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Thread: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

  1. Link to Post #101
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Quote Posted by TargeT (here)
    Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details
    Lockheed Martin aims to develop compact reactor prototype in five years, production unit in 10

    Hidden away in the secret depths of the Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin research team has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.

    Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

    Yet the idea of nuclear fusion, in which atoms combine into more stable forms and release excess energy in the process, is not new. Ever since the 1920s, when it was postulated that fusion powers the stars, scientists have struggled to develop a truly practical means of harnessing this form of energy. Other research institutions, laboratories and companies around the world are also pursuing ideas for fusion power, but none have gone beyond the experimental stage. With just such a “Holy Grail” breakthrough seemingly within its grasp, and to help achieve a potentially paradigm-shifting development in global energy, Lockheed has made public its project with the aim of attracting partners, resources and additional researchers.


    Looks like these guys are serious, they just put out another media feeler.... their plans (as much on them as you can find) do seem technically possible; we live in exponentially more and more interesting times...

    Quote Lockheed Martin Claims Sustainable Fusion Is Within Its Grasp
    NEWS ANALYSIS: Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works claims the ability to generate cheap energy from nuclear fusion with little waste or global warming is within its grasp.
    Imagine a source of electrical power that uses water for fuel, produces byproducts that are totally safe and releases no air pollution.

    Then imagine that once it's up and running, it'll be so portable that an entire power plant could fit into the cargo hold of an airplane. Now, imagine that it'll be running in prototype form in five years and operating commercially in ten.

    It sounds like science fiction, but it's not. However, it is being built by a group of scientists and engineers in a place that's legendary for doing what was thought to be impossible in a remarkably short amount of time. This place, which is part of Lockheed Martin's aeronautics business, is popularly known as the Skunk Works.

    This is the same Skunk Works created by the near-mythical Kelly Johnson, an aerospace engineer able to head teams that built the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance jet years before any other organization even thought Mach-3 flight was possible.
    http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-m...its-grasp.html
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  3. Link to Post #102
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    This is pretty cool.....
    Quote

    A Team of Biohackers Has Figured Out How to Inject Your Eyeballs With Night Vision
    In "people becoming superhuman" news, a small independent research group has figured out how to give humans night vision, allowing them to see over 50 meters in the dark for a short time.

    Science for the Masses, a group of biohackers based a couple hours north of Los Angeles in Tehachapi, California, theorized they could enhance healthy eyesight enough that it would induce night vision. To do this, the group used a kind of chlorophyll analog called Chlorin e6 (or Ce6), which is found in some deep-sea fish and is used as an occasional method to treat night blindness.

    "Going off that research, we thought this would be something to move ahead with," the lab's medical officer, Jeffrey Tibbetts, told Mic. "There are a fair amount of papers talking about having it injected in models like rats, and it's been used intravenously since the '60s as a treatment for different cancers. After doing the research, you have to take the next step."

    To do so, team biochem researcher Gabriel Licina became a guinea pig.

    How it happened: With what's basically a really fine turkey baster, Tibbetts slowly dripped 50 microliters of Ce6, an extremely low dose, into Licina's speculum-stretched eyes, aiming for the conjunctival sac, which carried the chemical to the retina.

    "To me, it was a quick, greenish-black blur across my vision, and then it dissolved into my eyes," Licina told Mic.

    And then they waited. From the patent they read, the effects start kicking in within an hour. Licina and Tibbetts had done their research, going so far as to post a paper called "A Review on Night Enhancement Eyedrops Using Chlorin e6." But they are, after all, a bunch of guys working out of a garage. So they went out to a dark field and tested Licina's new superpowers.

    Did it work? Yes. It started with shapes, hung about 10 meters away. "I'm talking like the size of my hand," Licina says. Before long, they were able to do longer distances, recognizing symbols and identifying moving subjects against different backgrounds.

    "The other test, we had people go stand in the woods," he says. "At 50 meters, we could figure out where they were, even if they were standing up against a tree." Each time, Licina had a 100% success rate. The control group, without being dosed with Ce6, only got them right a third of the time.

    Hacking the human body: Biohacks like these are a perfect example of where science and biology can go, and something like providing temporary night vision could be used for more than just a really serious Doctor Mid-Nite costume. Imagine search-and-rescue teams being able to see in the dark in forested areas or hostage situations.

    It doesn't have to be done with a colossal budget, either. With the amount of information freely available, pursuing science can be more about curiosity than resources.

    "For us, it comes down to pursuing things that are doable but won't be pursued by major corporations," Tibbetts says. "There are rules to be followed and don't go crazy, but science isn't a mystical language that only a few elite people can speak."

    What's next? For the lab's night vision experiment, there are other tests they need to do, with hard science with actual lab equipment and getting real numbers on the electrical stimulation in the eye. But for now, it's fair to say it worked.

    "Once you get the hard numbers, that's it," Licina says. "You take it and quantify it and write it down, and release it. ... This is how science works. It isn't flashy. But it makes it more accessible. It shows it can be done. If we can do it in our garage, other people can, too."
    http://mic.com/articles/113740/a-tea...h-night-vision
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  5. Link to Post #103
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    The Fibonacci sequence applied to a common use item, and magic happens.



    Hermes Award 2015: The “Oscar for engineers” goes to WITTENSTEIN AG
    WITTENSTEIN AG of Igersheim, south-west Germany, is the winner of this year’s HERMES AWARD. The technology leader for mechatronic drive systems was shortlisted from a field of almost seventy entrants from ten different countries with its revolutionary Galaxie Drive System and subsequently made the most convincing impression out of the five finalists.

    “The high performance Galaxie Drive System is an outstanding development and a prime example of Germany’s innovative drive. WITTENSTEIN has proved that with courage, creativity and determination a completely new kind of gearhead can be created. The company has also succeeded in embodying the future of industry – the networking of production and services – in its gearbox”, said Professor Johanna Wanka, Federal Minister of Education and Research, in her address at the award ceremony in Hanover on Sunday evening.

    Deutsche Messe’s annual HERMES AWARD technology prize is open to all companies and institutions exhibiting at the Hannover Messe and is the world’s most important industrial award. Professor Johanna Wanka (Federal Minister of Education and Research) and Professor Wolfgang Wahlster, jury chairman and scientific director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), presented the award to Dr. Manfred Wittenstein, chairman of the supervisory board of WITTENSTEIN AG, and Thomas Bayer, head of Galaxie Drive Systems at WITTENSTEIN AG, on Sunday evening (April 12, 2015) when the Hannover Messe was officially opened in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel. “The Galaxie Drive System will open more new doors for development engineers than any invention during the last several decades”, explained Bayer, Galaxie’s inventor, with pride. “The first customer projects have already confirmed Galaxie’s standing as the enabler for the next generation in high performance engineering.” The Galaxie Drive System presented by WITTENSTEIN introduces a brand new gearhead generation. The gearhead has been fused with a newly developed high performance motor to obtain an ultra-compact, hollow-shaft drive system with integrated Industry 4.0 connectivity.
    http://www.designworldonline.com/her...tenstein-ag/#_
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  7. Link to Post #104
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF MOORE's LAW, WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY AGAIN?

    a 3 atom thick transistor is about as small as we are capable of creating right now, this effectively ends the MOORES LAW race until we find a way to over come this physical limitation.

    This is a good thing, until now the focus has been on faster and faster hardware with less focus on more efficient coding; as this physical limitation is felt more and more we should see improvements in coding become more focused on.

    Quote Chemists cook up three atom-thick electronic sheets

    Making thin films out of semiconducting materials is analogous to how ice grows on a windowpane: When the conditions are just right, the semiconductor grows in flat crystals that slowly fuse together, eventually forming a continuous film.

    This process of film deposition is common for traditional semiconductors like silicon or gallium arsenide – the basis of modern electronics – but Cornell scientists are pushing the limits for how thin they can go. They have demonstrated a way to create a new kind of semiconductor thin film that retains its electrical properties even when it is just atoms thick.

    Three atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide were cooked up in the lab of Jiwoong Park, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology and member of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. The films were designed and grown by postdoctoral associate Kibum Kang and graduate student Saien Xie. Their work is published online in Nature, April 30.

    “The electrical performance of our materials was comparable to that of reported results from single crystals of molybdenum disulfide, but instead of a tiny crystal, here we have a 4-inch wafer,” Park said.

    Molybdenum disulfide, which is garnering worldwide interest for its excellent electrical properties, has previously been grown only in disjointed, “archipelago”-like single crystal formations, Park said. But making smooth, flat, ultrathin sheets, like paper, is the ultimate goal, and the bridge to actual devices.

    The researchers pulled off the feat by tuning the growth conditions of their films using a technique called metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Already used widely in industry, but with different materials, it starts with a powdery precursor, forms a gas and sprinkles single atoms onto a substrate, one layer at a time.

    Park’s group systematically optimized the technique to make the films, tweaking conditions and temperatures not unlike experimenting in the kitchen. They found that their crystals grew perfectly stitched together, but only with a little bit of hydrogen and in completely dry conditions, for example. In addition to advanced optical imaging techniques, researchers led by co-author David Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics and director of Cornell’s Kavli Institute, contributed advanced transmission electron microscopy to test and characterize the quality of the films as they went along.

    The team also demonstrated their films’ efficacy when stacked layer by layer alternating with silicon dioxide and employing standard photolithography. This effectively proved that these three-atom-thick semiconducting films can be made into multi-level electronic devices of unsurpassed thinness.

    The MOCVD method for thin film generation is seemingly generic. The researchers showed the ability to simply change the precursor to make other films; for example, they also grew a tungsten disulfide film with different electrical properties and color. They envision perfecting the process to make atomically thin films of all varieties, like a packet of colored paper, from which new, exciting electronic and optoelectronic devices can be derived.

    “These were only the first two materials, but we want to make a whole palette of materials,” Park said.

    The paper is titled “High-mobility three-atom-thick semiconducting films with wafer scale homogeneity.” The work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Cornell Center for Materials Research funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Samsung Advanced Institute for Technology. Devices were fabricated at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, also supported by NSF.
    http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...ctronic-sheets



    and of course, these batteries are nothing really new but their price point is HIGHLY competitive.

    I've been slowly planning to convert my house to solar and these batteries are almost half the cost of systems I was looking at.

    Quote Late Thursday, the glitzy electric car company Tesla Motors, run by billionaire Elon Musk, ceased to be just a car company. As was widely expected, Tesla announced that it is offering a home battery product, which people can use to store energy from their solar panels or to backstop their homes against blackouts, and also larger scale versions that could perform similar roles for companies or even parts of the grid.

    For homeowners, the Tesla Powerwall will have a power capacity of either 10 kilowatt hours or 7 kilowatt hours, at a cost of either $ 3,500 or $ 3,000. The company says these are the costs for suppliers and don’t include the cost of installation and a power inverter, so customers could pay considerably more than that.....

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/e...ch-a-big-deal/
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    About one of every 15 workers in the country is employed in the trucking business, according to the ATA

    Here is the beginning of the end for an industry... automated shipping will hit the US job market so hard we will likely not recover (as moving "stuff" around is one of the few things we actually still do mostly by hand)

    Quote The first self-driving 18-wheeler hits the highways

    Daimler Trucks this week unveiled what it said is the world's first licensed 18-wheel semi-tractor trailer that can drive itself.

    Daimler unveiled the new 18-wheeler yesterday during a ceremony at the Hoover Dam.

    The Freightliner Inspiration Truck, a concept truck, underwent extensive testing, Daimler said, before the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles granted it a license to operate on public roads in the state. This past year, the truck was driven more than 10,000 miles during a test in Germany.

    Daimler said its new self-driving rig "promises to unlock autonomous vehicle advancements that reduce accidents, improve fuel consumption, cut highway congestion, and safeguard the environment."
    http://www.computerworld.com/article...-highways.html
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    This will change the battle field dramatically, wars are still "won" by "boots on ground" (aka Infantry) and most gunfights involve cover; hiding behind something and shooting over or around it.... This weapon removes cover from the equation.





    Quote Army’s first shoulder-fired “smart weapon” close to final test
    "Anti-defilade" XM25 lets soldiers set range for shells to blow up beyond cover.



    Early next year, the US Army will begin acceptance testing of a weapon that seems like it's straight out of Call of Duty Advanced Warfare: the XM25 Counter Defilade Engagement System, a "smart" grenade launcher from Orbital Sciences subsidiary Orbital ATK. The XM25 is designed to be an "anti-defilade" weapon—its purpose is to allow soldiers to hit targets shielded by cover.

    The XM25 has a built-in "target acquisition and fire control system" that allows any soldier with basic rifleman skills to operate it effectively—the soldier points the weapon's target selector down range, and a laser rangefinder determines how far away it is. The soldier can add additional distance to clear obstacles, and the fire control computer gives the soldier a new aiming point to put the round on target, as well as setting the fusing of the grenade in the chamber. The grenade doesn't have to strike anything to explode, so it can detonate in the air over whatever or whoever might be hiding behind a vehicle, wall, or entrenchment.

    The XM25 has been in development since the middle of the last decade. It was originally developed by Alliant TechSystems, which was acquired by Orbital Sciences. In 2010, the Army's PEO Soldier program office sent prototypes of the XM25 to Afghanistan for "forward operational assessment"—use in actual combat to see how it performed. PEO Soldier's Lt. Colonel Chris Lehner said in a post about the field tests that the "introduction of the XM25 is akin to other revolutionary systems such as the machine gun, the airplane, and the tank, all of which changed battlefield tactics. No longer will our Soldiers have to expose themselves by firing and maneuvering to eliminate an enemy behind cover. Our Soldiers can remain covered/protected and use their XM25 to neutralize an enemy in his covered position. This will significantly reduce the risk of U.S. casualties and change the way we fight."

    According to Orbital ATK, the XM25 can accurately hit a "point target" at 500 meters and hit targets with area airbursts at up to 700 meters. The semi-automatic grenade launcher, built by Heckler & Koch, is a semi-automatic that carries five 25 millimeter shells per clip. Non-lethal, armor-piercing, and door-breaching rounds are under development in addition to the high-explosive airburst shell currently in production.

    The Army is also testing a smart grenade to work with existing rifle-mounted 40 millimeter grenade launchers. Called the Small Arms Grade Munition, the grenade round can detect when it passes over an obstacle and explode once it has cleared it.
    http://arstechnica.com/information-t...behind-things/
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  13. Link to Post #107
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    An interesting and, now that I think about it, obvious use of 3d printing

    Quote 3D printed teeth to keep your mouth free of bacteria


    Lost a tooth? Soon your dentist could print you another – and it’ll help keep your mouth clean, too.

    Getting fitted for a false tooth or other dental treatment tends to involve a mouthful of foul-tasting gunk and plaster casts. But now dentists are moving to high-tech digital scanning and 3D printing. That switch opens the door to more advanced materials that could improve your oral hygiene.

    Andreas Herrmann of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues have developed an antimicrobial plastic, allowing them to 3D print teeth that also kill bacteria. It’s an important issue, say the team, because bacterial damage to existing implants costs patients millions of dollars in the US alone.

    The team embedded antimicrobial quaternary ammonium salts inside existing dental resin polymers. The salts are positively charged and so disrupt the negatively charged bacterial membranes, causing them to burst and die. “The material can kill bacteria on contact, but on the other hand it’s not harmful to human cells,” says Hermann.

    Then they put this mix in a 3D printer, hardened it with ultraviolet light and printed out a range of dental objects such as replacement teeth and orthodontic braces. To test its antimicrobial properties, they coated samples of the material in mix of saliva and Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium that causes tooth decay. They found the material killed over 99 per cent of the bacteria, compared to less than 1 per cent for a control sample without the added salts.

    Further tests will have to be done before the material can be rolled out to patients, as the team only left the samples in the saliva and bacteria mix for six days. “For clinical used we need to extend this, and investigate the compatibility with toothpaste,” says Herrmann.

    They also need to confirm the plastic is strong enough to use as a tooth, but he thinks it shouldn’t take too long. “It’s a medical product with a foreseeable application in the near future, much less time than developing a new drug.”
    https://www.newscientist.com/article...e-of-bacteria/
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    It has begun.... once vehicles are automated the loss of jobs will be staggering; moves like this are the canary in the coal mine falling over in its cage. (adapt or be left behind)
    Quote Driverless trucks move all iron ore at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mines, in world first


    The first two mines in the world to start moving all of their iron ore using fully remote-controlled trucks have just gone online in Western Australia's Pilbara.

    Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away.

    Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site.

    Mr Bennett said the two pits are the largest of their kind in the world.

    "To the naked eye it looks like conventional mining methods. I guess the key change for us is the work that employees and our team members are doing now," he said.

    "What we have done is map out our entire mine and put that into a system and the system then works out how to manoeuvre the trucks through the mine."

    The company is now operating 69 driverless trucks across its mines at Yandicoogina, Nammuldi and Hope Downs 4.

    The trucks can run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without a driver who needs bathroom or lunch breaks, which has industry insiders estimating each truck can save around 500 work hours a year.

    Mr Bennett said the technology takes away dangerous jobs while also slashing operating costs.

    "We have taken away a very high risk role, where employees are exposed to fatigue," he said.
    More here:
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-1...d-mine/6863814
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    The implications of this are almost as large as the above (automated vehicles) soon the concept of "100% employment" will be a bewildering joke as everything becomes automated.

    Quote MIT’s AI machine removes humans from big-data analysis

    he spread of the Internet and prevalence of mobile devices have put data front and center today more than any age in the past. But with volumes of data comes the need to make sense of that data. Called big-data analysis, the process has mostly relied on human intuition. As any artificial intelligence scientist will tell you, intuition is one of the hardest parts of the human thinking process to replicate. Researchers from MIT, however, might be on the verge of a breakthrough, with a Data Science Machine capable of performing just as well or even better than humans.

    The Data Science Machine was designed and built specifically for big-data analysis. To test just how far they've come, the researchers signed up the AI into three data science contests. In one competition that had 906 teams it finished ahead of 615. In two out of three competitions, it was 94 and 96 as accurate as human players. And while it was only 87 percent accurate in the third, it only worked on the data for a maximum of 12 hours. Humans took months to finish their analysis.

    Max Kanter, whose masters' thesis was the basis of the machine, and his thesis adviser Kalyan Veeramachaneni uses several techniques to give the Data Science Machine the semblance of intuition. For example, it uses the structural relationships in databases as hints. All major databases these days have these relationships, making it easier to implement.

    Rather than worrying yet again about the dark cataclysmic future filled with robotic overlords, the Data Science Machine is, at least for now, being employed for somewhat more mundane tasks. In particular, the machine is being used to help determine which students are likely to drop out from MIT's online courses. The machine tries to gain that insight by analyzing how early or late a students starts an assignment and how much time he or she spends online on the course.

    Kantar says that there is so much data out there in the world. Just ask Google. However, most of those are just sitting there, underused and underutilized. The Data Science Machine could, in the future, reduce the time needed to sift through that data to produce something more useful. Or maybe even something more dangerous.
    http://www.slashgear.com/mits-ai-mac...ysis-19410327/


    And, on a why-did-this-take-so-long note:

    FINALLY!

    Quote A machine that folds your laundry is finally here

    obots can do amazing things, but many would be scuppered by the simplest of tasks – it’s a common complaint that they can’t even fold laundry.

    Well, not any more. In the video above, LJ Rich of BBC Click reports on Laundroid, a Japanese clothes-folding machine created by Seven Dreamers, in partnership with Panasonic and Daiwa House.

    Ok, folding takes four minutes per garment, but hey, this is progress.
    http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2015...s-finally-here


    The writing is on the wall (internet?)

    Quote How Not to Be Replaced by Robots: Better Brush Up on Your Social Skills

    ennis Mortensen, the founder of a technology startup, had a simple request for Amy Ingram: set up a meeting with a journalist.

    Within minutes, Amy sent an e-mail with a preferred date and time and two alternatives. She reached out again in the middle of the night about nine hours later after getting no response: “I wanted to follow up with you about this meeting with Dennis.” Four hours after that, she fired off another e-mail: “I haven’t heard back from you yet about this meeting. Is this time convenient?”

    Some would call Amy persistent, others might say she’s overly aggressive or even annoying. What can’t be argued is that she got the job done. A meeting was scheduled less than 24 hours after the initial request.

    Amy Ingram is a virtual personal assistant created by New York-based Mortensen and his team at x.ai. Her initials are also those of artificial intelligence, and her last name refers to a model used in helping machines understand human speech.

    Her single-mindedness is an example of the need to imbue such programs with social skills, so Amy remains a work in progress, Mortensen said in the interview arranged by her.
    Job Polarization

    Efforts to make agents of artificial intelligence more sentient threaten to erode one of the biggest competitive advantages humans have over robots: the ability to summon social skills, including reading a person’s feelings, managing emotions, working in teams and communicating effectively, to complete a task. Machines’ capacity to do routine jobs that don’t require a personal touch -- think assembly-line workers, bank tellers or grocery store checkout clerks -- has been behind the so-called labor-market polarization that has contributed to the hollowing out of middle-class professions.

    David Deming, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University, has found that jobs requiring social interaction are growing relative to work that doesn’t, and such skills may offer some protection from robotic takeover. Certain high-level professions that demand technical expertise and low-skill work that can be done by a greater share of the population often have in common a need for language, creativity, flexibility and physical dexterity, all things humans currently can do better than machines.

    Almost all job growth since 1980 has been in work that is social-skill intensive, according to research from Deming published in August. Occupations that require high levels of analytical and mathematical reasoning but little social interface -- for example statistical clerks and machinists -- have “fared especially poorly,” he wrote. Meanwhile real wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require workers to have both math and social skills, such as registered nurses, designers and financial managers.
    ‘Unconscious Process’

    Social interaction is “an unconscious process” for people, Deming said in an interview. “It’s really hard to write a program that does that as well.”

    While true for now, it’s only a matter of time before robots catch up to humans in this area too, argues Pedro Domingos at the University of Washington in Seattle. He says machines are already making impressive headway on at least mimicking social skills. One day that computer on the other end of the customer service line will be so good you won’t need to keep pressing zero to reach a human operator.

    In Domingos’s labor market of the future, having a person do something a robot can do for less -- tend bar, wait tables -- will be a luxury. Jobs like that “will remain, but they’re going to be comparatively very highly paid jobs and there are going to be fewer,” he said. Even technical workers such as computer scientists will be out of work eventually, as machines become more nimble at understanding natural language, said Domingos, who is the author of "The Master Algorithm," a book on machine learning published last month.
    Brighter Future

    For David Autor, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who is considered a leading expert in the field of job polarization, the future is brighter, although there is likely to be some hardship in the form of lost jobs along the way. Automation has put people out of some type of work -- agriculture, manufacturing, dishwashing -- for the past 200 years, and mankind always bounces back, he said.

    “People tend to underestimate that, as we mechanize one set of things, we think of all kinds of new things to do,” Autor said in an interview. The way we respond “is through our creativity and also through educating ourselves. We continue to make ourselves relevant.”

    In the meantime, women may have the upper hand. Jobs that require social skills have become more female-dominated, and women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence, according to Anita Williams Woolley, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh.

    That may help explain why labor force participation for men in their prime working years is hovering at an unprecedented low near 88 percent, she said.
    more here:
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...s-seeking-work
    Last edited by TargeT; 20th October 2015 at 15:20.
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Lots of nails being pounded into Big Oil's coffin.....

    Quote Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like A Real Car

    TOKYO — The most notable thing about Honda Motor new hydrogen-powered FCV, to be unveiled Wednesday at the Tokyo Motor Show, is not the silent burst of acceleration it provides when your foot touches the pedal, or the fact that it emits nothing but water vapor from the tailpipe. It’s not even that the FCV can go more than 400 miles between three-minute hydrogen fillings - assuming you have access to a hydrogen station.

    No, the most important thing is that Honda’s new fuel cell system is one-tenth the cost of previous versions and — for the first time — fits neatly under the car’s hood, taking up no more space than a typical V-6 engine. That means two things: 1) there’s more space for passengers and cargo, and 2) the compact fuel cell power train can be used in a variety of other Honda vehicles.

    This really does feel like a real leap forward in the shift toward fuel cell vehicles and a so-called “hydrogen society.”

    Of course, getting the hydrogen remains a sticking point. In California and the Northeast, companies like First Element and Air Liquide are installing hydrogen stations with support from government grants as well as loans from Toyota and Honda, but the rollout to date has been slow.

    Honda might have a solution, though: it’s developing a compact Smart Hydrogen Station, enabling you to use high-pressure electrolysis to produce your own hydrogen at home. There’s no word on when that might be available, but if it’s affordable, it could be a huge breakthrough in speeding the adoption of fuel cell vehicles.

    Honda’s new fuel cell goes on sale next spring (about six months behind Toyota Motor's ‘s recently introduced Mirai fuel cell) and the automaker expects to sell far more than the 72 units sold of its previous-generation fuel cell, the FCX Clarity. Honda said the same platform will also underpin a new plug-in hybrid vehicle, coming shortly after the fuel cell vehicle’s launch. Honda said it sees plug-in hybrids as an important bridge toward hydrogen-powered fuel cells.

    “Compared to 10 years ago, I think fuel cell vehicles have developed significantly in terms of the technology,” said Takahiro Hachigo, who took over as Honda’s president and chief executive in June. “Ten years ago, we said fuel cells could not be driven in cold weather, for example, and that the hardware was too heavy. Today – fuel cells are equal to gasoline engine cars.” The next step, he said, is figuring out how to mass produce them affordably. Honda is partnering with General Motors GM -2.94% to develop next-generation fuel cell systems and lower-cost hydrogen storage tanks.
    More details about Honda FCV — including its real name — will likely be disclosed at Wednesday’s press conference, but Honda gave journalists a preview of the car at an advanced technology presentation at its Research and Development Center outside Tokyo.

    Despite its compact size, the new fuel cell system gets a 30 percent increase in power, to 130 kilowatts, with a 700-kilometer (435 mile) range. It’s paired with a flat lithium-ion battery pack that fits under the front seats. There are two hydrogen tanks: a large one that fits behind the rear bulkhead, with a smaller one under the rear seat. The larger tank clearly cuts into trunk space, but there’s still a decent amount of room for golf bags or luggage.

    Virtually every automaker is working on fuel cell vehicles; it’ll be interesting to see how they develop. Just as with hybrid vehicles a generation ago, it’s Honda and Toyota leading the way.
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmul...rtner=yahootix
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    I just saw this article which brings in subjects we constantly
    speculate in the alternate and scy - fy world. Moving things
    with Sound waves, beam holding pea sized object under
    cardboard UFO in short clip. This just shows that engineers
    are developing the concept which is the starting point to
    most innovations.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------



    'Tractor beam' grabs beads with sound waves

    By Jonathan Webb
    Science reporter, BBC News


    2 hours ago

    From the section Science & Environment


    Short vid on link...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34647921

    This video shows how the holograms work, ending with a "cardboard UFO"
    wrapped around the speaker grid to demonstrate its "tractor beam" function
    (footage: Asier Marzo/Bruce Drinkwater/Sriram Subramanian)



    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34647921


    ====================================================

    Another article from the link .....




    Tractor beam breaks distance record

    21 October 2014
    From the section Science & Environment



    Drs Shvedov (L) and Hnatovsky used a doughnut-shaped laser beam to push and
    pull small glass spheres

    Scientists have created a tractor beam that can drag objects for distances of up to
    20cm - around 100 times further than in previous experiments. The doughnut-
    shaped laser is also reversible - so it can either repel or attract objects.In future,
    these beams could be used to study atmospheric pollutants, or to retrieve delicate
    particles of material for examination.

    The research is published in the journal Nature Photonics.


    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29708358
    Last edited by Cidersomerset; 27th October 2015 at 20:02.

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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Loads more US tax $ for the mil ind complex and share holders.....


    The U.S. Government Is Spending 400,000 Dollars On A Single Helmet

    By David Icke on 28th October 2015


    F-35_Helmet_Mounted_Display_System

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------



    InvestmentWatch

    Spreading the truth. Empowering the people.
    Submitted by IWB, on October 27th, 2015
    By Michael Snyder


    The U.S. Government Is Spending 400,000 Dollars On A Single Helmet

    ‘Would you pay $400,000 for a single helmet? Of course you wouldn’t – but that is precisely
    what the U.S. government is doing. Just the helmet for the pilot of the new F-35 Lightning II
    is going to cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. And since we are going to need 2,400
    of those helmets, the total bill is going to end up approaching a billion dollars. But what is a
    billion dollars between friends, eh?’

    Read more: The U.S. Government Is Spending 400,000 Dollars On A Single Helmet

    http://investmentwatchblog.com/the-u...single-helmet/

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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Hopefully the internet doesn't get locked down due to the Paris Attacks; 'cause it's about to get a WHOLE lot faster.... (all the existing fiber connections can easily be upgraded with this)


    Quote ASU's white laser technology one of year's top breakthroughs

    Engineering professor's invention promises a bright future according to Popular Science magazine

    The invention of the world’s first white laser, which could revolutionize communications, lighting and displays, is being recognized as one of the top 100 breakthroughs of the year by Popular Science magazine.

    Arizona State University electrical engineering professor Cun-Zheng Ning worked on the problem for 10 years until he and his team of graduate students cracked it.

    The white laser will eventually produce computer and TV displays with 70 percent more colors than current technology.Laser TVs exist now, but they are bulky, heavy and extremely expensive. And, without the white laser, they haven’t reached their full potential.

    Ning saw the first laser TV eight years ago in Japan.

    “When you see a laser TV, you want to throw away the best other TVs immediately,” said NingThe School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering is in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Ning is also graduate faculty in the Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and in Material Science and Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering., a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. “There’s just no comparison. It can cover much wider color ranges. … You get many, many more colors.”
    https://asunow.asu.edu/20151117-disc...-breakthroughs

    Quote 'Power Over Wi-Fi' named one of the year's game-changing technologies

    University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router—a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments—to power devices.
    The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine's annual "Best of What's New" awards announced Wednesday.

    The technology attracted attention earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet.

    The final paper will be presented next month at the Association for Computing Machinery's CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on emerging networking experiments and technologies.

    "For the first time we've shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices," said lead author Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. "We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source—it doesn't degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it's powering devices."

    PoWiFi could help enable development of the Internet of Things, where small computing sensors are embedded in everyday objects like cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, air conditioners, mobile devices, allowing those devices to "talk" to each other. But one major challenge is how to energize those low-power sensors and actuators without needing to plug them into a power source as they become smaller and more numerous.

    The team of UW computer science and electrical engineers found that the peak energy contained in untapped, ambient Wi-Fi signals often came close to meeting the operating requirements for some low-power devices. But because the signals are sent intermittently, energy "leaked" out of the system during silent periods.

    The team fixed that problem by optimizing a router to send out superfluous "power packets" on Wi-Fi channels not currently in use—essentially beefing up the Wi-Fi signal for power delivery—without affecting the quality and speed of data transmission. The team also developed sensors that can be integrated in devices to harvest the power.

    In their proof-of-concept experiments, the team demonstrated that the PoWiFi system could wirelessly power a grayscale, low-power Omnivision VGA camera from 17 feet away, allowing it to store enough energy to capture an image every 35 minutes.

    It also re-charged the battery of a Jawbone Up24 wearable fitness tracker from zero to 41 percent in 2.5 hours.

    The researchers also tested the PoWiFi system in six homes. Users typically didn't notice deterioration in web page loading or video streaming experiences, showing the technology could successfully deliver power via Wi-Fi in real-world conditions without degrading network performance.

    Although initial experiments harvested relatively small amounts of power, the UW team believes there's opportunity for make the PoWiFi system more efficient and robust.

    "In the future, PoWi-Fi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
    http://phys.org/news/2015-11-power-w...ogies.html#jCp
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    first functional "free" energy device!
    Quote Freevolt generates power from thin air

    What you see above may look like an unremarkable slice of electronics, but it can theoretically power a low-energy device forever, and for free. If that sounds like a big deal, well... that's because it is. Drayson Technologies today announced Freevolt, a system that harvests energy from radio frequency (RF) signals bouncing around in the ether and turns it into usable, "perpetual power." Drayson isn't exactly a household name, but the research and development company has a particular interest in energy, especially where all-electric racing is concerned. And now it's developed the first commercial technology that literally creates electricity out of thin air.

    We're constantly surrounded by an ever-denser cloud of RF signals. They're the reason your smartphone gets 2G, 3G and 4G coverage, your laptop gets WiFi, and your TV receives digital broadcasts. Capturing energy from this background noise is nothing new, but most proof-of-concept scenarios have employed dedicated transmitters that power devices at short ranges. Furthermore, research into the field has never really left the lab, though a company called Nikola Labs is hoping to release an iPhone case that's said to extend battery life using RF energy harvesting.

    According to Drayson, Freevolt is the first commercially available technology that powers devices using ambient RF energy, no dedicated transmitter required. The key to Freevolt is said to be the efficiency of its three constituent parts. A multi-band antenna scavenges RF energy from any source within the 0.5-5GHz range, which is then fed through an "ultra-efficient" rectifier that turns this energy into DC electricity. A power management module boosts, stores and outputs this electricity -- and that's all there is to it.

    Freevolt may well be the most efficient system of its kind, but it's still only viable for devices that require very little power. In a location where lots of RF signals are flying around, like in an office, a standard Freevolt unit can produce around 100 microwatts of power. That's nowhere near enough to say, run your smartphone, but Drayson has some specific use cases in mind. The company thinks Freevolt can be the backbone of the connected home, and in a broader sense, the internet of things. Sensor-based devices, such as a smart smoke alarm, can be powered by Freevolt indefinitely. Beacons that provide indoor mapping and targeted advertising are also perfect candidates.

    While it's easy to visualize specific examples -- a smoke alarm that never needs a new battery, or a low-power security camera that isn't bound to a mains outlet -- the true potential of Freevolt is hard to grasp. We're talking about free energy here: devices that never need charging, cost nothing to run, and aren't limited by the location of an external power source. An entire smart city -- where roads know when they're busy and bins know when they're full -- could be devised using countless sensors that require no upkeep, and have no overheads beyond the price of the hardware itself. It's a powerful idea, and beyond sensors, Drayson imagines Freevolt being used to trickle-charge all kinds of hardware, significantly extending the battery life of a wearable, for instance.

    What's more, Freevolt can be scaled up for applications that require higher power outputs, and Drayson is currently working on miniaturizing its initial reference design and creating a flexible version that can be integrated into clothing, among other things. There are limitations to the technology, of course. The amount of power Freevolt can harness depends on the density of ambient RF signals, which are way more prevalent in urban areas than the countryside. A sensor-based product could still operate in these lower-yield environments, though, by monitoring a value every five minutes instead of every five seconds, for example.
    more here:
    http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/30/f...t-free-energy/
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Instant communication is coming, soon...

    Quote Physicists set quantum record by using photons to carry messages from electrons almost 2 kilometers apart

    Their work is described in the online edition of Nature Communications.
    Scientists and engineers are interested in the practical application of this technology to make quantum networks that can send highly secure information over long distances – a capability that also makes the technology appealing to governments, banks and militaries.
    Quantum entanglement is the observed phenomenon of two or more particles that are connected, even over thousands of miles. If it sounds strange, take comfort knowing that Albert Einstein described this behavior as "spooky action."
    Consider, for instance, entangled electrons. Electrons spin in one of two characteristic directions, and if they are entangled, those two electrons' spins are linked. It's as if you spun a quarter in New York clockwise, an entangled second coin in Los Angeles would start to spin clockwise. And likewise, if you spun that quarter counter-clockwise, the second coin would shift its spin as well.
    Electrons are trapped inside atoms, so entangled electrons can't talk directly at long distance. But photons – tiny particles of light – can move. Scientists can establish a necessary condition of entanglement, called quantum correlation, to correlate photons to electrons, so that the photons can act as the messengers of an electron's spin.
    In his previous work, Stanford physicist Leo Yu has entangled photons with electrons through fiber optic cables over a distance of several feet. Now, he and a team of scientists, including Professor Emeritus Yoshihisa Yamamoto, have correlated photons with electron spin over a record distance of 1.2 miles (1.93 kilometers).

    "Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer," Yu said. "This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world."
    To do this, Yu and his team had to make sure that the correlation could be preserved over long distances – a key challenge given that photons have a tendency to change orientation while traveling in optical fibers.
    Photons can have a vertical or horizontal orientation (known as polarization), which can be referenced as a 0 or a 1, as in digital computer programming. But if they change en route, the connection to the correlated electron is lost.
    This information can be preserved in another way, Yu said. He created a time-stamp to correlate arrival time of the photon with the electron spin, which provided a sort of reference key for each photon to confirm its correlation to the source electron.
    To eventually entangle two electrons that had never met over great distances, two photons, each correlated with a unique source electron, had to be sent through fiber optic cables to meet in the middle at a "beam splitter" and interact. Photons do not normally interact, just two flashlights beams passing through one another, so the researchers had to mediate this interaction called the "two-photon interference."
    To ensure the two-photon interference, they had another issue to overcome. Photons from two different sources have different characteristics, like color and wavelength. If they have different wavelengths, they cannot interfere, Yu said. Before traveling along the fiber optic cable, the photons passed through a "quantum down-converter," which matched their wavelengths. The down-converter also shifted both photons to a wavelength that can travel farther within the fiber optic cables designed for telecommunications.
    Quantum supercomputers promise to be exponentially faster and more powerful than traditional computers, Yu said, and can communicate with immunity to hacking or spying. With this work, the team has brought the quantum networks one step closer to reality.
    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-physici...trons.html#jCp
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Well, replicating objects might be as easy as a quick scan with your smart phone then a trip to a 3d printer soon.... very interesting advancement here.

    Quote MIT Figured Out How to Make Cheap 3D Scanners 1,000 Times Better

    Scientists developed pretty good 3D-imaging technology a while ago. They’ve also developed cheap 3D-imaging technology. Good and cheap has always been tough, but researchers at MIT have made a breakthrough using old fashioned polarization. The quality isn’t just good either–it’s great.

    To be more specific, the new polarization technique can increase the resolution of any cheap, conventional 3D-imaging device by a factor of 1,000. That not only makes it leaps and bounds better than your grainy old Microsoft Kinect, it makes it better than high-precision and not-at-all portable laser scanners. This advance could be a game changer for the world of computer imaging, and enable anything from a cellphone camera that doubles as a super accurate 3D-scanner to self-driving cars that aren’t phased by snow or rain.

    “Today, they can miniaturize 3-D cameras to fit on cellphones,” says MIT graduate student Achuta Kadambi who helped develop the technology. “But they make compromises to the 3-D sensing, leading to very coarse recovery of geometry. That’s a natural application for polarization, because you can still use a low-quality sensor, and adding a polarizing filter gives you something that’s better than many machine-shop laser scanners.”

    In other words, the 3D scanners of the future will look less like the eyeborg that is Google’s Project Tango (see above) and more like the camera on the back of any old smartphone. The image quality will also far surpass existing portable 3D scanning technology. The extent to which the breakthrough hinges upon existing technology is well expressed by the fact that the MIT researchers used a Kinect to come up with it.

    The trick boils down to measuring the exact orientation of light that bounces off of an object. The new technique blends existing depth estimates used by technology like the Kinect with readings taken through three different polarization filters. A standard graphics chip like the one in a video game console helps the scientists calculate the orientation of light signals in a range of hundreds of micrometers.

    Well, there’s a little bit more to it than that, but luckily, the MIT Media Lab is offering up the full paper for free.
    http://gizmodo.com/mit-figured-out-h...er%3Dt3_3v4yxs
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Quote An interesting and, now that I think about it, obvious use of 3d printing

    Quote 3D printed teeth to keep your mouth free of bacteria
    I just seen this article suggesting that 3 D printers will soon be used widespread.
    Particularly in the medical field.



    'Most firms will be using 3D printing'

    By Adam Easton
    BBC News, Olsztyn, Poland
    2 December 2015


    Short vid on link....http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34977335

    It sounds like the stuff of science fiction - machines that can "print" solid objects
    - but 3D printing isn't really printing at all, at least not in the traditional sense.

    It is the process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file.
    Successive layers of material are formed under computer control to create
    objects ranging from plastic bottles to aircraft parts and prosthetic limbs.

    A 3D printer is essentially a type of industrial robot.

    It's a growing market worth an estimated $5.2bn (£3.4bn) this year, according
    to market analysts canalys.Now, there are those who believe we're standing on
    the cusp of a new industrial revolution - with 3D printers destined to become as
    common in our homes as mobiles and tablets are today. You might expect the
    boss of one of Europe's youngest players in the market, to agree. But you'd be wrong.

    Rafal Tomasiak is the chief executive of the Polish 3D printer company Zortrax,
    which is less than two years' old. His firm is based in Olsztyn, a mid-sized city in
    Poland's beautiful Masurian lake district.

    All the design and programming is done here. But the printers are actually made
    on the other side of the world in China; lower manufacturing and labour costs
    makes that an attractive proposition.


    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34977335


    Zortrax plans a stock market launch next year

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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Quote Posted by Cidersomerset (here)
    I just seen this article suggesting that 3 D printers will soon be used widespread.
    Particularly in the medical field.
    we haven't even scratched the surface of what this tech will do... printed E V E R Y thing is not far from now... especially as material science and 3d printers intersect (there are already several printers that can print different "substances" at the same time, like electrically conductive ink and plastic (embedded wiring))

    the next few years will be a decentralization rush as manufacturing becomes reasonable for "the average Joe".
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  37. Link to Post #119
    UK Avalon Member Cidersomerset's Avatar
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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    When they can do this .....LOL....I expect it is not far off.

    Last edited by Cidersomerset; 2nd December 2015 at 18:19.

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    Default Re: Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

    Quote Posted by Cidersomerset (here)
    When they can do this .....LOL

    My guess? 20-30years or less, we are at the exponential advancement stage right now, small discoveries trickle into every other tech and improve them all..

    "There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality. " - S. Spielberg
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