What do astronauts do with human waste?
Recently, NASA asked researchers to come up with a way to use all of the human waste expected to pile up when it builds a moon base. The best answer was to use it to fuel spacecrafts on their trips back to Earth.
Continue reading… “NASA will use human waste to fuel spacecrafts”
Ocean Spiral
They have built terminal 3 of Singapore’s airport and the The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line aka Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway. Aqualine is a bridge–tunnel combination across Tokyo Bay in Japan. It connects the city of Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture with the city of Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture, and forms part of National Route 409. With an overall length of 14 km, it includes a 4.4 km bridge and 9.6 km tunnel underneath the bay—the fourth-longest underwater tunnel in the world.
3D printed LED
Electronics, like antennas and batteries can be 3D printed. But LED’s and semiconductors have been elusive. You would need some other manufacturing technique to make them work, which limits what they can do and where they’ll fit. A team of Princeton researchers recently solved this problem, however.
Continue reading… “New 3D printing technology will put electronics into just about everything”
Platinum metals and water are the most profitable potential for operations of asteroid mining.
Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have announced that they will pursue their plans if asteroid mining. The companies have received contracts from NASA to study asteroid redirection.
Continue reading… “Mining asteroids comes closer to reality”
It’s hard to wait for the future to get here and give us all the amazing things we’ve dreamed up in our countless sci-fi books and movies (I’m still waiting for the hover-boards Back to the Future promised me). Though much of what we’ve seen on the big screen is still decades or millennia away… or straight up impossible by our current understanding of the universe, there are several sci-fi level technological and scientific advances we’re likely to see in just the next decade.
Blogger Jordan Lejuwaan over at High Existence has compiled a list of ten such advances to look forward to in the not-to-distant future:
Continue reading… “10 Ways the Next 10 Years will be Awesome!”
A machine that administers sedatives recently began treating patients at a Seattle hospital. At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to people’s rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that The Los Angeles Times published.
Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.
A new study found that more than half of players are downloading their game content on consoles or PC, and that 75 percent spend at least some time playing free games. A third of all gaming time is spent on free-to-play titles, the study showed.
In the coming year, mobile will continue to strengthen its hold on the industry, smart data will outshine big data, and real-time marketing will become an achievable goal.
With just a few weeks left in 2014, it’s time for some of my annual digital marketing predictions for the upcoming year.
Corporate venture capital is picking up speed in the investment industry, as large companies start setting aside funds for external investment in fledgling companies or startups.
Tech giants like Intel, Dell and AMD all have strong track records with their proprietary funds, and more companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are now entering the venture-fund game. During the past four years more than 475 corporate venture funds have started, bringing the worldwide total to more than 1,100, according to Global Corporate Venturing.
With this surge comes a lot of uncertainty. How will corporate venture-capital players influence the funding ecosystem? What do entrepreneurs need to know when choosing between corporate and traditional venture-capital partnerships?
Do you work for a firm where managers think employees really have to work (what is called) “full time”? That forty hours per week (or whatever is considered “full time” in your profession) is really a necessity? Perhaps you are one of those people with that conviction yourself — that in your job it is really not possible to work “part time.”
Of course you are wrong: working five out of seven days is really just as arbitrary as six days, or three – or twenty-eight for that matter. Chopping up the total amount of work that needs to done in your firm into blocks that suit our human physiology has nothing to do with the actual work. If the total amount of work that needs to be done in a firm in one week equals 20,000 hours, it is just as arbitrary to chop that up into 500 40-hour work weeks as it is to chop it up into 800 blocks of 25 hours. A five-day work week consisting of eight-hour days happens to be the social norm in many of our societies at present, but I have long thought that a company that disrupts that kind of social norm in its industry could potentially build a momentous competitive advantage out of it.
Continue reading… “Is Working When You Want More Productive?”
After applying linguistic tools to the calls of monkeys, researchers
now think they can understand what our primate relatives are saying
Fiona Macdonald – Researchers have used human linguistic tools to translate the language of Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli), primates found in western Africa.
For years primatologists and linguists have been studying their advanced language to try to crack the code of monkey vocabulary, but now a team of researchers believe they may have finally done it, all thanks to the monkey term “krak”.
They found that Campbell’s monkeys in the Ivory Coast’s Tai Forest use the term krak to indicate that a leopard is nearby, and the sound “hok” to warn others that there’s an eagle circling overhead. You can listen to how these words sound over at Scientific American.
America’a middle class has stagnated because the upward talent flow got clogged
Jim Tankersley – America lost its exceptional economy because too many Americans stopped doing the most exceptional things they could. Too many middle-class workers were forced into low-skill, low-paying jobs. Too many people born poor were knocked off course on their way to gaining more valuable skills. Too many American elites flocked to Wall Street and K Street, where they got rich at the expense of the overall economy. Not enough entrepreneurs took risks and built new businesses.
These trends run in stark contrast to how Americans built decades of shared prosperity in the postwar era: by investing in themselves and clearing paths for others to get ahead, too.