🔦 The 1.24-mile laser flashlight

Hi all, Loz here.

As Aussie kids in the early 1980s, my brothers and I used to watch a weekly TV show called Towards 2000. It felt like a window into the future, showing off the latest wild new technologies like liquid crystal displays, TV game consoles, calculator watches, home computers, robotics and next-gen energy projects.

Clearly, the producers didn’t expect it to become as successful as it did; they had to change its name to Beyond 2000 as the millennium came barrelling into view, and then to Beyond Tomorrow as the march of time made that one obsolete too. All in all, with a few gaps in the middle, it ran for 14 wonderful seasons.

I loved that show. I couldn’t believe just how clever and creative people could be. By the time the ‘84 LA Olympics opened with an honest-to-god jetpack flight, it seemed like everything that could’ve possibly been invented had been invented.

Now we know better, of course. Human ingenuity treats boundaries as starting points, and over the last 23 years, we’ve rarely for a day found ourselves short of groundbreaking new inventions and discoveries to write about at Gizmag/New Atlas. Heck, we’re at the point now where people are trying to improve on ingenuity itself.

It struck me on the weekend that our little website has now run nearly 10 years longer than Towards 2000. This has been an incredible adventure of a job for me, and I couldn’t be prouder to steer this ship as we head towards a quarter century celebrating what’s new and what’s next.

Thanks for being on board!

🥰 – Loz Blain