Like Tony Stark Making Technology from Scraps

Take some metal scraps from the junkyard; put them in a glass jar with a common household chemical; and, voilà, you have a high-performance battery. “Imagine that the tons of metal waste discarded every year could be used to provide energy storage for the renewable energy grid of the future, instead of becoming a burden …

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Gene Editing could destroy latent viruses in the human body like herpes

Almost all of us carry one form or another of herpes virus, and the consequences can be far worse than the occasional cold sore. Herpes viruses also cause shingles and can be implicated in blindness, birth defects and even cancer – and as yet, we can’t rid ourselves of them. One of our best ways …

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Three exoplanets about the size of Venus and the Earth are the best known targets for life outside the solar system

Star-like objects with effective temperatures of less than 2,700 kelvin are referred to as ‘ultracool dwarfs’. This heterogeneous group includes stars of extremely low mass as well as brown dwarfs (substellar objects not massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion), and represents about 15 per cent of the population of astronomical objects near the Sun. Core-accretion theory …

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IBM has Carbon Nanotube Electronics Breakthrough

IBM Research announced a major engineering breakthrough that could accelerate carbon nanotubes replacing silicon transistors to power future computing technologies. IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor contacts without reducing performance of carbon nanotube devices, opening a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful computer chips beyond the capabilities of traditional semiconductors. …

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40 foot tall 3d Printer for printing houses

An Italian company (Wasp project) has gone even bigger with a record-breaking 12 meter (40 ft) tall printer called the Big Delta. By 2030, international estimates foresee a rapid growth of adequate housing requirements for over 4 billion people living with yearly income below $3,000. The United Nations calculated that over the next 15 years …

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US Military buying 55,000 Oshkosh L-ATV’s for protection of light tank and MRAP but half MRAP weight and more mobility

Oshkosh Defense was awarded a $6.7 billion contract, Aug. 25, for production of the joint light tactical vehicle, or JLTV. Col. John Cavedo, the former JLTV program manager, said the average unit procurement cost will be below the original $399,000 acquisition report, when all the kits are included, in base year 2012 dollars. The average …

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Justifying and discussing optimism and pessmism about China

As often arises whenever Nextbigfuture has an article about China, there are various points brought out: 1. Too many articles about China 2. Too much optimism about China’s prospects – some were too optimistic about Japan 3. The expectation that China will stumble badly or collapse I am perfectly willing to consider evidence or strong …

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Google will be the GE of the internet of things era

The Economist makes the case that Google is positioning itself to be an inventor and re-inventor of hardware. Google will also be the GE of the internet age. The common factor shared by GE’s early products was electricity, something businesses were then just learning to exploit. With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor …

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Where in the world are the 2.1 million deaths per year from 2.5 micron particulate air pollution happening

Occasionally, short-term meteorological conditions merge with ongoing human emissions to produce extreme outbreaks of air pollution. In January 2013, a blanket of industrial pollution enveloped northeastern China. In June 2013, smoke from agricultural fires in Sumatra engulfed Singapore. In most cases, the most toxic pollution lingers for a few days or even weeks, bringing increases …

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Progress to lab grown brains and brain tissue from bio-scaffolds and stem cells

Swedish researchers combined a scaffold made from gelatin with a tiny amount of rat brain tissue that had already had its cells removed. This “decellularised” tissue, they hoped, would provide enough of the crucial biochemical cues to enable seeded cells to develop as they would in the brain. When the team added mesenchymal stem cells …

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Canadian writer fears Canada will become a Vassal of China instead of a Vassal of the USA and wants Canada to merge with the USA

Diane Francis makes the case that the USA and Canada are declining relative to the rest of the world and particularly China. She proposes a simple and obvious solution: What if the United States and Canada merged into one country? The most audacious initiative since the Louisiana Purchase would solve the biggest problems each country …

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