Futurist Thomas Frey: If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose?
Continue reading… “Driverless Cars: A Driving Force Coming to a Future Near You”
The Nissan Leaf batteries have extended value beyond powering the car.
It’s not because a battery pack isn’t good enough for an electric or hybrid car anymore that it should go directly to a recycling plant. There are lots of potential secondary uses for batteries that can still hold more than half of their original charge. Articles have already been written about how they could be used to store wind power to reduce the intermittency problem, but a new partnership between Nissan North-America, ABB, 4R Energy, and Sumitomo Corporation of America believes that used electric car batteries (Nissan LEAF ones, in this case) could be used for residential and commercial energy storage, even acting as emergency back-up during natural disasters like last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan…
Continue reading… “Old electric car batteries to find second life on the power grid”
Energy efficiency is very important to overall U.S. energy consumption.
Buildings are blamed for as much as 40% of U.S. energy consumption, and while green construction is on the rise, identifying the best ways to make an older building more efficient can be a tedious manual endeavor. Retroficiency, whose aim is to disrupt the energy efficiency market, eases the process with the help of extensive data sets and predictive analytics.
Greening an old building traditionally involves a walk-through analysis or diagnostic hardware installation, but the Boston-based company’s newVirtual Energy Assessment (VEA) tool shows energy service providers which changes within the building will have the greatest impact on its efficiency. Retroficiency focuses on commercial real estate, which uses 18% of the country’s energy and spending close to $108 billion annually…
Marriage offers little benefit over simply living together without wedding rings.
We’ve all heard married people are happier, but that might not be a reason to rush to get married, according to a new study.
Continue reading… “Cohabitating couples are happier than married couples”
“Get on the shelf” contest
Wal-Mart has launched an “American Idol”-like contest for entrepreneurs and inventors to find the best new products to win a spot on its store shelves.
Continue reading… “Wal-Mart launches ‘Get on the shelf’ contest for inventors”
There are street artists that paint awesome murals and some that leave thought-provoking installations in public spaces. But artist Pavel Puhov out of Russia uses urban objects as his muse. (21 Pics)
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Continue reading… “Amazing street art by Pavel Puhov”
There’s a bad moon rising?
Last year, we heard about a new technology to identify individuals based on the pressure signature of their feet on the ground. Now, Japanese scientists at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology built a system that can identify an individual by the pressure signature of his or her ass. They’re not, er, resting on their laurels though. There’s work to be done!
Continue reading… “Butt biometrics”
DISPLAX Multitouch Globe from DISPLAX™ Interactive Systems on Vimeo.
The demo kind of falls apart when they start poking around Windows, but Displax’s new 40-inch diameter Multitouch Globe looks like an absolute joy when it comes to navigating interactive maps. It’s just too bad it’s a bit impractical…
Continue reading… “Multitouch Domes are a great way to display maps”
The market appears to anticipate rapid growth from Apple.
24/7 Wall St. forecasts the publicly traded U.S. companies that will have the highest profits in the year ahead every January. For 2012, Apple is likely to pass Exxon Mobil as the most profitable corporation in the Fortune 500. It already passed the oil giant in market capitalization for a while last year. The market appears to anticipate rapid growth from Apple comparable to that of the past two years. The stock has reached several all-time highs recently and now trades around $425, up nearly 25 percent in the past year.
Continue reading… “U.S. companies that will be the most profitable in 2012”
iBooks 2 app
Apple reinvents the textbook by way of an update to its iBooks app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch on Thursday. The iBooks 2 app offers a new experience for students and teachers.
Continue reading… “Apple reinvents the textbook with the iBooks 2 app”
The world’s smallest map is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nm2 and was created in only 2.23 minutes.
Zurich scientists have created the world’s smallest 3D map – of the world. IBM’s perfectly formed ‘nano-world’, has now been accepted by the Guinness World Record organization. (Pics)
Continue reading… “World’s smallest 3D map of the world”
The FBed
If you are with obsessed with Facebook and can’t stand being away it out of fear of missing a post or a poke from a friend, we found the bed for you. Of course, you could be like most people and just charge your smartphone at the bedside, but this concept is better for the true Facebook fan. It’s called the Facebook bed. I imagine Zuckerberg has something similar. (Pics)
Continue reading… “Facebook bed for the true Facebook fan”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.