Science & Technology News – Page 282

China, Crime Prevention, Farms, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

More tigers now live in cages than in the wild.

May 18, 2019

They’ve been farmed,butchered, sold — commodified.

We joined this man on his obsessive quest to expose the traffickers.

THA BAK, Laos — He was up there somewhere, at the top of the hill, the man Karl Ammann had come to see. It would soon be night. The forest was all shadows and sounds. Ammann had driven across the country to reach this remote river village, and now he was finally here, looking to the top of the hill, ready to confront the person he believed had murdered more tigers than anyone in Laos. In the distance, he could hear them: dozens of tigers roaring.

Continue reading… “More tigers now live in cages than in the wild.”

China, Employment, Science & Technology News

Chinese millennials are rejecting dull factory jobs — and transforming the economy

May 19, 2019

Job seekers check out employment ads at a recruitment fair in Qingdao, eastern China. (STR / AFP/Getty Images)

Life as one of China’s industrial worker ants did not suit Liu Xu: waking up early in factory accommodation, working for 11 hours operating a machine in the tool-making factory, eating all his meals in the factory canteen and going to bed, only to wake up and do it again.

His parents spent most of their lives in deadening jobs — his father on construction sites and his mother in factories — but 23-year-old Liu Xu lasted just a year in a factory in the southern China city of Dongguan. Half of that was the time his company invested in training him to work the machine before he up and quit.

Like Liu, a generation of young Chinese is turning its back on the factory jobs that once fueled China’s growth — and they are helping to transform the economy by doing it.

“Life in the factory was really boring and repetitive,” Liu said. “Every day I walked into the factory, I felt like this was all there was to my life. I was going to end up in that factory forever.

Continue reading… “Chinese millennials are rejecting dull factory jobs — and transforming the economy”

Housing, Human Behavior, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

The future of housing looks nothing like today’s

May 17, 2019

After a century, Americans are choosing to live together–transforming not just the buildings we live in, but the way we live in them.

What does a living room have to do with living?

When Lisa Cini and her husband, kids, and rescue dog moved in with her parents and grandmother a few years ago, the Ohio-based architect pored over the design of her 94-year-old grandma’s bedroom “apartment.” An Alzheimer’s diagnosis made security and mobility important, but her ideas went beyond extra locks and grab-bars; she felt it was crucial that she have her own living room within the family home.

“It’s interesting, when we’re younger and full of life, when we’re just doing life so hard, we have to find time to sleep. But when we get old, when we’re slowing down so much, we have to work to find ways to do more life and less sleep,” Cini recalls in her book about living with four generations under one roof. Designing a separate living room gave her grandma a space to hang out, engage, and entertain visitors outside of her bedroom, a subtle but important distinction. “Her living room really helps her keep living life,” Cini observes.

Continue reading… “The future of housing looks nothing like today’s”

Energy, Engineering, Science & Technology News, Wearables

Self-Powered wearable tech

May 17, 2019

For emerging wearable tech to advance, it needs improved power sources. Now researchers from Michigan State University have provided a potential solution via crumpled carbon nanotube forests, or CNT forests.

Changyong Cao, director of MSU’s Soft Machines and Electronics Laboratory, led a team of scientists in creating highly stretchable supercapacitors for powering wearable electronics. The newly developed supercapacitor has demonstrated solid performance and stability, even when it is stretched to 800% of its original size for thousands of stretching/relaxing cycles.

The team’s results, published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, may spur the development of new stretchable energy electronic systems, implantable biomedical devices, as well as smart packaging systems.

Continue reading… “Self-Powered wearable tech”

brain-computer interfaces, Entertainment, Films, Science & Technology News

Brain-Machine interfaces could give us all superpowers

May 17, 2019

I Am Human investigates the real-world possibilities of brain-computer interfaces.

ONE RAINY DAY, Bill was riding his bicycle when the mail truck in front of him suddenly stopped. Bill didn’t. The crash left him paralyzed from the chest down. His autonomy, or what’s left of it, comes from voice controls that let him lower and lift the blinds in his room or adjust the angle of his motorized bed. For everything else, he relies on round-the-clock care.

What It’s Like to Regain Your Sense of Hearing, Smell, or Touch

Bill doesn’t know Anne, who has Parkinson’s disease; her hands shake when she tries to apply makeup or weed the garden. Neither of them know Stephen, who went blind in adulthood from a degenerative condition, and needs his sister to navigate the outside world. Imagining the three of them together sounds like the setup to a bad joke—a blind man, a tetraplegic, and Parkinson’s patient walk into a bar. But their stories come together in a new documentary, I Am Human, which premieres today at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Continue reading… “Brain-Machine interfaces could give us all superpowers”

3D Printer, Biotech, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

New video shows 3D printed lung “breathing”

May 16, 2019

First Breaths

Scientists just took a major step forward towards 3D printed organs — with a new lung-like system full of air sacs can expand and contract, filling the same biological role as our lungs do by pumping oxygen into blood.

Bioprinted organs could someday help people who are waiting and sometimes dying on the organ transplant waitlist. In research published in the journal Science last week, the team behind the new printing technique made a similar device and successfully grafted it into mice with injured livers.

Continue reading… “New video shows 3D printed lung “breathing””

Energy, Engineering, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy

Researchers make organic solar cells immune to the ravages of water, air and light

May 16, 2019

The market for organic solar cells is expected to grow more than 20% between 2017 and 2020, driven by advantages over traditional silicon solar cells: they can be mass produced at scale using roll-to-roll processing; the materials comprising them can be easily found in the earth and could be applied to solar cells through green chemistry; they can be semitransparent and therefore less visually intrusive — meaning they can be mounted on windows or screens and are ideal for mobile devices; they are ultra-flexible and can stretch; and they can be ultra-lightweight.

Continue reading… “Researchers make organic solar cells immune to the ravages of water, air and light”

Electric Vehicles, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Long-nosed prototype of ‘world’s fastest bullet train’ ALFA-X unveiled in Japan

May 14, 2019

RIFU, Miyagi — A long-nosed prototype of the next-generation Tohoku and Hokkaido shinkansen bullet trains, which are set to have the world’s fastest regular operation speed of 360 kilometers per hour, was unveiled to the press here on May 9.

Continue reading… “Long-nosed prototype of ‘world’s fastest bullet train’ ALFA-X unveiled in Japan”

3D Printer, Breakthrough Thinking, Home Technology, Housing, Science & Technology News

Watch a 3D printed neighborhood spring up from nothing

May 14, 2019

We’ve already seen a 3D printer construct a house. Now we can watch one build a whole neighborhood.

On Thursday, housing nonprofit New Story shared a video that shows how it plans to build what it calls the “world’s first 3D-printed community” — a futuristic application of 3D-printing technology that could bring affordable housing to the places that need it most.

Continue reading… “Watch a 3D printed neighborhood spring up from nothing”

Analysis, Future, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

The peculiar blindness of experts

May 14, 2019

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.

Continue reading… “The peculiar blindness of experts”

Employment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

I’ve been a freelancer for more than 15 years. Here’s what all clients should know

May 14, 2019

As more freelancers enter the job force, managing them is an art form in and of itself. Here are the secrets to managing independent workers.

I’ve been a freelancer for more than 15 years. Here’s what all clients should know

For the past several years, there has been a steady stream of research indicating that companies are increasingly turning to freelance labor to fill talent gaps and create more flexible teams. Recent research from freelance website Upwork found reports that more than one in three Americans freelanced in 2018, and the freelance workforce grew 7% from 53 million to 56.7 million in five years. Full-time freelancers make up more than one-quarter (28%) of freelancers—up 11% since 2014.

And while hiring specific, on-demand talent may seem like a perfect solution to gaps in your workforce, learning how to manage freelancers and independent contractors well is essential to making the relationship the most fruitful it can be.

Continue reading… “I’ve been a freelancer for more than 15 years. Here’s what all clients should know”

Augmented Reality, Engineering, Ford Motor Company, Science & Technology News, VR

Ford designers are dropping their pencils and reaching for VR goggles instead

May 15, 2019

Ford Gravity Sketch

Ford outlined how it’s increasingly using virtual reality (VR) technology to eliminate the distance between its design studios in North America, in Asia, and in Europe. The Co-Creation tool the firm created jointly with Gravity Sketch lets engineers work on the same project even if they’re located thousands of miles apart. VR is part of the company’s effort to streamline its design and development processes, and it illustrates an ongoing trend in the automotive industry.

Instead of drawing on a piece of paper, or sketching using CAD software, Ford designers are beginning to use VR headsets and controllers to bring their ideas to life. Significantly, the co-creation tool lets Ford skip the 2D stage of design when it wants to save time, and go straight to 3D. Designers can use the technology to transfer virtual ideas. For example, if a designer prefers an upcoming car (like the born-again Bronco) with a more upright grille, he or she can send a VR-wearing colleague a file containing a sample design.

Continue reading… “Ford designers are dropping their pencils and reaching for VR goggles instead”