Creating fire is still one of man’s greatest achievements. The problem arises when you have to control it or put it out.
This summer, the state of Colorado was helpless as hundreds of thousands of acres went up in flames. Homes and lives are lost worldwide at the hand of this merciless element everyday.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been tinkering with a way of using physics instead of chemistry to combat our half friend, half foe.
Courtesy of Hitachi
“The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven’t necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones. The possibility of losing information may actually have increased.” -Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii
To combat this problem, Hitachi is looking towards an unlikely source: slivers of quartz glass.
In the 80s, you weren’t cool if you weren’t rocking a boombox; now in the 201st decade, you might not be cool unless you have a boombot.
A company called TovBot, a compilation of robot researchers and entrepreneurs hailing from Georgia Tech, IDC in Israel, and MIT Media Lab, was over the plain old method for taking in music. They wanted an interactive and intelligent user experience. A new robofriend named Shimi (fittingly pronounced shimmy) has been born to do just that. Shimi has some pretty amazing features for an mp3 dock, and should be in your living room in 2013.
In the 21st century, we’re wired to multitask. Even behind the wheel, we’ll perform as many activities as possible while maintaining a crash risk above 50%. Besides eating and putting on make-up while driving, we want access to a worldwide library of music, we want to hear step by step directions instead of learning the local terrain, and we want to stay connected with friends. We also don’t like clutter. How is all of this possible?
For as smart as our phones have become, the battery life and charging constraints are pretty dumb. If you’re not a classically trained ‘always prepared’ Boy Scout that brings your charger everywhere, a dead phone has been a frequent foe. The phone taps out at the most inopportune times; when you really need to talk to someone, when you run into your favorite celebrity, or when you really need to play Angry Birds. Even if you brought your charger along, where are you going to find an outlet? Most establishments guard their electricity like L.A. Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick guards the net. Lucky for us, we live in the 21st century, a magical time where outlets will soon be a thing of the past.
With the recent explosion of electronic music rocking nightclubs worldwide, many mainstream artists have moved to incorporating the same types of themes into their music in order to stay popular.
Rising stars such as Avicii, David Guetta, Skrillex, and many others have even recently began collaborating with pop and hip-hop artists to add catchy verses and hooks to the exciting beats that they produce to capture the largest audience possible. Mainstream mainstays such as Britney Spears, Usher, Lil Wayne, and countless others have been prominently featured on major electronic, dance and dub step tracks that have become global sensations. While these collaborations provide for exciting, larger than life club anthems, impressing audiences with well thought out and meaningful lyrics has become a lost art.
Spending time in the great outdoors is wonderful; the sights, the smells, the tranquility. It really brings you back to the days of our ancestors whose lives were shaped in the plains. The problem is that in the 21st century, we need to stay connected to the outside world. E-mails, sports scores, breaking news; we like to have our cake and eat it too. Those of us without an RV who don’t want to risk killing our car battery have had to suck it up and survive a few days without a smart device. Even resisting those temptations, it’s still nice to have some music to jam out to while in the mountains.
Materials scientists David Toledo and Paul Slusser wanted to make life more convenient for outdoorsmen in the United States, and potentially bring a scarce resource to people in third world countries. They are on the brink of doing just that. Their start-up company, Power Portal, is in the final stages of prototyping on a product called the PowerPot. The PowerPot will be able to create electricity for anyone with a hot surface and a cool liquid inside.
Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest musicians, lyricists, and performers of all time, and to see him seemingly alive and kickin’ sixteen years after his tragic death is definitely worthy of the world spotlight. The epic performance of Tupac and Snoop Dogg at Coachella in California will live on in history for a number of reasons, but what it really did was shed some light on one of the coolest forms of future technology that could be in our living rooms soon. Holograms and Telepresence are about to become a major part of the way we live our everyday lives. We are nearing an age where will be able to trick ourselves into thinking people and objects are there that aren’t.
Astounde.com covered an overview of Augmented Reality in February. Augmented Reality is essentially the opposite of virtual reality. AR is placing virtual components into the real world, rather than trying to make a real world in a digital one. AR is still in it’s infancy, but is starting to take a stronghold on our tablets and phones.
One of the most exciting developments using AR is taking place in a new device that can be worn on your face. Technology is shrinking and becoming more powerful than we ever imagined, and that is enabling us to come up with some sensational new applications. Many technology experts believe that 2012 may go down as the year of wearable technology. This evolution of technology and communication has enabled Google to release Project Glass; which is the introduction of what is becoming known as Google Glasses. These glasses have the potential to change the way we live forever.
Pharmaceuticals is one of the largest and most necessary industries on the planet. Every single person on Earth has something wrong with them; whether it be a headache, anxiety, or some sort of uncontrollable pain. We all require some sort of medication to help us cope with these problems.
The main issue is, that for each new drug that is introduced to the market, a particular company must spend anywhere from $100-400 million on research and development. These costs are often passed down to the consumer, and even with top-end insurance or medicare coverage, we’re forced to pay each time we re-up on our drug of necessity. Could there be a low cost alternative lurking in the air? There are those who believe so. Welcome to the amazing world of binaural audio.