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 Future Trends – Mind-controlled Tesla we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, November 25th, 2016. We see hackers using EEG helmets to drive Teslas, thinking soil, the Impossible Drive,

Hackers mind controlled a Tesla Model S in hackathon project

Earlier this year, we reported on a Tesla Model S owner technically controlling his car with his mind, but we noted that it was “gimmicky” at best since we were only talking about sending commands that you can use through Tesla’s app with its API tools.
Last weekend, a group of hackers pushed the idea further and managed to put together a prototype that truly controlled a Tesla Model S through commands translated from brain activity, aka mind control.

The project, called Teslapathic, was created during a 36-hour hackathon that took place over the weekend in Berkeley.
The four hackers, Abenezer Mamo, Casey Spencer (top right), Lorenzo Caoile (top left), and Vivek Vinodh, were inspired by “the rapid advancement of the automated auto industry” and wanted to showcase ” the future of human-computer interfaces, mind controlled devices”, according to their development page.
They took Spencer’s Model S (if his name sounds familiar it’s because he is the same guy who broke the Tesla hypermiling record a while back) and installed actuators on the pedals and a motor on the steering wheel controlled by an analog signal translated from brain activity detected on an EEG headset.
 
Read more at Electrek

New ‘Thinking Soil’ Fixes Concrete Foundations Using Engineered Bacteria

The creation of a concrete-repairing bacteria by British students has inspired scientists to develop biocement, a material that genetically-engineered soil microbes would produce in response to changing pressures in soil to automatically reinforce the land under foundations.
Here’s how the concrete-repairing function works.
When the bacteria Bacillus subtilis is added to soil, it produces an enzyme called urease. That enzyme causes the organic compound urea to break down into ammonium and carbonate, increasing the pH in the surrounding environment. Calcium carbonate accumulates at the cells’ surface, and when there’s enough of it, you get a calcite deposit.
Growth of the bacteria is triggered by the specific pH of the concrete they’re used on, which means they start growing only once they’ve made contact with concrete. Once the cells have germinated, they seep into the cracks in the concrete and begin to clump together at the bottom.
This clumping activates the concrete repair process, and the cells differentiate to produce three types of material: calcium carbonate, reinforcing fibers, and a binding agent. The cells have a built-in self-destruct gene preventing them from expanding away from the concrete and affecting adjacent objects.
Read more at Singularity Hub

NASA Just Tested The ‘Impossible Drive’: Does It Work?

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.