Curated content

Sleeping on the ISS in a small room with a sleeping bag wall

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Fri, 01/10/2014 - 16:57

Until we get artificial gravity or stations large enough the circular motion of the station can keep us pressed against the outer walls, we have to live, work, play and sleep in zero gravity. Check out this quick 2:18 video presenting Koichi Wakata giving a tour of his sleep space.

Via Wired

3D printed homes in a day

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Fri, 01/10/2014 - 15:55

3D house printer Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from The University of Southern California is testing a process called Contour Crafting, which is a way of 3D printing homes. It's basically a robot that extrudes concrete to provide the frame for a building. The process begins by printing hollow walls that are then filled with a solid wall of concrete for maximal structure. From there, human workers complete the home by hanging doors, installing windows, laying flooring, etc...

Check MSN's article for a better overview. Freshome's article includes Dr Khoshnevis' TEDx video.

The human face in 100,000 years and why it might change

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Thu, 01/09/2014 - 22:53

Faces of our future Mother Nature Network has an article on speculative work by artist Nickolay Lamm and computational genomics expert Dr. Alan Kwan. They started with the question: “What do you think the human face might look like in 100,000 years and why?” and offered their view of how mankind MIGHT adapt over that time.

IFTF: Feral Zones

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Thu, 01/09/2014 - 14:13

IFTF blog posted this Artifact from the Future (click the thumbnail to see the full image on their site). I'm of the opinion that self-driving vehicles will eventually be forced upon us due to the expense of insuring our vehicles with a higher fee when we take over the driving.

A Robotic Petting Zoo

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Tue, 01/07/2014 - 15:28

Image of robotic petting zoo Minimaforms presented Petting Zoo, an interactive display designed to respond to human touch and movement. Using a Kinect camera and software designed to respond with emotions, the exhibition provided three "pets" with three different patterns of responses and a basic machine learning allows each to develop behaviors based on input from the situation.

Preparing for limited living quarters for deep space travel

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Fri, 11/15/2013 - 00:13

View of Japanese mini-apartment Tiny living quarters only get love in mainstream science fiction unless there is a need to present a stressful or different setting. Too much of our space travel is shown on grand ships with lounges, hotel-sized quarters and gravity. The truth is, our first manned deep-space voyages are more likely to occur on ships designed like the ISS than the USS Enterprise. Can we thrive or even manage normal levels of stress in such conditions?

3-D printed food machines

Submitted by admin on Thu, 06/20/2013 - 13:46

Star Trek's replicator technology looks a bit more microwave than printer. Beaming stuff together seems like a pretty good idea, and certainly cleaner than nozzles blowing carbs and proteins into an edible, but hardly something we're ready to crack in the near future.

7 billion humans and rising

Submitted by Daryl Weade on Wed, 06/19/2013 - 16:00

Image of a crowd

Brandon Keim at Wired brings up some good points about what it means to have an ever growing population and how it changes the world around us a bit at a time. In October 2011, we pushed bast the 7 billion humans on Earth.

Big data, but little information?

Submitted by admin on Tue, 06/18/2013 - 12:42

Data view An interesting article on POPSCI by Lawrence Weschler on how we'll handle the vast amount of data we, as a species, are compiling at a breakneck pace. And this is before (or perhaps just as) the algorithmic writer-bots begin absorbing and synthesizing information (news) in order to free up the need to let humans do the job of reporting on humanity.

According to Business Insider, there is an estimated 14.3 trillion pages on the Web. I can't find any reliable data on how fast that's growing, but this is in less than two decades and the speed at which we are adding to this is only increasing.

Using drones for precision farming will decrease farming costs and water usage/contamination

Submitted by admin on Tue, 06/18/2013 - 11:42

Drone in flight

A great article on Next Big Future about drones and precision farming pointing out the results of using this process to manage nitrogen alone are seeing an increase of income per acre from both decreased expenditures and increased crop performance. The practice uses multispectral imagery, combined with other traditional testing methods, to identify how much seed, fertilizer or other crop supporting products to use in a given field zone.