David Neivandt, a professor at the University of Maine, and Alex Caddell, an undergraduate student there, have developed a golf ball made from the shells of lobsters.
Though biodegradable golf balls already exist, this is the first to be made with crushed lobster shells with a biodegradable binder and coating, creating value from waste material…
Continue reading… “Biodegradable Golf Balls Made From Lobster Shells”
The Cologne zoo has a special animal exhibition on display: a collection of 20 animals including an elephant, a giraffe, and an ostrich, preserved through a process called plastination. German anatomist Gunther von Hagens became famous for his controversial exhibition displaying plastinated human bodies…
Continue reading… “Dead Animals on Display at Zoo”
All manner of wonderful graphics are being created from the newly-available 2010 US Census data. A new sort of nuclear family, for example, is portrayed with this mouse-over map showing the population density inside 10 and 50 mile evacuation radii around the US’ 65 nuclear power plants (containing a total of 104 reactors).
The upshot: One in every three Americans currently resides less than 50 miles from an operating nuclear reactor. MSNBC mapped the details in Nuclear neighbors: Population rises near US reactors …
Continue reading… “One In Three US Citizens Live 50 Miles Or Less From A Nuclear Reactor”
Digital billboards that display different ads depending on who is looking at them were once only found in Minority Report. But a recently launched startup aims to make targeted billboard advertising as ubiquitous as targeted online advertising.
Immersive Labs introduced its smart billboard technology at TechStars‘ Demo Day in New York on Thursday. The software combines video analytics with environmental factors and Twitter and Foursquare information to decide what the best ad to display at that moment is…
Continue reading… “Startup Aims To Build Billboards That Target You, Personally”
Ford–which is about to release an all-electric version of the Focus–just put out the above map of the United States with the cities it feels are best suited to electric car ownership. And with a few exceptions, it looks like the flyover states aren’t making preparations for the messianic arrival of the electric car. What do you want to bet that in the next presidential election, we’ll add “electric-car” to the litany of liberal-associative words like arugula, lattes, and sushi.
Continue reading… “Will Electric Cars Be The Next Red/Blue Divide?”
Crystal Smith of The Achilles Effect blog looked at the words from TV commercials for toys and used to present the stark gender bias in toy advertising in graphic form…
Continue reading… “Word Clouds Show Gender Bias in Toy Ads”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Can you feel the layers being lifted? Transparency is entering our lives in unusual ways and much like having individual veils lifted from a multi-veiled garment; we are now seeing the world around us with far greater clarity.
Continue reading… “The Laws of Transparency”
Tajikistan’s Council of Ulema is set to issue a fatwa banning a so-called SMS-divorce, the state religious committee have announced. The move comes amid growing complaints that some Tajik men – working as migrant laborers in Russia – divorce their wives by sending a mobile-phone text message or just making a phone call.
Sunni Islamic traditions allow men to divorce their wives by merely saying “talaq,” an Islamic term for a declaration of divorce. Tajik religious leaders, however, insist that ending a marriage is not such a simple matter…
Continue reading… “Authorities In Tajikistan Plan Ban On Divorce By Text Message”
Scientists from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan cultivated embryonic stem cells in a test tube and added proteins to coax them into developing. They had wanted it to form a recognizable organ, but were stunned to find that over 10 days, the stem cells had formed an embryonic eye:
Professor Yoshiki Sasai, lead author said: “What we’ve been able to do in this study is resolve a nearly century-old problem in embryology, by showing that retinal precursors have the inherent ability to give rise to the complex structure of the optic cup.”
Continue reading… “Scientists Created Embryonic Eye in Test Tube”
Plants only need a specific wavelength to grow, not the full spectrum of the sun.
If we were to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe, we’d better figure out a way to boost crop yield to keep feeding the planet’s growing population. Gertjan Meeuws and other bioengineers of PlantLab have found an answer: a greenhouse where every aspect of the growing condition is controlled, where climate (or even the Sun) is not a factor at all…
Continue reading… “Sunless Farming of the Future”
A brief update on a story from a year ago: Bolivia is about to pass laws granting all of nature equal rights to human beings. The laws were first proposed after the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth and show the deep differences in zeitgeist between Bolivia and, well, pretty much every other nation-state on the planet…
Continue reading… “Mother Earth To Be Given Rights Equal to Humans In New Bolivian Law”
While on the move, what if any of your gadgets, such as a phone, laptop or iPod, run out of energy? Since it’s not always possible to carry a charger everywhere you go, what one can do wait for a power supply nearby. So, if such a situation arises, you can’t do much but wait till you get back home to pump life into your gadgets. But Revolution designed by Carl McGreavy is here to change this theory. Revolution is a self recharging digital camera which will get all the powers to function by a Dynamo…
Continue reading… “Revolution Self Recharging Digital Camera to End Charging Woes”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.