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thinkahol *

First successful transplantation of a synthetic windpipe | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    A 36-year-old man has received the world's first synthetic trachea, made from a synthetic scaffold seeded with his own stem cells, in an operation at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. Professor Paolo Macchiarini of Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet led an international team, including professor Alexander Seifalian from University College London, who designed and built the nanocomposite tracheal scaffold, and Harvard Bioscience, which produced a specifically designed bioreactor used to seed the scaffold with the patient´s own stem cells. The cells were grown on the scaffold inside the bioreactor for two days before transplantation to the patient. Because the cells used to regenerate the trachea were the patient's own, there has been no rejection of the transplant and the patient is not taking immunosuppressive drugs. "The big conceptual breakthrough is that we can move from transplanting organs to manufacturing them for patients," says David Green, the president of Harvard Bioscience in Holliston, Massachusetts. Transplantations of tissue-engineered windpipes with synthetic scaffolds in combination with the patient's own stem cells as a standard procedure means that patients will not have to wait for a suitable donor organ. Patients could benefit from earlier surgery and have a greater chance of cure. This would be of especially great value for children, since the availability of donor tracheas is much lower than for adult patients.
thinkahol *

Citizen Scientist 2.0 - 1 views

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    What does the future of science look like? About a year ago, I was asked this question. My response then was: Transdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers from a variety of domains-biology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, law-all coming together, using inputs from each specialized area to generate the best comprehensive solutions to society's more persistent problems. Indeed, it appears as if I was on the right track, as more and more academic research departments, as well as industries, are seeing the value in this type of partnership. Now let's take this a step further. Not only do I think we will be relying on inputs from researchers and experts from multiple domains to solve scientific problems, but I see society itself getting involved on a much more significant level as well. And I don't just mean science awareness. I'm talking about actually participating in the research itself. Essentially, I see a huge boom in the future for Citizen Science.
thinkahol *

Researchers create light from 'almost nothing' - 0 views

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    (PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.
thinkahol *

FORA.tv - Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly at the NYPL - 0 views

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    In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.* What forces drive the steady march of innovation?* How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson look at where technology is taking us. One of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants, makes the argument that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, explains why certain spaces, from 18th-century coffeehouses to the World Wide Web, have an uncanny talent for encouraging innovative thinking.
thinkahol *

US approves world's biggest solar energy project in California | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    The U.S. Department of Interior approved on Monday a permit for Solar Millennium, LLC to build the largest solar energy project in the world - four  plants at the cost of one billion dollars each - in southern California. The project is expected to generate up to 1,000 Megawatts of energy, enough electricity to annually power more than 300,000 single-family homes, more than doubling the solar electricity production capacity of the U.S. Once constructed, the Blythe facility will reduce CO2 emissions by nearly one million short tons per year, or the equivalent of removing more than 145,000 cars from the road. Additionally, because the facility is "dry-cooled," it will use 90 percent less water than a traditional "wet-cooled" solar facility of this size. The Blythe facility will also help California take a major step toward achieving its goal of having one third of the state's power come from renewable sources by the year 2020. The entire Blythe Solar Power Project will generate a total of more than 7,500 jobs, including 1,000 direct jobs during the construction period, and thousands of additional indirect jobs in the community and throughout the supply chain. When the 1,000 MW facility is fully operational it will create more than 220 permanent jobs. Adapted from materials provided by Solar Millennium, LLC.
thinkahol *

Sony network breach shows Amazon Cloud's appeal for hackers | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    The hackers that brought down Sony's Playstation Network for more than a month used stolen credit cards to rent computing power from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to carry out their attack. Personal information, credit cards, and passwords from millions of customers were seized by hackers during the attack. Because computing power can be rented from EC2 anonymously, hacking using the service can be hard to trace. Tracing the attack may require the FBI seeking a search warrant to access Amazon's detailed records of which IP addresses accessed the service at which time, and tracing those IP addresses to homes or businesses. The Playstation Network remains down in Japan due to government concerns over its security.
thinkahol *

‪Michael Pawlyn: Using nature's genius in architecture‬‏ - YouTube - 0 views

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    http://www.ted.com How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature. At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.
thinkahol *

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    Have you played with Google Labs' NGram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
techinstro com

Description and Specification of Graphene - 0 views

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    Graphene is a single-atom-thick sheet made from combined carbon atoms. The carbon atoms are bonded together to share electron in a hexagonal, honeycomb-like structure. It is a single atom thick layered 2D material ever discovered in the world. It is made up of a hexagonal lattice pattern of carbon atoms in a monolithic honeycomb-like structure. It is a layer of SP2 single bonded carbon atoms arranged like a chicken wire mesh. It is 200 times stronger than stainless steel (SS) and 100 thousand times thinner than the human hair. It is the slimmest and strongest compound available on the earth. Anybody would be amazed when they know that we have found a material which is harder than diamond, yet lightweight, stronger than steel, but also highly flexible, and this material can be mined from the earth as it occurs naturally. It is yet thin enough to be mistaken for a saran wrap. Apart from the optimum physical properties, the other features are also impressive. Properties of Graphene These are some prominent features which make it a hi-tech material: Excellent Electronic Conductor Chief electronic property makes it an efficient Zero-Overlap Semi metal and gives it sufficient electrical conductivity. Carbon atoms possess typically 2 electrons in the inner shell, and 4 electrons in the outer orbit, total 6 electrons. Although conventionally, the outer 4 electrons in carbon can connect with another atom, each, the atoms can form a 2-dimensional bond with three atoms per single atom. This leaves an electron available for electronic conduction. Such electrons are known as 'Pi' electrons and found above and below in sheet. Ultimate Tensile Strength Mechanical strength is another prominent property of the material. It considered as being the foremost most robust material ever discovered, owing to the 0.142 Nm-long carbon bonds. It also possesses ultimate tensile strength, measuring 130 Gigapascals (or 130,000,000,000 Pascals). Compared to the tensile strength of industr
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
melvinahebert

Does Your Device Keep Disconnecting From Wifi? - 0 views

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    Windows troubleshooter in order to fix all the hardware or software problems affiliated with your device. Although they do not have the ability to fix each and every problem, the problem of your Wi-Fi being disconnected from your laptop can using this.
thinkahol *

Scientists report first solar cell producing more electrons in photocurrent than solar ... - 0 views

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    (PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum
thinkahol *

Why Big Media Is Going Nuclear Against The DMCA | TechCrunch - 0 views

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    When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation.  In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs).  Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that. Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills.  The content industry's lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites.  The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will.  This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation. The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines.   What is going on and how exactly did we get here?
Infogreen Global

Bugs from space to increase the electrical output of the fuel cells Bugs from space to ... - 0 views

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    Microbial Fuel Cells, which work in a similar way to a battery, use bacteria to convert organic compounds directly into electricity by a process known as bio-catalytic oxidation.
Infogreen Global

Extracting energy from the waste water and salt water - 0 views

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    The technologies Logan refers to are microbial fuel cells (MFC)- which use wastewater and naturally occurring bacteria to produce electricity - and reverse electrodialysis (RED) - which produces electricity directly from the salinity gradient between salty and fresh water. The combined technology creates a microbial reverse-electrodialysis cell (MRC).
thinkahol *

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003 - 0 views

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    Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, the first panel featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As moderator David Kirkpatrick was introducing him, he rattled off a massive stat. Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That's something like five exabytes of data, he says. Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.
thinkahol *

Moving holograms: From science fiction to reality - 0 views

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    Scientists have developed a new type of holographic telepresence that allows the projection of a three-dimensional, moving image without the need for special eyewear such as 3-D glasses or other auxiliary devices. The technology is likely to take applications ranging from telemedicine, advertising, 
thinkahol *

Collective memory | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    As computing power continues to move from the desktop to portable devices, the nature of communications networks will change radically. A network in which devices are regularly being added and removed, and where the strength of the connections between the devices fluctuates with their movement, requires much different protocols from those that govern relatively stable networks, like the Internet.
Todd Suomela

Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 - 1990 - 0 views

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    This site charts the development of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990. For the purposes of this project electronic musical instruments are defined as instruments that synthesise sounds from an electronic source.
Todd Suomela

Apomediation - P2P Foundation - 0 views

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    Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [
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