Super-Slippery Material

Based on research into the pitcher plant, a flesh eating jungle plant, a researcher has created synthetic materials that are 10 slicker than existing slippery materials. Obviously has a wide range of applications, go to Discover for the article. 

Carbon Nanotube Muscles Strong as Diamond, Flexible as Rubber

Cool stuff from wired http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/nanomuscle/

My current favorite authors

Charles Stross
Richard K Morgan
Peter F Hamilton
Walter Jon Williams
Joe Abercrombie

Eternal energy source for cars - Thorium based

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/tiny-block-thorium-could-power-car-forever-203442766.html

E-reader ownership doubles in six months according to Pew

The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011 from 6% in November 2010. E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook, are portable devices designed to allow readers to download and read books and periodicals. This is the first time since the Pew Internet Project began measuring e-reader use in April 2009 that ownership of this device has reached double digits among U.S. adults.

Tablet computers—portable devices similar to e-readers but designed for more interactive web functions—have not seen the same level of growth in recent months. In May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom. This is roughly the same percentage of adults who reported owning this kind of device in January 2011 (7%), and represents just a 3 percentage-point increase in ownership since November 2010. Prior to that, tablet ownership had been climbing relatively quickly.

Read the rest on the Pew site

Personal Responses To Large Scale Collapse

Great article over on www.FuturePundit.com about how to respond to disaster and/or the collapse of civilization. A brief excerpt is below, full article here.

"A proposed collapse response typology:

-Stay put and live defensively.
-Migrate.
-Hide in plain sight (this can be added to either of the first two options).
-Form a defensive perimeter for an armed camp.
-Form a raiding gang.
-Hide out of sight.
-Tunnel down and surrender the surface to nature."

Global Poverty is Decreasing at a Dramatic Rate

The Brookings Institute has just published a report called The Changing State of Global Poverty.

Socialists have to be pretty unhappy about the results, as the shift to market economies in many places throughout the world continues to improve the lives of the people and clearly show that when markets are allowed to work, nearly everyone benefits.

Comments from Next Big Future below:

"Our results indicate that the world has seen a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past six years, and that this trend is set to continue in the four years ahead. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010. Looking ahead to 2015, extreme poverty could fall to under 600 million people—less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today. Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.

Over the past half century, the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest countries, have seen dramatic improvements in virtually all non-income measures of well-being: since 1960, global infant mortality has dropped by more than 50 percent, for example, and the share of the world’s children enrolled in primary school increased from less than half to nearly 90 percent between 1950 and today.5 Likewise there have been impressive gains in gender equality, access to justice and civil and political rights. Yet, through most of this period, the incomes of rich and poor countries diverged, and income poverty has proven a more persistent challenge than other measures of wellbeing. The rapid decline in global poverty now underway—and the early achievement of the MDG1a target—marks a break from these trends, and could come to be seen as a turning point in the history of global development."

Heads up display on goggles and glasses - this will be big

Imagine this display on glasses and sunglasses with a bluetooth or near-field connection to your smartphone. I believe that this will happen within 3 years or so.

Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states

Very cool graphic from the Economist comparing US States to the nearest country in terms of GDP.

Hornet's Can Convert Sunlight to Electricity

An analogue to photosynthesis in the animal kingdom http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=13661

What makes you who you are?

How much can one change and still be yourself? Pondering this question led me to the next and more fundamental question, which is - what exactly makes you, you?

We change from second to second, literally picosecond to picosecond as our fundamental particles bounce around randomly. We are dependent upon the meat we live in (for now), which is easily altered or damaged, and even beyond our physical structure much of what we are as individuals is dependent upon the chemical "soup" within our bodies.

This came to mind recently as I was reading Accelerando, an intriguing novel in which the protagonist relies on technology external to his brain for processing power and feels like a very different person when that technology isn’t available. Humans will certainly become continually more “interfaced” with technology in the coming decades, to the point that human and device will become parts of a whole.

Other sci-fi books that I have read in recent years that address this theme in some way are Altered Carbon and its two subsequent books by Richard K. Morgan, also Peter F. Hamilton's Void series where some of the characters progress from being so called "natural" humans to enhanced humans with nanoscale biological enrichment to ultimately becoming non-corporeal beings in a virtual environment.

I don't have the answer, but it is an interesting question to ponder and perhaps write upon.

The 70 Online Databases That Define Our Planet - Technology Review http://ping.fm/XbtOR

New Energy Storage Blog

Check out the new Energy Storage Trends blog from PennWell, some great articles from the widely revered Pete Singer.

Technology Review: Thin Displays as Wristbands. Sweet! Widescreen Dick Tracy! http://ping.fm/VmADb

National Ignition Facility Fires Up

The National Ignition Facility completed the first dry run of what is at the moment the world's most powerful laser. The facility focuses on fusion energy research as well as simulation of nuclear explosions for defense researchers. Links here to articles from Wired and Laser Focus World.

Ipad frenzy revisited

I have owned an iPad for several months now, and I have to say that I am reasonably impressed. It is the 3G version and honestly does have some utility as an email machine on the road, and as an entertainment device. It doesn't replace my laptop, but I can do a number of the things on it that used to require breaking out and booting up the laptop, as well as some things that I couldn't do on the laptop as I don't have a 3G card for it.

The iPad should be lighter and more feature rich, and certainly needs to be less expensive, so its not ideal (yet). Despite these criticisms, I find the iPad to be a useful device, and my guess is that some of the shortcomings will be rectified in the next generation or two of devices.

Lots of competitive tablets are on the way, so expect the market to drive extensive innovation in the next few years.

Graphene Overview and Nobel Prize

A really nice article about the Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of graphene with links to a number of other articles about graphene from ElectroIQ which covers semiconductor manufacturing and nanotech / mems among other topics.

Roundup of Nuclear Energy

From Next Big Future . Fascinating graph as well.

Happiness and Sadness Spread Just Like Disease

Wired highlights an impressive study that provides strong scientific evidence that emotions really are contagious. The implications could be profound both for personal behavior choices such as whom to associate with as well as for organizations.

Short excerpt from the Wired article: "Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

Patterns fit disease models in another way. “The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness,” said David Rand, an evolutionary dynamics researcher at Harvard. “It fits with the infectious disease framework.”

The findings still aren’t conclusive proof of contagion, but they provide parameters of transmission rates and network dynamics that will guide predictions tested against future Framingham results, said Hill and Rand. And whereas the Framingham study wasn’t originally designed with emotional information in mind, future studies tailored to test network contagion should provide more sophisticated information."

Japanese Powered Exoskeleton Now Supposedly Available

The manufacture Cyberdyne claims that strength can be augmented up to 10 times and that the battery pack will last up to 5 hours depending upon usage.

Now imagine the HAL exoskeleton unit with about 20 pounds of lightweight Graphene armor (I admit that's some years out) bolted on and the wearer carrying one honking badass gun or perhaps a slightly smaller badass gun.


You would have yourself a super soldier, at least until the battery runs out.