Off-grid solar
The off-grid clean energy market is booming. Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing 300 percent compound annual growth in off-grid lighting; Bangladesh is putting up 30,000 to 40,000 solar home systems every month; and d.light, a for-profit seller of solar lights, recently reached its1 millionth customer. (Video)
Continue reading… “Off-grid solar is the next big market in clean energy”
Putting a baby and a 4-year-old into a child care center cost more than the annual median rent in every single state.
It is no surprise to parents that child care costs are getting costlier and costlier, according to a new report. It costs families more to put an infant in a child care center than to cover tuition and fees at a public college in more than half of the states, according to a new analysis by Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on child care access.
Imagine a world filled with hyperlinked smart objects that are constantly interacting over a network to improve user experience IRL. The ‘Internet of Things’ is perhaps the buzzwordiest buzzword in all of the tech sector right now, as it promises to produce a sleek, futuristic, friction-free—and lucrative—environment for all of us to live and consume products in. Which is probably why it’s relentlessly being heralded as the next big thing in consumer electronics: Recent projections from some of the industry’s biggest players say the IoT could be a $15 trillion market in just six years.
Continue reading… “Internet of Things will be the ‘biggest business in the history of electronics’”
Black Hornet
Flying insects have one huge advantage over humans: the gift of enhanced mobility. Insects are small and nimble enough to get into almost any tight space, so it makes sense to create a similarly sized drone for stealth military missions.
ULTra PRT transport pod.
Chances are if you have been to London’s Heathrow Airport you have probably caught a glimpse of something called an ULTra PRT transport pod. These driverless pods have been shuttling travelers from terminal to terminal at the massive airport sonce 2011. That’s all well and good, but now these driverless robo-cars are breaking free of their confines and heading out into the city streets. (Video)
Continue reading… “Driverless cars to be launched on UK streets by 2015”
Futurist Thomas Frey: It’s easy to spot signs of desperation in people’s eyes. With unemployment rates at persistently high levels and young people unable to find jobs from one year to the next, we have become a society seething with anxiety.
Modern Meadow is developing technology to provide instant meat.
You have probably read about the “Googleburger,” so named because Google’s founder Sergey Brin bankrolled it. Have you heard of Modern Meadow, though? Modern Meadow is developing the technology that will someday in the distant future provide the meat counterpart of instant coffee: instant beef! For now, it is focusing on synthetic meat made with 3D printers.
Continue reading… “3D printed meat may be coming sooner than you think”
Bill Gates
Whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires believe, the internet is not going to save the world, says Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates. But eradicating disease just might.
Continue reading… “Bill Gates thinks tech billionaires have all their priorities wrong”
The battery is the biggest limitation for electric vehicles (EV). Tesla, General Motors, Nissan and others install heavy batteries that limit vehicle range and performance. The batteries take up as much as 15% of the vehicle’s total weight.
Contour crafting.
There have been huge advancements in 3D printing. We have seen 3D printed oversized wrenches that measure 1.2 meters in length. Now. we can print an entire 2,500 square foot house in 20 hours. (Video)
Continue reading… “The 3D printer that can print a 2,500 square foot house in 20 hours”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Lg_kvLaAM[/youtube]
This YouTube video about the invention of a plastic-to-oil converting machine went viral and exceeded 3.7 million views. This shows that concern over “the plastic problem” is certainly not going away, despite encouraging bans on and decreases in the use of plastic shopping bags.
Hundreds of companies are investing in electricity transferred through magnetic fields.
Nikola Tesla, the inventor and rival to Thomas Edison, in the early 1900’s built the Wardenclyffe Tower, a 187-foot-high structure on Long Island, which he said could transmit electricity wirelessly. Financier J.Morgan backed the Wardenclyffe Tower. The project failed, and Tesla ended up broke. (In an earlier experiment in Colorado, Tesla had wirelessly lit up 200 lamps over a distance of 25 miles, but pedestrians witnessed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground, and electricity flowed from faucets when turned on. Oops.)
Continue reading… “Electric power without transmission lines”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.