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The Future, as Imagined by Google
Larry Downing/Reuters Facebook Twitter Google+ Save E-mail Share Print In Eric E. Schmidt’s future, his life will be a lot easier.
An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.
How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - Alexis C. Madrigal
On Monday, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved Google’s license application to test autonomous vehicles on the state’s roads. The state had approved such laws back in February , and has now begun issuing licenses based on those regulations . The state previously outlined that companies that want to test such vehicles will need an insurance bond of $1 million and must provide detailed outlines of where they plan to test it and under what conditions. Further, the car must have two people in it at all times, with one behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed.
Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars on Nevada roads
Driverless car bill is signed in California at Google headquarters
26 September 2012 Last updated at 07:13 ET Governor Brown arrived in one of Google's driverless vehicles A bill to bring driverless cars to roads in California has been signed.
Google Today Google lifted the veil off its massive and beautiful data centers around the world. Data centers are typically shrouded in secrecy because they are the brains behind tech companies. Google says when you're on a Google website, you're accessing one of the most powerful server networks in the known Universe. Google has been working on building its data centers for over 10 years.
Google Data Center Walkthrough
Electric Clothes Physicists at Wake Forest University have developed a fabric that doubles as a spare outlet. When used to line your shirt — or even your pillowcase or office chair — it converts subtle differences in temperature across the span of the clothing (say, from your cuff to your armpit) into electricity. And because the different parts of your shirt can vary by about 10 degrees, you could power up your MP3 player just by sitting still. According to the fabric’s creator, David Carroll, a cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone’s battery charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours, using the heat absorbed from your pants pocket.
32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature
Big cities across the globe will soon be getting much, much bigger. As architect Kent Larson shares in this future-focused talk from TEDxBoston , 90 percent of the world’s population growth is expected to happen in cities. But while newly established cities tend to sprawl to accommodate growth, Larson envisions that the metropolises of the future will look more like cities of the past — for example, Paris — with tight-knit neighborhoods offering residents everything they need within the radius of a 20-minute walk. So how will we live comfortably with even more people crammed into even smaller areas?
From folding cars to robotic walls: 5 innovations to make future cities far more livable
2050 is far enough off to imagine the urban environment will be very different from today. But, from current trends, we know a few things are likely. Three-quarters of people will live in a city, or 6.75 billion of the projected 9 billion global total. Everyone will have grown up with the Internet, and its successors. And city residents will have access to less natural resources than today, making regeneration and efficiency more of a priority.
Is This What Urban Buildings Will Look Like In 2050?
LifeEdited / CC BY 2.0 Since 2010, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill has been rethinking how much we really need to live, and trimming down all his needs into one tiny, hyper-functional, changeable space. He calls it LifeEdited . The goal? Live with less stuff but more flexibility, comfort, and happiness in his 420-square-foot Sullivan Street apartment on New York's SoHo.
The New York Times on TreeHugger Founder's Tiny Apartment and Its "Convertible Tricks"
German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space
Syncom 1, the First Geosynchronous Satellite What NASA could do in the 1960s, we can do now. At least, that's the line of thought underpinning the Hackerspace Global Grid, a project that aims to build a space-based network of communications satellites that would freely provide uncensored Internet to users on the ground, taking the power of censorship out of the hands of governments. NASA There’s more than one way to stick it to The Man. There’s civil disobedience, subversive propaganda, political art, outright violent revolt--each possessing its own degree of difficulty and consequence.The Transparency Grenade by Julian Oliver (@julian0liver) – Design Fiction for Leaking Data
Provocations within The Critical Engineering Manifesto (2011) state that reliance on specific technologies are “both a challenge and a threat” and that “the exploit is the most desirable form of exposure”. Julian Oliver is one of the authors of this manifesto and on reviewing his body of work, one can see that the mandate is clearly at the heart of his practice. The Transparency Grenade , Oliver’s most recent endeavour, reimagines the iconic Soviet F1 hand grenade as the chassis for a personal data-leaking device. A concerned individual with physical access to site shrouded in secrecy could simply wait for an opportune moment, pull the pin and create a ‘detonation’ of related data that would be instantly published to the web. The statement for the project describes the operation of the prototype:The 61-year-old American, who has predicted new technologies arriving before, says our understanding of genes and computer technology is accelerating at an incredible rate.
Immortality only 20 years away says scientist
MIT physicists have been testing a light-emitting diode that has an electrical efficiency of more than 100 percent. You may ask, "Wouldn't that mean it breaks the first law of thermodynamics?" The answer, happily, is no. The LED produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent. That means it operates above "unity efficiency" -- putting it into a category normally occupied by perpetual motion machines.
Ultra-efficient LED puts out more power than is pumped in
E-paper History: An Interview with Nick Sheridon, Father of E-paper In the 1970s, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) was a powerhouse of innovation. Many aspects the modern computer, namely the mouse, laser printer, Ethernet, GUI, computer-generated color graphics, as well as a number of important computer languages, were invented at PARC around that time . Yet another development, nearly lost among those important breakthroughs, was invented in 1974 by PARC employee Nicholas K. Sheridon.