Science fiction books, movies, games, TV shows and other media have long been home to amazing technology. Many of these ideas can serve as inspiration for today's scientists, but just how close are we to the real-life versions? In this feature, we look at ten of the best examples and rate the chances of their arrival within the next 30 years. As Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons famously put it: "I'd like an hour on the holodeck with Seven of Nine." Futuristic virtual reality experiences appear in many works of fiction, though few are as well-known or fantastic as Star Trek's Holodeck.

On this fifth episode from the Blueprints for American Renewal and Prosperity project, two Brookings experts discuss their blueprints for strengthening governance to meet key international challenges in the technology arena. Senior Fellow Landry Signé is co-author with Stephan Almond of "A blueprint for technology governance in the post-pandemic world," and Senior Fellow Joshua Meltzer is co-author with Cameron Kerry of "Strengthening international cooperation on artificial intelligence." Also on this episode, Senior Fellow David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings, looks at the politics and the economics around raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Listen to this segment on Soundcloud. See below for excerpts from the transcript.

The theory and the reality of digital transformation are very different. Business leaders know they need to re-engineer their organisations to be agile and adaptable. But making that shift happen so that the business is positioned to respond to the changes coming this year, next year and in five years time is, to state the obvious, hard to get right. To find the path to digital sustainability, leaders are struggling to know exactly what it looks like for their business and how to get there. But waiting and watching is not an option for organisations and executives today as complete irrelevance can be reached from a stage of absolute dominance faster than you can say "disruption".

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." The word disinformation is a cognate for the Russian dezinformatsia, the name of a KGB division devoted to propaganda. The world has come a long way from the Stalin days: USSR split, KGB became extinct, the Berlin Wall came down, and Fukuyama announced the End of History. Once the cold war ended, we thought the worst was over. Except, propaganda is a perpetual motion machine.

Responding quickly to disinformation requires addressing the twin hurdles of limited data and unreliable or intentionally wrong data labels.

It's official: there's a brand new Nest Hub in town--and it's available for pre-order now with a release date slated for March 30. The Nest Hub (second-gen) is the first new smart display from Google's smart home brand since the 2019 release of the Nest Hub Max. Pre-order the Nest Hub (second-gen) at Best Buy for $99.99 Google claims the second-gen Nest Hub offers 50% more bass over the first-gen smart screen, and is built with a machine learning chip (1.2 TeraOPS of processing power) that helps the built-in Google Assistant learn your most common commands and respond to them faster than ever before. It also uses Google's proprietary Soli Sensing technology that allows you to use gestures to play and pause video--a huge help when you're cooking. Like the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, the second-gen hub supports popular streaming services like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Disney so you can keep up with all of your favorite shows.

Game of Thrones, touchscreen devices, and superhero movies: those things have little in common apart from the fact that they went through a meteoric rise in the 2010s. Still, if you believe what AI experts have to say, they pale in comparison to the largest tech phenomenon of the decade: Big Data. The'old' generation of data scientists still remember the days they were telling their manager (usually, someone with no expertise in machine learning) that gathering data would take months. And, honestly, it really did. For example, in the early days of the digital era, continuously sharing data on social media was still uncommon behavior, and it would take months for companies to collect what can be collected in just days (if not hours) today.

Adelaide (Australia): Researchers at the University of South Australia have developed a cost-effective new technique to monitor soil moisture using a standard digital camera and machine learning technology. The United Nations predicts that by 2050 many areas of the planet may not have enough fresh water to meet the demands of agriculture if we continue our current patterns of use. One solution to this global dilemma is the development of more efficient irrigation, central to which is precision monitoring of soil moisture, allowing sensors to guide'smart' irrigation systems to ensure water is applied at the optimum time and rate. Current methods for sensing soil moisture are problematic -- buried sensors are susceptible to salts in the substrate and require specialised hardware for connections, while thermal imaging cameras are expensive and can be compromised by climatic conditions such as sunlight intensity, fog, and clouds. Researchers from The University of South Australia and Baghdad's Middle Technical University have developed a cost-effective alternative that may make precision soil monitoring simple and affordable in almost any circumstance.

Forget about finding weapons in Fortnite. The video game's latest season will let players make their own. Season 6 of Fortnite Chapter 2, nicknamed Primal, launched on Tuesday, introducing new features such as the option to create makeshift weapons and the introduction of wild animals. The Primal season will also add several new characters players can use, including Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft and soccer star Neymar, Jr. Details on Neymar's arrival are coming soon, said publisher Epic Games. Following the game's Zero Crisis finale wrapping up the last season, a mysterious pulse blanketed the island, erasing advanced technology and giving the island a more primitive look, said Epic Games.

Since 2019, GoPro has worked to streamline its two mobile apps into a single experience. As of today, that project is complete, with the company merging its GoPro and Quik apps into a single offering named after the latter. In its newest iteration, Quik also has a new purpose. According to the company, the app is something anyone can use, whether they have a GoPro camera or not, to manage their media library and rediscover their favorite memories. At a time when so many photo library apps are adding AI components to help people cull and organize their best shots and clips, GoPro's approach is refreshingly old-school.