Combining Current Tech Could Make Solar Cheaper than Coal
22 Feb, 2012
By the end of the decade, manufacturers in the United States could make solar panels that are less than half as expensive as the ones they make now. That would be cheap enough for solar power to compete with electricity from fossil fuels, according to…
R e a d M o r eInnovation as the Infinite Resource: My Talk at Chicago Ideas Week
31 Jan, 2012
Innovation as the Infinite Resource: Ramez Naam at Chicago Ideas Week
R e a d M o r eNo Big Fukushima Health Impact Seen, UN Official Says: Scientific American
31 Jan, 2012
The health impact of last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan appears relatively small thanks partly to prompt evacuations, the chairman of a U.N. scientific body investigating the effects of radiation said on Tuesday. …. “As far as the doses we have seen from the…
R e a d M o r eJapans population to drop by 1 million each year
30 Jan, 2012
Japans rapid aging means the national population of 128 million will shrink by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the shrinking work force population to support the social security and tax systems. The population…
R e a d M o r eDuke Researchers Send Touch Sensations into the Brain
5 Oct, 2011
More advances in mind-machine interfaces this week. MIguel Nicolelis (a pioneer in neural interfaces) and colleagues announced that they were able to send touch sensory data into the brains of monkeys. So the tally is now: Vision: In and out Sound: In Motion: Out…
R e a d M o r eReconstruction from brain activity – YouTube
27 Sep, 2011
Below is a clip showing the reconstruction of video subjects where shown via MRI scanning of their brains. Pretty remarkable. The ‘reconstructed’ video looks odd because the reconstruction method was actually to match the brain activity against snippets of YouTube videos. Future…
R e a d M o r eCarbon Nanotubes Could Replace Rare Earth Indium in Solar Cells
27 Sep, 2011
A frequently voiced concern about solar energy is the dependence of solar cells on rare earth elements such as indium. While rare earth elements are actually far more plentiful than their name suggests, it’s also encouraging to see studies showing that components made from abundant…
R e a d M o r eRat cyborg gets digital cerebellum
27 Sep, 2011
New Scientist covers another step towards functional neural prosthetics. Development here will be slow and complex, but we now have sufficient proof of concept across the field to see that interfacing digital systems with out brains is quite possible. We’ll use that first to help…
R e a d M o r eMemory Prosthetics – Some Progress
27 Sep, 2011
Theodore Berger and team, who I’ve been following since describing their work in More Than Human, achieved success earlier this year in recording a rat memory during encoding, and playing it back to the rat later. This is a very very very early step towards…
R e a d M o r e30,000 Human Genomes to be Sequenced in 2011 – Exponential Growth
26 Sep, 2011
MIT Technology Review on the incredible rise in number of genomes sequenced per year: Exponential: The number of human beings whose entire DNA sequence is known has increased dramatically. This year, the world’s DNA-sequencing machines are expected to churn out 30,000 entire human genomes, according…
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