Researchers at UT Dallas have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.
2013 Ford Shelby GT500 includes a new carbon fiber driveshaft.
If dieters think they have it hard, consider what Ford Motor is going through. Ford has created a goal of cutting 750 pounds of ugly, dangerous fat out of every car by the end of the decade.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.