This month, the Web is 25 years old. If you think about it, it’s quite astounding how entwined with and dependent our lives are on the internet. Pew Research published a weighty report this week in honor of the Web’s anniversary, Digital Life in 2025. The results are thought-provoking, even controversial.
Continue reading… “Experts predict what education will look like in 2025”
Sheerwind
“What if you could scoop the air? Scoop it and move it downward, amplifying its kinetic energy along the way, concentrate it to a single point of intensity, the way a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight to a single incendiary point?”
Continue reading… “The future of wind power”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Throughout history, speed has been synonymous with greatness. In sports, those who ran the fastest were heroes. In times of war, those with the fastest chariots, ships, planes, and weapons had a significant advantage. In the business world, a company’s competitive edge has typically been formed around speed – quickest delivery, fastest transaction times, or speed of information.
Continue reading… “The Next Bold Step in Transportation: Personal Rapid Transit Systems”
Experts predict the Internet will become more ‘like electricity’ — less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill.
Continue reading… “Experts predict digital life in 2025”
Millennials are looking for ways to live bank-free in the future.
Scratch polled 10,000 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption. The results from the poll found that banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands, but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant.
Continue reading… “Millennials see financial institutions as irrelevant”
Letting nature wash the problems of the world away!
Quote of the Day: “If you even dream of beating me, you’d better wake up and apologize.” – Muhammad Ali
Continue reading… “Top 14 Photos of the Week”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Yesterday my wife Deb and I had lunch at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants, and afterwards we’re given the typical fortune cookies that come with the bill. Jokingly I broke open the first one and asked, “I wonder if it’d be possible to create a real fortune sometime in the future and put it into these cookies?”
Continue reading… “Passing the Fortune Cookie Test”
Tesla Model S at a charging station.
When Elon Musk was designing the Tesla Model S he wanted an electric motor that had the same horsepower as the most powerful internal combustion engine but with nearly-instantaneous torque. He also wanted it to be the size of a watermelon. Musk was told this couldn’t be done by engine manufacturers. So the Tesla CEO decided to build his own motor. The earlier versions of this had a hand-wound stator which increased winding density to help eliminate resistance and increase peak torque. Later versions of the stators were built by robots.
Continue reading… “Tesla could have a $35K car that gets 1,000 miles per charge by 2020”
The pace of technological innovation is accelerating quickly.
The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon’s fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now “sound like science fiction” that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google.
Continue reading… “Could we already be living in the technological singularity?”
Workers install solar electric panels on a residential rooftop.
The head of America’s second-largest power company, David Crane, said microgrids will soon phase out large centralized electrical grids making the industry’s current business model obsolete.
Continue reading… “Microgrids will soon make large electrical grids obsolete”
Scientist Angelo Vermeulen on a Mars mock-up in Hawaii.
NASA has big plans for Mars in the coming decades, including intentions to blast a fifth rover onto the planet’s surface by 2020 and send a manned mission by 2030.
Continue reading… “How NASA scientists plan to farm on Mars”
Embedded tracking technologies are being used to remotely monitor individual health and performance.
Personal wearable devices are painting a more intimate picture of your health and overall fitness level by the data they are collecting. The real opportunity of wearables may be in connecting that information to a person who can help us make sense of the data and in turn, build a new relationship between patients and experts, one that carries with it highly personalized layers of analysis and recommendations.
Continue reading… “How wearables will redefine the doctor-patient relationship”