Ancient people ate far differently than we do.
While we may brush and floss tirelessly and our dentists may regularly scrape and pick at our teeth to minimize the formation of plaque known as tartar or dental calculus, anthropologists may be rejoicing at the fact that past civilizations were not so careful with their dental hygiene…
Continue reading… “Dental plaque used to probe diet of ancient people”
From left: physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates.
Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power…
Continue reading… “Scientists see solution to critical barrier to fusion”
From senior executives identifying the profit motive as an obstacle to sustainability to corporations questioning the very nature of capitalism as we know it, the plus side of the recent financial crisis and ongoing slow recovery has been that tough questions are finally being asked about how our economy functions and whose interests it serves.
On May 2nd Forum for the Future—whose work on system innovation aims to create change across entire sectors of our economy—are hosting an event in New York which will explore better ways of doing business in a post-Great Recession world…
Continue reading… “To envision sustainable business, We must reimagine our economy”
Grand Challenges create a new vision of the future.
Tom Kalil of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy gave a presentation today about Grand Challenges, such as the ones proposed by futurist Thomas Frey HERE. Kalil called them “ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology to achieve,” like NASA’s Green Flight Challenge and the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health. I think Tom’s speech, delivered to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, does a terrific job showing why the grand challenge approach is a powerful way to tackle some pretty daunting problems. He also puts grand challenges in the context of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation. (By the way, it must be nice to be authorized to use the Presidential PowerPoint template.) From Tom’s speech
Continue reading… “White House’s Tom Kalil on “Grand Challenges””
Gas prices are a supreme motivator.
Drivers tend to convert to the fuel-efficiency religion once they get severely wounded in the wallet. It’s a sad fact that environmental concerns alone are often not enough… Of course, the best ways to save on gas costs are to walk, bike, and take transit (for an example of a city that has great sustainable transportation, check out Colombia’s Medellin). But if you’re going to drive, you should get the most fuel-efficient vehicle that meets your needs. Near the top of the list, the Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius can be found, and thanks to relatively high gas prices in the U.S. lately, they’ve both set new sales records in March 2012.
Continue reading… “Prius and Volt Set New Sales Records Thanks to High Gas Prices”
Don’t ya just wanna cuddle em?
Imagine a tyrannosaur weighing one and a half tons, completely covered in soft, downy plumage. Even its tail is fluffy with feathers. Though we’ve known for a while that many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, a group of Chinese researchers have now provided direct evidence that gigantic, deadly tyrannosaurs might have looked a bit like wuffly birds. Three nearly complete, well-preserved fossils give us a glimpse of tyrannosaurs the way we’ve never seen them before…
Continue reading… “Hard evidence that giant tyrannosaurs were cute”
Vanilla is a hot commodity at the moment.
At our current rate of consumption, we’re driving vanilla prices sky-high. The price for a kilo of the brown stuff has jumped from $25 to $40 in a single day, which means your summer ice creams might be an even more expensive treat than usual.
Virtually all of the world’s vanilla supplies are grown in Madagascar, Mexico and India. But in the last year, Mexico’s yield has dropped by a staggering 90 per cent, reports Management Today. In fact, India’s yields are struggling too, leaving Madagascar as pretty much the sole source…
Continue reading… “A worldwide vanilla shortage is making ice cream a luxury”
What if oil company executives were only allowed to drink fracked water?
Toxic fracking chemicals that leached into the ground making you sick? Why that’s bad press for the oil industry!
That’s why they came up with this ingenious (in an evil way) to deal with the problem: “gag” doctors from telling their patients what is making them sick. See, problem solved!
The demand and popularity of coding keeps increasing.
There was a time when people used to go to night classes or buy DIY guides to learn foreign languages in their spare time. But theNew York Times is to have us believe that French and Spanish are out of the window, to be replaced by Python and Java.
It’s an interesting concept. There’s certainly no denying the fact that as a nation we’re becoming more tech savvy—you only need to look around a coffee shop to tell you that—and with that is bound to come an increased shift to learning how to make devices work better. This is giving rise to new fast coder training programs like DaVinci Coders. From the New York Times…
Continue reading… “Is learning to code more popular than learning a foreign language?”
VenusAngelic, a prominent, 15-year-old member of online ball-jointed-doll fandom, describes how she uses cosmetics to make herself look like a doll, narrating it in a kind of whispering, Asian-inflected voice. I confess that this isn’t my subculture or interest, and VenusAngelic’s opening remarks, “Hello my dolly molly inky pinky cotton candy clouds!” are not the sort of thing that I’d be likely to say to other people. But VenusAngelic’s cultural identity seems to me to have the kind of deeply transgressive edge that characterizes the best teenaged subcultures, the kind of thing that evokes panicked, hostile, knee-jerk reactions from grownups. The YouTube comments on her video are a kind of pure, distilled youtubidity — vile, misogynist, patronizing, incoherent — which suggests that she’s touching a nerve…
Continue reading… “How to make yourself into a doll”
Solve your wardrobe problem.
The model for how women purchase clothing is essentially broken. Because it is an ever-changing status symbol and subject to trends, fashion is not exactly like any other goods.
For example, with furniture you buy a new couch or a bed and then you have one, you don’t need another one or a different one two weeks later. Not so with dresses or shoes. In fact if many women, myself included, had their way, we’d never wear the same thing twice.
But spending $$$ on something you’ll only wear once isn’t really economically feasible, for even the 1%ers among us…
Continue reading… “99dresses wants to give women an infinite closet”
Rupert Murdoch
Everybody’s favorite octogenarian media tycoon is at it again. This time, Rupert Murdoch is accused of hiring hackers to crack a pay-TV rival’s encryption system and then post the hack on the internet in order to financially cripple them. It worked: they’re now bust…
Continue reading… “Rupert Murdoch employed hackers to destroy a Pay-TV rival”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.