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Every day, we make decisions that have good or bad consequences for our future selves. (Can I skip flossing just this one time?) Daniel Goldstein makes tools that help us imagine ourselves over time...
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FutureCast shared this post on Twitter. (January 9, 1:15 PM) |
FutureChronicles
I started Futurecast that evolved into the FutureChronicals back in 1996: To provide an ongoing, world-wide-web based chronicle of the study of the future and the current trends that will affect the actual definitive future...that fleeting intangible event that eventually makes tomorrow, today.
H Lee Siddons, Jr. 
We’ve seen the future of television, and we want it now.
NDS, a company that develops DRM security and DVR technology for pay-TV providers like Cox and DirecTV, has developed a proof-of-concept called Surfaces that shows how television could become the center of a much more compelling, immersive living room experience. The prototype jettisons the single, static screen that’s been a hardware mainstay since the golden age of television. In its place is a slick, highly customized room-sized desktop that hosts not only a traditional widescreen TV image, but also windows for a plethora of digital accoutrements. 
With the cargo version of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft waiting patiently at Cape Canaveral for its scheduled launch on May 19, its astronaut-carrying sibling has received a thumbs up from NASA. 
The robotic rover Opportunity found signs of both hydrothermal vents and water evaporation near the Endeavour Crater on Mars. 
A new material uses abundant elements, including iron and manganese, and has an energy density similar to electrodes used in lithium-ion batteries. 
Read 'The TeleHuman is a life-size, 3D video chat pod straight out of your sci-fi dreams' on Digital Trends. The TeleHuman is a life-size video... 
As computer components grow smaller and smaller it becomes more and more difficult to manufacture them by conventional means, meaning the nano-hard-drives of the future are going to come at a cost. So researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology are enlisting the help of magnetic bacteria, which they say can be harnessed to build tiny computing components similar to those found in conventional PCs, or even to construct the biological computers of the future. 
NASA asked the world’s top aircraft engineers to solve the hardest problem in commercial aviation: how to fly cleaner, quieter and using less fuel. The prototypes they imagined may set a new standard for the next two decades of flight. 
We may be at the dawn of a new, private era in space. In the near future, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will liftoff the launchpad, bringing the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Until now, only the U.S., Russia, and the European Union have accomplished such a goal. If SpaceX succeeds, it will become the first private company to do so.
Us folks at iDownloadBlog love conceptual gadget artwork as much as you do, especially gorgeous, believable renditions like a Liquidmetal-based iPhone 5. 
by Sean Carroll Speaking of writing popular books, I’m at it again. I’m currently hard at work writing The Particle At the End of the Universe, a popular-level book on the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. If all goes well, it should appear in bookstores at the end of this year or beginning of next. (Ideally, it will go on sale the same day they announce the discovery of the Higgs. I’m trying to bribe the right people to make that happen.) The title is somewhat tentative, so it might change at some point. 
Flying objects can achieve forward thrust in a few ways, but here’s a unique new one: Flipping inside out to move forward. Designed by the people who brought us the amazing robot seagull, the SmartInversion flying object can move through the air indefinitely. The object is based on a design envisioned by inventor Paul Schatz. It’s a six-sided articulated ring of prisms that attaches to a cube, and when it’s unleashed, it can start folding into new geometric shapes. As it turns itself inside out, it moves forward. This property of kinematics is called inversion 
Billionaire-backed space startup Planetary Resources has officially unveiled its business plan to much fanfare and with few surprises. The company’s principals--which include X-Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson, and former NASA Flight Director Chris Lewicki--today pledged that Planetary Resources would make the abundant resources of space available here on Earth, and introduced a couple of the company’s own spacecraft that will make such space prospecting possible. The rush for space resources is officially on. |
Nanotransistors just got a lot more nano. A new chip construction process cooked up by Applied Materials in Santa Clara creates transistors so small they can be measured in smatterings of atoms. 
Clyde William Tombaugh (1906-1997) was born in Streator, Illinois, and grew up in Burdett, Kansas, where he built his first telescopes. In 1929, with only a high-school diploma, Tombaugh joined the staff of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to hunt for Planet X, a world which Boston businessman Percival Lowell had predicted should exist beyond Neptune. On February 18, 1930, 24-year-old Tombaugh discovered Pluto. 
A Seattle company has announced plans to build a new spacecraft that, like its Earth-bound counterparts, is all about moving other vehicles around. Spaceflight Inc. is designing what it’s calling the Sherpa to fulfill the need for an orbital tugboat that can move payloads, such as satellites, to different orbits around Earth. 
Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste... 
Boxfish, a new Palo Alto startup, promises to make TV searchable in real-time through the use of closed captioning. 
In my post earlier today regarding Microsoft Research (MSR) projects I didn’t include this project so thought I’d add an additional post on it. As you can see from the video above, it’s a novel use of existing LCD displays to project two different images. The projected was shown at the Microsoft TechVista event in India earlier this year and will be shown again this week at CHI 2012. 
The company plans to start testing a service this summer that allows customers to hook up all manner of sensors to a base unit that connects wirelessly over AT&T's cellular network. 
The largest nation on Earth is flying more people more places than ever before. 
Owning and operating a public EV charging station just got a little easier thanks to new management software that can turn a charger into a business WattStation Connect is a cloud-based EV charging station management system that’s compatible with internet-connected GE WattStation chargers. While drivers already have a myriad of services they can use to search for public plugs and see what prices they’ve put on electricity, WattStation Connect makes it easy for owners of charging stations to set hours and rates using a computer or smartphone. 
"The future is the mind's default," Hammond said. "When at rest and not having to do other things, it goes into the future."In most people's minds, she said, the future is a spacious place where there are oodles of time and time-management skills prevail. Ask a busy person for 10 minutes today, and they won't have it. But ask for an hour sometime next year, and they will gladly schedule you in, even if they are unlikely to slow down in the interim. 
Astronomy | asteroid impacts | Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space! 
Planetary Resources, the nascent billionaire-backed company that's planning to mine near-Earth asteroids, has revealed details of its first exploratory missions - and that it plans to mine ice deposits as well as precious metals and minerals. The water could support life, or be split into oxygen and liquid hydrogen to make breathable air and rocket propellant, the firm says. Though it will be many years before it reaches an asteroid, Planetary Resources has even begun advertising for 'asteroid miners'. 
Since the announcement last week that a team of high-profile backers--Eric Schmidt and Larry Page from Google, filmmaker James Cameron, Ross Perot Jr. (son of the former presidential candidate), space tourism pioneer Eric Anderson, and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, among others--is launching a company that will "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP," media speculation has generally centered on one thing: asteroid mining. And this morning, hours before the official press conference launching Planetary Resources Inc., that speculation appears to be confirmed. |
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