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From business to leisure to everything in between, technology can make our lives easier and more enjoyable. Further, tech can also be used to promote the common good and make a positive impact on humanity. When an innovation can do both, it’s something truly special and important that deserves our attention.

As industry leaders, the members of Forbes Technology Council stay on top of current trends and developments, including the most exciting and impactful new technology out there. Below, 15 of them share the coolest products and services they’ve seen that are making a real difference in the world.

Membrane separations have become critical to human existence, with no better example than water purification. As water scarcity becomes more common and communities start running out of cheap available water, they need to supplement their supplies with desalinated water from seawater and brackish water sources.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have created (CNT) pores that are so efficient at removing salt from water that they are comparable to commercial desalination membranes. These tiny pores are just 0.8 nanometers (nm) in diameter. In comparison, a human hair is 60,000 nm across. The research appears on the cover of the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Science Advances.

The dominant technology for removing salt from water, , uses thin-film composite (TFC) membranes to separate water from the ions present in saline feed streams. However, some fundamental performance issues remain. For example, TFC membranes are constrained by the permeability-selectivity trade-offs and often have insufficient rejection of some ions and trace micropollutants, requiring additional purification stages that increase the energy and cost.

O,.o.


NASA has unlocked nuclear fusion on a tiny scale, with a phenomenon called lattice confinement fusion that takes place in the narrow channels between atoms. In the reaction, the common nuclear fuel deuterium gets trapped in the “empty” atomic space in a solid metal. What results is a Goldilocks effect that’s neither supercooled nor superheated, but where atoms reach fusion-level energy.

☢️ You like nuclear. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.

In the sixties of the previous century, the science of Cybernetics emerged, which its founder Norbert Wiener defined as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Whereas the cyberneticists perhaps saw everything in the organic world too much as a machine type of regulatory network, the paradigm swapped to its mirror image, wherein everything in the natural world became seen as an organic neural network. Indeed, self-regulating networks appear to be ubiquitous: From the subatomic organization of atoms to the atomic organization of molecules, macromolecules, cells and organisms, everywhere the equivalent of neural networks appears to be present.

#EvolutionaryCybernetics #CyberneticTheoryofMind #PhilosophyofMind #QuantumTheory #cybernetics #evolution #consciousness


“At a deep level all things in our Universe are ineffably interdependent and interconnected, as we are part of the Matryoshka-like mathematical object of emergent levels of complexity where consciousness pervades all levels.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis.