futurist

A123 partners with SolidEnergy to bring 800 Wh/kg solid polymer lithium batteries to market

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A123 Venture Technologies, a Massachusetts technology incubator, announced today its collaboration with MIT startup SolidEnergy. This strategic partnership leverages SolidEnergy’s transformative solid electrolyte technology enabling the safe and practical use of lithium metal anodes for high energy density batteries in a wide range of applications. It is also the first publicly announced agreement under A123’s …

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Three major vertical farming proposals with Sky City being likely to be built first

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Vertical farming is the idea of putting farms inside high rises and skyscrapers. Unlike traditional farming in non-tropical areas, indoor farming can produce crops year-round. All-season farming multiplies the productivity of the farmed surface by a factor of 4 to 6 depending on the crop. With some crops, such as strawberries, the factor may be …

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Europe approves breakthrough drug to treat multiple sclerosis by rebooting the immune system

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A transformational new treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) – the result of over three decades of research in Cambridge – was approved today by the EU agency responsible for regulating new drugs. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved the drug Alemtuzumab, to be known by the brand name Lemtrada and previously called Campath-1H (for …

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Higher population density boosts interaction and per capita productivity if there is good transportation

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MIT researchers think they know why when you double a city’s population that its economic productivity goes up 130 percent. Not only does total productivity increase with increased population, but so does per-capita productivity. Increases in urban population density give residents greater opportunity for face-to-face interaction. Nature Communication – Urban characteristics attributable to density-driven tie …

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Doctors use 3D bioprinter to create a splint for baby’s blocked throat

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The Youngstown, Ohio, baby turned blue again and again as his little airways collapsed and kept air from reaching his lungs. But doctors used a 3-D bioprinter to custom-make a splint that is holding his airway open and helping him breathe. Now 19-month-old Kaiba Gionfriddo is “into everything”, says his mother, April Gionfriddo. “Quite a …

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World Bank President Outlines Plan to Reduce Extreme Poverty to less than 3% of the World’s Population

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World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim outlined a bold agenda for the global community toward ending extreme poverty by 2030 and promoting shared prosperity to boost the incomes of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. Kim noted that the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG), to halve extreme poverty, was achieved …

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Doubling CO2 May Cause 20-50% Less Warming

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Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as …

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Worldwide accepted measures of human development and quality of life justify radical life extension and developing per capita wealth beyond todays levels

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The UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices to rank countries into four tiers of human development. It was created by economist Mahbub ul Haq, followed by economist Amartya Sen in 1990, and published by the United Nations Development Program. We can see that the current …

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The lowest cost combination of wind, solar and storage for the northeast United States for all renewable option for 2030 but more costly than nuclear

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Journal of Power Sources has a paper “Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time”. NBF – This actually looks like a more credible and realistic plan. Tbhis is basing analysis upon the crappy plans by Stanford’s Professor Jacobson. This plan looks like it …

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Real Life Mad Science Blobs are only 100 micrometers across . . . for now

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New Scientist – Creating drops of the active gel about 30 to 100 micrometres across resulted in something akin to cells that crawled across a microscope slide. “It mimics a little bit what might happen in a living system,” Marchetti says. But the researchers can control how their artificial cells behave. Adjusting the amount of …

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European Space Agency has 2018 mission to probe ice on the moon

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By 2018 a mission which includes British technology hopes to have landed a robot probe on the surface of the Moon to find out if it has ice present under the surface. Finding ice would upend scientific orthodoxy and the results of previous lunar missions, which suggested that the Moon was dry. The £500 million …

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