It’s been nearly two decades since the U.S. officially eliminated measles, but we may lose that status before we hit the 20-year mark.
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that we’ve now topped 1,000 cases in 2019. Elimination isn’t about case numbers, though, it’s about time—and just last week, the Director of the CDC warned that we could be in danger of losing our status as a measles-eliminated country.
A creative company in California called Reduce. Reuse. Grow has designed a coffee cup that is not only biodegradable, but even has seeds in its walls so that it can be planted and grown!
The cups, which are currently part of a Kickstarter campaign, will have seeds embedded in their walls based on their locations. Participating stores will encourage people to plant the cups themselves or to return them to be planted by the company.
Read on for designer Alex Henige’s answers to some of Bored Panda’s questions about his unique cup design!
Posted in habitats
RSA Encryption is an essential safeguard for our online communications. It was also destined to fail even before the Internet made RSA necessary, thanks the work of Peter Shor, whose algorithm in 1994 proved quantum computers could actually be used to solve problems classical computers could not.
Michelin and General Motors have teamed up to literally reinvent the wheel with a new generation of high-tech airless tires.
The automotive companies’ Uptis (Unique Puncture-proof Tire System) prototype grabbed headlines after it was presented at the Movin’On Summit on sustainable mobility in Montreal this week.
It doesn’t have a traditional sidewall and carries a load by the top via a resin-embedded fiberglass material that Michelin already has 50 patents for, according to Car and Driver.
Posted in robotics/AI
At its re: Mars conference, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage today to be “interviewed” by Jenny Freshwater, Amazon’s director of forecasting. As any AWS machine learning tool could have forecasted, having an employee interview her boss didn’t lead to any challenging questions or especially illuminating answers, but Bezos did get a chance to talk about a variety of topics, ranging from business advice to his plans for Blue Origin.
We can safely ignore the business advice, given that Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit” is about as well known as it could be, but his comments about Blue Origin, his plans for moon exploration and its relationship to startups were quite interesting.
He noted that we now know so much more about the moon than ever before, including that it does provide a number of resources that make it a good base for further space exploration. “The reason we need to go to space is to save the Earth,” he said. “We are going to grow this civilization — and I’m talking about something that our grandchildren will work on — and their grandchildren. This isn’t something that this generation is able to accomplish. But we need to move heavy industry off Earth.”
