GLIMPSES OF THE FUTURE
A monthly digest of technologies, developments and trends that will shape our lives. (If you would prefer not to receive these digests, flip back 'NO THANKS' and you will be removed from the list).

Globalization Releases Half A Billion People From Extreme Poverty

Globalization has an undeservedly bad reputation in some quarters but a new report from the prestigious Brookings Institute in the U.S.A. claims that the Millennium Development Goal to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 was met sometime in 2007 and that nearly half a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty by the spread of world trade.

The report, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015, goes on to claim that by 2015 we will not only have halved the present global poverty rate, but will have halved it again to under 10 percent, or less than 600 million people, with India and China responsible for three-quarters of the reduction in the world’s poor expected between 2005 and 2015.

I suspect that, when pursued ethically and sustainably, globalization will turn out to be the greatest force for good in the 21st Century.

New Nanoparticle Could Lead To Vaccines Against HIV and Cancers

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology have developed a new type of nanoparticle that could safely and effectively deliver vaccines for infectious diseases such as HIV and malaria, and could even help scientists develop vaccines against cancer.

The problem with existing vaccines is that they work by exposing the body to an infectious agent in order to prime the immune system to respond quickly when it encounters the pathogen again. Some vaccines, such as the diphtheria vaccine, consist of a synthetic version of a protein or other molecule normally made by the pathogen, while others, such as the polio and smallpox vaccines, use a dead or disabled form of the virus. However, such an approach cannot be used with HIV because it's difficult to render the virus harmless. The new type of nanopartcle developed at MIT appears to overcome these problems.

The research team is now working on developing the nanoparticles to deliver cancer and HIV vaccines, while additional studies are examining their potential for delivering a malaria vaccine.

Get Ready For Really, Really FAST Computers!

Where U.S. Government research goes today is where we find ourselves tomorrow and President Obama's recent budget included $120 million dollars to develop 'Exsascale Computing': Exascale computing systems are said to be capable of 1,000 times the processing power of the fastest computer currently operational, the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer.

Last year the President allocated a mere $24 million for super-computer development.

Male Baldness Cured! (Again)

I seem to have been writing about promising new treatments for male baldness for over 30 years but, judging from the appearance of many of my friends, these cures have failed to arrive (at least in the mainstream marketplace).

Now researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Administration in the U.S.A. may have inadvertently stumbled across a new treatment for hair loss. During an investigation into the affect of stress on gastrointestinal function, the researchers believe they may have found a chemical compound that induces hair growth by blocking a stress-related hormone associated with hair loss. (It was a similarly serendipitous discovery in the labs that led to the development of Viagra.)

At present new hair growth has only been induced in mice, but research into possible human treatments is now underway.

(Those old guys with a full head of hair and a pocketful of Viagra are going to be insufferable!)

Skiers May Soon Get Air Bags On the Slopes

Dainese - the Italian maker of safety air bags for motorcyclists - has signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Ski Federation (FIS) to bring its D-Air wearable airbag technology to Alpine slopes.

The project is currently in early stages of testing where the dynamics of ski racing are being investigated in order to tailor the existing motorcycle-specific technology to the needs of ski racers.

The motorcycle system packs in three accelerometers, three gyroscopes, a GPS and a 2 gigabyte internal memory and without any physical connection to the motorcycle, it can deploy a high-pressure airbag around the rider in just 45 milliseconds when crash conditions are detected. This detection capability is the key to the system – it can differentiate between an imminent fall and normal riding, but to transfer the technology to skiing, an entirely new set of data needs to be collected and the triggering algorithm reworked.

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Engineers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. have developed what they say is the world’s first control system for programming satellites to 'think for themselves'.

The new system is a cognitive software agent called Sysbrain and it allows satellites to read English-language technical documents, which in turn instruct the satellites on how to do things such as autonomously identifying and avoiding obstacles.

Devices equipped with Sysbrain could read such documents directly off the internet, which would allow their control system to be updated remotely – although outer space internet is still a work in progress, Sysbrain has also been suggested for use in a variety of terrestrial vehicles.

Graphene Processors Come A Step Closer

Graphene has long been heralded as a key component in the supercomputers of the future, but the problem with making transistors out of the stuff is finding a way to turn them off.

Now however, a new type of design suggests that simply creating 'U' bends in graphene could do the trick as has been demonstrated by scientists at the Nano Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K.

Graphene is the thinnest material known, made up of sheets of carbon arranged in a honeycomb structure just a single atom thick. This structure allows electrons to pass through it faster than most other materials, making it an ideal candidate from which to make electronic devices like transistors.

Robot Nurses May Assist Surgeons Of The Future

Much surgery is carried out using robotic arms and even remote robots, and now researchers at Purdue, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in California and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel are suggesting that robot nurses could also improve the surgical experience.

The robot nurses envisaged by the researchers recognize hand gestures as commands to control a robotic scrub nurse or to tell a computer to display medical images of the patient during an operation.

Both the hand-gesture recognition and robotic nurse innovations might help to reduce the length of surgeries and the potential for infection, claim the researchers.

Researchers Now Able To Lift Fingerprints From Clothing

Warning to the bad guys: Promising early results from research undertaken by the University of Abertay Dundee and the Scottish Police Services Authority in the U.K. could lead to fingerprint evidence being obtained from clothing, for use in criminal prosecution.

Refining an existing technique that's been used to successfully recover print detail from smooth objects such as glass and plastic, forensic scientists have managed to create a kind of photo-negative of fingerprint impressions on fabric.

The researchers used a method known as vacuum metal deposition that's already been used to recover print detail on smooth surfaces like carrier bags, plastics and glass since the 1970s, but has not previously been applied to fingerprint detection on fabrics.

The fabric is placed in a vacuum chamber. Gold is heated and evaporated and spread in a fine layer over the fabric. Heated zinc is then applied, which attaches to the gold layer where the fabric has no fingerprints, leaving the original fabric to show through where contact has been made.

Blind Driver Negotiates Daytona Track Unaided

The U.S.A.'s National Federation of the Blind has announced that for the first time a blind individual has driven a street vehicle in public without the assistance of a sighted person.

Mark Anthony Riccobono was behind the wheel of a Ford Escape hybrid equipped with nonvisual technology and successfully navigated 1.5 miles of the road course section of the famed track at the Daytona International Speedway.

The Ford Escape was equipped with laser range-finding censors that conveyed information to a computer inside the vehicle, allowing it to create and constantly update a three-dimensional map of the road environment. The computer sent directions to vibrating gloves on the driver's hands, indicating which way to steer, and to a vibrating strip on which he was seated, indicating when to speed up, slow down, or stop.

www.rayhammond.com

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