This week we’re talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace Styrofoam.
Continue reading… “A future with less plastic thanks to mushrooms”
Creating a ‘Ripple in the Force’ of the Power Industry
Futurist Thomas Frey: Working with many early stage inventors, I often have the privilege of seeing some truly remarkable inventions and innovations. A few days ago I was shown a technology that snugly fits into that remarkable category, one that has the potential to radically transform the way cars and other vehicles are powered. In fact, vehicles using this power source will never need to stop and refuel.
Continue reading… “Creating a ‘Ripple in the Force’ of the Power Industry”
The future of pothole repair is Silly Putty
Pot holes pepper highways everywhere.
Fixing a hole in a road should be easy—but the fact that our nation’s highways are littered with potholes is testament to the fact that it’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds. But a new solution, inspired by silly putty, could make our streets much smoother in the future.
In fact, the idea—developed by students from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland—has won an engineering contest, reports Science. But prize-winning or not, the idea of mending a road with something like silly putty sounds like madness, right?
Continue reading… “The future of pothole repair is Silly Putty”
Limits to growth: 40 year old prediction of ‘collapse’ still on track
In a controversial study released 40 years ago, recent research supports the conclusions of that study: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.
Continue reading… “Limits to growth: 40 year old prediction of ‘collapse’ still on track”
Printable Houses and the Massive Wave of Opportunity it will bring to Our Future
Futurist Thomas Frey: All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented called Contour Crafting to construct the world’s first 3D printed wall.
His goal was to use the technology for rapid home construction as a way to rebuild after natural disasters, like the devastating earthquakes that had recently occurred in his home country of Iran.
While we have still not seen our first “printed home” just yet, that will be coming very soon. Perhaps within a year. Commercial buildings will soon follow.
For an industry firmly entrenched in working with nails and screws, the prospects of replacing saws and hammers with giant printing machines seems frightening. But getting beyond this hesitancy lies the biggest construction boom in all history.
Here’s why I think this will happen.
Continue reading… “Printable Houses and the Massive Wave of Opportunity it will bring to Our Future”
A multitouch floor could one day detect your heart attack
Multitouch floor.
The smart home of the future will need a way to sense who its residents are and what they’re doing. One way to do so may be through the floor.
Continue reading… “A multitouch floor could one day detect your heart attack”
14 Global Projects that could Make You the World’s Next Billionaire
Opportunities are often right before our eyes, but few of us can see them.
Futurist Thomas Frey: The super-connected nature of the Internet is giving us a far different “opportunity landscape” than ever before in history. Unlike the painstakingly slow 400-year period between DaVinci’s drawings of flying machines and the Wright Brother’s first flight, development cycles in the digital era can now be measured in hours and minutes rather than decades or centuries.
Continue reading… “14 Global Projects that could Make You the World’s Next Billionaire”
100 million televisions will be connected to the internet by 2016
By 2016, the living room TV will become as hyper-connected as the people watching it.
Researcher NPD In-Stat predicts that 100 million homes in North America and Western Europe will own television sets that blend traditional programs with Internet content by 2016. These new hybrid devices, capable of displaying interactive content related to TV shows, are a bid to hold the viewer’s attention in a device-cluttered world.
Continue reading… “100 million televisions will be connected to the internet by 2016”
Smoking related deaths triple in the past decade
A billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century – one person every six seconds.
Deaths related to tobacco use have nearly tripled in the past decade and big tobacco firms are undermining public efforts that could save millions, a report led by the health campaign group the World Lung Foundation (WLF) said on Wednesday.
Continue reading… “Smoking related deaths triple in the past decade”
The Coming Coder Wars
Futurist Thomas Frey: In the late 1980s, I spent some time as a mainframe programmer at IBM. Conversations around the water cooler often had to do with some of the cryptic code written 2-3 decades earlier, buried deep within the system, that was incomprehensible to what anyone was writing at the time.
Continue reading… “The Coming Coder Wars”
When Death Becomes Optional
Futurist Thomas Frey: The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one.
Continue reading… “When Death Becomes Optional”
Eat anything, never exercise and never gain weight by blocking marijuana-like chemical in brain
Who wants to eat anything and stay thin?
A diet pill that someday allows people to eat as much as they want without gaining weight seems possible, based on new research into certain brain chemicals that influence how quickly we burn fat.
