Michael Sargent, co-blogger at the future technology blog the Speculist, was killed in an automobile accident. The web community of futurists and technology enthusiasts will be poorer for his absence. In lieu of flowers, Peggy Sargent has asked that donations be sent to the American Heart Association. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader …
Ray Baughman, director of the Nanotech Institute at UT Dallas, is developing various kinds of carbon-nanotube-based “artificial muscles” for prosthetics and robotics. These materials change shape and size in response to electrical or chemical signals; some expand by up to 1 percent and exert 100 times more force than natural human muscle over the same …
On March 5th, 2009 the Terrafugia Transition achieved first flight at Plattsburgh International Airport. Soon people can stop complaining that there is no flying car so the future we have is inferior to what was promised, but instead just complain that they cannot afford the future. * The Transition® is only 6’9″ tall and 80″ …
There are Do It Yourself (DIY) Segway projects where people can spend about $1000-1200 and build their own Segway vehicle. Now University of Louisiana Students have made a crawling version of a DIY Segway that is more stable but has a top speed of 3 mph. One of the more advanced DIY Segways is the …
Magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) is an imaging technique that acquires magnetic resonance images (MRI) at nanometer scales, and possibly at atomic scales in the future. IBM and Stanford combined ultrasensitive magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) with 3D image reconstruction to achieve magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with resolution Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought …
A Goldman Sachs study on “The Expanding Middle: The Exploding Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality” While America laments the loss of its middle class as there is divergence between a mass affluent and wealthy class and those at middle class, there is the rise of the global middle class. The global middle class is …
California is going through a state budget crisis and has been going through chronic and persistent budget problems for over a decade. California chooses not to use its offshore oil or develop more nuclear power. Some environmentalists will say that the oil and nuclear power would not be enough to solve the energy problems of …
The total abundance of Uranium in the Earth’s crust is estimated to be approximately 40 trillion tonnes. The Rossing mine in Nambia mines Uranium at an Ore concentration of 300 ppm at an energy cost 500 times less than the energy it delivers with current thermal-spectrum reactors. If the energy cost increases in inverse proportion …
200 million megaton of explosions will not kill the biosphere. The current nuclear arsenal will not kill all humans and the pattern of nuclear explosions for a nuclear war between the largest nuclear powers will not destroy civilization, let alone kill all people or even half of all people. The greatest risks from a total …
This is a rendering of the vision of Masdar City. A small army of workers and heavy equipment currently inhabit the 6.5 square kilometer site of the future eco-city. Abu Dhabi will be making a podcar, personal rapid transit, system in its new Masdar City. The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 …
Singularity University (SU) (www.singularityu.org) will open its doors in June 2009 on the NASA Research Park campus with a nine-week graduate level interdisciplinary curriculum designed to facilitate understanding, collaboration, and innovation across a broad range of carefully chosen scientific and technological disciplines. The curriculum will be broken out into 10 tracks as follows: * future …