As a child, everyone had a favorite superhuman power – flying, invisibility, comic book character strength and agility. Some of us secretly hoped to cultivate psychic powers like telekinesis, precognition, mind reading, etc., even as teens and young adults.
SporoBot would increase the speed of production 20 – 30 times over.
What if you had developed a vaccine for malaria that, in early trials, was 100% effective. But you couldn’t get the funding you needed to produce enough of the vaccine to market it because of political wrangling over the budget. What would you do? (Video)
Brick-and-mortar retailers didn’t have a fighting chance these past few years to compete with the personalization and convenience provided by online shopping. By cultivating mountains of rich customer data, online retailers had the upper hand.
“We’re considering the possibility that you can write software for living things with bio-code (aka DNA).”
May was a good month for miracles. During these first weeks in May, two separate teams working at two separate institutions announced that when it comes to creating life from scratch, well, there are a couple of new gods in town.
Futurist Thomas Frey: Imagine stepping out of the shower in the morning, and rather than reaching for a towel, a swarm of thousands of flying drones will surround you and begin to dry you off.
Neural interfaces and prosthetics will do away with human disabilities.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it and that is exactly what Hugh Herr has done. At the age of 17, Herr was an accomplished mountaineer, but during an ice-climbing expedition he lost his way in a blizzard and was stranded on a mountainside for three days. By the time rescuers found him, both of his legs were frostbitten and had to be amputated below the knee. Once his scars healed, Herr spent months in rehab rooms trying out prosthetic legs, but he found them unacceptable: How could he climb with such clunky things? Surely, he thought, medical technologists could build replacement parts that wouldn’t slow him down.
George E. Bye, CEO and Founder of Bye Aerospace, Inc., will speak on the endurance capabilities and benefits of solar-electric powered aircraft as part of DaVinci Institute’s Speaker Series on Tuesday, June 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the DaVinci offices in Louisville, Colo.
The World Health Organization’s recent research has revealed that 17.3 million people died from cardiovascular diseases worldwide in 2008, representing 30 percent of all global deaths. A report by the American Heart Association, Forecasting the Future of Cardiovascular Disease in the United States, believes the total direct medical costs of cardiovascular disease will reach $818.1 billion over the next three decades. (Video)
We have seen tremendous changes in technology in the short span of two years. IQ by Intel is now casting their gaze toward the future. It has a lot to do with Moore’s Law, an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. It states that every two years the number of transistors that can fit on a microchip will double, leading to an exponential rise in computing power and the many groundbreaking advances that derive from it.
Futurist Thomas Frey: A couple weeks ago I turned 60. I remember how old 60 was when I was a kid, and now I’m here.
As a person who spends a lot of time asking “what if” questions, constantly thinking about extreme possibilities, the notion of 3D printing a replacement body for myself became very intriguing.
I remember seeing science fiction movies where cloned bodies were grown over long periods of time, and more recent ones with accelerated cloning technology, but the 3D printing of replacement bodies is a faster option, just now coming into view.
Bioprinting is the process of using 3D printers to form human tissue. This process that has already been used to print replacement kidneys, bladders, livers, skin, bones, teeth, noses, and ears, as well as prosthetic arms and legs. This is a list that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, but is now growing on a regular basis.
At TED2014, the speakers and attendees were asked to riff off the conference’s theme (“The Next Chapter”) and tell them what might radically change society, life, technology and so on in the next 30 years. The answers may surprise you.