CFO Ruth Porat gives the unit a shout-out.
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A lot of things are becoming “smart” these days, but bricks might not be something you’d expect to be added to the list. On the way to buildings that act like “large-scale living organisms,” scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) are developing smart bricks that would make use of microbes to recycle wastewater, generate electricity and produce oxygen.
Microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which will be embedded in the bricks to give them their “smart” capabilities, have proven handy in the past, with researchers demonstrating how they can be used to generate electricity from human urine, dead flies or just plain old mud.
“Microbial fuel cells are energy transducers that exploit the metabolic activity of the constituent microbes to break down organic waste and generate electricity,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos, professor at UWE Bristol’s Robotics Laboratory. “This is a novel application for MFC modules to be made into actuating building blocks as part of wall structures. This will allow us to explore the possibility of treating household waste, generating useful levels of electricity, and have ‘active programmable’ walls within our living environments.”
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced today that it will build an “innovation train” for Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, the largest railway operator in Europe. The train will not be a super-fast hyperloop, in which pods are propelled through aluminum tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph, but a conventional train that includes some of the futuristic technologies the startup has been showcasing at tech conferences around the world.
As a startup that relies on crowdsourcing and volunteer engineers, the collaboration with Deutsche Bahn may allow HTT to start generating revenue while it works toward the larger goal of building passenger-ready hyperloop systems. Indeed, HTT’s CEO Dirk Ahlborn said in a statement that the partnership will help create “new monetization strategies and business models” for his company.
Demonetized Cost of Living
Posted in economics, employment, government, robotics/AI
People are concerned about how AI and robotics are taking jobs and destroying livelihoods… reducing our earning capacity, and subsequently destroying the economy.
In anticipation, countries like Canada, India and Finland are running experiments to pilot the idea of “universal basic income” — the unconditional provision of a regular sum of money from the government to support livelihood independent of employment.
But what people aren’t talking about, and what’s getting my attention, is a forthcoming rapid demonetization of the cost of living.
A new story with lots of transhumanism in it:
Zoltan Istvan is in the running for President of the United States. You may not have heard of him, but if elected, he hopes to put an end to death. All of it. (Yes, seriously).
There are people right now walking around with artificial hearts – something that many people believed would not happen for another decade (or even longer). There are quadriplegics no longer bound to a wheelchair, but walk with exoskeleton technology. There are hundreds of thousands of people with brain implants that help them with various ailments. In short, recent technological breakthroughs like these open up the possibility for humans to enhance themselves and their health—and perhaps to even become immortal (someday).
As you can imagine, such radical developments demand strong, intelligent and science-focused political leadership. That is why Zoltan Istvan, of the Transhumanist Party, says that he is running for U.S. President this year, as the #ScienceCandidate.
HP Virtual Reality Display
Posted in virtual reality
““The factory is the machine that builds the machine,” Musk says, sitting in the lobby of his new building.”
NANOG. I just like the sound of it.
In the biology lab-based equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, researchers from the University at Buffalo have uncovered the human body’s internal fountain of eternal youth, in the form of a gene called NANOG. When expressing this gene in aged stem cells, the team found that it reactivated certain processes that had become exhausted, restoring their ability to develop into fully functioning muscle cells.
As we go about our lives, wear and tear causes the body’s cells to die via a process called senescence. When this occurs, new cells are created from stem cells in order to replace those that have become senescent, although when we hit old age our stem cells become depleted or unable to develop.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), for example, normally develop into smooth muscle cells (SMCs). However, once we reach a certain age, these MSCs lose their efficacy and start generating SMCs that lack a protein called actin, rendering them unable to contract like healthy muscle tissue should.
Interesting…
However, new research carried out at the University of Waterloo and University of Lethbridge, in Canada, argues there is a much longer measureable minimum unit of time.
If true, the existence of such a minimum time changes the basic equations of quantum mechanics.
This means our understanding of how the universe operates on a very small scale may need to reconsidered.
