Soft robotics are key to wearable tech, things like Jovian wet-suits in Sweet, and also humanoid androids such as followers. This Science Daily article describes a problem and breakthrough along that line. 

"the research introduced the innovative concept of bifunctional polymer. By forming a one-dimensional ion channel several nanometers wide inside the polymer matrix, which is hard as glass, a superionic polymer electrolyte with both high ionic conductivity and mechanical strength was achieved."

I like to say, 'there is nothing hard about science except scale and terminology.' My friends often point out that I tend to be verbose when I do. However I stand by the claim, usually when verbosity gets in the way of teaching. 

For example click-bait. We all hate it. I regret that I let myself get involved with writing such garbage for a time. Science Daily tends to avoid it to the extent market forces permit. Judging by this wonderful article, the market forces are quite formidable. 

It's about bio-medicine, but invokes the term "nano-robot." Not quite hyperbole, and not quite a misrepresentation. But we are talking about DNA origami, not a glass and metal device. 

Say you were in some future, fifty to a century. Would you call this stuff nano-robotic then? Or would it just be medicine. Probably the latter, and nano-robotics would mean something specific and different, whereas you can kind of say they overlap now.

And that's kind of the point I'm getting to. If you write fiction stuff in the future, do you try to immerse your audience by writing how they would talk, or how you think your audience will receive it? I think the second option is shallow and ultimately wrong. You never have full control on how someone else interprets things. But you can put a lot of depth into a writing by including some assumptions in it. If you lived on Ganymede, you would not want to call 'Luna', "The Moon," so if you only write Luna, it implies the context. 

Setting that point aside though, this article linked above is something to ponder. It is another example of a trail-head, something emerging now that will be a big deal in the future. In Sweet it will be so eschewed so deeply that it wont be addressed in such click-baity terminology, but just casually implied leading one to be able to ponder all the prerequisites to get to there, from here. 

Zombie fly fungus lures healthy male flies to mate with female corpses

A unique fungus survives by 'bewitching' male flies into mating with dead female flies. The longer a female fly carcass has lain and rotted, the greater the male's lust.

Link to Science Daily article. 

I use something similar to this in Sweet, however maybe I should use this exact example in Suffer. It's kind of a little too on-point with Venusian lore. 

Essentially the fungus is a fly STD, that happens to manipulate the behavior of the fly while consuming it. So the fungus takes turns infecting a female, then a male, and repeat. Little wonder it appears, in the end, splitting the abdomen of the fly. The fungus' name is Entomophthora Muscae. 

 So here's a thought exercise. One cannot predict the future well, but for those who are inclined to try, there are the ones taking faithful fliers, and the ones trying to get the answer right. Still, what is a safe bet? 

Anything that improves the quality of life, and can't be messed up by the government, (stupid supreme court,) is on the table, and anything that is happening now and has room for improvement is a fair bet. 

In Sweet, when dividing broad traits to four spacefaring nations, I'm not remotely trying to be predictive. Venusians are too much genetic engineers, Pacificans are too much androids, Mediterraneans are too much Cyborgs. They probably wouldn't be divided so starkly in reality, but it makes the story flow. Jovians are too much in tune with their wetsuits. 

This is existing and emerging tech. Here is a sciencedaily article and here is raman spectroscopy, a breakthrough discovery that's going to take it to the next level. If you want to start a business, get in on this racket. 

In Sweet I avoid sticking my neck out too much. Some for fun, but I mostly am only using real world tech, for example the above. Stuff that exists but hasn't been made ubiquitous yet. 

By doing it that way, I am laying out before the reader, options. Tech isn't an obstacle to overcome. How do you get to there, from where and when you are now?

 This recent article is so on point for robot-apocalypse tropes I have to link it. 

Sweet Sol System does not have any kind of robot-apocalypse, or any other apocalypse, in it, but rather the opposite. In Sweet androids are symbiotic with the "Pacifican" libertarian nation, and other androids are self-aware colonies for blue-collar "Jovians." However the implications of how they got to that point are central to the plot. 

A reoccurring but only implicit theme in Sweet is "how do we get from here to there?" A common problem with SCIENCE-fiction is that people will conjecture about a distant possibility and not go through all the prerequisites it would take to get to that possibility. Yeah, sure, you can terraform Mars, but before you get to that point you would already have better options than the terraformed Mars result. That's part of why hard-sci-fi is usually set near the present and anything that is "long ago & far away" is filed under space opera.

The premise in Sweet is that modders, coders who make add-ons for video-games, found a way to allow anyone to mod casually, and a nation emerged from that event. So androids went to a libertarian non-utopian ideal instead of a authoritarian dystopia.      

 One in 500 men carry extra sex chromosome

From ScienceDaily.com. The article is finding a correlation between an increase in certain cardio and pulmonary illness such as throwing a clot, or COPD, and an extra sex chromosome. Curious because there is no clue towards cause, and it does not matter if it's an extra X or y. Therefore this will be the trail-head of an ongoing research path.  

But this gives me an opportunity to mention something in "Sweet," Sevens.

In "Sweet," Sevens are a type of Venusian male that can fly. They are XXy and the book goes on at length why, crossing through genetics 101 but stopping short of genetics 315. 

I set them up like that reasoning that a genetic-engineering society would work themselves towards one gender. The idea being genetic-engineers would want to make themselves easier to engineer, and want to have maximum freedom. But "Sweet" is held at a time when that kind of stuff must be further down the line. I pushed the believably with Venusians enough as was, actually having to resort to "creative-freedom" once or twice. 

Sevens though, I'm very proud of. They address a lot of complaints I've had over the years. The existence of XXy as effectively a 3rd gender seems a fact politicians are unaware. I loved the lymphatic system when I studied A&P and wanted to use it, and I can't stand how Angels and Succubi are never anatomically feasible. Sevens let me put all these torments to rest. 

   

 I want to share something I think is neat. 

See this? 

The geological map of Ganymede. The image I used as a critical guide to make Jovian Society in Sweet Sol System. 

Now check this out. 

This is from the current JUNO mission, June 8 2021. Neat picture huh? 

See that big white crater with the awesome bright star shaped ejecta? It's name is Tros. In "Sweet" Tros is a self-aware city burrowed into that crater basin. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

Tros is located inside a sulcus. A sulcus in context of Ganymede is very likely a rift, with horst-graben tilt-block geomorphology. The sulcus Tros is impacted in is named Phrygia Sulcus. There's a lot of implications buried in that information alone, and planetary scientists are loath to read too much into them. But I'm free to ass-pull some creative freedom so here it goes. 

When water freezes it expands 11%. So it's implicit that the sulci popped open as Ganymede froze solid to some depth or another. The sulci of Ganymede occupy more than 11% of the surface area, so it sure as hell didn't happen on one go. But that's what gives planetary scientists pause. They cannot prove that the sulci rifted in accordance with that 11% rule. So they have to explore more. Some sulci are doubtless much older than others. And the temptation of invoking cryovolcanism mechanics is ever-present. Could be all that and more. More probes are needed. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about either.

Look up (not north, this image wasn't aligned so up is north,) from Tros, through Phrygia sulcus, to the "continent", only slightly darker in the black and white image. Ganymede's continents are different from Earths, don't read too much into the use of the word continent. But that dark pointy continent is named Perrine Regio. Perrine Regio is split by another sulcus. Both sides of that sulcus are Perrine Regio, and the sulci name is Sicyon Sulcus. The Regio continents are way older than the sulci, darker and higher. But that's also not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

Look closer. Compare the two images. You should be able to see by comparing that there is another sulcus splitting Perrine Regio. It's name is Nineveh Sulcus. In Ninevah are craters. You can find their names on the map. You see Bau crater in Nineveh, and Enki Catena in Sicyon Sulcus. Enki Catena isn't a normal crater, it's a machine-gun impact. Something got busted up by mighty Jupiter and the bits shotgunned into moving Ganymede. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

The cool thing I am writing about, you may have noticed by now. Not all the craters on the geological map are named, but one at the crossing between Ninevah and Phrygia is missing from the new image, and it's a big one. How cool is that? 

It looks like it has pale ejecta to the north and south of it. I can't see any newer small craters in the basin or on the ejecta, but there may be one down and to the right. Can it be this huge impact happened between the JUNO and Galileo missions? And everybody missed it? Unlikely, I must doubt. But I've gone looking and can't find an explanation. Could be the older images used to make the geological map were incomplete in the first place. Could be something else. Dunno. But that's a big neat crater and the idea that something that big could have hit Ganymede in the age of observation, and no one noticed, that has fun implications.  

Oh, and in my own self-interest I must mention. In Sweet Sol System, Sicyon Sulcus between Enki Catena and Sati Crater is where "Zarathustra" the self-aware Jovian city where the plot of the Jovian story mostly takes place, is located.