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

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

3D house printerProfessor 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

Faces of our futureMother 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

MendikostanIFTF 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

Image of robotic petting zooMinimaforms 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

View of Japanese mini-apartmentTiny 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

Printed food on plate

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.

Big data, but little information?

Data viewAn 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

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.  

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