GLIMPSES OF THE
FUTURE |
One Step Closer To Hydrogen Power A hydrogen manufacturing fuel station producing enough hydrogen to run householders' homes and cars has been unveiled in London. The British invention, due to go on sale within two years, is roughly the size of a heating boiler and will cost under £2,000. Its creators say it will revolutionise commuting, help homeowners slash energy bills, and give easy access to a fuel that does not produce carbon dioxide emissions, helping to combat climate change. ITM Power also unveiled a Ford Focus that has been converted to run on hydrogen. Restoring Speech To The Paralysed Researchers at Boston University are developing brain-reading software that translates thoughts into speech. It is hoped that this technology will allow paralysed patients who are 'locked in' and unable to physically speak, to talk again. Combined with a speech synthesizer, such brain-machine interfacing technology has enabled one patient to vocalize vowels in real time - a huge step toward recovering full speech for patients with paralyzing speech disorders. Super-Conductivity At Room Temperature? Scientists at the University of Cambridge have identified a key component to unravelling the mystery of room temperature superconductivity. The quest for room temperature superconductivity has gripped physics researchers since they first saw the possibility more than two decades ago. The essential conundrum facing scientists working in this area has been: how does a magnet that cannot transport electricity transform into a superconductor that is a perfect conductor of electricity? The Cambridge team have made a significant advance in answering this question. The researchers have discovered where the charge 'hole' carriers that play a significant role in the superconductivity originate within the electronic structure of copper-oxide superconductors. These findings are particularly important for the next step of deciphering the glue that binds the holes together and determining what enables them to superconduct. Lookout Doctors - Your Patients Are Arming Themselves With Knowledge! Already dismayed by patients arriving with internet print-outs under their arms, doctors will soon face even better informed consumers. A group of American medical schools is working on a project to essentially collect and organize all medical knowledge in a Wikipedia-like form. Access to MedPedia will be available to all, but editing rights will be limited to M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s in relevant fields of research. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley will kick off the site with initial content and work with the rest of the medical community to make it comprehensive. With that in mind, the project organizers are calling on all M.D's and Ph.D's to register to become editors of what they believe will be the largest and most complete encyclopedia of medicine in history. As the official press release describes the project: 'Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year, the thousands of medical procedures being performed and the millions of medical facilities around the world. 'These pages will provide insight into the latest health and medical discoveries along with photographs, video, sound, and images. The site has been designed so that everything on a subject will be simple to access. The main topic pages will be written in language the general public can easily understand, and each topic page will have with it a "Technical” page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical and scientific language. Medpedia will constantly improve in real time, keeping up to date with discoveries in health and medicine.'
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Artificial Wombs, Designer Babies And The Frankenstein Metaphor In my 1986 book 'The Modern Frankenstein' I predicted the arrival of artificial wombs and wrote about what I saw as a forthcoming revolution in reproductive medicine. Now a group of medical scientists have written an article in Nature making the following predictions:
But, as I asked in 1986, what might be the psychological effects on a child that was reared from an embryo propagated within a machine? New Search Engine Named After Irish Term For Wisdom A female ex-Google software engineer and her husband (ex-IBM) have raised $33 million to launch a new search engine called 'Cuil' - pronounced 'Cool' and named after the Irish word for wisdom. The new search platform employs a new type of web crawler to index 120 billion web pages. It does indeed look 'cool' but whether it will have a major impact on Google remains to be seen. Early reports suggest not. Part Battery, Part Fuel Cell - New Energy Unit May Take Cars 'Beyond Petrol' A new approach to storing electrical energy can store more energy than gasoline in the same volume, and could help extend the range of electric vehicles. The biggest technological hurdle facing electric vehicles is their range. Even the best rechargeable batteries cannot match the density of energy stored in a fuel tank. Combining electric power with a combustion engine to make a hybrid electric vehicle sidesteps that problem. But a new take on electrical power storage that is part battery, part chemical fuel cell could ditch gasoline for good. The new design stores energy more densely than petrol, and was conceived by Stuart Licht of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and colleagues. Dot-Com Cable Mania All Over Again In the year 2000 dozens of well-funded companies were laying new internet cables across continents and under the oceans confident that demand for data transport could only increase. Then came the dot.com crash and most of those companies went bust. But now the Finanical Times reports that the world’s biggest telecoms companies are rushing to add capacity on inter-continental routes, to keep up with booming demand fuelled in part by consumers downloading bandwidth-hungry video content from YouTube, iTunes and other sites over broadband networks. Demand is also being driven by fast-growing telecom and internet markets in some developing countries, and by the need to build additional 'redundancy' into the network undersea cables to protect against damage and failure. Seems the view from 2000 was right after all. Back issues of 'Glimpses' are archived here. |