Vertical Harvest’s three-storey-tall hydroponic greenhouse.
By 2050, there will be billions more hungry people in the world. Growing our food on vertical farms or under radical new lighting systems may be key to ensuring they have enough to eat. (Pics)
Continue reading… “Can urban farms feed a hungry world?”
Bitcoin
What will the next big thing in technology be? Depends on who you ask. At Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing conference in Half Moon Bay, California, a number of industry thinkers and innovators did some crystal ball-gazing.
Here’s a round-up of some of their more interesting predictions.
Continue reading… “Top 5 expert predictions on the next big thing in technology”
Masdar City will use solar energy and other renewables , and will be car-free.
Mankind is rethinking how we build the structures we live and work in which is changing the way our cities look and feel. According to architect Philip Beesley, our cities of smooth stone and steel may become more like floating forests – with buildings that can think and breathe and cool themselves.
Continue reading… “Future cities will have buildings that can think and breathe”
Flying robots are going to become a lot more common in the U.S.
Investors and entrepreneurs are betting on a future full of flying robots that can be programmed to do anything from survey crops or wildlife to delivering vaccines to remote villages in Africa.
Continue reading… “Entrepreneurs and investors bet on the future of the drone economy”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Let’s first start off with a different question. “Who controls the bread supply in London?”
This was the opening question that Jonas Eliasson started with in his TED talk titled “How to solve traffic jams.”
Continue reading… “Who Controls the Education Industry?”
Steve Mann, “the father of wearable computing.”
“People always ask me if this is the dawn of the augmented reality industry,”says Bruce Sterling, celebrated sci-fi author. “No, this is not the dawn,” he says with relish, “this is 10:45AM on what’s turning out to be a hot and turbulent summer day.” Augmented reality is here to stay.
Continue reading… “Augmented reality will reach 1 billion people by 2020”
Putting new information directly in front of users as they go about their daily tasks is sure to disrupt a wide variety of industries.
Technology that was once only science fiction is now becoming a reality. Robots, touch screens and iPads could become passé as Google’s latest invention, Google Glass, begins to change the world forever.
Continue reading… “Five industries Google Glass will change forever”
Insects may be the food of the future.
In Western societies, eating insects is considered disgusting or even primitive. But 2 billion people elsewhere consume insects on a regular basis. According to a report released last month by the UN, the benefits of using insects as food is so great that it is high time we convert the other 5 billion people into insect-eaters.
Continue reading… “Insect-eating is the future of food”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Over the past few days I’ve been wrestling with a very troubling thought.
It started with the simple question, “Ten years from now, anyone who is frustrated with those in power, whether it’s a local, national, or international issue, what options will they have for protesting what they see as an injustice, inequities, or outright corruption?”
Thomas Edison
Larry Page, CEO and co-founder of Google, wants to be more like Thomas Edison than Nikola Tesla. “If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody,” he recently told Fortune. “You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.” Edison did that with practical incandescent light, the phonograph, the movie camera, and hundreds of other inventions. Tesla had his grandiose successes, too, but a shrewd businessman he was not. “He couldn’t commercialize anything,” Page added. “He could barely fund his own research.”
Continue reading… “Google X’s vision of the future”
So what is the future of marriage?
In 1996 a symposium titled “Can Government Save the Family?” was published by the Hoover Institution. A who’s-who list of culture warriors—including Dan Quayle, James Dobson, John Engler, John Ashcroft, and David Blankenhorn—were asked, “What can government do, if anything, to make sure that the overwhelming majority of American children grow up with a mother and father?”
Continue reading… “Living in a world where marriage is on the decline”
Who’s responsible? And perhaps more importantly, will we make any attempts to stop it?
If Google has it’s way Driverless cars will soon be here. But what happens when we’re all zipping around, hands-and-feet free, nary a care in the world, and BAM! we’re in a terrible accident?
Continue reading… “What happens when your driverless car crashes?”