Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub
Consumer 3D printing has been creeping into mainstream awareness. Last year, office supply chain Staples announced they’d sell 3D Systems Cube 3D printers in stores, and UPS began offering 3D printing services at select locations.
Not to be outdone, massive online retailer Amazon dedicated an online storefront to 3D printers and supplies. And most recently, the firm added another storefront selling 3D printed products—bobbleheads, jewelry, smartphone cases.
Written By: Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub
To Aubrey de Grey, the body is a machine. Just as a restored classic car can celebrate its hundredth birthday in peak condition, in the future, we’ll maintain our bodies’ cellular components to stave off the diseases of old age and live longer, healthier lives.
Dr. de Grey is cofounder and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and faculty at Singularity University’s November Exponential Medicine conference—an event exploring the healthcare impact of technologies like low-cost genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, gene therapy, and more.
Kurzweil AI
A team of Korean researchers has synthesized hexagonal carbon nanosheets similar to graphene, using a polymer. The new material is free of the defects and complexity involved in producing graphene, and can substitute for graphene as transparent electrodes for organic solar cells and in semiconductor chips, the researchers say.
Christina Sarich — Nation of Change
Scenes from the movie Slumdog Millionaire accurately depict India’s latest consumer-influenced economy. Tree groves are littered with a rainbow color of plastic bags like some kind of ominous carnival wreckage. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and other ‘garbage’ liters the streets in a land where city officials have long forsaken their duties of providing a pristine infrastructure to its inhabitants, but a professor of chemistry in Madurai, India thinks that the trash lining his country’s roads and fields could be utilized as a ‘wonderful resource,” transforming common plastic liter, from thicker acrylics to bottles and grocery bags, into a substitute for bitumen in asphalt.
The ‘Plastic Man,’ as Rajagopalan Vasudevan is known in India, travels throughout the country instructing engineers how to apply his technology to recycle the trash copiously littering streets from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. To date, more than 3000 miles of plastic roads have been laid in at least 11 states.
The Daily Galaxy via University of Sydney
A new home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres is giving Australian astronomers the first ‘Google street view’ of the cosmos — incredibly detailed views of huge numbers of galaxies. Developed by researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the optical-fibre bundles can sample the light from up to 60 parts of a galaxy, for a dozen galaxies at a time. The technological leap is the ‘hexabundle’, sixty or more optical fibres close-packed and fused together, developed by the University of Sydney’s astrophotonics group.
— Quartz
Over the past six years, Beijing has seen at least 1,812 days of “unhealthy” air quality, and that trend isn’t going to get better any time soon. Pan Tao, head of the Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, estimates that air pollution in the capital won’t be reach safe levels until at least 2030.
China’s president Xi Jinping has called air pollution the “most prominent challenge” Beijing faces. Foreign firms are paying their workers “hardship” salaries to be posted in the city. In February a report from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences said that pollution in the capital is “near a level that is no longer livable for human beings.”
As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple With Ethics http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/technology/the-boon-of-onl…e&_r=0
Can Tech Innovation Help End Cancer? http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2014/07/can-tech-innovation-help-end-cancer.html
This Doctor Thinks We May Achieve Immortality, But Isn’t Sure We’d Want To www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/12/david-casarett-shocked-imm…mg00000046
Brain regeneration: Crayfish turn blood into neurons http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26042-brain-regenerati…-u2nGMb8my
Talking ’bout regeneration: How do some animals regrow missing parts? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140806124854.htm
LEAKED: Google’s Next Major Smartphone May Come With A Screen That’s Bigger And Sharper Than The iPhone http://www.businessinsider.com/nexus-6-specs-rumors-2014-…m=referral
NATURE: Iranian is first woman to nab highest prize in maths http://www.nature.com/news/iranian-is-first-woman-to-nab-hig…hs-1.15686
NATURE: Quantum dots with single-atom precision http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v9/n7/full/nnano.2014.129.html
TIME: Treating Cancer With Bacteria Shows Real Promise http://time.com/3107896/bacteria-cancer-tumor/
“Real Gasoline Without Oil” for 90% Returns? http://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/oxford-resource-explorer…0-returns/
Ending tariffs on green goods will show free trade can fight climate change http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/eliminate-ta…ate-change
CMOs and CIOs Increasingly See Eye to Eye http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/cmos-and-cios-increasingly-see-eye-to-eye/
New Horizons Spacecraft Captures Images of Charon in Orbit Around Pluto http://www.21stcentech.com/horizons-spacecraft-captures-imag…bit-pluto/
Exclusive: Italy’s grid company to get 1.5 billion euro loan ahead of China Grid deal — sources http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/23/us-cdpreti-state-g…YG20140723
REUTERS: Cisco to cut another 6,000 jobs as forecast falls flat http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/13/us-cisco-systems-r…YH20140813
REUTERS: Planned U.S. cyber warfare program could hurt innocent countries: Snowden http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/13/us-cybersecurity-s…BS20140813
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Why Indian Agricultural Policy Might Unravel the WTO http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141872/surupa-gupta-a…s-the-farm
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Iraq Needs U.S. Ground Troops More Than Ever http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141873/robin-simcox/go-big-or-go-home
There Are A Lot More Adults Working In Schools Lately, And Most Of Them Are Not Teachers www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/13/fordham-institute-hidden-h…mg00000067
Implanted neuronal stem cells generate neurons and synapses, becoming a functioning part of mouse brain http://www.kurzweilai.net/implanted-neuronal-stem-cells-gene…ouse-brain
3D sketching system ‘revolutionizes’ design interaction and collaboration http://www.kurzweilai.net/3d-sketching-system-revolutionizes…laboration
FORBES: Now In Orbit: A Satellite That Can See Through Smoke http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/08/13/now-in-orbi…ium=social
Do-It-Yourself Biology? Messing Around with DNA Increasingly a Garage-Band Venture http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014&…gly-garage
Computer scientist reviews frontier technologies to determine fundamental limits of computer scaling
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-scientist-frontier-technolo…s.html#jCp
One Engineer’s Perspective on Global Warming http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles…rming.aspx
‘4D Printing’: Programming Material to Transform Itself http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/4d-printing-progra…elf_430797
Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini AND href=“www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini” target=“_blank”>www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini
— Washington Post
Despite plenty of debate in Congress, a majority of the American people (52 percent) remain in favor of using drones against extremists on foreign soil.
On that count, though, the United States is in the distinct minority on the Planet Earth.
By Michael Snyder — Washington’s Blog
From our fields to our forks, huge corporations have an overwhelming amount of power over our food supply every step of the way. Right now there are more than 313 million people living in the United States, and the job of feeding all of those people is almost entirely in the hands of just a few dozen monolithic companies. If you do not like how our food is produced or you don’t believe that it is healthy enough, it isn’t very hard to figure out who is to blame. These mammoth corporations are not in business to look out for the best interests of the American people. Rather, the purpose of these corporations is to maximize wealth for their shareholders. So the American people end up eating billions of pounds of extremely unhealthy food that is loaded with chemicals and additives each year, and we just keep getting sicker and sicker as a society. But these big corporations are raking in big profits, so they don’t really care.
If we did actually have a capitalist system in this country, we would have a high level of competition in the food industry. But instead, the U.S. food industry has become increasingly concentrated with each passing year. Just consider the following numbers about the U.S. agricultural sector…
Princeton
Research to curb global warming caused by rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, usually involves three areas: Developing alternative energy sources, capturing and storing greenhouse gases, and repurposing excess greenhouse gases. Drawing on two of these approaches, researchers in the laboratory of Andrew Bocarsly, a Princeton professor of chemistry, collaborated with start-up company Liquid Light Inc. of Monmouth Junction, N.J. to devise an efficient method for harnessing sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into a potential alternative fuel known as formic acid. The study was published June 13 in the Journal of CO2 Utilization.
The transformation from carbon dioxide and water to formic acid was powered by a commercial solar panel generously provided by the energy company PSE&G that can be found atop electric poles across the state. The process takes place inside an electrochemical cell, which consists of metal plates the size of rectangular lunch-boxes that enclose liquid-carrying channels.
