Steve has had a long day. He is tired despite having taken the
anti-fatigue pill “Alert” to get through the last web conference on
the company’s newest video unit.
Steve has had a long day. He is tired despite having taken the
anti-fatigue pill “Alert” to get through the last web conference on
the company’s newest video unit. A happy hour beer-fest at an Alfa
lounge sounds tempting, but just after leaving the building; a
sharp chest pain stops him mid step. The pain finally subsides, and
he quickly speaks to his cell phone, activating his personal health
record by uttering the word, “Emergency”.
Immediately, Steve is routed via the internet to his health
plan’s Clinical emergency centre for diagnosis. This Involves
answering a series of yes or no questions about the symptoms and
vital signs asked by a Med-Tech on duty computer. Steve places a
finger on the screen of his cell phone where his bio-signature
converts his bio-scan signals and sends them instantly to the
Emerg-Med Team via virtual Net Centre many time zones away.
The GE Cyberdoc decides that Steve’s condition maybe acute
cardiac ischemia and dispatches a clinic mobile to his exact
location. En route to the nearest emergency-care unit, a battery of
tests, including another bio-scan, are performed and transmitted
immediately through a wireless devise in real time to a lab for
interpretation. (cont.)
Underwater cities have been a dream of futurists.
Starting from Atlantis to the evasive Captain Nemo.
The first underwater built city in Dubai was a scientific
breakthrough. Located just off the coast of the man made “World”
islands, it was the first under water facility capable of
sustaining prolonged life under water. It was built in the shallow
waters, merely ten meters from the surface allowing plenty of
natural light to seep through.
At first air was pumped from the outside until a new air
harvesting technology called “air farming” was adopted in 2020. Air
farming is literally a network of fields of sea plants, saturated
with pumps and filtering systems, extracting and transporting air
to the underwater city. The switch from external to internal air
came in 2022 which introduced a new era of development under water.
It was later discovered that air produced and extracted straight
from the ocean was so beneficial to human health that the
underwater cities quickly became the preferred choice for the rich
and famous. Nicknamed “Utopia”, it became the centre of the
scientific advancement. (cont.)
Let's think beyond simply trying to find new ways to produce more energy, and focus on ways of storing energy. Why? Because this expands ways for us to produce more energy! Confused?
Solar and wind alone are a hard sell to utility providers because of intermittent production when the sun isn't shining or wind doesn't blow. Add utility scale storage to solar and wind farms, and you have a more valuable proposition.
Battery powered cars sound great, but not if we have to plug in our vehicles every 50 or 100 miles. Or what about a new iPhone with a battery that cannot last the entire day.
We have written dozens of posts on energy storage and believe it deserves much more attention from the media and policy leaders. 2009 could be a turning point for awareness around the importance of enabling next generation batteries, fuel cells and capacitors.
List of 20+ Energy Breakthroughs in Batteries, Fuel cells, and Capacitors
It was the summer of 2022 and I was invited to go
rock-climbing with some friends. I had never attempted this
exercise before, so naturally, I was concerned.
My friends simply dismissed my unease, saying “rock-climbing is
not what it used to be”.
They were right.
Body line pressurized suits have been in use since 2012; first
in NASA spacewalks and then were quickly
introduced to the public. At first they were simply pressurized and
used as a space suit based wrap. It increased mobility and
decreased its size. Since then electronic fibers were introduced to
manipulate the structure of the “smart” fabric thus magnifying the
strength of movement while wearing the suit. Making the user of it,
astoundingly stronger. I knew that hours in the gym would not be
needed for what would be a grueling rock-climbing trip, because my
hire suit enhanced my strength five fold. The trip turned out to be
great, getting to the top was definitely worth the now-easy trip.
Next month we will go kite surfing, I think I might need hire the
suit again.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, has written an excellent
article entitled “The
End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes Scientific Method
Obsolete” in which he convincingly argues that massive amounts
of data, in combination with sophisticated algorithms and super
powerful computers, offers mankind a whole new way of understanding
the world.
Anderson believes that our technological tools have now
progressed to the point where the “old way” of doing science –
hypothesize, model and test – is becoming obsolete. In its place, a
new paradigm is now emerging whereby scientists, researchers and
entrepreneurs simply allow statistical algorithms to find patterns
where science cannot.
If Anderson is correct – and I believe he very well could be –
this will take science in a whole new direction. In short, instead
of modeling and waiting to find out if hypotheses are valid the
scientific community can instead rely on intelligent algorithms to
do the heavy lifting.
Before this vision can be achieved, however, it will require a
great many brilliant scientists to unlearn the idea that their
“model-based” method of trying to make sense of today’s
increasingly complex world is the only way to search for new
meaning. (cont.)
It got me thinking — is our salvation really in the hands of these small microbials? Do science fiction writers have it right?
War of the Worlds
An invasion of Martians threaten to obliterate humanity. Humans are forced to run, unable to combat the technologically advanced tripods the Martians are manning. All seems lost until tripods start falling down for unknown reasons. Eventually, all the Martians have died due to a lack of immunities against Earth’s bacteria.
Red Planet
Earth, due to overpopulation and pollution, has seeded Mars with oxygen-producing algae in the hope of being able to eventually move to the planet. Astronauts are sent to the planet to find out why oxygen production has stalled and discover a native bug which feeds on the algae and produces oxygen. Running out of air, the astronauts remove their helmets expecting to die but find oxygen.
At some point in the not-so-distant future, somewhere on planet Earth…
Beta Bogdanovsky’s Italian Cācio-model translator spoke with a decidedly male monotone, and had the vocabulary, albeit in 13 languages, of a 3rd grader. Her dog’s translator was nearly as well spoken. Then again, Tóse was a smart dog, an Illyrian sheepdog whose eyes expressed more care than those of most people, and he almost certainly had the capacity to communicate on levels beyond the short sentences programmed into his collar.
“Iz vee NEH tuh,” she said in Bulgarian to a rotund bearded man blocking access to the window seat next to him. A roundish silver and gold box hung from a beaded chain around her neck, and a small bas-relief profile of the Roman god Mercury spoke the Greek, “Syghnomi.”
Excuse me.
The man’s posture shifted to make way even before he looked up, and when he did lift his head he was eye to eye with Tóse. Expressionlessly he made a symbolic attempt to scoot his plastic bags out of the aisle, and Beta sided into the seat, setting her gear on the floor between her feet. Tóse sat on his haunches in front of them both. Beta wondered why it was that people could not seem to rein it in in crowded public places and on trains.
As the ARMA Speed Tram pulled away from the passenger bay, the lights in the tramcar faded slightly as they always did between stations, and Beta closed her eyes and relaxed her neck, as she always did when she was commuting. Bitoli was five stops from the sea, as the tram tunneled through the Korab and Pindus Mountains, and then there were six more on the other side of the water before reaching Monopoli. This trip would be an opportunity to shut her eyes for approximately 2 hours, which was a very good thing, because Beta’s eyes were very tired.
If you had an opportunity to sit down and interview Thomas Edison, what would you ask him? That’s a similar position I found myself in at the recent NanoTX’08 conference in Dallas, TX. I asked Stanford Ovshinsky, founder of Energy Conversion Devices and Ovshinsky Innovations to sit down with me after he gave a keynote where we discussed, among other things, his plans for a 1 Gigawatt solar power plant that would produce electricity more cheaply than a coal fired plant.
Over the past few months Americans have been trying to grasp what each presidential nominee will bring to the table once inaugurated as our Commander-in-Chief this coming January.
With looming issues that include the economy, the war in Iraq, and gas prices, there has been little emphasis placed on how either John McCain or Barack Obama feel about the government’s role in science and technology despite a growing group of citizens who want the issue debated.. These individuals believe that the future of America’s science and technology sectors are crucial to the success of our economy, world image, and ultimately our well-being.
The table compares the decisions made by McCain and Obama regarding policies on science and technology spanning energy, health care and innovation.
It is clear through this table that Obama has given each issue some more thought: his calls for change include concrete numbers and percentages, while McCain’s do not.
With some more research, I found that much of the same was reflected in McCain and Obama’s campaign websites and other articles written about their stances.
In the blur of announcements from solar companies, oil company TV commercials, and news pundits, science sometimes get lost in the conversation. But it's science that will bring us to a workable energy future and this year has seen some significant breakthroughs. MIT's Daniel Nocera announced the development of a low cost catalyst that helps in the electrolysis of water into oxygen & hydrogen. The development of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for solid hydrogen storage continued to evolve; Nanotechnology continues to bring promising experimental results across many energy related fields including, catalysts for fuel cells; conversion of waste heat into electricity; a new theory explaining molecular movement in polymers; and more.
Which of these scientific breakthroughs might change the commercial viability of cleaner hydrocarbons, bioenergy, renewables and advanced energy storage systems?
Continue Reading other Top 10 Energy Stories from 2008
In his first ever post on the NYTimes' The Wild Side blog, biologist Aaron Hirsch describes what he sees as the increasing centralization and decentralization of scienctific processes. These new approaches, he argues, are driving larger and more complex efforts to generate more useful useful data in different ways.
Centralization: Across many different fields, new data are generated by a smaller and smaller number of bigger and bigger projects. And with this process of centralization come changes in what scientists measure — and even in what scientists are.
Hirsch attributes this to the high cost of powerful machines and technologies that can quickly generate results that otherwise would take far longer to discover. This new dependence on massive facilities or operations, he argues, is changing the nature of the scientist.
It’s not only scientific instruments, but also the scientists themselves who are transformed by centralization. If the 19th century was an age of far-flung investigators alone in the wilderness or the book-lined study, the 21st century is, so far, an age of scientists as administrators.
Decentralization: Simultaneously, we are are experiencing a huge decentralization of much of our scientific process through projects such as SETI that tap the distributed power of personal laptops. Hirsch labels this "Citizen Science".
This mashup video project created by students in a Brown University Global Media course (2007) integrates various video clips that ask:What is nanotechnology?
It was the summer of 2022 and I was invited to go
rock-climbing with some friends. I had never attempted this
exercise before, so naturally, I was concerned.
