show evolution in action in urban settings. They published their results in the journal Science Thursday.
Read more at CBC

Birds eating your crops? $10k laser turrets will solve that problem

Read more at Digital Trends