Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day I read through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
Top-5 Futures, August 28th: Drones, Families, and 3D Printed Bones goes into some really interesting territories where civil unrest, family dynamics, sexual health, and the future of entertainment with virtual reality (VR) is discussed.

North Dakota cops can now use lobbyist-approved taser/pepper-spray drones

Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association introduced an amendment to ND HB 1328 that allows cops to shoot at citizens with drone-borne rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, tazers and sound cannon.
The bill was originally intended to force cops to get a warrant before using a drone to spy on people. It was also opposed by the founder of a drone company.
(via BoingBoing)

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9 Different Visions Of What Families Will Look Like 50 Years From Now

Family is a moving target. Our ideas about what constitutes a “normal” family have changed a lot since the 1960s, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop changing. How weird could things get? Here are nine different ideas about the future of the family.

No rigid definition exists for the “family,” and there’s no sense trying to come up with one. It’s a fluid concept, one that means different things to different people and at different times. Indeed, our sense of the family as a concept has changed over time, it and will continue to do so well into the future.

At the same time, however, families are a microcosm of society. This puts them in a unique and challenging position; they are simultaneously the vanguard of social change, and often the target of moral outrage. For instance, anti-miscegenation laws were only finally removed from all U.S. states as late as 1967, while same-sex marriage only became legal across the U.S. last month (by comparison, Canada has allowed same-sex marriage since 2005). What’s more, we no longer talk about “broken homes,” nor do we speak disparagingly about “test tube babies” (which we refer to today as in vitro fertilization).

Looking ahead to the future, families will continue to change and adapt according to cultural, socioeconomic and technological factors. Here’s what to expect.

• Multiple Family Households
• Extreme Multi-generational Families
• Gender Fluidity in the Family
• Clone Families
• Robotic and Artificially Intelligent Caregivers
• Space Colonist Families
• Post-Cryonic Families
• Mind-linked Families
• Virtual Families

(via i09)

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Discovery launches short-form VR videos, starting with sharks

Discovery is helping us get closer to sharks. Discovery VR is the company’s new initiative in virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree experiences. It all begins with a series of short-form shark videos from Mythbusters. It also launches with Gold Rush and Survivorman spin-offs, showcases of freeboarding and surfing, and tours through California’s Half Moon Bay and Muir Woods. The Discovery VR videos can be viewed online, via mobile apps for iOS and Android, and in Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR. Oculus support is “coming soon,” though probably not before the Rift actually launches in Q1 2016.
(via engadget)

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This Low-Cost 3-D Printer Can Produce Human Organs And Bones

At a lab in Philadelphia’s Drexel University, a desktop 3-D printer is cranking out miniature samples of bones. In Toronto, another researcher is using the same printer to make living tumors for drug testing. It looks like an ordinary 3-D printer, but instead of plastic, it squirts out living cells.
BioBots, the startup behind the device, wants to change how researchers do biology. “We’ve been doing experiments on cells in a dish since 1905, and that’s still what we’re doing today to learn about how things work inside of our body,” says Danny Cabrera, CEO of BioBots. “But the body is a three-dimensional structure. Cells in our body are used to interacting with the world in 3-D. The fact that we’ve been doing biology in 2-D for over 100 years now is sort of limiting.”
(via FastCoExist)

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Wireless Armour underwear protects against smartphone radiation to prevent infertility

(via Dezeen)

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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.