Creating the Future

A study identifies early-stage technologies that could be combined to cut the cost of solar panels in half.

Technology has the potential to transform our concept of sickness.

 

There’s nothing in the 2,000-plus page [Healthcare] bill that gets into this kind of hyper innovative individual medicine, biosensor leveraging, genome and all these sorts of things – it doesn’t really show up.

 

But it is a great opportunity to make medicine and healthcare more affordable. For example, it’s estimated that about a third of the $350 billion spent a year on prescriptions is a total waste. So there’s a great opportunity there, with gene-specific drugs.

 

If we do the 20 million echocardiograms, and almost as many abdominal and fetal ultrasounds, for free with ultrasound pocket devices, there are billions of dollar we could save there.

 

With sensors, if we could get tens of millions of people in this country to manage or prevent their diabetes that could have enormous financial implications.

 

And it’s the same for high blood pressure: 50 percent of people with high blood pressure do not have it adequately managed, so they’re vulnerable for strokes and heart attacks.

 

If we can manage it with a simple cellphone sensor, that would be an enormous potential to lower costs for stroke disabilities, heart attack, heart failure, all those sorts of things.

Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails.

The Safe Road Trains for the Environment project completed the first successful test of a multiple vehicle platoon.

 

The test fleet included a lead truck followed by three cars driven entirely autonomously at speeds of up to 90 km/h (56 mph), with no more than a 6-meter (20-foot) gap between the vehicles.

Joule Unlimited will build a production plant for turning sunlight and CO2 into liquid fuels.

 

The company claims that its genetically engineered bacteria will eventually be able to produce ethanol for as little as $1.23 a gallon or diesel fuel for $1.19 a gallon, less than half the current cost of both fossil fuels and existing biofuels

Conference on Anti-Aging Strategies and Tactics San Francisco March 31 - April 1

As our cars become networked—to the Internet and to one another—new trends in technology and society will redefine transportation. What's certain: tomorrow's automobiles will provide experiences that go well beyond driving.

Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a half-brother, the strange assertion that ‘‘science fiction is dead because the future is here.’’

 

Now, I will stipulate that science fiction writers often think that they’re predicting the future. The field lays claim to various successes, from flip-phones to the Web, waterbeds to rocket-ships, robots to polyamory.

 

I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘‘predicted’’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events.

BEIJING -- China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a plan released Thursday that shows the country's space program is gathering momentum.

"I presented [that information] there as a rapid illustration of the underlying principle that Facebook causes people to do *ecological* harm by collaboratively destroying one another's privacy. The point is that by sharing with our actual friends through a web intermediary who can store and mine everything, we *harm* people by destroying their privacy *for* them. It's not the sharing that's bad, it's the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle. That is at once outstandingly stupid and overwhelmingly dangerous."

Advances in the study of stem cells have fueled hopes that someday, via regenerative medicine, doctors could restore aging people’s hearts, livers, brains and other organs and tissues to a more youthful state.

In separate studies, researchers have determined that in cold conditions, people’s calorie-gobbling brown fat uses ordinary fat as fuel — and that exercise may convert ordinary fat to brown fat.

Aging mice injected with stem cells lived three times as long, according to findings one scientist found initially unbelievable.

In the battle to lose weight, and keep it off, our bodies are fighting against us.

 

This is a great article that reports on some of the more recent studies on loosing weight. Pretty much all the standard "solutions" are out of touch with the reality that the body will fight hard to gain back lost weight.

 

We are going to need real science based pharmacological / genetic techniques to help folks who are already over-weight find a permanent solution. Diet and exercise can prevent obesity, but in reality can not permanently reverse it for most people.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China became the world's top patent filer in 2011, surpassing the United States and Japan as it steps up innovation to improve its intellectual property rights track record.

 

China is recapitulating the under-developed to developed country evolution but an order of magnitude faster than the last couple of generations of countries. Unless they stumble due to their own internal issues, China is poised to blow by the USA as the US collapses faster than any major empire in recent history, due to the US institutionalized stupidity and financial parasites.

This is a glimpse of the future and what we can do with cheap computing and 3D printers.

 

Toss this foam-covered ball skyward, an accelerometer inside determines when it has reached its maximum height. At that moment, 36 cameras are triggered simultaneously, creating a mosaic that can be downloaded and viewed on a computer as one spherical panoramic image.