"TRUTH" tends to spread information - those who are not so
popular in world mainstream medias - those who would show nothing
but the truth, the other side of the coin. Real and objective information
would already change the world for the better, solve the existing problem
of hunger and poverty, overcome many crisis in the world - that is the
reason why it’s been deliberately framed and restricted, by those whom
suits to the most.
A new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Civilisation is almost inevitably doomed, a Nasa-funded study has found.
The study used simplified models of civilisation designed to experiment with the balance of resources and climate that creates stability - or not - in our world.
These theoretical models - designed to extrapolate from simple principles the future of our industrialised world - ran into almost intractable problems.
Almost any model "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid", the report said.
3D printing technologies have come a long way since their earliest incarnations as rapid product prototype makers. It's now shaping up as the next disruptive technology and in medical science, 3D printing has huge potential. The latest advance comes from University of California, San Diego Nanoengineering Professor Shaochen Chen, whose group has demonstrated the ability to print three-dimensional blood vessels in seconds.
If the technique proves scalable, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine. Imagine being able to recover from a heart attack by replacing your faulty aortic valve with a brand new one, made of your own cells. No more pig valves, no more mechanical solutions, no more waiting for a donor. The donor is you.
Scientists have taken a quantum leap forward towards future computing after discovering that ‘background interference’ in quantum-level measurements, may be the very thing they need to unlock the potential of quantum computing.
In a paper published in Nature Physics, researchers from The University of Queensland, The Australian National University and The National University of Singapore (NUS), suggest that this interference – quantum discord – may be what will make a future quantum computer tick.
“Up until a few years ago, researchers thought that realising quantum technologies would mean harnessing the most difficult-to-tame properties of the quantum world – the phenomenon known as ‘entanglement’.
“But in the past few years, scientists have discovered examples of technologies that seem to work without entanglement, which has left us with the puzzle of where the quantum power comes from,” said Professor Ping Koy Lam of the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
Traditional platter-based hard drives and solid state flash drives might dominate the storage landscape today, but in the future, you'll be storing more data than you could possibly sift through within your very own DNA.
George Church and Sri Kosuri, two Harvard Wyss Institute scientists, have successfully demonstrated a process by which it's possible to store 700TB of data in one gram of DNA.
At the moment, the stashing and unstashing process for DNA data isn't exactly simple. Once you've translated your binary data into the right sequence of DNA base pairs (A and C for zeros, T and G for ones), you have to turn all of those sequences into DNA itself. Doing so involves standard laboratory techniques, but it takes a while: several days to convert 675 KB of text, pictures, and Javascript into 55,000 DNA strands. Reading it out again with a gene sequencer (another now-standard laboratory technique) takes even longer, and neither the read process nor the write process are particularly cheap, which is why you'd only really want to use DNA storage for archival purposes.
Genetic data storage may easily become practical within a few decades, however, as speed increases and costs plummet. For example, in 2001 in cost $10,000 for a custom sequence of a million base pairs of DNA. Now, it costs about $0.10. This, for the record, vastly outpaces Moore's Law, and things are only getting faster.
Don't throw out that broken toaster: it's key to our prosperity. Redesigning the economy so that all waste is reused or recycled would be good for business, according to two new reports.
For centuries the global economy has been linear. Companies extract resources from the environment, turn them into products and sell them to consumers – who eventually throw them out. As a result we are burning through Earth's natural resources and wasting useful materials.
But it doesn't have to be that way, says Felix Preston of think tank Chatham House in London. Instead, we could have a circular economy in which waste from one product is used in another.
In "A Global Redesign: Shaping the circular economy", Preston argues that reusing resources makes good business sense now that resource prices are high and volatile. He cites a January report by consultants McKinsey & Company which tries to put a value on the circular economy.
"Towards the Circular Economy: Economic and business rationale for an accelerated transition" estimates the circular economy could save the European Union $340 to $630 billion per year in materials costs, about 3 per cent of the EU's GDP.
"The opportunity is enormous," Preston says. "The challenge is how to unlock it."
However, a company wishing to go circular will face considerable upfront costs, and companies that have invested heavily in the existing system will be reluctant to change. Nevertheless some are pushing forward: for instance Renault's Eco2 cars are designed so that 95 per cent of their mass can be recovered and reused.
China is already pushing the circular economy. According to its 12th five-year plan – covering 2011-15 – China will "plan, construct and renovate various kinds of industrial parks according to the requirements of the circular economy".
For the first time, University of Florida researchers have developed plant-based technology that could reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and may also help treat cancer.
Known as lignin nanotubes, these cylindrical containers are smaller than viruses and tiny enough to travel through the body, carrying cancer patients’ medicine. They can be created in biorefineries from lignin, a plant substance that is a byproduct of bioethanol production.
Bioethanol is a renewable alternative to fossil fuel created by fermenting sugar — such as that from sugarcane and sweet sorghum juices, stalks and stems.
“We’re looking at biomedical applications whereby these nanotubes are injected in the body,” said Wilfred
Printing three dimensional objects with very fine details using two-photon lithography can now be achieved orders of magnitude faster than similar devices in a breakthrough by Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) researchers. The 3D printing process uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a hardened line of solid polymer a few hundred nanometers wide. This fine resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. “Until now, this technique used to be quite slow”, says Professor Jürgen Stampfl from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at the TU Vienna. “The printing speed used to be measured in millimeters per second — our device can do five meters in one second.” In two-photon lithography, this is a world record. This progress was made possible by combining several new ideas. “It was crucial to improve the steering mechanism of the mirrors,” says Jan Torgersen (TU Vienna). The mirrors are continuously in motion during the printing process. The acceleration and deceleration-periods have to be tuned very precisely to achieve high-resolution results at a record-breaking speed.
Faster printing for large objects too “The resin contains molecules, activated by the laser light. They induce a chain reaction in other components of the resin, monomers, and turn them into a solid,” says Torgersen. These initiator molecules are only activated if they absorb two photons of the laser beam at once, and this only happens in the very center of the laser beam, where the intensity is highest.
In contrast to conventional 3D-printing techniques, solid material can be created anywhere within the liquid resin rather than on top of the previously created layer only. So the working surface does not have to be specially prepared before the next layer can be produced (see video), which saves a lot of time.
Because of the dramatically increased speed, much larger objects can now be created in a given period of time. This makes two-photon-lithography an interesting technique for industry.
At the TU Vienna, scientists are now developing biocompatible resins for medical applications. They can be used to create scaffolds to which living cells can attach themselves facilitating the systematic creation of biological tissues. The 3d printer could also be used to create tailor made construction parts for biomedical technology or nanotechnology.
Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. “There’s a classic obstacle to innovation called ‘functional fixedness,’ which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.” McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. The article also reports on McCaffrey’s test of GPT’s effectiveness. Its results: People trained in GPT solved eight problems 67 percent more often than those who weren’t trained, and the first group solved them more than 8 times out of 10. Here’s how GPT works: “For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions,” explains McCaffrey, who is now a post-doctoral fellow in UMass’s engineering department. “1. Can it be broken down further? and 2. — this is the one that’s been overlooked — Does my description of the part imply a use?” So you’re given two steel rings and told to make a figure-8 out of them. Your tools? A candle and a match. Melted wax is sticky, but the wax isn’t strong enough to hold the rings together. What about the other part of the candle? The wick. The word implies a use: Wicks are set afire to give light. “That tends to hinder people’s ability to think of alternative uses for this part,” says McCaffrey. Think of the wick more generically as a piece of string and the string as strands of cotton and you’re liberated. Now you can remove the wick and tie the two rings together. Or, if you like, shred the string and make a wig for your hamster.
McCaffrey has drawn his insights by analyzing 1,001 historically innovative inventions. In every one, he found, the innovator discovered an obscure feature or an obscure function. McCaffrey cites a recent invention to solve a modern problem. “In this very poor section of the Philippines, people living in shanties were using electric lights inside while it was sunny outside,” he says. How to save money on electricity? “Take a 2-liter Coke bottle, stick it through a hole in the roof, fill it with water. The water reflects the light around the inside the house.” A simple idea, using an overlooked feature of water: “It refracts light 360 degrees.”
GPT is one of a “palette” of techniques McCaffrey is developing into what he calls “innovation assistance software,” which itself can be put to novel uses. His undergraduate student, a comedy writer, is applying the technique to build obscure situations that can make people laugh.
